Hari Om

It occurs to me that no matter where I am in my life, emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, my practice is there to facilitate my returning to a center line. It may be only for a brief moment, but even this is regenerative, healing, and helpful in my understanding of how to love and be loved. Realistically, it is probably neither possible nor ideal to think about my life as needing always to be centered. The vast range of experiences is all a part of the canvas of our existence. The difference made by the practice of returning with and to awareness is that I can experience the chaos, the ups, the downs, the plateaus, without believing myself to be any of those experiences. When I get stuck in a role, it is dreary.

There is a more expansive space inside of us. We are not confined to our worst days or best days as the gauge of our entirety. Going inside, through the breath, sitting with patience, kindness, and offering the loving care of silence to our body and mind is a very accessible pathway to the home that is our awareness.

bell hooks, again, brings us to that place:

Appalachian Elegy 7.

into the always present…such a wonderful way to invite our awareness! To even be reminded of the present as being the only place we truly exist is a meditation bell. Thank you to bell hooks for her ability to receive and transmit the messages to so many people. treasure I find here is all gift…remembering that it is all grace.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

Praying

Another voice. That is the key to truly understanding that there is no way you are alone. In the depths of the greatest belief of your isolation, it is still true that you cannot be alone. If what you are made from is also what I am made from, and there is nothing new under our shared sun, then we are both made of old things. Old things are pulsing through us. Things that have been here, and have seen this, and will move through this with a grace that may, at times, be unimaginable. Not knowing who we are means not knowing if who we think we are is real. Hint: it’s not. Not really. And the problems arise when we are trying to liberate ourselves to become this next thing, thinking we can carry who we thought we were with us. There are a thousand tiny deaths we must die just to be alive. Those are the letting go moments that open us. Step into this!

bell hooks also offers us a reminder that we are held this morning in 6. from Appalachian Elegy, her loveletter to the place from where she learned to live and love this world.

Appalachian Elegy 6.

The covenant between us can never be broken. Ah! There it is! This promise is kept in so many ways that once we are here, and we know it, we can never not be here. We can only imagine, once again, that we are not. We can only believe we are somehow not where we are supposed to be. But the truth may be that what is not supposed to be is the belief in the first place. And, even the belief of not belonging invites us into our belonging.

Thank you, friends, for being here with this practice. We will not be holding practice on Wednesday or Thursday of this week, however will return Friday. I am considering rolling out some modules in a workshop format surrounding Poetry and the Practice, as well as Recovery and Breath. I will post more on those two separate sessions soon, and will be asking for people who would like to attend to RSVP. Let me know your level of interest below.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity

Hari Om

Some mornings, the thoughts are calm and slow. Like a smoke from the incense, drifting in their own time, and on their own weight in the wind. This morning, they were the numbing screeches of construction work, pounding incessantly, and unwilling to listen to reason. This is fine. I am not taken off guard by this, as this is something I have had in my mind’s experience for a very long time. Chatter. Only chatter.

Of course, after years of identifying as a person who prides myself on using my mind to own knowledge, solve every problem, and never be wrong under penalty of rejection and certain abandonment, having a practice of not listening to every little thing my mind vomits out has been quite helpful. So I worked it out on the typewriter, clicking out a rhythm that a melody of words and sounds could find their way into, and wrote a poem. Not a great poem. Maybe not even a good poem. Whoever said they have to all be good is probably an editor and a capitalist and must be liberated of their need for trophies. We aren’t here to be good! We are here to be clumsy sometimes, and that clumsiness makes us fall, and that is why we call it falling in love.

We pick back up in bell hooks Appalachian Elegy with number 5 today. Quite an astonishing thing, to be given permission by a poet. It is as near to the voice of God as humans have ever had on the page.

Appalachian Elegy 5.

What a thing it is to be given the attention that we are given by bell hooks in this poem. The poet is focusing all of their love right here into each of us, reminding us that all of this life, all of this world, all of this earth, all of this knowledge, this love, this sorrow, this…grace; it is all here for those who are thirsty. No secrets. No miracles. No mistakes.

Thanks, bell hooks. Good looking out.

