The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We reflected on our inter-being and inter-breathing with the great web of life. We imagined ourselves as trees generating life sustaining energy for the world around us. We contemplated who and what we love and will protect.
We heard from Joanna Macy’s recent Lion’s Roar interview on The Great Awakening the Planet Needs. Joanna Macy has spent over sixty years organizing environmental and social action groups. Joanna is a national treasure. You can hear more about her remarkable life and work by listening to A Wild Love for the World on On Being with Krista Tippett. Her work describes the process by which we can develop interbeing. In essence when we realize our interbeing caring for our world is simply and profoundly a way of caring for ourselves
We heard writer Deena Metzger’s poem, Inflammation. Deena is “a writer, a teacher, a healer and Earth advocate. [She] lives at the end of the road at the border of Topanga State Park with a variety of neighbors including mountain lions, bobcats, raccoons, coyotes, squirrels, rabbits, moles, gophers, rattlers, and a variety of birds who come to the bird feeder every day or to drink at the Buddha fountain.”
We heard eco-philosopher, David Abram’s, thoughts about inter-breathing as interbeing.
We closed with Yahia Lababidi’s poem, Breath. Underneath the busyness of our lives, nature pulses – ready to be felt, heard and seen. Life waits quietly for our attention and care.
Guided Reflection
Welcome. In the wake of last week’s heartbreaking fires, we reflected on the inner resources of balance and equanimity. Cultivating inner balance can help to see and think clearly. It can help us to respond with wise compassion. I grieve for the humans and more than humans that suffer in Los Angeles. I also grieve for those around the world who are struggling to live. The precarity of our shared condition seems to grow every day.
In a recent interview Joanna said
When we’re suffering massive collective trauma, there’s always choice. There’s a choice about how we relate to suffering. Seems to me there are two ways. One is that we can let that suffering open us up to each other, and bond us in greater trust and collaboration, shared strength. Or we can let it divide us into feuding and conflict and bitterness.
It was good to be reminded of this choice. It is easy to forget when I’m in despair. Life experience includes humans and more than humans. As poet and Deena Metzger’s poem, Inflammation, reminded me:
What I don’t know,
the lick of fire
on my shoulder
as my hair
becomes a torch.
That singed deer,
a yearling,
standing startled
and alone,
the flames behind her
like a halo.
I don’t know the pain
nor does the man
with the camera
who caught her,
so he and I, so we
could know
what we can’t know,
because
the embers rained
down upon her
not us
although we
set these fires
with our own hands,
moment by moment,
by our inflammatory lives.
The deer’s suffering and my despair meet in the realization that my hands, my inflammatory life, set these fires. The life energy flowing through us is the same life energy that flows through rivers and mountains, trees and forests, and plants and animals. We are so intimately a part of the living world around us. In taking in and giving out we live and open. In opening we realize our vulnerability. In our vulnerability we feel. In feeling we open to the experience of being part of all that is.
Buddhist Monk and activist Thich Nhat Hanh describes this relationship as interbeing. Eco-philosopher David Abram suggests that our experience of interbeing is a “directly felt, bodily experience.” He describes our interbeing as interbreathing. He writes:
What could be more visceral . . . than breathing? . . . The altered awareness of breathing as uttermost reciprocity – as a “pure, continuous exchange” between us furred or smooth skinned animals and the numberless plants that surround us, each making possible the other – has become . . . the most tangible, sensuous example of . . . Interbeing as interbreathing.
Here right now, we are interbreathing with grasses, plants and forests. We can recall all the beings with whom we share interbeing: the familiar and the wild, the oceans, deserts, mountains and ice-lands. We can only flourish together. How do we offer ourselves in service of that which we love?
As the world grows smaller and her resources are drawing down, we are being challenged to expand our boundaries. We are challenged to imagine wider ideas of who we are. We are being called from identifying as separate selves to selves that include other beings and life on our planet. Joanna believes it is imperative for us to recognize this. She says:
I think the most important thing we need to hear is the voice inside us which connects us to all beings and to the whole web of life. . . . When Thich Nhat Hanh was asked what we most need to do for the sake of our world, he said “to hear within ourselves the sounds of the earth crying.” I believe it’s true. The earth is crying, deep in our consciousness. Sometimes it reaches us.
