We had our fourth Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss yesterday.   We shared a guided meditation of Embodied Presence, Home Base & Remindfulness taken from meditation instructor and author, Tara Brach.  Again, I deeply appreciate that students are willing to dedicate the time and presence to this practice.  It’s almost a revolutionary act to stop and disentangle ourselves from the web – digital and real – of busyness and distraction.

We bring many motivations to practice:  stress relief, developing concentration and emotional resilience to name a few.  Embodying presence suggests that we’re not intending to transcend life experience but to sense it, feel, see, hear, taste and touch it more clearly.  The value of meditation and yoga practice is the way we bring moment to moment awareness to movement, stillness and breath.  We explore with curiosity and hope to let go of interpretation.  The challenge is that we’re not trying to escape being human and all the love, joy, sadness, fear, anger and grief that living entails.

Where does this exploration lead?  I hope it leads to an ability to see more clearly and that our vision will help us choose to take care of ourselves, each other and the world with more compassion.   In our meditation we choose a “home base” where we focus our attention – like where we feel the breath most vividly.   From home base, we can observe how the lenses of our perception, our senses including our minds, can often be clouded or distorted.  These clouds and distortions take many forms – genetic inheritances, conditioning, life experience including culture and socioeconomic class – greatly influence how we see our selves and the world and inform the choices we make.

Our feelings, thoughts and emotions reflect and reveal – often carrying our attention away to the past or the future.  We realize that our life is only this present moment when we practice “remindfulness” by recognizing when our attention  has drifted away and we bring it back to home base.  Perhaps this “remindfulness” practice is a way of sharpening our vision, reminding or remodeling our minds!  (Brain researchers tell us that the neurons that fire together also wire together.)  Often this process will yield deeper insights – direct experiences of how we become our “selves” in relationship with each other – how we inter-are.

Understanding our interconnection and interdependence is fertile ground from which compassionate action grows.   I also think of our circle as home base – a place where we can take sanctuary and draw support from our shared presence.  Our presence affirms a willingness to suspend driving habit energies and abide in the unknown potential of this moment.  Again, I appreciate this opportunity to learn and practice together.

You can find this week’s homework and other resources at:

Sunday Meditation Class 4 Homework