The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored how resolve can bring aspirations to life. This is a “heart training” or caring for ourselves and our communities. We are creatures born of causes and conditions. We will all die some day. Our actions and their consequences are what will touch the lives of humans and the more-than-human world. No effort is too small.
We continued to draw from Oren Jay Sofer’s book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. Oren explores the importance of bringing resolve to our aspirations. He describes his approach to resolve as “heart-training” with practical steps we can take in our daily lives.
We heard Mushim Ikeda’s views on resolving to bring our actions to the people with whom we share daily life. You can hear her inspiring poet’s voice in the Lions’ Roar podcast program: Fear, Forgiveness & Self Care. Mushim is a poet, social activist and teacher at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California.
We heard from writer Koun Franz’ essay, Buddhism’s “Five Remembrances” Are Wake-Up Calls for Us All. Koun Franz is a Soto Zen priest. He leads practice at Thousand Harbours Zen in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We focused on the fifth remembrance concerning our actions and their continuing consequences.
We hard Maria Popova’s poem: Spell Against Indifference. This spell brings our attention to the fragility and impermanence of this beautiful world. Even appreciating the rain can help us remember “all we know of heaven.”
Guided Reflection
Welcome. In our last class we explored ways of recognizing integrity. We develop it in relationship. We learn it and we teach it. We support it in one another through our inter-dependence. Integrity affirms wholeness. I think that integrity calls for resolve. Resolve harnesses our heart’s energy to what we deeply value. In his book, Your Heart Was Made for This, Oren describes what resolve can bring to our lives:
Resolve lends firmness to the heart-mind, enabling us to follow through on aspirations, work with resistance and stay the course through . . . ups and downs.
Resolve swims against the current of society. . . . instant gratification, hedonism . . individualism . . . resolve requires patience, restraint and letting go.
Resolves knows the value of gradual cultivation . . honoring the . . training of the heart.
Resolve helps us relinquish personal preference to protect the greater good.
This week I’ve reflected on aspirations and resolve. I appreciate Oren’s big picture of what it is to actualize our aspirations. Reading this chapter helped me to recognize that this will be a life long journey. It will be a journey that requires “patience, restraint and letting go.” It will also require specific steps of engagement “working to protect the greater good. “ This means not looking away and answering calls to care.
I particularly appreciated Mushim’s Ikeda’s encouragement to bring our aspirations home. She places utmost importance on creating more safety, trust, belonging, creativity, joy and contentment to our relations. She asks herself: What actions can I take that can help people with whom I relate on a daily basis? How can I help others to feel truly heard and seen? She affirms that no effort is too small.
As I grow older and the world seems to grow more troubled every day I am reminded of last of The Five Remembrances which are recitations from the Buddhist teachings:
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
What we do matters. It matters for us and for countless human and more-than-human beings. In his essay, Buddhism’s “Five Remembrances” Are Wake-Up Calls for Us All, writer Koun Franz writes:
When you breathe out, your body needs to breathe in again. Just like that, multiple times a minute, you have a reminder that what you do matters, that what you do now is leading to something else. We always bear the weight of that, but we can also choose that weight in the way we sit and stand and walk and speak, because again, what other option is there?
Most importantly, the author, affirms this profound resolve: Don’t look away.
We can pause our busyness to recognize the sacred, to ask: what dies and what is being born with this breath? What we choose will birth consequences. I believe in us. We humans who don’t look away. We humans who express countless acts of caring, creativity and kindness. We humans who call one another to care.
Here is Maria Popova’s poem, Spell Against Indifference
The rain falls and falls
cool, bottomless, and prehistoric
falls like night —
not an ablution
not a baptism
just a small reason
to remember
all we know of Heaven
to remember
we are still here
with our love songs and our wars,
our space telescopes and our table tennis.
Here too
in the wet grass
half a shell
of a robin’s egg
shimmers
blue as a newborn star
fragile as a world.
How many reasons do we have to remember all we know of heaven? We can resolve “to remember we are still here.” We can choose to recall ”the wet grass [and the] half a shell of a robin’s egg [how it] shimmers blue as a newborn star fragile as a world.”
Let us be here now with the utter fragility of this world and this moment. We can only take one breath at a time. Zen teacher Maezumi Roshi’s counsel: Appreciate your life. There is no life without each other. Let us open our hearts in practice to consider the many reasons we have to remember all we know of heaven.
I invite you to adjust your posture as you need to be aware and at ease. Give yourself a few moments to let all those words move through you. You might take a few deep, slow breaths. Relax what you can.
Notice the quality of aliveness you feel. Notice how energy may be expressing in your body: perhaps as relaxation or tension, hardness or softness, subtle currents of energy, warm pulsations or buzzy vibrations. Be with what arises and allow it to subside. You might sense how it dissipates into a bigger space – a boundless space of awareness.
If there is a sense of doing see if you can let that be. You can let that float on the natural energy of awareness. Let the sense of aliveness support you. Stay with the truth of what’s happening in your experience as effortlessly as you can. You may take a deeper breath now and then. You might swallow or shift position. And then settle – perhaps resolving to allow. Allow experience and sensation, thought and sound appear in your awareness.
You can notice experience changing. Continuous waves of energy unfurling and rebuilding. This energy is always now, the ever present. The unknown arises and you can see life revealing itself. Here, now, with the utter fragility of this world and this moment, not forever just for now. We can only take one breath at a time. Something dies with the outgoing breath. Something being born with the incoming breath.
We feel our way through the ever-changing world. I invite you to attune to your heart’s energy. Listen to your own heart’s call to care. Listening, opening, allowing loving awareness to your experience of being. What calls for your love and attention? What calls for your caring, creativity and kindness? What moves you to compassionate action? What do you resolve?
Teacher Kathleen Dowling Singh writes:
. . . here we are, today, giving the gift of our attention, learning and sharing. . . . our hearts open every time they close. One breath follows another in and out of our Body home. Perhaps this is why we are here. . . . Mindful of each breath, we increase our capacity to show up in our lives . . . We will come to know that there is nowhere to go except more deeply into tender communion with all that is . . . We live in interbeing, wishing each other awakening