The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  Today we explored awareness as relationship with ourselves and the world around us.  In mindfulness we train the mind to stay with present moment experience whether it expresses as sensation, emotion or thought.  We also notice how we respond to pleasant or unpleasant experiences can reveal so much about the nature of mind and personality.

We drew inspiration from Jennifer Williamson’s poem I Am Enough.  Jennifer is a writer and suicide loss survivor.  Her web-site, HealingBrave.com, offers a wonderful sampling of her writing and healing resources.  These words from Jennifer’s bio spoke to my heart:

Some wounds are meant to hurt. If you let it, the pain wedges you open, so that new things can get in and something else can come forth.
In the hollowed out place where your life used to be, starting again is part of the medicine. And part of the revolution.
The way you heal can be its own healing.
You can make change, connections, things, beauty. You can take what you’ve been given and give back differently. You can love people better, even the people you don’t like… including yourself: because deep healing is brave work. And important. And, well, WORK.

Meditation instructor, hospice director and writer, Frank Ostaseski, describes how mindfulness practice can help us develop the capacity to “be with” difficult experiences.  In his book, The Five Invitations, he discusses the nature of our “wild” mind and our impulse to control life experiences that cannot be controlled.  Of course our super powers are loving kindness and compassion.

These capacities are two of the four inner resources that traditional Buddhist meditation teaches:  loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity.

We ended with Taoist philosopher and poet, Lao-Tzu’s poem We Are a River.  This interpretation is drawn from The Sage’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for the Second Half of Life.

In our post- meditation discussion we discussed our relationship to time.  I mentioned David Farrier’s fascinating essay, We’re Going to Carry That Weight a Long Time, in the current issue of Emergence Magazine.

Relaxed Reflection

As we stay with our experience we practice mindfulness – we can narrow or widen the lens of our awareness – and stay present where we are right now.  We remain in relationship, intimate relationship . . . as experience reveals itself . . . the forces underlying thoughts, feelings and emotions . . . how we relate to their expression can lead to suffering or wisdom.

We enter a different relationship with space and time.  Mindfulness reveals the ways we are pulled by craving and pushed by aversion.  It shows how the mind spins its “if only” stories.  If only we had the the job, house, car  . . . If only we could be taller, shorter, slimmer, stronger.  If only our friend or family member would change.  Eventually we find the worm in the apple of our desire.   We recognize old patterns of thinking.  We disentangle ourselves moment by moment.   We grow toward freedom.

We are nurturing that part of ourselves that enables us to find a helpful response to life’s difficulties . . . We recognize those moments we are called to listen and when to express our caring . . . In staying with our experience we come to appreciate the deeper beauty of being fully human.

Poet  Jennifer Williamson writes:

I Am Enough
There is a wholeness that’s already mine.
It’s already ours.
[I am not just the seed,
I am the rain that waters the flower.]
It’s a reality that’s already there,
That I am enough.
I take on faith
That wholeness is already mine,
That I need do nothing to deserve,
That my worthiness is based only on my being.
I am wise enough to let go,
And I am strong enough to remember the truth
Of who I really am.
I can encounter the world
In such a way
That I remember who I am.

I am the rest inside the unrest.
I am the depth of the sky,
And the light piercing the sea.
I am the crest of a wave.
All that I need to be,
I am.
There is no problem to solve in this moment.
There is no plan to make,
No failure to be feared,
No other place to be.
This moment is enough.
This place is enough.
This imperfection is enough.
[I am patient enough for my life to unfold in divine timing.

I feel the fullness of my life in this moment.
I feel the richness of my life in this space.
I am loved beyond thought,
And I have nothing to prove.
There is no one to impress.
I receive the message
That being is enough. . . .

Beyond the shadows
That I have created,
The message remains:
I am the same.
I have always been enough,
Simply by being here.
Simply by being.

It only takes a moment,
And I remember this again.]

There is a wholeness that is already ours.  We are enough, simply by being.  It only takes a moment to remember.  And yet,  it is also in our nature to forget.  How easy it is to find ourselves in the trance of wanting . . . not wanting . . . as James Joyce describes it’s like  “living a short distance from our bodies.”  We find ourselves in pieces.  When we “re-member” we make ourselves whole again.   In our reflection we can consider wholeness – What are the parts we welcome?  . . . What are the parts we pass like strangers on the street or the neighbors we live beside and don’t know?   How does our welcoming and avoiding shape our experience and views?  

Frank Ostaseski reminds us that

.  . . . true mindfulness begins and ends with a simple choice to pay attention to what is so.  . . . feel open to things without assigning them a value:  pain, joy, sorrow, anxiety.  Past, present, future all become the same.  It can all be there and that’s okay.  There is room for everything to exist.   . . . Mindfulness  . . . is about being authentic, imperfect, vulnerable and human.

When we are willing to be vulnerable, we can feel the energy of personality in our attachments . . . our aversions . . . We can offer our personality compassion . . . it works so hard . . . defending and struggling . . .  The teaching is to let it be . . . welcome it all . . . allow experience to unfold . . .

We can call on Jennifer’s words like a prayer:   May I remember that  wholeness is already mine . . . May I remember my worthiness is based only on my being.  May I be wise enough to let go . . . May I be strong enough to remember the truth . . . May I encounter the world in a way that I remember who I am. 

Remembering and welcoming are two wings that carry us home.  Moment by moment the mind opens to reveal just a bit more of our creatureliness, our domestication and our wildness. 

Frank writes:

. . .   Our minds are wild.  We don’t tame them by trying to stop our thoughts, repressing our emotions, or even by resolving our problems.  We have a lot less control over life than we imagined.  . . . Your mind didn’t become wild when you started to practice meditation.  The mindfulness simply made you aware of what had been happening in the background all along – what your personality is reacting to and trying to manage.  Here is a counter-intuitive suggestion:  allow it all.   . . .

. . . meditation is about making friends with ourselves, to meeting each and every part of our lives with curiosity and compassion.  . . .

To pay attention is to relate – to be in relationship.   To pay attention is to notice how we are relating to what is.  When we find ourselves struggling, judging and rejecting our experience, we can bring loving kindness to the pain.  We can offer a loving kindness that is patient and wise enough to let it be – this humanness that is creaturely, tame and wild.  We can offer loving presence and let it be.  

Lao Tzu: We Are a River

Our life has not been an ascent
up one side of a mountain and down the other.
We did not reach a peak,
only to decline and die.
We have been as drops of water,
born in the ocean and sprinkled on the earth
in a gentle rain.
We became a spring,
and then a stream,
and finally a river flowing deeper and stronger,
nourishing all it touches
as it nears its home once again.