The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We reflected on the vital importance of having spiritual friends. We reflected on the Eight Worldly Winds of change that create stress in our lives. We contemplated the teachings on equanimity as a way of restoring balance. We can cultivate qualities of resilience to change what we can and to accept the truth of our experience.
We heard a quote from history Adam Tooze’s address to the World Economic Forum.
We heard Kaira Jewel Lingo’s teaching on the Eight Worldly Winds from her book We Were Made for These Times.
We heard Gil Fronsdal’s teaching’s on equanimity from his Tricycle Magazine article, A Perfect Balance.
I shared Los Angeles Times journalist, John Corrigan’s, story What We Can Learn from Africa’s Likoma Island.
We heard a Rumi quote from Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s Emergence Magazine essay, Unborn and Undying.
Guided Reflection
Welcome. Last week we considered how our spiritual friends support us in living with authenticity and compassion. We heard Thich Nhat Hanh’s encouragement to draw on our inner meditator, artist and warrior while serving in the world. He urges us to cultivate relaxation and joy so “our actions become a true expression of our love, care and awakening.”
This week I’ve sensed the winds of chaos that have been swirling around our world. We are living in the age of polycrisis. In his address to the World Economic Forum historian Adam Tooze who originated this term, said:
If you’ve been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you all at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.
I know I am not alone in feeling the fear, grief and vulnerability in response to what is happening all around us.
There is a Buddhist teaching called the Eight Worldly Winds. They are forces that express the ever changing reality of our lives: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. We feel our vulnerability when these winds don’t blow the way we want. In her book, We Were Made for These Times, Kaira Jewel Lingo writes:
The wheel of these eight winds is always turning. It never stops. So we can’t get comfortable with the joys of pleasure and gain, nor should we identify with the misfortunes that come our way and think they define our whole life. . . .. . . we will suffer if we think we can control them. . . . This doesn’t mean our choices don’t matter, or that ethical living is not important . . . This teaching can help us face the ever changing reality of our lives . . . these winds do not blow in response to our actions, they are not necessarily deserved, whether pleasant or painful. . . . When we can do something to change things, we must. But sometimes there is nothing we can do to shift the situation. . . . When we accept that this is life, we are able to touch that we are more than our life’s ups and downs.
Practice and spiritual friends help me in my struggle for this acceptance. When I can’t do something to shift a particular situation I look for balance in the teachings on equanimity. In his Tricycle Magazine essay, A Perfect Balance, Gil Fronsdal writes:
A simple definition of “equanimity” . . . is the capacity to not be caught up with what happens to us. We can practice with equanimity by studying the ways that we get caught. Instead of pursuing the ideal of balance and non-reactivity directly, we can give careful attention to how balance is lost and how reactivity is triggered. . . . when the obstacles are understood and removed, then the resulting equanimity can be the foundation for caring, presence, flexibility and diligence. . . .
. . . Wisdom can teach us to separate people’s actions from who they are. We can agree or disagree with their actions, but remain balanced in our relationship with a person. Or we can understand that our own thoughts and impulses are the result of impersonal conditions. By not taking them so personally, we are more likely to stay at ease with their arising. . . .
Letting go brings equanimity; the greater the letting go, the deeper the equanimity. . . Freedom comes when we begin to let go of our reactive tendencies.
I believe cultivating these qualities of caring, presence, flexibility and diligence can help us to navigate our collective windstorms. I discovered an inspiring example of this in my in-box the week. The Los Angeles Times journalist, John Corrigan, wrote a story about Likoma Island in Malawi, one of the poorest places on the earth. He described its dire poverty including the population of orphans due to the high numbers of people affected by HIV. There are few opportunities for education or work. He also wrote about the Katundu workshop that Suzie and James Lightfoot created to use all the beverage bottles being generated by a tourist resort. Katundu recycles the bottles and other discarded materials.
Susie and James’ caring, presence, flexibility and diligence enable them to employ women – many of whom are mothering – to make useful things that they sell in many places throughout Africa and beyond. Perhaps the spaciousness of equanimity enables them to see a bigger picture, as Gil describes to “see with understanding.”
I invite you to take some time to find your center of gravity – a center which can hold the darkness and the light of being human. A posture in which you can be awake, aware and at ease. A posture for the body as a field of awareness. As you are ready, allow awareness to travel. Sense those areas of contact and support. Where do you feel grounded and stable? Perhaps connecting with the back body, sit bones, legs and feet. You might feel upper back, arms and hands. Allow awareness to rest upon sense organs: Eyes. Ears. Nose. Tongue. Skin. Mind.
What is it like to experience the spaciousness of awareness? A space that can hold your embodied experience. There may be areas that are charged with energy. There may be agitation, anticipation. There may be a sense of heaviness, tiredness or torpor. There may be inner balance and clarity.
If emotions or thoughts are present how do they feel in Body? Heart? Mind? There may be meeting inner stillness. There may be flooding with feeling. Can you see what is with understanding? To see what’s in the way as the way of all beings. We share this human experience of pain and pleasure, suffering and joy. We also share the experience of inner balance, equanimity.
You might bring to mind an image that embodies the depth, wisdom, and spaciousness of equanimity: a mountain, . . . open sky, . . . your ancestors gazing at you lovingly . . . As you visualize, notice any sense of balance, depth or perspective the image calls forth. Notice where and how you experience this in your body.
When you are ready call to mind a situation person or circumstance for which you’d like to have more equanimity. Keep coming back to the felt sense of perspective and balance. With equanimity’s support you can silently repeat a phrase that captures the essence of equanimity’s wisdom.
“This is how it is for me right now.”
“May I be at peace with things just as they are.”
Loving attention allows feeling or thought to be in the field along with whatever self-care that is needed. What kindness, patience or resolve can you offer yourself? There may be other qualities – love, tenderness, equanimity – you wish to cultivate. Is there a place where you can focus that is calming or that feels safe? Sometimes it can be opening closed eyes, taking a sip of water or touching Earth.
Each of us is part of a great field of awareness. We all suffer. We all want to be happy. We are all deserving of care. I invite you to give yourself kind attention. Time. Space. Presence. We may sense each other in the field of awareness. Abiding in the great field, we can know there is caring and being cared for. Take a breath or two to allow yourself to know this.
May we bow in service to the larger story. May we offer the world our caring, presence and compassion. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee:
As Rumi simply says, “Step out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.” You cannot love or experience love tomorrow or yesterday, but only in the moment, and in that moment you are fully alive, awake, sensing the mystery of things.