The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. We practiced concentration by focusing awareness on breathing and sensation. We explored widening awareness to include our inter-being with all of life. We practiced experiencing the self as an expression of life. This broader view helped to “lay down the self” and to surrender our struggles with impermanence and change.
These steps lead us through an opening to compassion and love.
We heard poet Jan Richardson’s invitation to “let there be an opening.” Jan is a poet, writer and artist. Her book, Sparrow: A Book of Life and Death and Life is a moving memoir of experience of loss, grief and hope after the sudden death of her husband. I think her spirit is reflected in this writing: “A blessing meets us in the place of our deepest loss. In that place, it gives us a glimpse of wholeness and claims that wholeness here and now.” You can find her books and blog writings at her web-site.
We heard an excerpt from Sophie Strand’s 2022 Feldenkrais Summit Keynote Address. Sophie writes at the “. . . intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story.” You can find many intriguing and provocative essays at her Substack site.
We drew inspiration from poet and writer Mark Doty. His book, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, can be found at the public library. Mark’s writing is yet another invitation to open to the experience of inter-being and love.
We drew from the fourth chapter of Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older. In this section Kathleen outlines a map to awakening. The journey traverses Chaos, Surrender and Transformation. We experience Chaos when facing the “predictable sufferings” in life. Her suggestion is “to lay down the self” again and again through spiritual practice. She describes this as a process of surrender which goes beyond acceptance or resignation.
We closed with a few short lines from Rainier Maria Rilke’s Collected Writings.
Guided Reflection
Practice is always an invitation. An invitation Jan Richardson makes in poetry:
Let there be
an opening
into the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.
I invite you to let there be an opening to this experience of living right now. Tune into the direct experience of gravity, holding you to Earth. With the gentlest weight. Can you feel it? Just enough to hold you together. Feel Earth beneath you. Feel Earth inside you. Earth abiding and alive.
Breathing and aware, right here, right now. Tune into your living hum and vibration. As you are sitting or lying down, can you relax and stay present? Let breath come to you. Where do you feel the incoming and the outgoing breath? How is it to take this world in and then give it back out again?
I invite you to explore Body’s language of sensation. Notice where your awareness is drawn. Body isn’t always a comfortable place to be. What is true for you right now? How do you relate to Body’s fluid nature? How do you relate to Body’s abiding nature?
In the course of feeling body breathing there may be a sense of being in the stream of time. Thoughts and emotions may surface, naturally expressing mind. Perhaps you notice how you are relating to what is surfacing and how you can continue to feel body breathing, feeling and being alive. You can explore awareness stretching, growing more expansive.
Writer Sophie Strand describes
Our bodies [as] love songs to extinct ecosystems, weathered down to minerals and sparkling dust. We are all the ecotones [places where biological communities meet and integrate] where vegetal translations of sunlight, minerals, pollen, and pollution converge to briefly coalesce into the constellation of a human self. . . . We are a landscape where microbial and subatomic reunions happen that we will never be able to witness. . . . Life experiments and changes and flourishes in the places where bodies meet and dialogue with each other, asking questions, and mutually changing each other.
Can you let there be an opening to this experience of life perhaps “shimmering beneath the storm?” What is it like to experience life flowing through this “you” expressed as Body? What is it like to “briefly coalesce into the constellation of a human self?” Can there be an opening of awareness of how we change and are, ourselves, changed? All of life is moving. And yet if we let there be an opening we might find
the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.
We sense our bodies resting on Earth’s body. Breathing and aware, right here, right now. Tune into your living hum and vibration. Sense. Your body a part of Earth’s body. Earth’s body a part of your body. Walt Whitman’s words echo through time:
Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
It is true. Our skin is permeable. Our very form allows life to flow through us. Poet Mark Doty writes:
. . . You’re the shore on which an ocean of air is constantly breaking, in waves of breath. “Inside” and “outside” of lungs, permeable boundary of skin, eyes, ears, nose, holes in the body for substance passing in and out, no stable and fixed entity that is you, but a moving set of points through which pass water, air, light, food, parts of the bodies of others: their breath, tongues, [and] hands. . . . The world enters us and departs, just as language and image and idea are imprinted upon our consciousness, considered, forgotten, passed on, released.
As we explore the territory of inter-being we might experience more expansive awareness. This expansion of awareness draws many of us who are traveling the uncertain ground of aging. Kathleen Dowling Singh believes a transformation of awakening is possible in “the act of surrender, the laying down of self.”
Paradoxically it is with the self that we are able to lay down the self. Kathleen writes:
We need a functioning self as the vehicle for engaging, – lovingly, compassionately and wisely – as an elder, with others and with the world.
She writes:
The laying down of self . . . can occur only in each of our individual journeys. [And] The laying down of self can be mapped. It occurs in stages. These stages could be said to be a map of awakening: chaos, surrender, and transcendence.
Most of us know the chaos that arises when we encounter the “predictable sufferings” of life. Aging brings us face to face with the truth of loss and impermanence. Frightening questions arise. “Who am I without my strength and agility?” My memory? My health? My status? My belongings? There is no refuge in the world of things. There may be peace in surrendering to what Kathleen describes as a
. . . far greater power [which ] is the awareness in which this chaos . . . is occurring. . . . it is the endless play of formless presence, the ground of being, unfolding its ephemeral display of forms. . . . Our practice of open, mindful looking allows that insight.
Again and again we are invited to let there be an opening. In this opening we can observe the attachments and aversions arise and we can also witness the self easing its grasp, letting go. Kathleens writes:
There is a growing compassion for ourselves . . . There is also a growing compassion for all who’ve lived around us. . . for any part of our environment we’ve used selfishly. This increasingly inclusive compassion, this expansion of caring, is one of the flavors of spiritual ripening. . . . There arises the wish to become harmless. . . . A shift of the whole being occurs in the recognition of the causes of our sorrows and stresses. This recognition is surrender.
And isn’t this surrender also at the gate of love? This recognition that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” and we are not separate selves. We are constellations of aliveness enlivened and sustained by love.
Rainer Maria Rilke writes:
You are not too old
and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives
its own secret.