Sitting with Friends - DharmaTouchDharmaTouch

The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. We devoted our hearts and minds to appreciating our spiritual friends and the wisdom teachings of meditation teachers, poets and writers. We imagined the many people who have cared, nurtured and guided us to be sitting in our circle.

We expanded the circle by imagining who will be singing beautiful songs of love and compassion in the future.

We heard Sufi poet Rumi’s Search the Darkness, from Love Is a Stranger Selected Lyric Poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Kabir Helminski.

We practiced a guided meditation inspired by Oren Jay Sofer. We imagined our mentors, teachers, family members and friends sitting in a circle of care.

We heard Rainier Maria Rilke’s poem, My Life Is Not This Steeply Sloping Hour, from the Book of Hours translated by Robert Bly.

We heard one of Erin Geesaman Rabke’s blessings from her Embodied Beatitudes. A more complete list from her “work-in-progress” is like a prayer of appreciation for our spirits.

Guided Reflection

I invite you to create posture to support relaxation and awareness. You might feel your connection with Earth and her support. Establish the kind of steadiness that allows you to relax. Allow the muscles of your legs and pelvis to relax; the area around your heart to relax. Can you let go of planning or remembering? Can you ease away from any sense of doing ? Allow the pressures of life to lift. If there is something weighing on you, see if you can set it down for a while.

Together we create a sanctuary – a place where we can slow down – a place where we can be awake for the many expressions of light. Rumi asks us to:

Search the Darkness

Sit with your friends, don’t go back to sleep.
Don’t sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.
Surge like an ocean, don’t scatter yourself like a storm.
Life’s waters flow from darkness.
Search the darkness, don’t run from it.

Night travellers are full of light, and you are too: don’t leave this companionship.
Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish, don’t slip into the dirt like quicksilver.
The moon appears for night travellers, be watchful when the moon is full.

Let’s take a moment to savor the light of our companionship.

Now let’s explore Oren Jay Sofer’s beautiful guided meditation on remembering the goodness, the light in our lives. Let’s start by remembering people who have helped us, the ones who have been there for us in some way. Let them come one by one. Imagine them them sitting around us in a circle. You might think about a mentor, a teacher, a relative. Someone who’s played a meaningful role in your life, who’s shown you kindness and care. You might see this person in your mind’s eye visually seeing their face, their form. Or if you’re less of a visual person you might just have a sense of them being here with you sitting in front of you. You might imagine their open eyes looking at you smiling, caring. See if you can let yourself take that in. How is it to feel their presence and receive their care?

Now invite another person to sit just to their right also in front of you: someone else who showed you kindness. See their face or sense their presence. Imagine them looking at you smiling, caring for you. See if you can let yourself take in their care. See both of them sitting in front of you. If you like you can bring in a third person just to the left: a brother or sister, son or daughter, friend, a colleague, a pet. See these faces seeing you, caring for you, seeing the best in you, reflecting your inner light. Feel your body as you take in their care.

We’re each held here through relationships of care, tenderness and meaning. Each of those we care for also have connections of care tenderness and meaning. Imagine behind each of the people in your circle all of the others in their lives, their parents, friends relatives, teachers, inspirations. This vast web of connections of care extending out. The connections extend within our life and they extend back through time through the generations. A constellation of generosity, patience, compassion that have made life possible or meaningful.

The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, writes about what it is to live in this constellation:

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”

Imagine yourself as the rest between two notes of a “song that goes on, beautiful.” Feel your body’s inner rhythms. You might sense what stands behind you: the many hands and hearts that have helped you on your way. You might imagine how you stand alive in the constellation of generosity, patience and compassion that make a future to be possible. We can reflect on those who will be singing these beautiful songs in the years to come.

We gather as spiritual friends. We cultivate inner support in meditation and compassionate reflection. As best as we are able, we call on our heart’s wisdom to bear witness to ourselves and the world. We stay with the difficult emotions as they surface. We learn to ride waves of loss, separation and uncertainty. We learn to recognize our habitual attachments and aversions. Here is another of Erin Rabke’s Beatitudes that affirms this practice with blessing:

Blessed are those who become large; who are willingly stretched by gratitude and grief, who see ordinary moments as blessings, and who welcome enough sadness to make obvious the preciousness in all things. They shall become a tender domain where all beings may find rest and refuge.

We give and receive outer support by offering each other our faces and our hearts. We share our life stories – our losses, our joys. We recount how we falter and how we pick ourselves up again. Right now we can reflect on the friends in our lives with whom we can live the difficult questions. We can remember those we ask for help – with whom we can reveal our vulnerability. We can recall ones who listened patiently allowing us to find our way with difficult words. Gradually we come to experience one another in deeper understanding. Together we can, as Rumi says “search the darkness:”