The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. We explored themes of intimacy and mystery. We tuned awareness to experience of breathing within the body and in relationship to the world around us. We ventured into mystery by letting go of the reflexive reliance on knowing. We oriented moment to moment experience with curiosity, feeling and compassion.
We drew on the teachings of Frank Ostaseski as set forth by his wonderful book, The Five Invitations. Frank is a mediation teacher hospice care trainer and writer. Adopting a “don’t know mind” is one of the tenets of meditation and hospice care. He encourages students and readers to cultivate “undefended openness.”
Meditation teacher and writer, Tara Brach, echoes this counsel. She encourages us to feel the vulnerability that arises from living with life’s uncertainty. Feeling is a path to authenticity and aliveness. You can find her helpful books and audio programs at her web-site.
We heard an excerpt from Ken Keyes’ poem Hokusai Says. You can find the complete poem at this Gratefulness.org web-page. He calls on our caring and the willingness to let life live through us. Ken wrote fifteen books on personal growth and social consciousness issues. You can read about his inspiring life at his Wikipedia entry.
We heard Sophie Strand’s invitation to lend our bodies to Earth’s healing. Sophie’s writing focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. We heard an excerpt from her essay, The Body Is an Ecodelic. I found the excerpt posted on Sophie’s Instagram page. (An “ecodelic” refers to an entheogenic or consciousness expanding plant.)
Self Reflection
Welcome. We are coming together in the midst of life’s constant change. We sense it in our bodies. We are aware of it in the world around us. In practice we learn how to bring awareness to moment by moment experience. I invite you to explore what is surfacing for you today. What are you bringing with you?
I invite you to tune awareness toward feeling being right now. Notice what surfaces: feeling breathing? physical sensation? emotional energy? mental formations? Is it possible to gradually let go of any preoccupation other than this moment?
I invite you to feel breathing: this in-breath and this out-breath. You might begin to experience intimacy with the breath. What is it like to sense taking in the world and giving out to the world? What is like to be sustained by so much life around you?
You might slow down long enough to feel the pulse of life. You might listen long enough to hear the voice that speaks from the heart. The mind becoming aware of what is true, perhaps aware of what is needed. This “presencing” is about carefully feeling our way moment by moment.
Frank Ostaseski believes that when we are intimate with our living experience we don’t have to know anything. We go beyond old habits of thinking. We open again and again to what is possible. We open to a wider – perhaps boundless view. He writes:
At the deepest level of intimacy, subject and object fall away. There are no longer any hard and fixed boundaries. “I” am not intimate with “you.” Our separateness dissolves. We experience undefended openness, complete union. This is the real heart and beauty of “don’t know mind” . . . .
What do these ideas of “undefended openness” and “don’t know mind” evoke in your heart? Can you suspend judgment about what surfaces? Can you offer compassion to whatever response arises? What are you learning about living so openly? Deep intimacy?
When we are willing to surrender our knowing, our preconceived ideas, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Tara Brach writes of of intimacy and vulnerability as a passageway:
We each live with uncertainty and the fear of rejection and loss, and we each are conditioned to avoid feeling or expressing that vulnerability. Yet intimacy with this un-lived life is the gateway to connecting authentically with others, full aliveness and spiritual realization.
What does it mean to live with fragility and resilience? Isn’t that what we witness with awe while gazing on the natural world around us? In his poem “Hokusai Says,” Ken Keyes guides us on this path of seeing aliveness and, with kindness, letting be:
It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you…
Look, Feel, let life take you
By the hand.
Let life live through you.
It is my hope that you enjoy these moments of rest unfolding. I invite you to feel Earth’s body supporting your body. You might even sense how all life is breathing together. Letting it in and letting it go. In its ebb and flow, the breath takes us further along life’s journey. Can you sense the small pulse of surrender as the out-breath travels out into the world to become another’s in-breath? The life inside us knows the out-breath is as vital as the in-breath.
Frank reminds us that:
. . . Reality cannot be mapped. It is beyond description or any one view. It is not a single static truth, but rather an endless unfolding mystery. It is alive, dynamic and constantly being expressed through form and formlessness.
We are on a journey that takes us beyond the static lines on maps. What is it like to be part of this “endless unfolding mystery?” Do we put one foot in front of the other? Do we leap or do we try holding onto something familiar and fleeting?
Frank encourages us to listen and get out of our own way:
A willingness to not know is, at times, our greatest asset. The degree to which we are able to live in this ever fresh moment – that’s the measure of our ability to be of real service.
We can recall times of great uncertainty. How did they ripple the smooth waters of knowing in our lives? Were they as great waves or even as shaky ground? Did they awaken us with feeling and perhaps vulnerability? How do we respond to these awakenings? How can we keep the ground from moving, the wind from blowing or the water from flowing? What did we learn from our fragility and resilience?
Have you ever tried to speak to the trees? To listen deeply to what the rivers have to say? Can you imagine the growth, healing and reciprocity of the community of mycelium under your feet? What would it be like to decenter ourselves? To return to the wonder of nature and to discover where love lives? Here are Sophie Strand’s adventurous queries about healing our living planet:
Where is the sore spot in your
landscape that needs the shape
of your body? The press of your
tender foot? Where can you place
yourself like
an acupuncture
needle in the mountain, the clear-cut
forest, the web of relations that you,
yourself, are woven from?
Place me where I can
melt into medicine.
Place me on the tongue
of the
one who
needs my taste.
As we attend to life in our body we experience our belonging to this natural world. Our ever changing, moving energies, our bodies are an expression of the great dance.