So,
For this week and next,
I want to explore with you the practices of giving and receiving,
The practices of generosity and gratitude.
And I want to begin this exploration with these words from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address.
Today,
We have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue.
We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things.
So now,
We bring our minds together as one,
As we give greetings and thanks to each other as people.
Now,
Our minds are one.
That feels like a really lovely way to start the day.
I'm told that the Thanksgiving address is at its heart an invocation of gratitude.
You know,
In this very first paragraph,
It states that we have been given the duty,
The responsibility to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things.
And the action suggested is that we bring our minds together as one in greeting and thanks to each other as people.
Here we are,
Our tribe.
Now,
If that doesn't resonate with you so much,
Maybe we can look at the Dalai Lama's reminder that everything,
Every day,
Every day,
Think as you wake up.
I am fortunate to be alive.
I have a precious human life and I'm not going to waste it.
I'm going to use all my energies to develop myself and to expand my heart out to others,
To achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.
Sounds similar,
The same.
Now our minds are one.
So it's in this spirit that I offer these reflections this morning.
In the classic teachings of Buddhist mind training,
We train our minds to be more empathetic through mindful awareness and the cultivation of compassion and resilience.
So what we're doing here together in practice is really moving against the stream of the ordinary ways in which people do when confronted with something difficult or unpleasant.
So instead of denying the difficulty or avoiding it,
When difficulty arises,
The practice that we do together is to turn towards it rather than away from it.
Turn towards it rather than away.
In this way,
Mindfulness practice is a kind of exposure therapy.
And so what exposure therapy involves is exposing ourselves to the source of our anxiety without the intention to cause harm.
And when we do this,
Exposing ourselves to our source of unhappiness or discomfort or dissatisfaction over and over again,
Turning towards it rather than away from it.
It will not only make it easier for us to overcome the anxiety or the distress that we're having,
But it will turn the difficulty into benefit.
Maybe that doesn't feel right at the moment.
That's why we have to see for ourselves.
We have to try it out.
When we train our mind to embrace what is hard instead of trying to get rid of it,
We really begin to walk the path of growth and resilience.
Last week I was on a retreat and it wasn't a silent retreat,
A meditation retreat like I'm used to.
It was really group work and taking really deep dives into loss and grief and emptiness and fear.
And a lot of the time we were working in small groups and sharing very intimately about our losses and our grief and our fear and what is wounded within us.
And a form of exposure therapy.
Also a training to facilitate working with these losses and grief in the realm of chaplaincy,
The realm of care.
And I mention this because in my experience with this turning towards over and over again to what's challenging in my body and my heart and my mind,
Not only does it lessen the impact like that happens,
But it really allows us to be with and embrace the suffering of others.
And when we can embrace the suffering of others,
Of another person,
It's a form of liberation.
We're opened by the suffering.
So the practices that I'd like to start with this week come out of a text called the seven points of training the mind.
And this is a Tibetan practice and I just want to disclaim use the disclaimer that I am not a Tibetan practitioner so much.
But there are some beautiful practices here that I think are useful and I'm going to bring them to us with some care because that's not my primary practice.
And the meditation practice it's called tongue Len and what it means is sending and receiving and what we're sending and receiving is compassion.
And compassion literally means to feel with passion.
That's the literal translation to feel with passion passion if you break that down to its root means pain.
So compassion is the willingness to feel pain with another to feel one's own pain and another's pain.
So the practice of sending and receiving has two main purposes.
First to train our hearts to do what it usually doesn't want to do,
Which is to go towards rather than away from what is painful.
And the second the purpose is to realize that your suffering your own suffering and the suffering of others is not different.
When we discover this when we are really able to meet and take in our own pain be willing to receive it we come to understand that it's the only way to open our hearts to love.
So we have to try it out and touch this experiential truth.
So I'd like to collect again and do a short meditation together and then we'll open it up for comments and questions.
So gathering again your attention in your body.
Let your body relax and release any holding in the shoulders and in the neck and in the back.
Gathering your attention by breathing in deeply and breathing out deeply.
As you breathe in feel the clarity and the strength of the inhale.
And as you exhale let go completely relaxing and opening.
Trusting that you're safe you can relax and be easeful.
Breathing in feel the clarity of that the strength of the inhale and breathing out letting go of anything that squeezes the heart.
Just relax.
Now we'll practice sending and receiving letting these two elements ride on the breath.
So the next time we breathe in breathe in our difficulties our concerns and worries our uncertainty breathe into the body that which is hard and breathe out.
We breathe out the pain into light and to ease like a soothing balm.
Breathing in noticing maybe the pain is dark and sticky and as you breathe out through the nostrils like a soothing balm a mist of ease and sweetness.
We breathe out healing light unharmed by the pain that we have in our life.
We breathe in transforming the pain.
We breathe out receiving the pain.
We breathe in sending the pain.
We breathe out breathing out a soothing balm breathing in the stickiness of uncertainty and fear trusting you're safe.
Breathing out breathing in the stickiness of our difficulties breathing out the soothing balm of healing.
