The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/RiverTree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  Today we opened ourselves to the sky, the earth, the sun and the moon.  We freed our awareness, our breath, and our love.  We listened to the language of Body, heart and mind.  We embraced life.  I can’t say it better than Ross Gay’s Unabashed:  Thank you. Every day!

We heard Eagle Poem: Joy Harjo’s instructions on prayer.  The poem asks that we pray by opening our whole selves to nature.  The circling eagle is held aloft in moving circles of air.  We, too, are sustained by moving currents of breath.  We are nature and our lives are bound by the ongoing cycles of birth and death.

We heard Haemin Sunim’s thoughts about love.  Haemin Sunim is a Korean Zen Buddhist teacher, writer and founder of the School of Broken Hearts. In his book, Love for Imperfect Things, he writes that truly offering our attention is love. He believes “we can love completely, even without complete understanding.”

Poet Ross Gay writes about joy and loss almost within the same breath.  We heard from the essay on joy from his Book of Delights.  He observes how we are joined by an “underground union” and by the shared knowledge that everything and everyone we love will pass away.  We also drew from his poem, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.  It is a long lyrical poem that alternates between celebrations and sorrows.  This collection is full of images that are earthy and fertile, teaming with life.  You can hear the poet’s exuberant voice reciting Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude to the music of Bon Iver. (It’s really worth listening all the way through!)

Relaxed Reflection

Thank you for being here.  Being here is an affirmation, a humble gratitude.  Sometimes we go about our days not remembering the hands that pruned and harvested our tea leaves.  Or the hands that picked only the ripest coffee cherries.  Many of us are sitting on Duwamish or Snoqualmie tribal lands.  We can remember with the deepest gratitude for the long, long time they stewarded the land we sit upon today.  When we savor the lives we’ve been given we pray.  Like Joy Harjo’s Eagle Poem we are lifted:

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

Let us open our whole selves “to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon . . . to one whole voice that is you . . . “

In this opening  we “know there is more that [we] can’t see, can’t hear . . .[we sense] the languages that aren’t always sound but other circles of motion . . . “

In circles of motion . . . “we see . . . ourselves and know that we must take the utmost care and kindness in all things. . . . [W]e “breathe in, knowing we are made of all this . . .knowing we are truly blessed . . . we were born, and die soon within a true circle of motion like the eagle rounding out the morning inside us. . . . “

Here now we enter the breath’s circles of motion simply by feeling sensations  – emptying and filling, cleansing and nourishing.   Let the breath flow at just the right pace for you. Let go of the need to control breathing in any way. You can notice the transitions between breaths:  weaving each breath smoothly and effortlessly into the next.  Breath and relax. Perhaps coming to sense “I am not the breather.”  Let the breath come to you. Just like the eagle being carried by currents of air.

This is our practice.  We take the utmost care and kindness with all things: body, breath, sensation, emotion, thought. We take the utmost care and kindness with all beings. “. . .[We] breathe, knowing  We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion. . .”

Once you feel those circles of motion settling you can take a few deep breaths and then just let them go. Relax into Earth’s support. You can feel her presence quietly meeting you.  “. . . We breathe, knowing We are truly blessed . . . “  And we are truly blessed knowing we breathe.  We can let our awareness free.  We can let the breath free.  We can let our love free.

Zen Buddhist teacher Haemin Sunim shares his thoughts on love:

I think one of the wonderful expressions of love is paying attention. When you are in love with something, when you love your child, . . . when you love whatever that you’re loving, then you pay attention.   And when you are paying attention to . . . you don’t think about yourself. Like when you are looking at your . . .  baby . . . sleeping at night, . . .  there is a feeling of warmth and love and . . . at that moment, you are . . . only paying attention to your [baby]. You are not thinking about your thoughts. It’s just so when our minds become quiet and . . . pay attention to whatever that is, . . .  in that moment there is a quality of love. . . .

Right now our minds are quiet and attending.  We can feel our breathing and our loving.  Breathing flowing like loving: taking in and letting go.  Beyond some idea of self or life there is being:  Attending, breathing, feeling, loving. In our practice we can feel whatever we feel. Our worldly life experience is inside in us. Emotional threads are entwined in our tissues and our breathing.  Subtly they can evoke sadness, anger, longing and joy.  All are living in a circle of motion.  Consider poet Ross Gay has to say about this:

. . . [I]n trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”

Here, together, we can sense the “underground union between us.”  We are here to notice.  We are here to bring that which matters into the light.  In this light we realize our circle is greater than we ever imagined.  We realize everything, everything has been given.  And being thankful is also loving.  

Here is from Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude:

. . . and [thank] you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.
I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude
over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,
the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems
slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,
which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.