The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  We explored the practice of embodying strong back and soft front.  We cultivated the inner resources of presence, equanimity, strength, openness, tenderness, and caring.  These qualities can help us to create a loving holding environment in which to experience life’s challenges.  We can expand this space to include others who are suffering.

This practice is inspired by the teachings Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski.  You can find a compassionate and rich exposition of these ideas  in the recent Upaya programs LOVE AND DEATH: Opening the Great Gifts.  You can access the online recordings and study resources by registering on the Upaya web-site.

We heard  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem, Temple.  In her simple heartfelt words, Rosemary expresses love for her body.  She affirms its broken places, scars and wounds as worthy of caring and tenderness.

We heard somatic therapist Karine Bell’s views on cultivating intimacy with the body as a way of developing empathy for others.

We heard Joanna Macy’s teachings on beloved community from her Kosmos Journal article, The Community Awaiting Us.

Guided Reflection

We are turning toward autumn.  Many of us have spent the summer months tending and watering gardens.  We know that growth and ripening depends on so much more than our own hands.  Our own growth and maturing depend on much more than our separate selves.  We cannot survive alone.  We live by our love and connection.  

Roshi Joan Halifax asks:

How can we give and accept care with strong-back, soft front compassion, moving past fear into a place of genuine tenderness? I believe it comes about when we can be truly transparent, seeing the world clearly — and letting the world see into us.

I invite you to reflect on the ideas of having a strong back and soft front.  What do they mean to you?  A strong back might mean feeling grounded and supported, flexible and upright, a sense of having boundaries, an ability to be in truth.  A soft front might mean a sense of openness, being deeply present with others, allowing ourselves to be seen.  Accepting life as it is.  What resonates with your heart and mind today?

Let us continue this reflection by settling our bodies.  We might give thanks to the environment that supports us.  We might appreciate the people who are supporting us in practice.  I invite you to gather your attention to be here and now.  Feel your attention settling into your body, into your breath.  Let yourself be fully here on this beautiful day.

I invite you to recall your intention for being here.  It may be to learn about mindfulness and presence, love and compassion.  Is it to feel connection with others?  Let yourself feel that intention in your body. Can you embody this intention in the posture of strong back soft front?  Can you let the beauty of this intention inform your posture of strong back and soft front? 

This may be a way of creating a holding environment:  a loving environment to hold ourselves and others in the midst of life’s difficulties.  Let strong back express those qualities that resonate in your heart today.  Feel them deeply in your body, holding, supporting and sustaining you.  Can you also allow the compassion of soft front to nurture loving tenderness?   Can you feel this loving tenderness deeply in your body and also your heart and mind? 

Can you sense yourself being held in this gentle loving holding environment?  Can you expand this to others, the many others who are suffering?  There may be a deep recognition that we are one in the same – yourself and all those who suffer.  Strong back fearless love. Soft front deep tenderness. Let these two sides support each other.  What is it like to allow this loving holding environment that we’re cultivating within ourselves expand to include others who are suffering?

I invite you to notice, too, if you don’t feel these things, they don’t resonate or if a sense of resistance to the meditation arises.  Can you be with what you are feeling  with a sense of kind tenderness toward yourself?  

The experience of strong back and soft front in our bodies, hearts and minds may help us to find the balance of compassion and equanimity.  Thich Nhat Hanh taught us to remember. We are the nature to grow old, suffer illness and die.  All that is dear and everyone we love are of the nature to change.  We can’t escape being separated from them.  There is no time not to love. Now is the time to love with our attention, compassion and caring action.  

Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes how the body can hold and be held in her poem Temple:

O body, cracked bell
that still sings when struck,
O leaky cup,
O broken stem,
I love you, body,
your crooked path,
your crumbling walls,
your faulty math.
I love the way
you stopped believing
you could ever
hold it all,
how you began
to let yourself
become the one
that’s being held.
I love the graffiti
on your inner halls—
scrawled names of all
who shaped you.
O body, my wreck,
my holey glove,
my street worn sole,
my crumpled page,
forgive me for years
of trying to fix you,
for believing the fable
of whole,
you, my perfect
wounded heart,
my stuttered hymn,
my sacred
begging bowl.

I invite you to rest your body on Earth’s body. Notice how awareness can hold sensation, the sound of my voice, the mind making meaning.  Notice also how you are  also held.  Notice what arises and subsides in the ever-changing stream of living.   

Somatic therapist and Karine Bell writes:

To know the landscape of our bodies, our experience, with intimacy and acceptance is to render us available to meet other bodies with compassion and empathy. It’s to make available again our creativity and imagination to dream a new dream.

How is it to know your body with intimacy and acceptance?  Can you imagine meeting others with such presence?  Can you feel the stirrings of empathy and compassion?  

My imagination and my heart tells me this is a time for love.  Paying attention is a way of loving.  Right now we can reflect on the last time we truly attended to someone or something or how we were attended in a loving way. Can you remember an experience of of feeling warmth and love? Was it the kind of love that truly opened your heart? Remember who you were with, where you were, how this loving felt in your body.  What loving qualities naturally emerged?

Joanna Macy teaches about beloved community.  She writes:

I doubt we can even imagine what can pour through us when we feel our true kinship with each other. We’ve been lonely, scared, and isolated at a deep level, as well as set on competing and outdoing each other. I wonder if we are able to envision how beautiful it will be, and what will come through our hearts, our hands, our voices when we hold each other’s backs.

In our practice we hold each other up.  We cultivate equanimity with the energy of strong back.  We practice caring steady presence. We ground ourselves while remaining flexible, adaptable, and open to change.  We cultivate compassion and wisdom with the energy of soft front. We are willing to see the world as clearly as possible with the energy of soft front.  We resolve to stay open to life.  Roshi Joan Halifax describes this is as gradual unfolding of intimacy.  We become intimate with our own hearts and minds.  We become intimate with the world  just as it is.  We allow the world to meet us as we truly are.  

Roshi Joan offers us this encouragement:

Your open heart allows you to perceive and be touched by others.
Your strength lets you uphold yourself in the midst of any conditions.
Sit with this sense of openness, tenderness, and caring toward others, and as well feel the support of your strong back.
Through your strong back, which lends you equanimity, you have the strength to be with whatever is present.
Hold in your mind and heart the sense that all beings and things are connected to one another, and this practice is about opening your life to others and to your own good heart.

May we live in kinship with all beings.