Hari Om

We have been here all along. This old road. I think we forget that. I think we forget that we are not “new” or “old” but “always”. When we enter into the conflicts within and without, we can feel so isolated, or so aligned, depending on how we can open our hearts in that moment.

When I am in my wounding, everything hurts. When I am in my healing, everything is medicine.

It is from this place that we can see, in any moment, how our heart is opening or closing. All along, though, we are on that road we have always been on, and eventually it will bring us right back around. This means we are working along a lineage of all of the love and the pain that we ever have had. We cannot bury the past, because it is our history. The difference is the past happened then, and our history is always coming through us.

bell hooks brings us into what that looks like in the place from which she comes.

Appalachian Elegy 15.

Thanks, again, bell hooks for that wonderful breath of grief and love and memory.

We also heard from Padraig O Tuama:

Men in a war

In many ways, we are all in this war we have agreed to inside of our heart and minds, I think. And when we are embroiled in that war, it is the weapons of pretext and emotional dysregulation that we use the most.

And finally, we have a great love poem from Ellen Bass, a prayer.

Prayer

Ah, yes! The best of prayer. To learn to really truly love the world as it is.

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

First, this video and audio is poorly synced. I would fix it but it seems to come in and out throughout the video, making that difficult. You may want to listen to the podcast audio instead of the video, today.

Today’s sit was encouraged by Angela to contemplate on the why it is we seem to seek external validation, but have such a difficult time finding internal resources for these very feelings. It is very interesting how we are all interdependant and at the same time have all of these feeling sna dunderstandings within, if we can access them. Perhaps this is where our interdependance comes from. Perhaps we are not meant to be able to do this alone, but acutally do require one another to see what we cannot seem to see in our selves. That said, the problem, if ther eis ever such a thing, is believing the voices of love when we hear them. That is very different.

To be able to believe something from outside of us, we must be willing to challenge the belief that is within us. To do this, we must use awareness practices to zoom out and see the multitude of who we are at any moment.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet.

We are much larger than we believe ourselves to be, and contain so much more than we can see at any moment.

Drifting

Like clouds that only seem weightless. But of course are not. Thanks Mary Oliver!

I decided after spending so much time on this topic today to hold off on Appalachian Elegy for today. I want to give it proper space each mornign, so we will revisit on Monday.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

Today, I asked a loved one if there was something I could consider focusing my contemplation on today. She said forgiveness.

It is something I could talk for hours about! There is so much in my life and in my practice that are deeply grown in the fertile soils of forgiveness. I find it to be such an expression of love for myself, and an opening to be with myself when I can move beyond forgiveness being only letting someone off the hook. It is much more than this. It is falling in love, it is growing in intimacy, it is being in communion with another, and with your own body and history and beliefs and healing. It is so very rich.

Some would say that it is not a necessity for healing, but I am not sure how it could not be the essence of healing. It is NOT the cure for our feelings of separation, but it is a barrier to us ever being able to truly confront those feelings. And, it isn’t truly about anyone but you.

Then we get to today’s offering cfrom Appalachian Elegy, and I am once again astounded at the poignancy of the poem today.

Appalachian Elegy 14.

Hard rain…softens harder ground.

Yep, bell hooks, forgiveness. Thank you poet!

Tell us about something you learned to forgive and how that changed your life. Leave us a comment and get the conversation going.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

The practice might begin with “everything is leaving. I, too, am leaving. I am arriving. I am leaving. I am the expansion and the contraction.”

Now, that is some nice, flowery language, and probably would serve just fine if I were to leave it at that. I, however, want to make this more present for me.

My elbow hurts.

It throbs and barks at me with the tiniest of movements, and I am unsure of which movement will trigger the pain from moment to moment. I am feeling pain, and with that is the invitation to suffering. Oh, poor me, why me, stupid me, I am not what I was, I am becoming weak, fragile, and slow. There you go, my famous Suffering Sauce recipe. Or, I can recognize that this too is changing, and this body is getting older, and with that comes limits that I sometimes push, and sometimes defy, and sometimes am forcibly pulled back into place with a great thump!

This morning, I feel the thump like a Zen stick to my back. “Remember your breath!”

Okay, thank you; breathing in, breathing out.

We are far simpler than we would like to think. We have been trained to think that complicated is superior. Fully in-depth programs with mathematical diets, astrological exercise routines, and organic crystal insertions are on the 72-fold path to a better you. Really, though: we breathe, we think, we feel, we decide, we believe, we fail, we move on. This practice is one of returning. The ebb and flow, expansion and contraction of life bring us to and from and back to where we begin, again and again and again.

Appalachian Elegy 13.

Profound prolonged lamentation. WOW! Thanks bell hooks. This is it. This is the sound, maybe, of all creation. A wailing of loss. Since the moment of the separation of all matter into an ever-expanding galaxy of rapidly departing bodies, we are wailing an aum of loss.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

We are wailing our lives into creation. Join the ancient chorus.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity here

Hari Om

Today’s sit meets shame and guilt as something other than roadblocks and failures. We are to look deeper into what it is that served us in the past with these emotional expressions, and to understand how we may be not in right relationship with them now. This is not a tip or trick to escape these experiences, rather a way forward to hold yourself with these experiences. Sit with it.

