The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/RiverTree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. We’re each held here through relationships of care, tenderness and meaning.   Imagine all of the acts of generosity, patience, and compassion that have made your life possible and continue to offer you meaning.  Today we took some time to remember the people who have made a difference in our lives.  We then considered spiritual friendship – those trusted friends with whom we can entrust our truths.

We heard poet Maya Angelou’s poem, Alone.  Her few words evoke the aloneness that pervades our lives.

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.

In his On Being interview, Be a Blessing, Rabbi Ariel Burger, shares his thoughts about how our friends help us to keep our hearts and minds open.  They help us find the questions worthy of our hearts’ devotion.

We ended with poet John O’Donohue’s beautiful Friendship Blessing.

Relaxed Reflection

Here we are gathering as spiritual friends.  Together we create a sanctuary – a place where we can slow down – a place where we can reflect on what matters most. Poet Maya Angelou describes what draws us to the flame of kinship in her poem Alone:

Alone
[Excerpt]
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

We are gathering the inner and outer support we need to make our way through the stress of separation, the sense of uncertainty and powerlessness and the courage and imagination to reimagine our world.   We cultivate inner support in meditation and compassionate reflection.  As best as we are able, we call on our hearts wisdom to bear witness to ourselves and the world.  We stay with the difficult emotions as they surface – especially the fear and grief that we tend to keep in the back of the closet. 

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.  We touch other lives and others touch our lives – the life of these exchanges continues in ways we can only imagine.  We are here today because of the many hands and hearts that have touched our lives.  

In his On Being interview, Be a Blessing, Rabbi Ariel Burger, shares his thoughts about how we can keep our hearts open in the work of repairing and remaking our societies and our life together.  He calls us to open to a larger perspective:

The best things I’ve ever learned were not content. They were some sort of contrast with someone else’s way of thinking that at first seemed really strange to me, that I allowed in, that I allowed to question me.  And I, through that process, became aware of my own assumptions and the lens through which I was looking.

This might be the gift of a spiritual friend – someone who challenges or encourages us to become aware of our assumptions.  A person who I allow to question me and I allow that question in.  A spiritual friend is one who helps me ask better questions of myself.  In spiritual friendship we simplify, we slow down:

. . . taking time to really question, how am I seeing this, and how am I perceiving, and how am I hearing, and what am I missing? And who’s missing around the table? And what tools are we missing in our work? And what are we taking for granted? Those are the questions, to me, that lead to, that get at the mechanics of moral transformation. It’s just a starting point. And really, the purpose is not to answer those questions; it’s to really live with those questions for life and to continue to ask, over and over again, and never to really settle into a complacency.

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 a deeper understanding. 

In his book, Anam Cara (Soul Friend), poet John O’Donohue wrote about this love in which:

. . . you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn . . . Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. . . . 

And from his Friendship Blessing:

May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara.