The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. We reflected on what it is to feel truly at home within ourselves. As social beings an integral part of belonging includes the communities we find outside ourselves. We experienced the hum of our shared humanity with breathing practice and empathic imagination. We slowed our habitual forward momentum by giving ourselves more time to pause and to feel. When we’re not rushing through life we can appreciate ourselves and each other. Life’s magic and mystery are revealed.
We heard the wisdom of Buddhist teacher and writer Clark Strand. As a former editor of Tricycle magazine he’s has written extensively about Green Buddhism, ethics and creative expression through Haiku. Clark encourages us to “meditate inside the life we have.”
We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s beautiful poem Belonging. Rosemerry encourages students to find creative expression “inside the life you have.” You can find articles, interviews, videos, audios about Rosemerrry’s work by going to the “about” section on her web-site.
We drew inspiration from activist and writer Starhawk. She is founder of Earth Activist Trainings which center round permaculture and sustainability. She described circles of support in which we experience community. In community we can speak our passions and be heard.
We heard singer songwriter Carrie Newcomer’s poem Send Love, It Matters. You can find her beautiful music on her YouTube channel. For a treat watch her project You Can Do This Hard Thing.
Guided Reflection
Let’s come to the present moment together. I invite you to take a deep breath in and then easefully let it go. Try this again and this time relax whatever you can: your face and neck, shoulders and arms. Bring your attention to the bottoms of your feet, ankles and knees, thighs enjoining your pelvis. Sense Earth beneath your body, supporting you. Move attention to your back. Sense how it rises upward, supports your rib cage in front, in back. Feel the weight of your shoulder blades resting on your back, moving outward with the in-breath, inward with the out-breath. Make any adjustments that you need to feel stable and to be at ease.
What is it like to feel at home in your body? Can you connect with that part of your being that offers you comfort and ease? Home is an inner and outer space where we can relax and just be. In our practice we are encouraged to come home to a space of wakeful, balanced awareness. This space of awareness can be a refuge, a sanctuary. It’s spacious enough to include all that arises.
Buddhist teacher Clark Strand talks about “meditating inside the life you have.” “Wherever you want to illuminate your life, meditate precisely on that spot.” How do you experience inner and outer spaces in which in which everything can belong?
Author and activist Starhawk writes about home as community:
We are all longing to go home . . . Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
How do we experience home inside and community outside? Where do we find the places to listen and to be heard? Where we can see and be seen? In breathing, in slowing down, we can enter those places that restore, replenish and nourish our hearts and minds. And sometimes we have to go outside of what we think we know to find those sacred spaces. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer writes about belonging:
And if it’s true we are alone,
we are alone together,
the way blades of grass
are alone, but exist as a field.
Sometimes I feel it,
the green fuse that ignites us,
the wild thrum that unites us,
an inner hum that reminds us
of our shared humanity.
Just as thirty-five trillion
red blood cells join in one body
to become one blood.
Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand
notes make up one symphony.
Alone as we are, our small voices
weave into the one big conversation.
Our actions are essential
to the one infinite story of what it is
to be alive. When we feel alone,
we belong to the grand communion
of those who sometimes feel alone—
we are the dust, the dust that hopes,
a rising of dust, a thrill of dust,
the dust that dances in the light
with all other dust, the dust
that makes the world.
I invite you to bring your awareness home to your body. Let it fill the whole field of your body. Notice where your awareness lands. Can you pause to feel and to listen? Can you tune in to your motivation for being here? Can you just listen to the very basic human need that may have brought you here today? Can you let that need belong? You might take a deeper breath or two around it and let that part of yourself know it belongs.
How generously can you listen to yourself? In present body awareness we can connect with those parts of our being that often go unheard, unseen even buried. We may sense our busy forward momentum in a more intimate way. How do you experience this energy? Is it wholly unconscious? A driving force? An exuberant reaching? What is the nature of these deeper stirrings? How do they motivate us to act in the world? Is there a part of you that yearns for rest? Healing? Tenderness?
What comes to mind when you think of sanctuary? Recall people and places that have offered you protection, solace and healing. Can you remember a particular experience? What happened and how did it feel?
We can also remember those we have offered nurturing and protection. We find healing and solace in the human and more than human world. We sustain this world with our care and devotion. Our interpersonal sanctuaries of friendship, silence and stillness call for our attention and time. There is always someone who needs help, always there are those who are suffering.
The poet and songwriter Carrie Newcomer encourages us to Send Love, It Matters:
Somewhere someone needs help.
Send love.
It matters.
If you can’t get there yourself,
then take a deep breath.
Breathe in the weight of their troubles.
Breathe out and send all those burdens
into the Light
where sorrows can be held
with the most tender and infinite grace.
Breathe in what you can do.
Breathe out what you can’t change.
Spool out a thread of connection,
send courage and calm.
For the nights can be long
and filled with shadows,
and sometimes terrible
unexpected waters will rise.
Somewhere someone needs help.
Send love.
It matters.