The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. We contemplated the importance of remembering the lives of humans and more-than-humans, places and experiences and histories that have helped to make us who we are. We considered how emotions and values inform our memories.
What we carry from the past influences our personal and collective present and future. May we continue the practice of mindful loving awareness on our journeys.
We heard from Fabiana Fondelvila’s Gratefulness.org essay, The Renewing Power of Ritual. This insightful essay explores how our transcendent emotions and essential human values can inform our practice of ritual. She offers examples and suggestions that help bring meaning to our personal and collective lives.
We heard Tibetan monk and teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s teachings on love.
Sophie Strand’s poem on love, The Final Lesson.
We heard from spiritual teacher, Ram Dass’ teachings on loving awareness.
We drew from Turning to Face the Dark, a Global Oneness Project conversation between Rabbi Ariel Burger and Parker Palmer.
Guided Reflection
I invite you to begin centering. Sense your body’s place in space and how you are connected to Earth. Feel your breathing and heart pulsing. Notice sensations surfacing. You can also move awareness through your body: feet, legs, thighs and hips; pelvis, low back and belly, the length of your spine; mantle of shoulder blades, arms and hands; neck and soft tissues of face; hard roundness of head.
Notice the presence of emotion; how the feeling expresses in your body. Notice the mind state that may be present; the nature of your thoughts.
Notice being in this moment sensing, feeling and breathing. I invite you to become aware of all that you are bringing to practice. If possible, let there be a tender allowing for your whole being. Can you open to the healing intuition that might tell you to stay or move awareness from body, to heart, to mind?
What is it like to give yourself this tenderness and time? Sensing what’s true takes time. Meeting what’s true takes tenderness. As humans, we experience the truths of our time, the time of this moment, yesterday’s time and tomorrow’s time. Our memorial days give us opportunities to come together in remembrance and gratitude. We can revisit the lives humans and more-than-humans, places and experiences and histories that have helped to make us who we are. Some of us have customs or rituals that affirm what gives our lives meaning.
Fabiana Fondevila writes about rituals of remembrance as:
. . . embodied symbolic act[s] through which we render visible the invisible values, emotions, and insights that are most essential to us. For example, transcendent emotions such as love, awe, grief, gratitude, compassion, longing, forgiveness; values such as courage, kindness, humility, justice; the memory of those no longer with us; the lessons of our forefathers that we want to keep alive; our personal and collective milestones.
Our memories are born and sustained in emotion and feeling. I invite you to reflect on who or what you might wish to honor, celebrate, grieve, remember. How have these humans and more-than-humans touched your life? What have you learned from your family members, friends, teachers, artists, musicians. advocates and defenders? Tibetan monk and meditation teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche writes:
Life begins with love,
is maintained by love,
and ends with love.
On our life’s journey anything can happen: beauty, frailty, the tenderness and resilience of love. Right now we can sense what we carry from the past and also our ability to open to the world unfolding. We can feel our impulses to cherish the world and those around us. We can live love through the simplest acts of kindness. We can let love teach us how to love. Here is Sophie Strands poem on love, The Final Lesson:
Whatever comes next, still,
blue birds, less humans perhaps,
less text, less books, more
oceans open to the page where
the boats float into a sturgeon
full moon reflection wrinkled
by the movement of a whale
below. More love, although
less human hearts to disrupt
the world’s more love. Or
we become love. Yes, that’s it.
Listen to it. Mycelial love.
Love like tendrils of starlight
through soil, sewing tree
to tree. Love first and now
and forever. Love the tender
animal of our last days.
As we relax, we can sense the wondrous workings of mind finding meaning, of heart moving beyond language. Sometimes by giving ourselves more space and time we gradually come to see our whole being is worthy of compassion. This spacious compassionate awareness – meditation teacher, Ram Dass, described as loving awareness. He wrote:
. . . . When I am loving awareness, I am aware of everything outside and inside. I’m aware of the waves on the ocean, the hibiscus flowers in the garden, my scary thoughts and dark feelings. Loving awareness witnesses it all .. .
When we feel love, it doesn’t seem to concern itself with who or what we should love. Loving awareness helps us to embrace our sadness, loneliness, fear, depression and physical pain. It shines a light in the darkness and reveals the actual sources of our suffering.
In listening to Turning to Face the Dark, a Global Oneness Project conversation between Rabbi Ariel Burger and Parker Palmer, I learned that Holocaust survivor and lifelong teacher, Elie Wiesel, took a vow of silence after the war. He did not speak about his experience for ten years. He went on to teach about the Holocaust the rest of his career, through the study of history, literature and philosophy. Rabbi Burger speaks of his concern about the decline of empathy he observes in today’s society. He says:
The challenge I see in much of this is that some of these questions are bigger than any one generation or human life. And so if we lose our memory, we’re starting from scratch every generation. We really have to think about the transmission of memory, . . . the kind of impact other people’s stories who came before us can have on our moral clarity.
Today we are thinking about our stories, the ones we inherit that affect the way we see the world and the ones we are living now that shape the world and future generations.
Isn’t this also love? Each time we listen, speak and act with mindfulness we are practicing non-harming. May we remember this loving awareness in those moments we feel pain and fear, helplessness and vulnerability. May we hold our memories and stories with loving awareness. May we offer our loving awareness to those who are suffering from lack of love. May we love them until they can love themselves again.
Life begins with love,
is maintained by love,
and ends with love.