The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. In exploring renunciation we practiced with letting go and opening to. I appreciate Oren’s encourage to ask for help. I am so grateful to have people I trust to help me in those moments when I’m contracting around a difficult experience. I also ask them to help me to open my heart when I know I’ve closed it.
We continued to draw from Oren Jay Sofer’s book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. Oren explores renunciation through the lenses of personal, inter-personal and collective. He writes: “Renunciation allows us to embrace the relative and to open beyond it. By releasing the tendency to contract around anything, we realize a wider perspective, very much including the diversity at the core of a just society. Renunciation creates the possibility of holding multiple even conflicting perspectives simultaneously.”
Oren quoted Roshi Bernie Glassman, founder of Zen Peacemakers. You can see a beautiful five minute video about Bernie and his work by following this link You can read Zen Is All of Life: Remembering Roshi Bernie Glassman, the Lion’s Roar article about Bernie’s legacy. You can see a funny picture of him, his dog and his cigar here too.
We heard Madronna Holden’s poem, Ask the River. I discovered the poem recently published by Kosmos Journal. Her site is an adventurous compilation of writings on world views and values, ecofeminism, folklore and poetry. Have a cup of tea here and be delighted!
Guided Reflection
Last week we explored courage. Courage is an expression of heart wisdom. It enables us to feel the most difficult moments in life. It sparks the willingness to stay with good trouble. It matures as a loving presence we can offer ourselves and others. It also illuminates the moment to let go. Our capacity for renunciation is the ability to let go. Oren writes:
Renunciation expresses the heart’s innate capacity to let go and experience inner richness. Understanding . . how less is more, renunciation strips away distraction, reveals the miracle of being alive, fulfills us through contentment rather than accumulation. Renunciation checks the flood of craving and unlocks a door to our inner wealth.
Oren writes of this letting go as a skill we can develop to free ourselves and to discover what we value most. Yesterday I practiced meditation by visualizing my death in 10 years, 5 years, 1 year, 6 months, 1 month and the next day. As my time got shorter and shorter I valued only people. My remaining desires were to love, to ask for forgiveness and to forgive. Oren’s writing also helps me to get to essence. He says:
Perhaps the most tenacious form of clinging is our tendency to grasp views and identities. . . . Renunciation invites us to let go of being right and move into more generative spaces of not knowing and curiosity.
Renunciation also carries us beyond such identifications. Roshi Bernie Glassman, founder of . . Zen Peacemakers, led street retreats . . . [during which] practitioners had to relinquish comfort, predictability, control, and . . their familiar identity. [He] also created a series of retreats bearing witness to the pain of genocide – another practice of renouncing comfort and the illusion of separation . . . in fostering intimate contact with suffering Glassman helped those of us who have more than we need act on behalf of others by realizing there are no others. Roshi Glassman wrote:
When we bear witness, when we become the situation – homelessness, poverty, illness, violence, death – the right action arises by itself. We don’t have to worry about what to do. . . . Once we listen with our entire body and mind, loving action arises.
Like courage, our willingness to bear witness arises from the heart’s wisdom. We listen with our entire body and mind. Loving action arises from the heart’s wisdom.
Let’s begin. You might take a few deep breaths. Adjust your posture as you need. Feel yourself gradually stilling. Sense how you are right now. How does your body feel? How is your mind? And how’s your heart? Relax. Rest your attention with something that feels simple, neutral: breathing, hearing sound or sensation in the body.
Once there’s a little bit of stability in the mind, whatever arises can be the object of your meditation. Experiences naturally come and go: sounds, sensations, thoughts and emotions. See if you can feel these experiences in the body. This is bearing witness. Can you let any sense of knowing drop away? This is not knowing. Attention is connecting, feeling, observing so intimately. If you get lost or confused you can always come back home to the simplicity of resting with one experience: the in-breath, the out-breath, sensation or sound. What’s it like to open yourself to this moment of being alive in this body?
When there’s pain or discomfort in your body, your heart, your mind, know that you can take a break. Rest with the breath, with sound, with something that’s simple and soothing. Let experience unfold in small doses as you are able. When discomfort subsides, see if you can enjoy the gift of ease that’s available. This is the practice of loving awareness, bearing witness to what is true.
As you rest on Earth’s body feel the experience of things dropping away – the things you’ve relied on for stability; the familiar habits of living you’ve taken for granted. Notice what you are opening to. Notice the space in which thoughts, feelings and sensations arise. Explore the awareness of this inner spaciousness and stability. What is the nature of your response to what arises? What is it like to bring curiosity and compassion to this experience?
Now I invite you to reflect on how it is to stay vitally alive to the truth of our shared humanness? As you rest on Earth’s body can you be alive to the truth of our shared creatureliness? Again notice what you are letting go of . . . Notice what you are opening up to. Can you meet the vulnerability of letting go with compassion? Can you meet what you are opening to with curiosity? Feel these experiences in the body – the truth of embodiment. Awake and feeling in loving awareness.
And if you have questions, poet Madronna Holden says:
Ask the River
Ask the river how to see this world
With a mind of water,
Holding the sky in your eyes,
Embracing the stone you stumble over,
Laughing in the face of the rain
As you gather it in–
So that everyone you pass
May quench their thirst
On you.