The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/RiverTree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. Today we reflected on the experience of sanctuary: the inner and outer places where we can restore and renew our spirits. We refill our hearts we and venture out into the sea of life. We offer our protection and support to the human and more than human world. In giving and receiving shelter we become more fully alive.
We drew inspiration from activist and writer Starhawk. She is founder of Earth Activist Trainings which center round permaculture and sustainability. She described circles of support in which we experience community. In community we can speak our passions and be heard. We can join our strengths to offer protection and support to the human and more than human world.
Mary Oliver’s poem asks Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Black Branches of Other Lives? Her question is a wonderful invitation to explore stepping out of our domesticity and welcome the wild aliveness of the world. The poem is from her collection: West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems.
We also heard Maria Popova’s musings on the courage we can find knowing there are kindred spirits who share our struggles. Maria is a cultural essayist who brings the wisdom of artists, scientists and writers to the contemporary concerns of our time. This passage is from her book, Figuring, which is a compilation of her many essays.
Relaxed Reflection
Come home to the present moment. Slowly invite a deep breath in. Easefully let it go. Relax whatever you can: your face and neck, your shoulders and arms. Feel your body breathing. Right here right now are home in this body and mind. Home is an inner and outer space where we feel at ease, where we can relax and just be. Every time our heart/mind leaves home we can always welcome it back again. We can come home to a space of wakeful, relaxed awareness. This space of awareness is a kind of refuge. It’s spacious enough to include all that arises in heart and mind. How do you experience inner and outer spaces in which in which everything can belong?
Author and activist Starhawk reminds us:
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been – a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
How do we experience home inside and community outside? Where do we find the places to listen and to be heard? Where we can see and be seen? In breathing, in slowing down, we can find sanctuary. We can enter those places that restore, replenish and nourish our hearts and minds. Sometimes we have to go outside of what we think we know to find those sacred spaces. Mary Oliver asks:
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives —
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
[. . . ]
Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
[. . . ]
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
[. . .]
How generously can you listen to yourself? Being here, right now, we are willing to be present for what is true. In present body awareness we can connect with those parts of our being that often go unheard, unseen even buried beneath all the busyness and distractions of our days. We can feel their deeper stirrings in our bodies – how they motivate us to act in the world. In the sanctuary of our practice we remember the things we hold most dear. We hope these memories kindle compassion and loving kindness in our hearts. As the Irish proverb says: It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.
In writing about Walt Whitman’s Ode to the Interconnectedness of Life, essayist Maria Popova observes:
We live our lives by tidal forces — vast oceanic waves of change and chance sweeping us together, stranding us apart, washing over us with their all-subsuming totality of feeling, only to retreat and then begin anew before we have fully regained our breath and our footing. What buoys us is the awareness that, however distant and desolate the shore might appear, however dark and cold the waters of the night, there are other bodies swimming these waves, others so different yet so kindred — life itself swimming itself alive, as it did long ago in the primordial oceans that gave us feet and lungs and consciousness to live by.
What comes to your heart/mind when you think of sanctuary? Recall the people and places that protect, restore and heal . . . Can you remember a particular experience? What transpired and how did it feel? These experiences strengthen us for the next journey. We are restored, renewed and ready to offer sanctuary to others.
We can remember those we have offered nurturing and protection. We can do this only if we tend to our sanctuaries themselves. We find healing and solace in the human and more than human world. We sustain this world with our care and devotion. Our interpersonal sanctuaries of friendship, silence and stillness call for our attention and time.
As Maria reminds us: “ . . . however distant and desolate the shore might appear, however dark and cold the waters of the night, there are other bodies swimming these waves, others so different yet so kindred — life itself swimming itself alive . . . “ Here, in our practice, we experience life breathing life and we can hear Mary Oliver’s call:
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives —
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
in the night
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.