The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. Including everything in mindfulness draws us more intimately into the reality of our lives.  Touching uncertainty and vulnerability can open our hearts to our shared human condition.  We can develop the inner resources we can draw on and that we can offer others in times of difficulty.  Our embodied presence makes so much possible.  We can create the conditions for our inner truths and deeper wisdom to arise.

We practiced a guided meditation inspired by Oren Jay Sofer.  Oren is author of the Sounds True Audio course, Speak Your Truth With Love and Listen Deeply:  A Training in Mindfulness Based Nonviolent Communication.  I’ve studied with Oren for a number of years.  This course is a beautiful and thoughtful training in how to bring our embodied presence to the world can support our relationships and help us to grow as compassionate actors in the world.

We heard Padraig O Tauma’s poem The Facts of Life. Padraig is an Irish poet and theologian.  He presents Poetry Unbound a program produced by On Being Studios. This poem encourages us to bring our hearts to live and love in the world.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  This week we explored how our minds are so much more than our brains.  We use the world to think.  We include feelings and movements of our bodies, the minds of others and our environments in our extended minds.  Mindfulness can help us to appreciate this inter-related network of which we are a part.  Mindful awareness can guide us to an experience of wholeness.  It can helps us accept ourselves and each other unconditionally.

We drew from Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Annie explains that “thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. . . .  the capacity to think well — that is, to be intelligent — is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them.”   I think we can develop our thinking minds with mindfulness.

We heard John Welwood’s poem about our basic goodness.  John was an  transpersonal psychologist.  His work integrated Eastern spiritual wisdom with Western psychology.  His teachings and writings centered around relationship as a spiritual path.  You can find his writings and some of his teachings on his web-site.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We reflected on memories, how we create them, store them and retrieve them.  Our mindful awareness enables us to witness how memories change and how we are changed by them.  Mindful awareness can help us to live in the present moment, truly the only moment we have.  Learning difficult and wondrous truths about mind and memory evokes compassion.

May we remember life’s impermanence and extend compassion to ourselves and others.

We heard Jane Hirshfield’s poem When Your Life Looks Back. The poem is an invitation to enter life more fully, moment by moment.  It’s about the fragility or our shared human condition.  In her wonderful interview with Lion’s Roar writer Noelle Oxenhandler, Jane comments:

Who is the “I” of this poem? It is all of us, called to the thresholds of our own lives, invited to go on through whatever sorrows and difficulties we may encounter, and to make our home in the happiness that can come to us only when—realizing how far we extend beyond our own skins –

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We practiced settling and exploring our deep experience of being.  Being aware and receptive to what arises  are conditions for attunement to ourselves and others. Attunement is an expansion of listening to and with our whole being.  With attunement we can appreciate the beauty, complexity, joy and suffering of others. May our practice support our ability to live compassion.    

We heard Mark Nepo’s short essay Unadorned. Mark’s words convey the precious and fleeting nature of life. He writes that “this clearing of awareness is where we stop and put everything down, accepting there is nowhere to go. It is there that we begin to flower slowly, one color at a time, letting everything we’ve kept hidden rise with the fragrance we were born with.”

We ended with Zen Earthlyn Manuel’s prayer For All Beings.  Zenju’s tender prayer of loving kindness conveys the peril and vulnerability that many people in the world experience today.  Her prayer names the essential needs we require to flourish in this world.  Care.  Love.  Safety.  Freedom.   “To be fed, clothed. To be treated as if their life is precious. To be held in the eyes of each other as family.”

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In today’s class we explored the way we view things.  We can inform our view with the knowledge that everything is constantly changing.  We can find our way by trusting our capacity to allow what emerges in the space of awareness.

In this space of awareness we can be touched by life experience directly.  In this still space, we can be moved to caring, empathy and compassion.

Our meditation practice was informed by Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal’s teaching.  Gil and his fellow teachers offer a library of talks, guided meditations and courses through AudioDharma.  You can experience his guided meditation,  Trust Emergence, in this archive.

We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem Directions.  You can find more of Rosemerry’s writings and poems on her web-site A hundred Falling Veils.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  I believe heart breaking world events are calling for care, compassion and understanding.  I am grateful to share a practice that can help to foster these life-affirming qualities.  Today’s class centered around our goodness and listening deeply from that place. We can do the inner and outer work of peace making.

We heard William Stafford’s poem, Being a Person.   You can learn about this remarkable poet by reading Steve Paul’s LitHub essay, On the Enduring Memory of One of America’s Greatest Contemporary Poets.  Steve’s been working on William Stafford’s biography.  In the essay he observes:

Looking back on his life, as I’ve been doing in recent years, unearths not only a wealth of poetic charms but a sense that Stafford projected a moral force that can be useful if not essential today. His work threaded through concerns about the environment, race relations, politics, history, spirituality, and the depths and limitations of the human heart.  . . . 

