The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.   We contemplated questions about how we want to spend our limited time here together. We cultivated a field of loving awareness in which our aspirations can grow.

Living by aspirations that are rooted in compassion might inspire us to affirm our inter-being with caring action.

We drew inspiration and guidance from Oren Jay Sofer’s new book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.  We reflected on aspirations that can help us live meaningful lives.  Aspirations can arise in answer to our heart’s natural longing for the flourishing of all human and more than human beings.

We also drew inspiration from Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal’s teaching.  Gil and his fellow teachers offer a library of talks, guided meditations and courses through AudioDharma. You can experience his guided meditation, Attuned Aspiration, in this archive.

We heard from poet Jane Hirshfield’s On Being interview, The Fullness of Things.  In this interview Jane shares how her natural inclination to question things expresses itself through her work and her life.  She describes “looking for . . .  an unmediated intimacy with things as they actually are, and perhaps an accurate understanding of what is the place of this self that we all walk around inside of and know the world through.”  I think this is a helpful approach to growing and living aspiration.

Guided Reflection

Last week we focused on attention: how the way we attend determines our aliveness.  Tuning into our natural vitality as a source of support can release us from the tension of trying too hard. Our inner aliveness can buoy us up like a boat on water. This week we’ll be exploring the inner resource of aspiration. Oren Jay Sofer writes that:

Aspiration connects us with a sense of what is possible. It is a key that opens the door to healing, spiritual cultivation and social transformation. . . .
To aspire is to connect with spirit, with the energy that animates our life.

Oren goes on to offer living questions – questions that come alive in our hearts. They help us to find aspirations that are rooted in compassion. They call us to consider what we value most:

How do we want to spend the time we’ve been granted on earth? What aspects of our world do you wish you could use your time, energy or resources to change? What kind of world do you long to leave for your children and future generations?

These reflections speak to a deep longing that stirs the heart. Oren describes this as an aspiration that “ yearns for and trusts in something deeper, more fulfilling, just or good in life.”

The poet Jane Hirshfield speaks in prose as she contemplates these living questions:

I have been given this existence, these years on this Earth, to accept what has come into my lifetime — wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness. I must take them. I must find a way to live in this world. You can’t refuse it. And along with the difficult is the radiant, the beautiful, the intimacy with which each one of us enters the life of all of us and figures out, what is our conversation? What is my responsibility? What must be suffered? What can be changed? How can I meet this in a way which both lets me open my eyes the next day and also, perhaps, if I’m lucky, can be of service?

As I reflected on these questions this week, a few aspirations stirred my heart. I think they will change and grow as I continue to live with them. The first is to seek to understand in my relations. The second is to grow my capacity to tolerate discomfort. The third is to strengthen the ability to recognize and respond to opportunities to help.

This week I sought to understand people who don’t think like me. I noticed how quickly judgments and opinions formed. I tried questioning my views and seeing people as if I really wanted to understand them – giving them a chance to reveal themselves. That experience brought in tolerating the discomfort of uncertainty. I tried being with the uneasy feelings I have in letting go of the attachment to thinking I know best. These awarenesses inspired me to examine the ways I approach helping. I realize that helping has to be a relational experience rather than a transactional one.

I also sense that sustaining these aspirations will require tenderness. The kind of tenderness that Jane describes as arising from belonging to one another:

I think if we enter the world with this sense of inseparable kinship, it gives us a little more tenderness towards our own failures — our failures of separation, our failures of chiseling against one another when we could be cherishing one another. We are a species capable of so many different ways of perceiving our connection and interdependence, and also of perceiving our own transience, because we are transient. Time will continue.

Insight meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal also believes that aspiration comes from a deeper place within us. That deeper place is the source of flourishing. This flourishing embraces our inter-being so that my aspiration for well-being includes the aspiration that all beings flourish. The roots of our mutual flourishing grow from the living ground of compassion. Gil believes we can nurture our aspirations the way that sunlight enables a forest to grow. It grows at the speed of calm, patience and gentleness. In sunlight the forest grow. Gil suggests that:

. . . we’re allowing ourselves to take in the goodness of our aspiration in a way to be present, in a way that is free. Present in a way that is kind, appreciative. Present in a way that is deeply attuned . . . in a way where there is a heightened awareness like the sunlight growing a forest . . .

Together we’ve created a space – not unlike a forest – where we come to understand our hearts and minds. We can reflect on the living questions – the deeper needs we share in mutual flourishing. Let’s cultivate a nourishing aspiration in mindfulness practice. I invite you to adjust your posture so that you can be present in this kind, appreciative way, a deeply attuned way. You can be aware of yourself sitting in this place at this time. Tenderly aware of this body in all its dimensions, all its sensations. You might explore breathing a bit more deeply, fully. Relaxing what you can with the outflowing breath. . . . . And to let your breathing return to normal. As you’re ready, I invite you to imagine the way sunlight bathes a forest. Imagine how its slow, gentle light awakens nearly imperceptible changes. An aspiration to cultivate loving awareness and mindfulness comes to life in this same, gentle, sensitive way.

See if you can open to an aspiration for being here, now, present in meditation. Your presence creates the conditions in which a deeper aspiration might arise. An aspiration that enlivens you. One that inspires you with a kind, calm presence. It may be an appreciative awareness. A forgiving awareness. A caring or loving awareness.

Can there be an aspiration to be present with freedom? A freedom that gives whatever we’re aware of its freedom. Freedom from clinging, aversion, judgment. Can you bring a tenderness to our shared humanity?

In relating to what is true – however imperfectly – what is unconscious can be revealed. If we can bring a willingness to stay engaged, even what is hidden can grow to the light. The light of loving awareness. A light we might bring to all our relations.

And as we come to the end of this meditation, I invite you to aspire for the well being and happiness of all beings. Bring your loving awareness to the sense of all beings in the world. A loving awareness that’s like an early morning light that awakens and spreads goodness and care into the world. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. May we find ways today to live these aspirations.