Good morning and welcome.
Good morning.
Lovely to see you guys.
Let's settle ourselves in.
So we're settling ourselves into a holding and perhaps that begins physically just allowing yourself to be held by ground or just maybe it begins by noticing ground.
Noticing if you need a blanket or any of the physical sensations that you can tend to as you settle into your practice.
Those legs become heavy,
Pelvis heavy.
Just notice how the spine is.
There are some traditions that teach that a super upright spine is what's needed.
That's just one person's version of events so just feel what's right for you.
As you become aware of the sensation in your spine perhaps there's a longing for oscillation or swaying or some pulsing.
Perhaps that allows you to soften into the tissue of the body.
Maybe the shoulders start to drop.
Perhaps the elbows become heavier and the hands resting in your lap.
Perhaps you can feel the weight of them through your thighs.
So it's a practice full of contradictions as we become heavier and we drop into stillness.
Often we become more aware of the dynamic energy,
Field of potential that's available to us in stillness.
By doing less in fact we can do more.
Perhaps your chin drops gently towards your chest so that the back of your neck can lengthen and you curl.
Allow yourself to curl as if you were bringing your arms slightly forward to hug your heart.
It's a very early posture from our earliest weeks of coming into form,
This curling.
Just letting yourself move into it in a way that's almost not choosing to move into it.
Slow and instinctive and then letting the arms lighten and start to float a little bit away from the body so that we can begin to move the heart forwards and bring the arms back and open up across the front of the body,
Bringing our hearts forwards.
This movement might be so tiny that it's not even visible to the eye.
Just playing with how it is to curl yourself around your heart and how it is to open up and allow the heart to lead.
Not as an idea of one being right and the other being wrong,
Just a way that we can move and maybe the movement brings you into your heart space.
It becomes easier to notice how the heart feels and allow our hearts to lead the movement.
Perhaps the breath also starts to resonate with the movement of the heart.
Maybe there's a harmonious coherence between breath and heart.
As this pulse,
This movement of heart expresses,
Notice what sensations emerge in the body.
I'm really feeling it in my throat.
You might be feeling it elsewhere.
The ripples of sensation that move through the tissue.
Another of the contradictions is that we practice here alone.
By gathering together.
So these sensations that you notice,
That you feel,
They're here in the inner world of you.
My sensations are in the inner world of me and by practicing together,
My inner world and your inner world meet.
There's coherence.
So that the practice is a practice together.
It's different.
To a practice alone.
None of it really makes much sense to the rational cognitive mind.
We do nothing to do more.
We practice stillness to find movement.
And we sit alone together.
If you were mapping it out with pencil on paper,
It would be hard to make sense of it.
Yet the feel is true.
The experience is true.
What we drop into the holding of the practice,
The field of the practice is true.
Somehow in the gaps between this and that.
Black and white.
Right and wrong.
Somewhere in the space between those polarities is this.
It's not fixed or solid or rigid.
It's alive.
With intelligence.
And it's able to hold all things.
Now it's here that we plant the seed of our mantra.
Om Mani Padme Hum.
May all beings be happy and well.
Drawing your awareness toward the sensations within the body.
Letting the mantra go.
And perhaps deepening the breath.
What is here for you in the residue of the practice?
What is here in this moment?
Offering the fruits of our practice to ourselves.
To each other.
And to all beings.
Namaste.
