In our Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss we returned to the practice of building a posture of awareness.  Our bodies come to express the quality of attention we are cultivating with our minds.  We explored narrowing and broadening our focus using the breath as our home base.  We always begin with the physical sensations of breathing and then notice other sensations as they arise.  We investigate experience with bare attention, nothing added.

Then we notice our feeling response to sensation – whether it’s pleasant, unpleasant or simply neutral.  What is the direct experience of pleasant feeling?  Is “pleasant” in the body, the mind, the heart?  Does our response arise in thought forms?  Do these forms have bodies?  Can you explore the body of a thought?  Then we notice emotions – their arising and passing away.  What and how do anger, joy, irritation, boredom and love live in our experience?

As we open ourselves in pausing we come to know that nothing is still or solid.  All experience changes and it’s hard to find a lasting essence.  Even the “me” we navigate the world with is ever changing and can’t be known completely.  This realization is tinged with sadness and perhaps a sense of deep appreciation for the gift of life.

I think we affirm our appreciation in the practice of mindfulness.  We enter the present moment and really see what we are looking at, hear what we are listening to, feel what we are touching.  We don’t clutter the moment by anticipating the next or remembering the last.  This one is so precious.

Our meeting was a small party of two today.  One of my teachers says that community only takes two.  He encourages students to just come to sit again and again and see who shows up.  My friend Steve and I had a lively conversation about the awarenesses that arise in the flow of living with practice.  As always meditation reveals the endless paradox of experience.  Our narrow focus also seems to create space and suspend time.  Everything we think we know can yield into a place of endless questioning.  Our habitual tendencies are revealed and inquiries often lead us to venture something new – or drop views which may keep us locked in ignorance or prejudice.  I like to think of meditation as the “gateway” drug to more tolerance and true compassion.

Steve described living in a “matrix of love.”  Wow.  I just had to let those words resonate.  What does that mean?  How does it look, feel and sound?  If I place myself in the matrix it seems to reflect back the many instances I’ve experienced loving acts.  I know Steve tenderly cares for his aging mom.  I recall my husband patiently spending time with grandkids at yestserday’s holiday celebration; the face of friends who support their partners as they share the little gains and difficult set backs of long term illness; those who are parenting teenagers who need to assert their independence.  With every stumble we seem to come back to love again, and again.  It isn’t easy – it is a worthwhile kind of hard.

Like meditation.  It’s the kind of hard that often yields into the soft nurturing that sustains us.  We find inner resources – the capacity to realize compassion in the matrix of love.  We are in it together, we are it together.