Then we met with Pastor and Poet Drew E. Jackson again in his work God Speaks Through Wombs. This is his first collection of poems responding to and repurposing the book of Luke from the Christian bible. Here we are again met with a permissive gift that offers us the reassurance that we must, even in our biggest angers, loudest throws of liberations screams, find our softer song to sing.

Where lambs Feed

If you ever doubted that poetry was the way we get to share how God sounds when we listen, ask yourself why it is that every religious text is written in poetic form. This pastor and poet, Drew Jackson, is qualified to take us to this place and offer us the permission to keep a softness in our hearts, even when we must harden the outside with protection. And take us there he does.

Thanks for being here with me today. Please take a moment to expand the conversation with a comment, a question, a remark, or a story as to how you are carried like a seed, and what seeds you carry to find their right place.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

Hello, friends. How many times have you had the experience of feeling pretty good about your life, your work, your fit, and then a small thought of doubt pops in and, in short time, becomes the center of the internal dialogue? It is a familiar voice, and for better or worse, we are attached to familiarity. It makes us feel safe, even if it is unsafe. Like a song you never liked coming on and you know every word so you sing along. This is our bias of unlovability to a t.

No belief is as unshakeable as an old belief. I would bet that many of us, if not most of us, have a belief that we just cannot measure up. So this familiar voice is soothing to us, like an apology after an abusive fit from one we love, we are lulled back into its grasp. This is our belief bias in full effect, reassuring us we were right all along when we thought we just weren’t worth it. And we are trash collectors of the highest caliber when it comes to defending our rightness, because another longheld belief is the belief that to be wrong is also unloveable. We find things that defend our feelings of being right about even that which makes us feel terrible! Such a lovely mess we make!

So algorithms come along, feeding upon our need for validation and offering it up innocently (just doing their job) so much so that we cannot help but feel justified in our worldview. We get our “feed” full of things that interest us, and then the interest becomes identity, so we are now being reaffirmed in how we identify ourselves. From there, it is a quick jump to not seeing the same affirmations in the people whose algorithms are completely different form ours, so we begin to believe we do not belong with the people around us who do not have the same views being validated, and either we must confront that we are “wrong” (wrong = unlovable) or they are just not aware, just not as awakened. But this is also a reaffirmation that we are “not like them”. There it is, then, that lifelong belief that you just don’t belong, 2.0.

I have never lost so much love as the love that I talk myself out of having.

The use of a language of spiritualism is not immune to the algorithms, and there is an issue now arising where the ends of psychology are being met with the questions of spirituality and answered in ways that appeal directly to our need to be affirmed. And still, there is a voice that proceeds affirmation that we are unlovable if we are wrong, so we hear the ways in which we are right and refuse imperfections! When we start to have feelings that defy our thoughts, we are at war with ourselves, and in this war, the casualties are most often our connections to one another. Because it is in our fear of losing connections that we safeguard ourselves from having them in the first place.

This article from Rolling Stone sheds a little light on what some people are experiencing in this new technological infusion of spirituality. People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

I land in the camp of caution with a heavy dose of skepticism generally when it comes to technologies anyway, so my personal bias is usually to be a little avoidant of things like AI. That said, I can see that if there is a tool to be used, it can help some people find their way to navigate a sometimes scary world, and what is also true is that it can be used to avoid anything. It is the avoidance that fuels my addictions in the past, and even into today. That which removes me from my ability to be present with life on life’s terms right now. I don’t suggest avoiding avoidance; rather, understanding what it is the voice of in the first place. And that may be that little voice of unlovability creeping back in.

Also, let us not forget the name of grief that moves through us in so many vibrant patterns, seeking its way to be seen, and to be expressed, and all of the ways in which our avoidance inflames our tenderness to its steps.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hari Om

How wealthy are we to have bell hooks offering us such gifts for the table? This morning’s sit was, again, a confluence of serendipity. My thoughts before coming into the Beside meditation hall were around the place of death. My friend was killed last month while walking down the road in the early hours of the morning. Struck by machines of our unmaking, so it goes. My morning poem was in dedication to this man and the place that will be marked for his final moment. Did he erupt into a green flash on the horizon of his life? Probably not that anyone could see, because to see that, to witness it in its avalanche of splendor, to quote bell hooks, requires of us pause. To stop.  We aren’t accustomed to that, around here. So we move through it, missing all of the flashes of goodnight and goodbye (sounds like a good thing so it must be a good lie. -Counting Crows)

The signposts on the path are pretty clear today, as we find bell hooks is taking us to the place where earth is all at once a grave.

