You, Finding The Extraordinary In The Ordinary (No Music)
This practice is inspired by the miracle of you. Exploring and awakening an extraordinary perspective of the human body, bringing a sense of awe to what we may simply have viewed as ordinary. Poetry : Pat Shneider, The Patience of Ordinary Things.
Transcript
Welcome to this practice together.
My name is David.
Just take a moment to ease yourself into a comfortable position that allows you to balance both a sense of alertness and restfulness.
Swaying a little too in our sitting posture,
Gently releasing what tension you can,
Allowing the body and the mind to come home to each other.
The hands resting with ease,
The back long and the chest wide open and shining forward.
Reflecting just now what is here for you.
Thoughts,
Feelings,
Images,
Sensations,
Impressions.
These are here anyway,
So we may as well acknowledge them and in doing so,
This practice becomes your own practice.
Flavoured with your own experiences.
Gently reflecting to,
Where may I be bracing against this experience?
A subtle desire for something to be other than it is?
Or where may I be leaning into this experience?
A sense of wanting,
Needing,
Desiring a particular experience?
Can we bring to mind a hope,
A wish that can form an intention for this practice?
An intention to be open.
Open to our sense of self sat here and to the miracle of being you.
Reflecting to,
What motivates us to practice?
Why have you come to be here?
At this time,
On this day,
At this hour,
In this place to experience this moment to moment flow of your life.
Leaving space even for no answer.
Maybe just an elusive and deep unnameable wish for well being.
For a flourishing.
All the while we can also know the body breathes,
The heart beats,
As it has done all your life.
Feeling into this body,
Your body.
Your body sat here held by gravity.
Held within a field of surrounding gravity that holds all things in their place on this earth.
Arms weighted.
Hands weighted as they rest.
Body weighted.
Sensing the sitting bones in contact with the cushion,
Chair or floor beneath.
This body supported by the ancient solidity and wisdom of the earth beneath.
Allowing your attention to settle softly upon your face.
Your forehead softening and releasing its tension,
Even a little.
The muscles of your jaw melting.
Speech no longer needed now.
Feeling your tongue resting on the floor of your mouth.
The warmth and humidity signalling arriving into stillness.
Sensing your skin.
The subtlest of temperature here.
Well the soft touch of a breeze as we sense beyond this gossamer boundary between what we see as ourselves and the world.
This boundary dissolving a little and falling open,
Receptive to the world beyond you.
Our muscles,
Neck,
Back,
Legs,
Free and released from needing to act.
And our bones,
Sitting deep inside the volume of this body,
Restful,
Quiet.
The body now feeling even more weighted.
Let's take three deeper conscious breaths together.
Breathing in we may feel cool air fall into the lungs.
Life's energy.
Breathing out we may sense the giving of air back into the world carrying what our body no longer needs.
Breathing in we may say to ourselves,
Nourished.
Breathing out we may say to ourselves,
Replenished.
Nourished and replenished.
Feeling whatever no longer serves us in this practice to softly fall away.
Imagining on each out breath whatever you no longer need to carry falling away to the side like on autumnal leaves.
Drifting down to the allotted space on the earth around us.
For now resting there.
Without need for attention.
Surrendering once more into the flow of this natural breath.
Your natural breath.
Feeling into where the sense of each breath rises up from the body to reveal itself to you.
Air moving across the upper lip.
The rise and fall of the ribcage,
A subtle organic rhythm.
The heart meeting.
Treating the release on each out breath as an invitation to drop into this breathing body.
Feeling this flow of experience of your body with awareness of it.
Until there is just this breathing body sat here.
Resting.
Nothing else to do.
Can we come to rest at this time,
In this place,
Perfect as we are,
In this world as it is.
Being breathed.
Distant Being.
Thank you.
Soon enough our minds will move away,
As they do for all of us,
Pondering the past and projecting into the future.
It is perfectly okay.
It is always okay.
But before we do anything we can consciously bring a feeling of friendly gratitude towards ourselves for being aware of this.
Gratitude for paying attention to the wandering mind and for creating the opportunity once more to become aware,
Mindfully aware right now,
To sense the simplicity once again of the flow of unentangled moments falling into the next.
Let's take a few minutes breathing together.
Simply rest here.
Be here.
Now.
Let's take a few minutes breathing together.
Can we take some time to reflect together now how we may mistakenly throw a blanket of ordnance over the miraculous?
When you look in the mirror each morning you might believe you are seeing yesterday's face staring back at you,
But some 60 billion cells are replaced every day.
Remodelling of the body continues every moment with every heartbeat,
With every breath.
Silently.
Relentlessly.
Even during this moment of practice together.
The self you were yesterday is not the self you are today.
You are not even the same person you were a moment ago.
Your body contains some 37 trillion cells,
Far more than the count of galaxies in the known universe.
It is estimated 800,
000 cells are dying and new ones regenerated in your body every second.
Your body produces billions of new red blood cells per day,
Each blood cell living its limited but vital destiny for about four months.
Right now you don't have a single blood cell you had six months ago.
In your body the symphony of organs,
Skin,
Heart,
Liver,
Brain and all remain in balance,
Quietly,
Effortlessly.
All infused with the selfless awareness of their nature and path within you.
A grand orchestra without a conductor.
The lining of your stomach is replaced every four days,
Your lungs every eight days.
Ten percent of your bones are replaced each year.
Your heart regenerates some three times in the course of a full life,
For most beating effortlessly with each vital pulse.
For an average lifetime your heart will beat a billion times.
In the web of life,
All things being well,
Your heart beats this way with little struggle.
Your skin replaced every month,
Your cornea regenerating cells within 24 hours.
When growing during early pregnancy our human brain added some 250,
000 neurons a minute,
Its evolutionary story reaching back almost beyond the curve of time to some 600 million years ago.
Your brain,
84 billion neurons,
Each neuron connected in an ancient ritual to thousands of others,
Weaving an interconnected web of 150 trillion synapses.
It is estimated capable of more possible patterns of connection than particles in the known universe.
Your body has thousands of miles of blood vessels,
Your brain some hundreds of miles of blood vessels.
You generate enough power to gently illuminate a room,
A human glow.
This exquisite web of vibrant living matter,
Giving rise to several thousand ephemeral yet distinct thoughts each day.
There is a constant ebbing and flowing of pruning and shrinking and expanding and connecting of neurons.
The majesty of this allows the number of synaptic connections in a neural pathway to double in just one hour of repeated activity.
All this continual turnover of the fundamental building blocks of you has profound implications for how quickly you heal.
Who you were before you arrived at this practice.
Who you are sat here right now.
Who you become in the next moment and the next moments when you move into the rest of your day.
Possibly even who you choose to become.
And yet sat here,
In the middle of all this seeming ordinariness,
Emerging out of the improbable possibility of stardust coming together in this particular pattern at this particular time.
Never even in the next moment to be repeated again is the utter unimaginable miracle of you.
All this while,
Beyond and behind all this,
We can know and be aware your body is breathing.
Your body was natural breathing all the while.
Your existence taking care of itself.
So let's take a little time to rest again together from the effort of listening.
And let go of any thinking.
Letting go of effort.
Resting back into effortlessness.
Allowing ourselves to simply be.
When you're ready taking three deep conscious breaths on each out breath.
Falling into this feeling body again.
Sat here.
Held by gravity.
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh pointed to something fundamental when he said meditation is not an evasion,
It is a serene encounter with reality.
This miracle of you is part of this reality.
Your reality.
The reality of every being.
Can we see the extraordinaryness held within the seemingly ordinary?
The face staring back at you in the mirror.
Nothing can change in your life unless you become aware of it.
We may momentarily reflect that the mind that arrives at practice is never on any level,
Even subtly so,
The same mind that leaves practice.
I have the following words to drift through you in The Patience of Ordinary Things penned by Pat Schneider.
It is a kind of love,
Is it not?
How the cup holds the tea?
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare?
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes or toes?
How souls of feet know where they're supposed to be?
I've been thinking about the patience of ordinary things.
How clothes wait respectfully in closets and soap dries quietly in the dish and towels drink the wet from the skin of the back and the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
You may wish to dedicate this practice,
Not just for the benefit of ourselves,
But to a mind that may move forward from this and into the world more skilfully aware,
More attuned to the miracle hidden within the ordinary that resides not just in ourselves but in yourself indeed.