In life as in his poetry he rejected loud conflict and social and political aggression. Let’s be reasonable and gentle with each other. Let’s greet the world with awe and an impish sense of humor. Let’s be honest with one another.

Stafford reveled in imagery from the natural world. Streams, rocks, trees, and prairie winds make recurring appearances as touchstones, inspiration, solid and fluid realities that guide our way. Contemplating the influence of those who love or hurt, Stafford offers solace in the stillness and hidden force of nature: “What the river says, that is what I say.”

To read Stafford today is to appreciate the richness and diversity of modern and contemporary poetry and to understand how he managed to make human connections, as if that were the absolute mission of his work. 

Stafford died at his Oregon home on August 28, 1993. The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, “‘You don’t have to / prove anything,’ my mother said. ‘Just be ready / for what God sends.'” I find today’s poem and the testimony of William Stafford’s life to be helpful inspirations for navigating today’s troubled waters.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We immersed ourselves in the contemplation of the wild salmon’s journey from their freshwater birthing waters out into to the vast ocean waters. They return pushing against tides and currents back to their birthing waters to spawn new life and then die.  They are nourished and in return nourish hundreds of other species along the way.  Their bodies’ nutrients are taken up by trees.  The out-breath of trees becomes the in-breath of many other creatures including us.  This web of inter-being is at the heart of our mindfulness practice.  May we all realize our inter-being and be moved to compassionate action in the world.

We were inspired by Alexandra Morton’s TEDx Seattle talk, What Humans Can Learn from the Wisdom of Salmon. Alexandra shares some of her moving experiences of studying whales, dolphins and salmon. She describes the inter-relationships between salmon and their greater habitat, including humans and more than humans.  In 1980  she witnessed wild salmon migratory returns were crashing. She began studying their immune systems and discovered a virus transmitted by the farm raised Atlantic salmon.  She and her team of researchers learned that by sampling the salmon along their migratory route back out into the Pacific ocean they could learn about the condition of ocean waters.  Alexandra’s story is an inspirational call to care and to act to protect the lives of our more than human kin.

We heard from poet Jane Hirshfield’s On Being interview, The Fullness of Things.  The fullness she refers to relates to the Buddhist perspective of accepting the suffering and perfection in life.  The practice is a journey of feeling life’s joys and sorrows.  She hopes that everyone’s journey includes a moment when “they stood in the world, undone by awe and radiance, and the small self vanishes, and you understand the world as immense and yours, and not yours. . . . The great gate to abundance is simply to feel yourself able to be porous, to be open to whatever is put in the bowl that is yours to hold with your 10 fingers and 54 bones. And that is abundance.”

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  The natural world’s seasonal turning inspired us to find a deeper aspiration for meditation practice and for a way of being in the world.  A deeper aspiration may help us to establish a kind, calm presence, like sunlight on a forest. It may be an appreciative awareness. A forgiving awareness. A caring, kind or loving awareness.  We begin by nourishing ourselves with the breath.  We feel sensations in the body.  We draw on Earth’s support.  Breath, body and Earth can help us to feel our entanglement with the world.

We heard John Muir speak of our interdependence with all beings.  In his book, Mountain Thoughts, he seems to presage Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on inter-being.  We have the sun and the rivers, the trees and flowers inside of us.  The bird song and wind song, the song of rocks in the heart of the mountains are our own songs of love.  You can read a bit more of his Mountain Thoughts at the Sierra Club web-site.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We continued exploring the practice of conscious witnessing.  We witness with the intention of feeling the sensations that arise in the body in response to what we see.  We stay with this direct experience without thinking about what we feel.  This is a profound way of being present and open to the mystery of life unfolding.  In this way we open to an intelligence that is vaster than our own.  In this opening we can be with life’s joys and sorrows.

Today’s practice was inspired by Ayya Santacitti’s talk, Resonance:  Engaging Creativity Beyond the Intellect.  Ayya is a Buddhist nun in the Theravada tradition.  In her talk Ayya explores witnessing on a personal, collective and global level.  She believes that we can bring different energy to life: Compassion.  Interest.  Kindness.  Willingness.  We resonate with the bodily sensations that arise while witnessing.  In this way we can open to a vaster intelligence and with creativity beyond intellect.

We heard from Kiowa elder and writer N. Scott Momaday’s book The Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land.  In an Paris Review essay, We Must Keep the Earth, he reminds readers that:

We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in.

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