Appalachian Elegy 4.

Let me know your thoughts on the place on which you stand in the comments. It would be lovely to have a conversation spring forth from this experiment in opening.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity

Hari Om

Today, we take on the alignments we find when we are in accord with life. What chord is being rung is not in question, as even discord is a harmonic tool that invites resolution into harmony. Dissonance gives depth to the music of our existence. It is precisely the dissonance that we are looking at in much of our practice because it is the dissonance we have, most of us, turned away from in our lives.

bell hooks has been our teacher this week (and for some time) in Appalachian Elegy, a 66-part love poem of sorts to the Appalachia she knew well. You don’t have to be from there to resonate with her love of the place, as the place is also our internal landscapes. In part 3, bell hooks takes us into the moment of darkness moving through us.

Appalachian Elegy 3.

no past…no present

I am not sure what the poet had in mind with this, but one of the beautiful things about poems is that once released, they are free to shift shape as needed. So these two lines, to me, are saying that without your past, there is no present. The bear in this piece is like a wrecking ball of freedom, barrelling down the steep hill with abandon, a kind of freedom without fear or anxiety. Beauty is enraptured by liberation from manmade confinement. What have we made to confine ourselves? What thought-forms hold us in solitary spaces, struggling alone? Finding and stamping those forms may be a path to our liberation.

Then, Pastor Drew Jackson chimes in again this morning through his poem A Grand Unfolding from his book God Speaks Through Wombs. This poem, as is the whole book, is a response to the Book of Luke in the Christian New Testament. Not too many years ago, I would have stayed far away from anything touching the Christian Bible. Now, though, this work and these teachings bring the kind of familiarity that feels welcoming and inviting, known, and safe. Somehow, the healing of those religious woundings is bringing me back to the truth of the love and the suffering of the lore. 

A Grand Unfolding

From the source of inspiration, Luke 6:12-16, Jesus is returning from prayer in the mountains. This prayer was a deep listening. The kind of listening that may entail hearing what you don’t want to hear, but know that you have to hear. That to not hear is to not live. In this case, Christ hears that he must understand the complexities of his relationships with these twelve figures in his life. Remarkably, the naming of Judas Iscariot is the only name with a prophecy attached to it. To become the traitor. If you are at all familiar with the Christ lore, you know the importance of the work of Judas Iscariot. No Judas, chances are: no Jesus. no past…no present.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity

Hari Om

Today, bell hooks' Appalachian Elegy takes us into contemplation with a bullet. 

Appalachian Elegy 2.

We would do so well to remember that the shadowy places are the precursor to a new perspective of lightness in our bodies that cannot be synthesized. It requires us to really go there, to go deep into the heart of the caverns of our soul.

Today, I am unable to go into the morning sitting with much vigor, as I spent the whole day with 50 students on a day-long field trip to see one of the best performances of one of the best reimaginings of Hamlet I have ever seen. Fat Ham. It really took on the theme well of going into our shadowy places to heal. I recommend it highly.

However, the day-long trip to Oregon Shakespeare Festivals in Ashland has zapped my brain power for the night, so I must leave you with a brief exposition.

The poet Angela Jackson helps us to remember that our goal can be to come through the darkest moments. …to get out with love in my mouth

Epiphany

Thanks for being here today. I would LOVE to hear your feedback on these morning sits, so don’t be afraid to engage in the comments.

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

An arrival of discomfort is an opportunity to deeper understanding. Most often, though, we avoid this. Oftimes with a cost of our own peace. Strange thing, that, to avoid our suffering and in doing so actually increase the suffering. One thing I am finding in my life is the ways in which I attempt to go around my suffering, to placate it with sensible thinking, or to pathoilogize it into a box in the corner of my mind, simply brings that suffering right back around the corner again, and this time with a vim to be front and center in my consciousness. I become overtaken by anxiety, or grief, or anger, or whatever accessible emotion my body can grab to express the deeper feelings I am experiencing, but cannot name, or define away.