Today’s poem from bell hooks reminds us that sometimes that which nourishes us does not have what we need to heal.

Appalachian Elegy 12.

Try to find your way into this discomfort, this smothering, oppressive fear, and you will find yourself in there.

Thanks for listening to today’s practice. You are invited to join this conversation by either commenting below or sending me a personal message. [email protected]

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

I will be very brief in this description. I’m holding the pieces of my broken heart. Each one, a jigsaw cut piece, fitting somewhere that I cannot find. This is the grief. To sit with this. This is the love. To sit with this.

This is the grief. To sit with this. This is the love. To sit with this.

All in love,

MichaelAll in love,

Michael

Feel free to send encouraging words to these students to my email: [email protected]

Hari Om

Today’s sit really took a meandering path inward. Sometimes the meandering path is the most direct route. We have to be able to get out of the map and into the territory, and the territory is full of beautiful and dark places. So often, we become experts at hide-and-go-seek and find little places to tuck away the things we do not believe we can let go of. But when we find ourselves in safe and secure relationships, and that includes the relationship to our own body, mind, and spiritual self, we can begin to open in such a way that there are no longer spaces to hide. There is a blossoming and an opening. There is only an invitation to the feast.

Today’s bell hooks magic is pretty amazing. I don’t know how this is happening this way, but I’m here for it. Sometimes you just have to accept things as they are without applying too much disbelief. We visit her wonderful multiple-part poem, Appalachian Elegy. Today we hear number 10.

Today’s bell hooks magic.

Appalachian Elegy 10.

The magic is real. Just under the surface of the earth, as well as under our skin, there are buried things that want to come to the surface. It is in our awareness that we can allow for these uprisings to be as bountiful gardens. It is in our avoidance that we experience this as a disruption. Both are fine. To be blessed with outcrops of a good harvest or to be disrupted in our programming, both are nutrimental.

No more sits this week, or probably next, as I am travelling about the country a bit and going camping with 60 of my favorite high school students in our school’s end-of-year trip. Looking forward to the space to explore and to returning when I can. Check out the archives if you are interested in more shared practices!

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity

Hari Om

We are blessed with the ability to roam, and the curse of feeling unplaced. It is why we seek refuge, to sit under the giving trees of our youth and to find kinship in the way an autumn day smells like forgiveness with the bouquet of dead leaves and forlorn trees weeping.

I was reminded by a friend that in all of the work of letting go, be careful not to eject. We do not need to force out anything, only find the opening and allow it to go. He asked me to consider that the critical voice inside my thoughts and the wounded feelings inside my body are not to be removed, but to be heard, seen, and inevitably held.

Then there is the apparent magic of bell hooks. I should note that I am making a solid discipline of not reading ahead in each day as we explore Appalachian Elegy, bell hooks’ love letter to place. When the poem aligns with the contemplation, that is not preplanned by me.

Appalachian Elegy 9.

This morning sit is so relevant, as was yesterdays, to myself and two people in my life, Angela and Lilly. It is amazing how we can find strands in this existence that connect us to our deeper selves, even from different places and different experiences. This reading of Appalachian Elegy has been an oracular tome for many of these experiences lately. I am curious: How are you feeling tethered to love and unbound at the same time? How is your practice finding synchronicities? What poems are speaking to you?

Thanks for being with this practice, and I look forward to your sharing with us all.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity

Hari Om

Daniel Sperry opens us up this morning with his reading of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. Click his name to learn more about his amazing work.

Kindness

Kindness as a shadow. What a way to understand even more deeply the ways in which we could love. Or perhaps it is just the way we do love; we are only lacking that understanding. When I am in the deeps of my sorrow, I can feel like I am wallowing,. and then the old voices are called into action, shaming, blaming, avoiding, guilting, manipulating all as a way to do what? I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that is not who I am; it is only an old voice I am rehearsed at hearing. There is another voice that I am not yet rehearsed in hearing. It calls to me in a steadier and melodic way. The birds in the early hours. The hum of my kettle. The soft brush of a hand on my back when I am unstill. There is a continuous voice that echoes love love love love love. And I have adjusted my focus, and again I can hear its lovely song. Right here in the midst of my sorrow, I learn, again, that I am not wallowing. I am swimming in it! I am splashing in the sorrow because it is here, right now, where my heart lives. It is here, right now, where my spirit wants to sit a while.

Appalachian Elegy 8.

Here it is again. The magic realness of poetry. THIS is why I love poems. This is why I am a poet. Becasue anytime a person can write a few lines like this, and drive directly into the soul of another, I know that I am not alone.

and then there is this, a gift from Mary Oliver.

When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention

Spin! Spin and spin and spin in it’s dizzying glory, friends. Your heart is in pain BECAUSE it is working! You are ALIVE! You are so very loved.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity