The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We contemplated our human need for help.  We give and receive help during the course of our lives.  With mindfulness we can call on our heart’s wisdom to hear and answer calls for help with compassion and wisdom.

We heard from poet and writer David Whyte’s essay, Help.  This essay is drawn from the collection, Consolations:  The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

We heard poet Tracy Shaw’s Blessing for the Inward Way.

Guided Reflection

Welcome.  Last week we contemplated our relationship with Earth as giver.  We considered how we are Earth’s dream and she is our dream.  Our natural response is gratitude.  Gratitude arises in a field of abundance among inter-related beings.  We can sense this in our bodies, feel it in our hearts and imagine it into being with our minds.

This week we are beginning a new year together.  It is a good time to sit with living questions.  This holiday season we’ve had so many desperate calls for our attention and our help.  How do we respond to these calls with compassion and discernment?  Our practice can help us to create the conditions in which we can feel and hear our heart’s wisdom.  We can recognize what we truly value by who and what we give our attention to.  

We can pause for a moment to consider the relationship we hold with our inner life. Do we tend it like a garden?  How are we awake to our lives?  What do our feelings, thoughts, words and actions say about this precious experience of living?  I think living questions is where we’ll find answers:  answers that will always be changing. The very animal nature creates strong impulses to be safe, to survive.   These impulses arise out of deep conditioning. This recognition awakens compassion for myself  and for others. We are social animals.  We need help and we will always need help.

Poet and writer David Whyte explores the transformational nature of help:

Every transformation has at its heart the need to ask for . . . help.  There are two kinds of help for which we must ask: visible help and invisible help. Visible help is practical . . . we ask for help with what we can see is troubling us . . . invisible help is the help that we do not yet know we need. Invisible help is the help we are not quite ready for and all we can do is shape our identity toward paying attention to what is just about to appear over the horizon of our understanding.

I think David is saying that we need help throughout our lives.  This includes the help we need to continue to grow, to venture into the unknown, to discover the gifts we have to offer the world.  Sometimes that may be about freeing ourselves from what we have outgrown.  He suggests that: 

To ask for . . .  help and to ask for the right kind of help . . .  may be an engine of transformation itself. Our greatest vulnerability is the very door through which we must pass in order to open the next horizon of our lives.

This is call for a brave openness of heart and mind.  Perhaps it is the heart’s wisdom that helps us to ask for the help we need and to offer the help needed by others.  Perhaps it is heartfulness that enables us to surrender to the unknown. It may be in tenderness and vulnerability that we can empty ourselves and be filled again in the natural rhythm of living. 

Here is poet Tracy Shaw’s Blessing for the Inward Way

May you learn to dwell
Below the surface of the days
At home with the ebb and flow of
Your own heart’s tides.
May you find the womb space at the center of your Life,
There grow wise in the sacred rhythm
Of filling and emptying,
Emptying and filling.
There, held safe,
May you surrender to the unknown
As completely as the dark moon
Empties herself into the secret embrace of her Beloved, the Sun.
There may you cherish hope of renewal
As tenderly as the crescent moon
Cradles the dark in the curve of her arm,
Enfolding, quickening with life new born.
And may you always open to the flow of love
As voluptuously as the moon at full,
Until filled, overflowing, you pour
Love’s gifts out into the world.
So may you grow ever more intimate
With the inward way, the deepening way,
Where filling is emptying, emptying is filling ~
At one with the mystery, at one.

Let’s enter stillness together.  I invite you to adjust your posture as you need.  You might take a few stretches and relax whatever you can.  May we practice the Inward Way.  May our practice teach us “to dwell below the surface of [our] days [and be] at home with the ebb and flow of [our] own heart’s tides. May [we] find the womb space at the center of . . . Life [and] there grow wise in the sacred rhythm filling and emptying, emptying and filling.”

You might take a few deep, slow breaths perhaps letting out a sigh.  Let go of whatever you can.  Experience how the breath and the body begin to settle.  Feel how your body can rest with silent Earth beneath you.  See if you can entrust yourself to the goodness of time – slowly moving below the surface of your day.  Become aware to the natural rhythm of breathing.

Entrust yourself to feeling being. Is it possible to relax into Body’s rhythm?  You might sense over the delicate muscles of your face, around the brow and eyes.  Can the eyes relax?  Sense around the temples and cheeks.  Can the jaw relax?  Moving over the lips and tongue.  Can the nose and throat be relaxed?  What is like to feel embodied and present in these areas?

You might sense along the inner and outer surfaces of you neck and upper back.  Can the shoulders relax?  Sense down the length of your upper and lower arms down into your hands.  Can you feel the energetic aliveness in these areas?  

Moving down the length of your spine.  Can you feel a sense of support at your center?  And the circumference of your torso.  Sense the expansion and relaxation of the lungs.  Can the belly be soft?  

Feel how the pelvic bones are meeting Earth.  Can you feel grounded as Earth element meets Earth?  Can you entrust yourself to these bones holding soft tissues and organs?  Moving awareness into the deep pockets of hip joints and along thighs, lower legs and feet.  Can you feel the aliveness, the stored energy in these areas?      

Can you be available to what arises in embodied presence?  Can you be available to the goodness of time?  

Available to whatever arises.  Associations may surface from the past.  We may find ourselves anticipating the future.  What is it like to allow a deeper encounter with what surfaces?  What is it like not having to judge it, not having to fix it or solve it somehow.  Is it possible to open the heart to all that arises?  

Life is so big.  Being human can feel overwhelming at times.  Especially when we pause, slow down.  Being immersed in the senses.  Experiences of pleasure, pain and change.  The traces of memory informing our ideas of the future.  As we feel our creaturely vulnerability, is it possible to also feel compassion?

Bring your attention to the space around your heart center.  Invite your heart to reveal itself.  Notice how you are meeting this awareness.  Is it possible to attune to a sense of loving awareness?  It could be that your heart is very quiet. You can meet the silence. Let it be your teacher. Whatever surfaces for you. Let it be.  Let your heart be known.   

There may be moments of presence.  Moments which don’t precede the future or follow the past.  There may be moments of peace.  A different way of knowing is possible – a greater trust and flow.  There may be a fullness of being, a heartfulness.  And then we find ourselves back in the confines of time.  The drama of becoming with its ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows is so poignant and heartbreaking and worthy of love.