I believe we are here in our circle of caring because we do hear Earth cries, human cries and more-than-human cries. Our practice keeps helps us to live the questions that keep our hearts open. What does it mean to know Life – Life that expresses itself through our inter-being? How to protect this miraculous web of being? How do we transform ourselves into a life-sustaining culture? Joanna calls for an engaged spiritual revolution. She describes it as: “spiritual with legs. Spiritual with hands. Spiritual with a loud mouth.” Spiritual and politically engaged. She believes:
. . . all we can really affirm is where we want to put our attention. [We] have a choice: do [we] want to give up and surrender to the great unraveling, or do [we] want to join those who are working for a livable future? Since the outcome is uncertain, we have to enjoy doing something exhilarating and useful without knowing for sure if it’s going to work out.
She cites Rilke’s words:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
We are circling now my friends. We circle and hear the call to live with open hearts and free minds. To develop the inner strength, values and practices. To act with compassion and wisdom. Our practice gives us the space and time to reflect on who and how we cherish, who and how we thank. Joanna asks:
. . . what better thing to do? How can you have a great turning unless you love it all into being? Don’t let urgency deprive you of the capacity to let life through in the biggest doorway of your being.
Each time we practice mindfulness we can realize our interbeing. We can let life in through the biggest doorway of our being and know ourselves as part of a greater, living web – a web want to protect for all our relations.
I invite you to allow these many words and ideas settle as we enter our practice of attending. Our practice of opening. Please adjust your posture as you need to be at ease and supported. Receive and release Breath as effortlessly as possible. Know that our shared web of life – our trees and plankton – enables you to breathe. We are sustained by everything Earth so freely offers.
You might sense your body, your arms and hands, chest and belly, legs and feet. You might trace your fingers over the contours of your face and neck. Perhaps you are feeling a sense of self, a sense of “Me.” I invite you to notice how your body arises from Earth’s body. Feel Earth supporting you. You can sense your aliveness: the water bathing, flowing and pooling inside; the inner fire of the body’s metabolic workings. Feel the currents of air moving through lungs into tissues and cells.
When Breath comes in, can there be a welcome for the energy that sustains you? Can you sense the body as a field of energy? Notice how effortless it is to be part of the greater field of life’s energy. Our bodies, our “Me’s” are nourished as we breathe in. We, in turn, are nourishing green beings – bacteria, algae, plants and forests, our “We”, as we breathe out. Our breathing takes us beyond the edges of our skin. What is it like to experience this kinship with all creation?
I invite you to reflect on some being, some kin, that is dear to you. We belong to the family of trees, four leggeds, winged ones, soil and rocks. We belong to the fresh and salty waters, the scaled and hard shelled ones. Who or what have you let yourself fall in love with? Who or what do you imagine you could give your love to?
You might imagine yourself as a tree. Feel your roots penetrating deep into Earth’s body. Your trunk growing upwards and your branches reaching and leafing all around. You make magic. Your whole being is sustaining life as you draw in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. You exhale water vapor cooling the air around you. Your body offers itself to feed and shelter animals, birds, insects, fungi, Earth. What do you experience in your tree-body? How does it feel?
What is it like to shift to a deep identity with the wider reaches of life? Is it possible to love it into being?
We can lean in and tenderly listen with curiosity, care, and compassion. We can open to receive the grand and humble gifts that are so freely given just by living on Earth. The gifts of Elephant and Hummingbird wisdom. Indigenous and spiritual wisdom. Ocean and Glacier wisdom. Tree wisdom. Here is the wisdom of Yahia Lababidi’s poem Breath:
Beneath the intricate network of noise
there’s a still more persistent tapestry
woven of whispers, murmurs and chants
It’s the heaving breath of the very earth
carrying along the prayer of all things:
trees, ants, stones, creeks and mountains alike
All giving silent thanks and remembrance
each moment, as a tug on a rosary bead
while we hurry past, heedless of the mysteries
And, yet, every secret wants to be told
every shy creature to approach and trust us
if we patiently listen, with all our senses.