The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  Today we explored ourselves as nature.  We reflected on the intimate relationships between breath, body and the natural world around us.  We sustain each other.  We breathe and live.  We drink in the world through magical senses. We sleep and dream.

Our love for Earth inspires us to bring our caring to her preservation. In his talk, A Primordial Covenant of Relationship, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee writes:

At the heart of that ancient primordial relationship that existed, there was love. Not the Hallmark variety of love, not even the human variety of love, but a much vaster, more ancient, and simpler form of love. A covenant of love between the human and the living Earth.

We heard Robinson Jeffers invitation to “uncenter our minds from ourselves.”  In his poem Carmel Point he juxtaposes Earth time with modern man’s time and its devastating effects on Earth.

We were inspired by Ben Bushill’s beautiful prayer that we “may we save ourselves and our world – love by love.”  Ben is a poet and spoken word performer.  You can find more of his words, films and music at BenBushill.com.

Guided Reflection

We are in the heart of Spring and it feels like everything is calling us outside.  This is a good time to slow down, to enter stillness.  It is a good time to cultivate the fertile soil of our hearts and minds so that insights might grow in our awareness. This is a good time to  feel your body on Earth’s body.  Let go and feel how she supports you.  Let go and feel how she nourishes you like the flowering blossoms giving way to greening leaves.   It’s Spring.

You can imagine this emergence happening all around you: a natural awakening of quiet changes. You can imagine the many leaves drinking in sunlight.  Know the trees are metabolizing this energy into nurturing sugars. You can imagine the threadlike fungi nestled around tree roots breaking down minerals.  The living fibers exchange water for the tree-made sugars. How do you sense Earth supporting and sustaining you – her breath, her body flowing and metabolizing life around you and inside you?

Perhaps this experience calll us to consider this invitation from Robinson Jeffers’  poem, Carmel Point:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Drawing on the beauty of nature, the poet speaks about our relationship to the natural world.   In our practice we can reflect on ourselves as a part of nature.

Right now see if you can enjoy the gentle letting go of your out-breath and the easy pulse of your in-breath.  Your out-breath breathed in by plant beings.  Plant beings, in turn, offer you an in-breath.  Like Earth rivers, your inner rivers flow throughout your body to nourish and sustain, to clear and cleanse.  Let your awareness be carried by this inner flow from your heart through your body and then back out again.  Your body’s compost feeding insects, fungi, microbes and bacteria. You can sense your inner fire metabolizing all you’ve taken in through your eyes and ears, nose and tongue, the sunlight bathing your skin.

Feel your body, heart and mind. Notice where your awareness is drawn:  the tissues of muscle, nerve or bone;  the dispersed sense of feeling emotion and energy; the mind states making themselves known.   Notice how you can feel the flow between things within your being. Notice the flow from more than human beings.   They are giving you the very life giving energy of the sun and water.  Imagine yourself as an Earthling metabolizing these gifts.

What does Spring call forth from your body, your heart, your mind?  How do you experience the joy of sunlight, the birdsong, the morning air?  What inner awakenings or rebirths may happen in this precious, regenerative time?   Do you sense your inter-being, your part of Earth’s greater wholeness?  I invite you to rest for a few minutes in a felt awareness of this time, space and aliveness that is happening for you.  If you find your mind in the past or the future, smile, and come back to your senses.  Your body is always here, now, expressing through sensation, emotion, energy and thought.  You might imagine what it would look like to be an instrument of life.  Not so much seeking anything.  Explore what it would be like to offer your being to Life, to Love, to Earth.

Imagine yourself following these beautiful lines from spoken word poet, Ben Bushill:

Lie back in the green arms
of the one forest,
flowers whispering on your cheek,
shadows of the leaf cascade
blessing your eyes
and sense, feel, imagine
the unfathomable intelligence
of the sacred earth.
Salmon form the rivers
they swim in,
Wolves change the hills and trees
they run through,
Birds shape the clouds…
Listen
Listen.
The great spirit of this wise earth
rises and swells
weaves you into it’s web of roots
and branches and stones,
quietening your busy mind,
soothing the inevitable aches of your human soul
and telling a story
of a planet
whose humble intelligence
displays the impossible miracle paradox
of a life
complex as a rainforest ecosystem
crazy beautiful as the myriad eyes on the peacock’s tail
and as simple
as a heart beating
day by day
love by love
keeping quiet time
for the rhythm of your life
as you walk your blessed pathways
in an eternal wilderness of light.
May we save ourselves and our world – love by love.

I invite you to feel yourself as a place and a part of all things.  “Love by love keeping quiet time for the rhythm of your life.”  Can you feel the rhythm?