It is this that invites in a moment of reflection and an invitation to to do the deeper work. You kind of have to. What is the alternative? To create new coping mechanisms for the overwhelm of yourself? Chances are, they would not be the most well formed copes, and would be just as temporary anyway, so why not face it full on, if you can? And we can. And we begin with three simple breaths.

Finding a way to express yourself is vital as well. It may be a physical movement of expression; a dance, a jog, twenty minutes on the punching bag, anything to move the body. Or, it could be a few minutes at the typer, banging away at the keys until the door opens.

So I did that, and the feeling did not go away. No. What happened was much greater than that. I grew. I recognized my capacity to hold even this was larger than my thoughts.

So I sat down, took time, and breathed into this body.

This body of pain and discomfort.

This body of shame and fear.

This body of misunderstanding.

And my breath was received. And my body released.

And I was healing.

Appalachian Elegy 1.

Again, bell hooks gives us the direction we are seeking. reminding us we are being guided that we may learn all the ways to hold tender this land.

This land is also our body. This body is also this mind. This mind is also this spirit. There really is only as much distinction as we need to feel in control. But we are not.

So breathe in, and breathe out.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity

Hari Om

This morning was asking for what each day asks for: to arrive. Waking early helps me feel more like I have agency in my days and life, but it is not always easy. Some mornings, the chill in my bones makes it difficult to move without certain pain and discomfort. Other mornings, the promise of just a bit more dreaming binds me to the bed. But when I am aware of the work I want to do, I move through those feelings, stretch my body out to the world, and move. This is my work.

To stretch myself outward and toward.

The hardest part of the morning is the beginning. Once we begin, the rest is simply the momentum of life doing what life does. Move. So if all this movement is the trajectory, why stillness? Why silence in the cacophony of the world? The answer is simple, because this, too, is my work. My work is to find the stillness within the chaotic blur of everything moving by, and to be in the silence of a loud and persistent place. This is my work because making space even for this or even for that is the way into love. Love makes space. Love is my work. Making space is my work.

The Buddha's Last Instruction

Whether or not this is a mistranslation of the words of the Buddha doesn’t even matter. It is what is in front of us to see, right now. So then, how is this for me?

We must understand what a light does. It shines, glows, illuminates, and helps us see more clearly. This, I feel, is aligned with the teachings of the Buddha. To shine a light of awareness is one of the core teachings through many Buddhist lineages. Beyone this, I find it to be quite valuable to my own practice to understand myself as the light I need to see all that I carry.

bell hooks, the great poet, philosopher, writer, feminist, artist, intellectual, voice of black liberation, and voice of Appalachia, gave us some amazing wisdom from the land itself, and for the land, which is to say everything that temporarily springs forth from these oldest mountains in the world; people and all. Her landmark piece, Appalachian Elegy, offers us 66 moments of pause for the land. bell hooks reminds us in number 50 that this is a sacred act of movement for us to walk…anywhere. This is our work.

50.

When the work is not on the ground, it is in the ground of our identity. We hold things to be true that just aren’t, not in the way we think, Rita Dove gives us a wonderful slice of time where grief, regrets, fears, wishes, resentments, all collide into the failure of memory to tell the whole story that the body will.

click on the title of Tarnished Psalm to hear Rita read this poem herself.

Tarnished Psalm

This is our work, too. To re-member with all of our awareness who we truly are.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity

Hari Om

I am a little sad to find that the audio was not working this morning, as I thoroughly enjoyed this morning’s session. I will revisit the poems tomorrow, possibly, so please come back. I, unfortunately, have made it a practice to not record the sessions on an external platform since having some issues with my current free DAW, and will be resuming that practice after having lost not only this audio, but some from other projects as well. Learned!

I will take this moment to encourage anyone who is checking in on the sessions to engage a bit. I would love to hear from you, your thoughts, your struiggles, your openings. And not only would I appreciate your showing up, others would as well. It is helpful to hear another voice, and another, to grow into our own. So, please consider joining the conversation here. Thank you, friends.

All In Love,

Michael