Keeping Your Heart Open: Feel What Need To Feel

I wanted to offer a guided meditation this week as I think we just need a little time to breathe and be with and inside this very moment,

This very body,

This very experience tailored just for us.

And what we need to learn is how to receive this moment really.

I noticed for myself there's a level of running,

Always looking for a remedy or a solution.

But I realized these patterns and habits are actually my way of ejecting from the moment,

Abandoning the moment,

And abandoning myself.

And it's easy for it to happen because there's good intention there.

There's good intention to work on ourselves.

It's a good intention.

So that good intention can often lead us astray and take us out of our bodies again and out of the moment.

And when we leave the moment,

Which means the feelings,

The chemical cocktails,

The experience we're having right now,

When we leave that,

We become confused.

And that confusion is what causes a tremendous amount of suffering.

So I've noticed that what life is asking from me right now is to stop all of that and to receive what is really going on for me,

Moment by moment by moment,

Without a narrative of problem-solving or deficiency,

Without a narrative of shame and self-criticism.

Life is saying sit with me in this moment,

Whatever that moment may be,

And admit what is here for you.

Admit what is inside of you.

Admit what is here.

And in that admittance comes a liberation.

But mostly comes the virtue of humility.

And humility to me is one of the hardest virtues to really feel.

Because there's this element of surrender and smallness and collaboration with something that I think we are kind of afraid of.

We're afraid of bowing down to the moment to admit everything that is present for us.

Because we know we have to give it up to something.

We know we have to give ourselves up to our lives.

And in many ways that's frightening for a part of us.

But also,

I think it's the only real thing for us is to learn to embrace this moment,

To then be brought to a state of humility and surrender,

And to begin to walk with something bigger than us,

Enveloping us.

So I wanted to do just a brief meditation today about just receiving this moment and what is present for us as if it's the only thing we have to do today.

This moment.

There's no escape hatch.

We just need to be with what is here for us now.

Bravery can never be measured by lack of fear.

It takes guts to tremble.

It takes so much tremble to love.

It's a quote by Andrea Gibson.

And she so perfectly articulates what it means to be in this moment.

To admit what's here for you now.

To learn to receive it.

To learn to be with yourself.

To not abandon yourself.

You are here to learn the guts to tremble.

It takes so much tremble to love.

So if you would like to join me,

You can just close your eyes and settle in on your breath.

Settle in on your body.

Just noticing the cocktail.

The chemical cocktail that may be present for you.

There's joy.

There's love.

There's longing.

There's fear.

There's panic.

There's terror.

There's overwhelm.

There's confusion.

And they're all the names and faces of love.

And they are here now for us to be with.

Because they're here.

Whatever is here is ours.

To come to know.

To receive.

It takes guts to tremble.

It takes so much tremble to love.

So when we settle into this place,

We'd be very mindful to not try and look for an escape hatch or a window above our head to fly out of.

We ever so gently keep softening those impulses to run away.

And we anchor deeper and deeper into the belly and the heart.

And we notice there's a type of swell,

A tensing and a releasing as we do this.

A pressure and a rooting down and dissolving.

And once we start to see the pattern of the pressure and the release,

We're teaching ourselves to not be afraid.

We're teaching ourselves how to be brave in our trembling.

Tension.

Release.

Tension.

Release.

Tension and release.

In order to really be with ourselves and our lives and our moments,

We have to learn how to confront this tension.

The tension is,

In many ways,

The doorway through.

And we have to be okay with it maybe not changing.

We have no other agenda but to love how life presents itself to and through us in this moment.

We don't have an agenda to remove this,

To heal it,

To calm it even.

We just have one agenda and that is to love this.

To love this.

To love this tremble.

A lot of our suffering comes from really wishing for this to be different than it is.

Wishing for our experience to just be full of joy or undisrupted peace.

We're always trying to get there,

Aren't we?

But sometimes the moment demands something different.

Demands our tremble.

Demands our courage.

Demands more love.

So we love.

We do our best to love.

If we find it hard to love this,

Find that compassion for yourself.

Knowing how hard it is to love yourself and your life sometimes.

How much shame you bring with you.

Everything that comes from this place,

We just be with it again and again as it unfolds and evolves.

The longer we sit with the moment,

The more we watch its organic process of revealing to us the many,

Many stories in us.

This incredible cocktail of the human experience.

And we just breathe with it,

With great courage and great honesty.

We stay.

This is the beginning of what becomes a nurturing relationship with yourself and reality.

A sobriety,

A groundedness,

A humility.

And if it's feeling a little intense,

I find the way to release that intensity is to name out loud the most intense stories.

You can do that now.

I am telling the story that I am hopelessly flawed.

Or I'm telling myself the story again that the world is a frightening and scary place.

Take a few minutes just to empty and name out loud the stories and after we feel the honesty of that moment,

The real touching of what is real for you now,

Whether imagined or in your mind,

We touch something true for us and that creates a little spaciousness around our heart,

A little relief and not having to conceal or disown any of this.

And then in that spaciousness you have a little room to ask for help or surrender or support or love,

Peace.

And we notice that something is listening and that something is here with us always,

In peace,

In well-being,

No matter the state our minds take.

I am here to learn to love the contents of my moment-by-moment reality.

I breathe and remember that though things can feel chaotic inside of me,

There is a foundational peace.

And the only way to reach that foundational peace is by going through a very wildness of my own being.

I'm going to end now with one of my favorite poems by Ephes,

It's called My Sweet Crushed Angel.

You have not danced so badly,

My dear,

Trying to hold hands with the beautiful one.

You have waltzed with great style,

My sweet crushed angel.

To have ever near God's heart at all,

Our partner is notoriously difficult to follow and even his best musicians are not always easy to hear.

So what if the music has stopped for a while?

So what if the price of admission to the divine is out of reach tonight?

So what,

My sweetheart,

If you lack the ante to gamble for real love?

The mind and the body are famous for holding the heart ransom,

But Ephes knows the beloved's eternal habits.

Have patience,

For he will not be able to resist your longing and charms for long.

You have not danced so badly,

My dear,

Trying to kiss the magnificent one.

You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,

My sweet,

Oh my sweet crushed angel.

Thank you for taking the time to be with your reality,

To tremble for love.