The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. I believe heart breaking world events are calling for care, compassion and understanding. I am grateful to share a practice that can help to foster these life-affirming qualities. Today’s class centered around our goodness and listening deeply from that place. We can do the inner and outer work of peace making.
We heard William Stafford’s poem, Being a Person. You can learn about this remarkable poet by reading Steve Paul’s LitHub essay, On the Enduring Memory of One of America’s Greatest Contemporary Poets. Steve’s been working on William Stafford’s biography. In the essay he observes:
Looking back on his life, as I’ve been doing in recent years, unearths not only a wealth of poetic charms but a sense that Stafford projected a moral force that can be useful if not essential today. His work threaded through concerns about the environment, race relations, politics, history, spirituality, and the depths and limitations of the human heart. . . .
In life as in his poetry he rejected loud conflict and social and political aggression. Let’s be reasonable and gentle with each other. Let’s greet the world with awe and an impish sense of humor. Let’s be honest with one another.
Stafford reveled in imagery from the natural world. Streams, rocks, trees, and prairie winds make recurring appearances as touchstones, inspiration, solid and fluid realities that guide our way. Contemplating the influence of those who love or hurt, Stafford offers solace in the stillness and hidden force of nature: “What the river says, that is what I say.”
To read Stafford today is to appreciate the richness and diversity of modern and contemporary poetry and to understand how he managed to make human connections, as if that were the absolute mission of his work.
Stafford died at his Oregon home on August 28, 1993. The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, “‘You don’t have to / prove anything,’ my mother said. ‘Just be ready / for what God sends.'” I find today’s poem and the testimony of William Stafford’s life to be helpful inspirations for navigating today’s troubled waters.
Guided Reflection
I believe it is truly a gift of incredible energy that we make when coming together in this way. A few weeks ago I started a nourishing Qigong class. Qigong centers around our body’s sensory perception of energy. I’m learning to cultivate awareness of energy inside by body and all around it. I’m learning to listen with my whole body. Our teacher encouraged us to practice “listening hands.” She encouraged us to cultivate sensitivity by softly cupping our palms to open them. When we open the hands we are releasing or sending out Qi out into the world. Our hands are formed by a quarter of all our bones. When we move them we’re using about a sixth of all our muscles. We have about 21,000 sensors of heat, pressure and pain in just a square inch of our fingertips.
All of these observations helps me to recognize that we are very sensitive creatures. We are energy beings. Standing beside the rivers with the migrating salmon or among the big trees along the trail I’ve been listening with my whole body. I’ve noticed a subtle opening inside me when listening to people sharing – really receiving as much of their whole beings as I can – what and how they communicate. I experienced so much feeling just taking them in. Their goodness, their beauty and caring are so moving! Maybe this is a kind of listening with love – to people, to salmon, to trees, to Earth. Isn’t this like our practice of presence? We listen with our whole body – in the moment, with loving intention.
I invite you to listen with your body now to poet William Stafford describing how to go about Being a Person:
Be a person here.
Stand by the river, invoke the owls.
Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important.
How you listen for the next things to happen.
How you breathe.
Here we are listening and dreaming the world together. Let’s each of us be a person opening to the sky, stars, all space even outracing thought.
I invite you to create a meditation posture that allows you to sense your inner goodness and beauty. Arrange your body with tenderness and then feel this body as if for the very first time. Sense and care for your body by relaxing, by easing the tensions you may feel. You might soften around those areas that don’t want to relax. It’s o.k. to be tense if it’s difficult to let go. As you feel your body, you might begin listening with your whole body. Explore a sense of opening to life unfolding now. Let it be easy. Breathe in a sense of spaciousness. Feel the chest and belly gently expand. Be aware of the space around you. As you breathe out relax into the space around you.
As you rest in the space, see if you can release any fixed ideas about yourself, about your body. See if you can soften the edges between you and the space around you. Soften the edges between your thoughts and the space around your thoughts. Rest in this spaciousness of ease. See if you can enjoy the experience of ease attuning to its goodness and the goodness inside you. Relax and release any ideas or stories that may obscure this goodness. Gently breathe in space and relax into space.
See if you can trust for these moments that you are better than you could have ever imagined. Gently open to your goodness. As you breathe, here and now, sense beauty inside all beings including yourself. As you breathe free of the stories and ideas telling you otherwise. Free yourself of noise. Let go of thinking, judging, wanting, so you can listen deeply with your whole being. Let go of trying to be good. Listen with a quiet mind and attune to your inner goodness.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
We can learn to listen well by learning how to quiet the voices inside, the ideas, the desires that silence our listening. We are learning to listen from the heart. This listening is not trying to control or fix things. Listen to your own heart quietly and non-judgmentally. Then listen to others without the filter of desires, fears, resentments, annoyances. If we listen from the heart we might be able to hear the hearts of others. We might listen to what’s deeper within them.
How [we sit] here is important.
How [we listen] for the next things to happen.
How [we] breathe.
Let’s see if we can listen in a way that we are connected with each other’s hearts. We can offer our beauty, caring and goodness to the world. We can offer our well wishing to all beings. May we learn through our practice to live in a way that promotes the happiness and well being of everyone including ourselves.