The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. Today we explored the many forms of mothering and being mothered.  We reflected on those who have mentored, nurtured and protected us.  We also contemplated our devotion to human beings and more than human beings.

We heard Alice Berry’s poem, Children of the Earth and Sky.  Alice is a contributing writer to Unitarian Universalist World Magazine.  Her poem affirms our inter-relationship with the natural world.

We reflected on Sylvia Boorstein’s ideas about nurturing and human nature.  Sylvia is a “mother, grandmother, author, [meditation] teacher and psychotherapist.”  In her On Being interview, What We Nurture, she discusses her experience of being nurtured.  She describes how mindfulness in every day life can help us in nurturing others and ourselves.

We drew inspiration from social activist and writer Rebecca Solnit’s essay If Motherhood Brings Out Conflicted Feelings in You, It’s O.K. You Are Not Alone.  Rebecca writes about the many forms of mothering she’s experienced.  She also offers readers this blessing:

May you locate the 10,000 mothers that brought you into being and keep you going, no matter who and where you are. May you be the mother of uncounted possibilities and loves.

We ended with poet Sophie Strand’s The Mother Secret.  The poem is a luscious word painting of the many mothers we have in the natural world.

Relaxed Reflection

Today is a day many of us come together to honor and to remember the people who have mothered us – those who have nurtured us.  We can reflect on the qualities of mothering, the ones we learn as they are given to us:  nurturing, compassion, love and protection.

I invite you to think of someone who has mothered you:   mothers,  grandmothers, fathers, grandfathers, aunties, uncles,  people who guided and mentored you. Bring that person, those people into your heart.  Can you feel their attention, love and care?  Perhaps memories surface with experiences you shared together.  They may be special occasions or every day moments in life. Tune into the goodness and love you shared. Let it come alive in your heart.

I invite you to take a moment to send this person, these people your blessings – they may be gratitude, love, respect, whatever comes to your heart.  Imagine your blessings touching their hearts – even if they have passed on – you can know that your love or kind regard once lived in their heart. Together you form a circle of loving kindness, a flow of giving and receiving. This is the love that makes life possible. Imagine this love touching all the mothering beings and young ones in the world.  

Giving and receiving loving kindness is at the heart of our practice.  The Buddha taught:  ‘Even as a mother protects with her life her child, her only child, So with boundless heart should one cherish all living beings; Radiating kindness over the entire world:’

We are those who mother and who have once been children.  We, as Alice Berry writes, are Children of the Earth and Sky:

Children of the earth and sky, we are nurtured, sustained, given warmth and light from above and below.
Supported by earth’s strong, firm crust, we build our homes, till the fields, plant our gardens and orchards.
When we turn from self and seek to be aware, we will find holy light in human faces, in blossom, birdsong, and sky.
Then earth is truly our home, and we are one with all earth’s creatures,
Parents of earth’s children yet to be.

Let us seek to be aware.  Let us find holy light in human and more than human faces so that we may be one with all Earth’s creatures.

As you rest on Earth’s body see if you can remain aware and be at ease.  You can feel yourself as a child of the earth and sky.  Sense how you are “nurtured, sustained, given warmth and light from above and below.”  Can you also sense yourself as a child of holy light?   Imagine the holy light of love.  

All living beings need love to survive.  This love moves from being to being and through time from ancestors to future generations.  This love informs the wisdom that enables life to adapt and thrive in even the harshest conditions.  We nurture and are nurtured.   I invite you to reflect on who and what you nurture in your life.  How might you hold someone or something with the devotion of a mother?

Sylvia Boorstein is “mother, grandmother, author, [meditation] teacher and psychotherapist.  She reflects on nurturing in saying:  

. . . [S]ometimes the pain of the world seems incomprehensible and unbearable to me, but I think if there’s anything that balances it, it’s the wonder at the world, the amazingness of people — how kind they are, how resilient they are, how people will take care of people that they don’t know. . . . [H]uman beings have that ability. I don’t think they have to learn it. They don’t have to have lessons. . . . [W]e care about other people, and we take care of them. . . . Human beings are amazing. Life is amazing. The sun came up in the exact right place this morning.   . . .

Life is amazing.  We can see mothering and nurturing in the more than human world.  Mother trees of the forest who nourish trees and more that tree beings.  Long-lived grandmother and mother elephants keeping each other safe and helping young ones to stand, walk and swim.  Grandmother killer whales find and share food with their grandchildren.  As Sylvia says, there is pain and wonder in this world.  

Essayist Rebecca Solnit writes about “mother” as a noun and a verb.  She explores the mothering she received from many sources including:

. . . . the vast expanse of the Pacific, its sheer beauty and power, and the reliability of the ocean that would always be there, the waves that would always be rolling in, had long offered me refuge and comfort. . . .
. . . the places from libraries to forests, the activities and routines and rituals, the songs and stories and authorial voices, the kindness of friends and colleagues and public voices.  . . . all the forces and processes that protected and provided for me.

Rebecca wishes that “all of us can have mother the verb in our lives one way or another, as something we give and receive, whether or not we have or are mothers.”  Poet Sophie Strand affirms this wish with her poem,  The Mother Secret

I have a secret. You are – whether moss, falcon,
mycelium, or lonely dawn-watcher at the riverside,
a mother. And you are mothered. By the galactic
complexity in your gut, by seasons and pollen and
footstep sucking mud, by the twin wings of your lungs,
by the green wind that comes to gently tuck
a curl behind your ear. Your body mothers you.
And child-like you nuzzle deep inside other bodies.
Forest bodies. Spore bodies. Weather bodies as blue
and vast as fabric. A man can mother his own mother.
A little girl on the mountain, mothers the summit, the lichen,
shepherds a salamander across the trail. A woman
can mother herself, tenderly, by making the coffee
strong enough, placing the tulips in a butter-circle
of sun on the windowsill.

I know your wound is salt-rimed and stings. I know
you ache for lullabies, a memory of haven, sound and natural
as a swallow’s nest. But here, let me give you a world-large gift.
A gift you also give me.
Everybody is a mother. Everybody can turn to the other
and offer a song, a wink, a fierce embrace.