new meditazione

every week or so i guide an online meditation,

sometimes in dutch, or,

like this time,

when non dutch folk arrive,

in english.

you can find the recordings right here.

after the meditation, it’s story time.

usually people stay and listen, which is nice.

sometimes a conversation slowly awakens,

other times,

not.

This time, Henry Shukman’s newsletter brought some meditative inspiration. I read out a part of this newsletter before actually starting the recording, so for those interested in the meditation, maybe read the text first:

An old Zen master, Yaoshan, who lived in ninth century China, used to advise students to 'take the backward step that shines the lamp inward.' That phrase apparently helped a lot of his students, and has come down in the annals of Zen as a sound piece of meditative advice.

Yaoshan seems to be saying something like: 'relax, don't strive, release back into a light of awareness that is already present.'

Sometimes practice can feel a little like drawing backward into a certain kind of presence that's already here. Many people have reported to me that it always feels sweet when that happens, as if this presence doesn't ask anything of us.

Be open to that happening, but don't try to bring it on. It may switch on when we least expect it. The advice of taking a 'backward step' seems to suggest that it won't help to be 'striving forward', thinking we know where to go in meditation. But that gentle release backwards is always there, ready to be recognised.

And then, after the meditation, I decided to quote some more Henry Shukman:

How amazing is it that we are aware? What extraordinary set of evolutionary chances have led to our species having the mental capacity to be aware? And not only that, but to be aware of our own ability to be aware. 

All of us will have times when we feel discouraged in a meditation journey. It's just inevitable. Sometimes we seem to 'get it' and have a lovely or exciting sit. Other times, we don't feel we're getting anything. I think the same is true with any long-term practice we take on.   

But actually, who cares whether we are 'getting it' or not? Can we just sit back and enjoy this simple fact – we are aware. We experience life. And whatever we are feeling, we are aware of it! Awareness is always here. What a precious gift.

And that was that!

PS: Shukman’s book ‘one blade of grass’ is great for some meditative inspiration. The subtitle ‘a Zen memoir’, says it all.

meditazione

every week or so i guide an online meditation,

sometimes in dutch, or,

when non dutch folk arrive,

in english.

usually, people join, which is nice.

you can find the recordings right here.

after the meditation, it’s story time.

usually people stay and listen, which is nice.

sometimes a conversation slowly awakens,

other times,

not.

this time, david whyte’s ‘breath’ brings story time to life, and

in the recording you can listen along, or read the text below.

BREATH

is a word that wants us to live in our mouths in the same way that it can live in our own bodies: without undue effort, and left to itself, relying on the easy, rested, autonomic give and take of the body itself. Real rest is the breath simply looking after itself and looking after everything else as it does it. Breath is not only an invitation into the body but the essence of the way we already know how to live in that body. Easy, relaxed, breathing always leads to surprise: at how centred we already are, how unhurried we are underneath it all, how patient we never knew we could be. 

Breath is a word that breathes deeply of its own self, asking us in turn to breathe even as we follow its long, stretching vowel sound and its gentle, arriving tide of air that in the end, forms the sweet final sound of the word itself, flowing out of our bodies and into the waiting, listening world. Breath is a self-compassionate word that is difficult to pronounce harshly. In speaking the word breath, the last soft ending in the very last letters are like the sound of water coming to rest on a sloping beach, telling us in effect of the way our breath has reached within the word itself some shoreline upon which it will rest and then recede and return again, back into the very body that was so instrumental in its first creation. 

Breath is the very tidal word that carries the very essence of our very tidal identity, where just the act of saying the word, culminates in that momentary, invitational  silence at its end, out of which the next in-breath is naturally born. Physiologically we do not need to breath in, we just need to breathe out fully and the in-breath follows as natural as the body’s natural wish to go on living. We are tidal creatures; always giving and always waiting to receive; always arriving and always about to say goodbye: we begin in some form of silence, live through the breathing exchange of a given life and end again in another form of silence. We are here and we are somehow not quite, a coming and a going, and in every religious inheritance, breath is the essence of that understanding, of our passing through, of our poignant transience, the way we appear and disappear, breath is the essence of prayer. 

David Whyte

—

post-it poem

and for those of you having trouble with my beautiful handwriting (myself included), and not wanting to miss even one syllable of this major work, here it is in zeroes and ones, with added title:

then that:

that,

then that,

and then,

that!

—

ok, that was that then, or then that. anyway, ciao (this is not part of the poem. but it could be viewed as part of the philosophy behind the poem, i imagine).