Welcome back to spending this time meditating together.
Take a little time to settle and find your place.
Can we give ourselves full permission to arrive in our sitting space we have chosen?
Landing softly like a flock of geese dropping earthwards from flight,
Quieting for their evening rest from the busyness of the day.
Or settling like early morning dew,
Each drop a hanging sparkle of sunlight,
Becoming bright with silence and stillness as the sun rises to the day.
Allowing gravity,
This mysterious force,
To hold you,
To feel it reach out and into you from the unknowable beneath you and to your body,
Every atom and cell in this sitting,
To gently pull you against this vast spinning earth.
Feeling weighted,
Your muscles melting and softening,
Your bones breathing a soft sigh of release,
Your blood flowing rivers within,
An ancient movement all of its own,
Your heart pulses,
Signalling life's rhythm within.
Just for a moment,
Feeling the magic of the in breath and out breath,
One breath at a time.
Feeling the chest rise and fall animated by what your body needs,
Not by what your mind thinks,
Like a flower opening to the brightness of the day and closing for a starlit night's rest.
Opening and closing.
You are now awake.
Feel how deeply the air falls into your body,
Noticing what is alive in your body right now.
Allowing the story of past and future that had been written into you to fall away,
Giving up the idea of what's not here,
Giving up even the hope for what should be here.
And instead,
Ask what is true without thought?
And instead,
Ask what is true without thought?
And instead,
Ask what is true without thought?
Giving kind and gentle attention to the doubts of physical sensations happening here,
Just as they are.
Not resisting being here.
There is only here.
Even holding the idea of healing may be a subtle resistance to the now.
Maybe what calls to be healed yearns only to be gently held with acceptance.
Be curious.
Open-hearted curiosity.
An open hand of mind,
Allowing all to be.
You are not trying to make anything happen here.
Whatever is here,
Challenges or pleasures,
Pain or ease,
Greet it all with a simple thought that right now it is like this.
You are not seeking a different experience or state from what is actually here now.
Only this experience,
This state,
This day,
This hour,
This moment,
This immediacy,
Where you can only be.
May I ask you,
What is it like to be alive here now?
What is it like to be uniquely,
Exquisitely you?
Meeting this moment in its newly minted freshness.
This moment is your anchor.
Your cosmic home in a chaotic,
Ever-changing world.
What you see as a body,
A mind,
A lifetime,
A memory,
A thought,
All hang in the air like ephemeral fingers of mist.
Yet to try to deny these from experience is like trying to escape your own shadow.
Rather see through thoughts and recognise a thought is just a thought,
A belief,
A memory.
Rather than bind our mind to these as our identity,
Can we sense them flowing through a river of awareness,
A river of awareness that has space to hold it all?
May I also ask,
What is true when felt through the sensation of experience,
Rather than through the idea of experience?
What is true if you see yourself not as fixed with unchangeable characteristics engraved in stone,
But as a fluid flow of becoming,
Of bubbling arising?
We always have a simple and profound choice.
When we make any choice we are bound to a simple reality,
A reality of foregoing something else we could have chosen.
One choice our life spins upon is to choose to sacrifice this mystery that is aware,
That is a weakness.
Your other pivotal choice is not to sacrifice this that is awake for the next promise of a better moment,
A pain-free moment,
Or a better experience.
To live without negotiation.
This is the fire of truth.
In any moment,
If you give away that which is awake,
If you let that briefly fall to the side,
Be aware of what you are giving that up for.
Make sure it is worthy of the price.
Often we are asked to be aware of what it is we experience,
As if it is something separate from us,
As I have experienced with the recently uninvited guest of physical trauma and pain.
Instead,
I ask you,
As I did myself,
What would it be like to allow awareness to merge with and move through experience,
To flow with experience and be woven like a golden thread into experience.
No separation.
Can we come into harmony,
Seeing what is happening in any one moment and also allowing awareness to bleed into the flow of what is happening,
Moment falling into the next.
Simply be from a place that is wordless.
Then you are not confused by words,
And do not limit your experience or your life to believing these words.
Thoughts are not the truth,
Not even yours,
Not personal,
Not who you truly are.
Thoughts are not your identity.
How much do you take what is arising as true,
Or you resist what is arising?
They are voices,
Whispers,
Suggestions,
Judgments,
Opinions of mind,
Ebbing,
Flowing,
Coming,
Going.
Like a flock of birds calling out their song.
Every bird singing a different tune,
A different song,
A different opinion,
A different suggestion,
A different perspective.
You are not the birds.
You are the wide open space within which the birds can sing and be heard.
You are the awareness that holds the birds,
The awareness that can hold it all.
You are the silence underneath and in between,
The silence infusing the birdsong.
You are awareness,
Undefinable,
Immutable.
You are the silence underneath and in between.
Many call this life an illusion,
But don't devalue your life in this way.
Illusion only means things are not what they seem.
When we intellectualise ideas of illusion,
We lose the magic of life by rejecting the very expression of a far deeper mystery that is the life we live.
When we can fall into the raw wordless experience and felt sense of illusion,
Seeing things not as they seem,
It animates our humanity and humbles our ego.
Can we see this life as it is,
As you are,
With all its facets and faces,
As an expression of awareness?
This existence,
This you,
Is an expression of awareness.
It is carried within awareness.
It is always richly textured and magical.
It is no illusion.
It is full of meaning.
Even with lice threads of strange chaotic messiness,
You are in essence witness to your rightful place in the family of things.
The following words by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj capture something of this essence.
When you look inside and see that you are nothing,
That's wisdom.
When you look outside and see you are everything,
That's love.
And between the two,
Your life turns.
Nothing and everything.
Everything and nothing.
No illusion.
No separation.
Awareness and your life lived as it is.
The same.
Giving up the idea of meditating now.
Rest back.
Float free.
Allowing the following words inked by Mary Oliver in the wild geese to infuse your mind and body like a dark velvet inky drop falling into clear water.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair,
Yours,
And I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
Over the prairies and the deep trees,
The mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese high in the clean blue air are heading home again.
Whoever you are,
No matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese,
Harsh and exciting,
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
This meditation will not really end when you are ready,
Allowing awareness to gently carry you into your day,
When the time feels right.
