This month our Moving into Meditation class will be studying the Yoga Ethic of Brahmacharya.  Here are some of the resources we used in our morning practice of guided relaxation, mindful movement and sitting meditation.  The inspiration for our guided relaxation comes from teacher and social activist Michael Stone.

Guided Relaxation:

Welcome . . . to this present moment . . . as you feel your breathing . . . you extend a welcome to each breath . . . receiving and releasing . . . taking in and giving out . . . each mindful breath . . . an affirmation of your intimacy . . . intimacy with yourself . . . intimacy with all beings . . . Feeling breathing nourishing you . . . and then feeling the outflowing breath affirming the life of other beings . . .

As we continue this simple practice we come to know, through direct experience, through feeling in our bodies. . . we can only fill ourselves so much, we only truly need that which sustains us . . . letting the life of each breath be enough . . . and then realizing we have to let go in order to be filled again . . . Feeling the natural release as we empty . . . the emptying just as vital as the filling . . .

Feeling the affects of gravity and time . . . creating a container for our experience . . . a form in which to explore the boundaries and limits of being . . . where our outer edges meet the world . . . our skin wrapping, our soft tissues enveloping one container holding another and then another deeper still down to the smallest cells . . . intelligent and self organizing . . .

And too, feeling, where the world enters our inner spaces . . . our hearts and minds . . . holding the space for surfacing mind states, emotions and feelings . . .
The curious mystery that enables us to remain present . . . to turn toward these arising expressions of life . . . maybe even toward arising reactivity . . . long enough to feel its energy, urges, anxieties even fear . . . What a wondrous miracle our consciousness is!

We come together again to be inspired by the teachings of Brahmacharya . . .

brahma-carya pratiṣṭhāyāṁ vīrya-lābhaḥ

“Devoted to living a balanced and moderate life (Brahmacharya), the scope of one’s life force become boundless”. Nischala Joy Devi

The intentional practice of Brahmacharya, mindfulness, turns the mind inward, balances the senses, and leads to freedom from dependencies and cravings.

Like the Buddhist “Middle Way,” in Yoga Philosophy, both overindulgence and repression can deplete your vital force; both can leave you insecure and anxious. On this middle path – this path of mindfulness – we learn to affirm and feel the fullness of life.

We begin by cultivating awareness of our sensory cravings, how they arise and how we express them. With relaxed awareness we can observe and feel the underlying energy of that which tips us out of balance. Is this underlying energy of craving the same seed that germinates and grows to tip the whole world out of balance?  Here we are, together, wanting to do good in the world somehow in a world swirling out of balance. It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed wanting to help the world – it’s so big, it’s bigness stops us in our tracks – we are so small – how can we make a difference?

Following the footsteps of the wise – we start where we are – we begin small. Teacher and social activist Michael Stone advises us: “A good place to start is in your body. . . . getting our house in order . . . a lot of the time people translate that as helping themselves only “I’m only going to work on myself.” The problem with just working on yourself is that it usually comes at the expense of other people . . . so one of the practices . . . is to make sure that your practice is always 50/50: aware of what’s happening in your own experience while noticing what’s happening in the relationships around you at the same time. . . . In his podcast, Raw Fear is a Dot in Space, he suggests that that we can make a vow . . . which is to do something about our own pain and our own fear, so that we can do something about other peoples’ pain and other peoples’ fear . . . We dedicate 50% of our practice energy to working and transforming our own pain and our own fear and 50% of our energy to helping to transform and settle the pain around us, the fear around us.

Imagine a gesture you can make . . . however small . . . perhaps toward a colleague at work who suffers from self criticism . . . one day you just turn to them and tell them what a great job you’re doing . . .

Our fears arise because we don’t want to lose control . . . to feel uncertainty.  Yet if we don’t learn how to open up to uncertainty then fear starts to harden in our bodies and our hearts and turns into aggression, violence, racism, sexism, we shut down . . . Michael says that aggression is inversely related to fear and our inability to cope with difference. . . . when we’re scared we act out . . . As meditators we can develop the courage to feel the more raw experience of fear . . . to feel how it emerges in our bodies and how it changes . . .

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says in her writings about uncertainty, more people are afraid of uncertainty then physical pain. Think about how uncertainty in your day to day life can make you behave in very nervous ways . . . maybe jumping from one thing to another, not completing an activity . . . . or may be you’re doing something in your life for which you are judging yourself . . . all ways of kindling anxiety . . . Perhaps you can even bring to mind the uncertainties that trouble you right now . . . can you also put your judgments aside and come here into this moment 50/50 . . . dedicate 50% of your being to your own experience 50% in relationship to what’s happening right now . . . together in this circle of friends. . . .

Can we help each other learn to practice unconditional friendship with ourselves? Unconditional friendship with our very human fears? When we indulge in our fears we abandon ourselves . . . we get so scared we try to numb ourselves in any number of ways gratifying unhealthy impulses or shutting down . . . often in familiar habitual ways that leave us feeling empty.

In our practice of mindfulness we don’t abandon ourselves when we get scared and we come to know what it feels like when we start abandoning ourselves.  As we start heading in that direction, we come to know what it feels like when we start leaving our body . . . The training in mindfulness is to see mental states arising, how they’re formed and how they change, so we’re catching it as we start to shut down. . . .

If we want to be friends with ourselves we can’t leave out the parts that are in pain. The parts that are in pain are the parts that are scared . . . the parts of ourselves that are painful to be with. . . This same dynamic plays out on a larger scale in our friendship with the world. . . When we can dedicate 50% of our attention to the care of the world, we feel its pain – not leaving out the parts that are scared and painful to be with . . .

This mindfulness practice becomes a heartfulness practice in which we can practice moderation.

Michael said that “You turn towards suffering and you know it by embracing it. Just like, you know another person by the movement to embrace, to hold. It’s not just a knowing, it’s a knowing with an embrace. . . . That teaching is the core of this path. It is so hard to remember that when you’re experiencing fear, you can turn towards it. When you’re experiencing a part of yourself that’s painful to feel, you can know it by embracing it – even if you don’t understand it. In relationship, you’re talking to someone and you still don’t understand their point of view.  You can still give them an embrace.  You can still love them and even though you still don’t completely understand their point of view. I don’t understand and I love you.

This creates a path forward . . you feel the sacredness of life . . . you feel a connection to something to something bigger than yourself, simply by letting your reactivity settle. . . . whatever your language is, you know when things are aligned, they are aligned because your reactivity has diminished. Not because you got what you wanted. You get what you want and things still don’t feel aligned. . . . “

Why keep meditating? . . . . why still practicing? We practice because we want to help. We practice for the benefit of future generations.

Pablo Neruda’s October’s Fullness

Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.
These veins carried
my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places
without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
The best thing was learning not to have too much
either of sorrow or of joy,
to hope for the chance of a last drop,
to ask more from honey and from twilight.
. . .
It pleased me to grow with the morning,
to bathe in the sun, in the great joy
of sun, salt, sea-light and wave,
and in that unwinding of the foam
my heart began to move,
growing in that essential spasm,
and dying away as it seeped into the sand.

Namaste my friends.