The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored how mindfulness practice offers us a way of seeing reality more clearly.  We can develop our faculties of faith, energy, concentration and insight.  Alone and together we can open our hearts and minds to the difficult realities of climate change.  As Mother Earth suffers we suffer.  We can support each other in witnessing and responding with caring and compassion.  Thankfully we have a trail to follow.

Today’s practice is inspired by Ayya Santacitti’s talk, Global Witnessing:  Take In the Planet’s Feedback.  Ayya is a Buddhist nun in the Theravada tradition.  She is founder of the Aloka Earth Room, a practice space in which practitioners consider:  “What is ours to do as we walk the Noble Eightfold Path in these times of eco-social unraveling?”

We ended with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem Because.  This poem is from Rosemerry’s A Hundred Falling Veils site which offers a poem a day.  She also co-hosts Emerging Form podcast on creative process, Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writers Circle. Rosemerry’s heartening words encourage us to love as if our lives depend on it.

Guided Reflection

In our last class we explored our inter-relationship with world.   We reflected on how our bodies are part of the greater Body of our biosphere.  We thought about what it is to live with loving awareness so that we might listen to what Earth is telling us and respond with compassion.  We heard Ruth King’s encouragement to explore our interdependence with care and compassion. She asks us to think about how Mother Earth has a nervous system just as we do.  

Earth is expressing her pain in so many ways.  Last week I had the joy and sadness of hiking up to the Nisqually Glacier which is rapidly melting.  I read articles about the desertification of what once was called the fertile crescent in Iraq.  In our country, in fifty years we’ve are drawn down underground aquifers that have been formed over millions of years.  Mother Earth’s circulatory system is struggling. I listened to Ayya Santacitta’s talk called Global Witnessing:  Take In the Planet’s Feedback.  She described a way of witnessing these events together.  She said:

We are looking at a bit of news. . . .   Not doing it alone, doing it together with others.  Fully connecting with what’s going on in ourselves.  The mind level, emotional level, body level and also the relationship level.  How are we able to stay in relationship with what we are seeing on the screen?  This kind of practice is what the world needs right now.  Willingness to stand on the threshold of the narrative which we have been lead to . . .  [a]llowing that to consciously crumble, allowing the cracks in the narrative and seeing what wants to come through.

That may sound difficult or even radical.  Yet, I wonder what do we have to lose?  I wonder what might come through if we can open ourselves up to the difficult truths of our time.  Ayya acknowledges this is a very powerful practice that should be done carefully, a bit at a time.  She says:

It brings up fear.  Fear’s o.k. because we’re not alone with it.  We need each other.  We are mammalian animals called human beings and we need each other for safety and for action.  Community is really crucial.  We are basically coming to the end of our hyper individualistic narrative.  We are recognizing if we are not cooperating with each other then we’re not going to pull through . . .  We need to stand in this together and be changed by it.  

Ayya believes knowing we are not alone can help us to tap into our inner resilience.  Together we can find what is needed to feel and to act for the benefit of the human and more-than-human world.   This potential is evidenced by five faculties that we have as human beings.  We can develop them through meditation.  They enable us to integrate and act on the insights that arise from our willingness to witness.  Ayya says:

. . . . [T]he path is made by walking.  . . .  As we are walking the next stepping stone emerges.  This is how we can to work together with the Dharma even the most difficult situations like waking up to a wild fire.  . . .   . . .   In the midst of it all we . . . have at least a small circle of other human beings . . .  on the same page.  This is where we start from.  We start walking in the right direction . . .  [W]e don’t know what’s going to happen.  We know that we’re walking in the right direction and that is very precious when there’s so much confusion and so much uncertainty.

Let’s explore these faculties.  Let’s sit together as these vital concerns move through our bodies and minds. . . . 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.  Each successive moment grounding what ever you can.   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. 

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.  Sense the gentle hug of gravity around you.  Let yourself explore your connection with the more-than-human world.  Our bodies are so deeply dependent, embedded and entangled with this amazing planet.

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 Saddha, the Pali term for faith.   It can be translated as conviction, trust, or confidence.   This faith is based on direct experience.  You might recognize this faith as 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 Viriya, 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, Sati.  Clear awareness enables us to understand the way things are.  Can you sense your energy and awareness right now?  How might they come back to the felt sense of the body and let go of distraction?  So often a sense of discomfort arises from which we escape into thinking.  What would it be like to stay with discomfort?

Faith, energy, mindfulness enables us to stay with experience as the body gradually lets go of tension.  Fragmentation fades as we calm ourselves.  A sense of stability, collectedness, balance arises.  A state of Samadhi, concentration arises.  We become immersed in our experience without escaping into thinking mind.  The mind settles and opens up by itself.  What is the experience of opening to moment to moment experience?  Let go of this moment completely to receive the next moment fully.  

We gradually settle down.  We become rooted in the body and in the land through the body.   We also become rooted in present moment experience of the changeability and impermanence of reality.  This direct discernment of things as they are is Panna wisdom or insight, the fifth faculty.   In this active knowing we see the context or structure of experience:  It is the active knowing that everything arises and ceases.  There is a sense of space.  Can you pause for a moment and explore letting go and opening to allow something new to emerge in this spaciousness of mind?

This exploration creates room for change to happen, for new insights to emerge.  Letting go of old stories we can be curious about what wants to be born.  We sit here together on a threshold of possibility of extinction or evolution.  That is a very powerful contemplation to open up to.  We are opening our bodies and minds as the planet is giving us this powerful feedback. As we breathe in we’re sensing how it feels to be in this body not separate from the planet.  As we breathe out, we’re relaxing into the space around us.  The space that goes beyond walls.  The spaciousness that can allow things to be what they are. 

We can open ourselves to a much wider context so that our perceptions and assumptions of who we are will adjust and grow.  We can open up to the needs of humans and more than humans. We’ve been given these ever changing, ever developing bodies and minds through which we experience life.  We are part of the great mystery – something so much bigger than ourselves.  We are not alone. 

Here is Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem Because:

So I can’t save the world—
can’t save even myself,
can’t wrap my arms around
every frightened child, can’t
foster peace among nations,
can’t bring love to all who
feel unlovable.
So I practice opening my heart
right here in this room and being gentle
with my insufficiency. I practice
walking down the street heart first.
And if it is insufficient to share love,
I will practice loving anyway.
I want to converse about truth,
about trust.
I want to invite compassion into every interaction.
One willing heart can’t stop a war.
One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry.
And sometimes, daunted by a task too big,
I tell myself what’s the use of trying?
But today, the invitation is clear:
to be ridiculously courageous in love.
To open the heart like a lilac in May,
knowing freeze is possible
and opening anyway.
To take love seriously.
To give love wildly.
To feel the shock of indifference,
of anger, of cruelty, of fear,
and stay open. To love as if it matters,
as if the world depends on it.