The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We contemplated our inner strengths:  clarity of mind, openness of heart, being peace.  We can respond to the troubles of our time by not giving up.  We persevere with acts of loving kindness.  We remember we are not alone.

Ellen, one of our group members, shared a practice she has adopted to get through the night.  In Ellen’s “blessing bathing” practice she recalls the blessings she receives that day.   And to get through a rainy day:  tromping through forest puddles in her rubber boots!  Beautiful ways to savor the goodness in life!

We drew inspiration from Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde. In her book, How We Learn to Be Brave, Reverend Budde reminds us that “When we choose love as our response to what we wish we could change but can’t, when we choose love as our response to the world as it is, not as what we wish it were; the we choose love over denial, or anger, or cynicism and withdrawal we share in God’s redeeming of our world.”

Guided Reflection

Welcome.  Last week we reflected on the inner light we can bring in service of social justice. When our own light falters we can seek out the lights of friends.  We can remember the many caring hands that continue to shape the world in healing and loving ways.  We also heard Thich Nhat Hanh’s invitation to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that we become solid, calm, and without fear.  Our world needs these qualities, our children, our and future children, need us.

This week I returned to Bishop Mariann Budde’s book on how we can learn to be brave.  Here are some of her words I needed to hear:

I want to convey that most audacious of faith statements:  there are forces for good at work in the world, even in the darkest hours.  We are our best selves, when we join those forces and do our part, tipping the scales ever more slightly toward the good.

She encourages readers to recognize their own courage and inner strengths.  An important strength is the ability to be vulnerable, even to accept weaknesses.  Our courageous acts are made possible by the practice of daily reflection.  For some of us this looks like meditation, prayer or contemplation.  For all of us this involves devotion.  

Throughout her book she returns to the perseverance we need to engage ourselves and the world with compassion.  I think this speaks to the willingness to truly open to the world just as it is.  To the manifestation of the indescribable – the mystery of life unfolding.  Each instant of opening is a small act of courage.  Persevering in many small acts becomes a path to wisdom.  

Here are national poet laureate Ada Limon’s Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Each day of our troubles I want to remember the “patient, plodding, . . green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.”  We too, can persevere through the cold that strikes against so much of what makes life worth living for us.    We go on living.  Our grand trees can inspire us to unfurl our fists of anger.  To open to life and take it all.  

As we come together in practice we can know we are not alone.  We share our love or the human and more-than-human world.  We are finding our way through the troubles together.  We open and persevere with small acts along the path.  Let’s come back to being solid and calm in the midst of life’s confusion and uncertainty.

You might take a few deep slow breaths. Feel the expansiveness of the in-breath in your body.  Follow the stream of outflowing breath through your body right into Earth’s body.  As you are ready let the breath, breathe itself.  Allow the breath to take your awareness into the body.  Sense how the nervous system relates to gravity as your body meets Earth’s body.   Patient and plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us.   

Feel the body as fully as you can.  Sense the areas around your head, face and neck.  Your upper back, your shoulders, arms and hands.  Your chest, belly and pelvis.  Hips, legs and feet.  Sense the living land beneath you.  Feel the gentle hug of gravity around you.  Our bodies are so deeply dependent, embedded and entangled with this amazing planet.  Continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.

Take a moment to reflect on what brought you here today.  What is that something that made you turn towards being here.  Become aware of that something.  You might be touching upon the quality of faith or conviction, trust, or confidence.   You might recognize your compassion, wisdom and kindness.  You might experience faith in meditation as it helps you to understand your mind and see reality clearly.  Consider the faith that brought you here today. Your presence here today affirms something that wants to be known.

In directing our minds to present moment experience we need energy, perseverance and strength.   You might sense this energy while staying present with experience in the body.  As we stay present we are cultivating mindfulness, awareness.  Clear awareness enables us to understand the way things are.  Can you sense your energy and awareness right now? 

Faith, energy, mindfulness enables us to stay with experience as the body gradually lets go of tension.  Fragmentation fades as we settle ourselves.  There may be a sense of solidity and calm, balance or equanimity.  Immersed in this experience.  The mind opens.   What is the experience of opening to moment to moment experience?  Let go of this moment completely to receive the next moment fully.  

Gradually, moment by moment, breath by breath.  Become rooted in the body.  Rooted in the land through the body.   We can be in the present moment experience of reality:  changeable, impermanent.  Knowing that everything arises and ceases.  Awareness.  A sense of spaciousness.  Can you pause.  Let go.  Open to allow something new to emerge in this spaciousness of mind?

This is an exploration of opening.  Opening to the goodness, the wholeness that we are.  The wholeness that can be overshadowed by fear.  We can remember how we grow toward the light of justice, compassion, inclusion and freedom.  Love.  

We can know there are many, many caring circles meeting in the world just as we are.  As meditation Tara Brach observes:

 . . . we are all in it together, cultivating presence, cultivating open-heartedness, and trusting basic goodness, the spirit that dwells within you and all beings. The more you trust, the more that will guide you in taking action, in sensing for yourself what is love asking.

What is love asking?  A question we can live by every day.  As we breathe in we can sense how it feels to be in this body and not separate from our collective body.  As we breathe out, we’re relaxing into the space around us.  The space that goes beyond walls.  In this great living space we can ask ourselves:  What is love asking?  We can open up to the needs of humans and more than humans. We are not alone.