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Category Archives: cradle your heart
bearing witness | new moon meditation
In Sangha last Sunday, I shared this beloved quote that I have carried close to my heart and have called up frequently during times of transition and transformation for over 20 years. It reverberates far, deep and wide in a season of bearing witness to our journey through challenge, change, growth, loss and renewal.
So powerful, in fact, that my dear friend called that very same evening to tell me she had recited those exact words (which she could specifically remember first hearing from me seven years ago) for a circle of her friends earlier in the day! With hundreds of miles between us, she wanted me to know how far they had traveled through space and time.
Our mutual conjuring of this affirmation was nothing short of magical!
Not only had we both synchronously chanted these hallowed words for those who felt moved by them. But also, in her giving them back to me, I saw clearly that the Universe was asking me to rest in and be transformed by them once more. For in that week alone, the energy of remembrance had engulfed me as I excavated hidden talents and paid tribute to my late grandfather and his grandfather for their military service. I continue to look back, beneath and beyond to see how very necessary these 11 words are for me in undoing ill-fitting and inaccurate perceptions, reclaiming the wholeness of my forgotten selves, and becoming even more of me.
Look Deeply
This quote appears as an affirmation under The Tower card in The Tarot Handbook. May be derived from the statement “what you think you are is a belief to be undone” from Lesson 91 in A Course in Miracles.
bearing witness | full moon meditation
How Spirit answers when you’re contemplating this coming Sunday’s dharma circle on Bearing Witness — looking back, beneath and beyond!
° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °
“untitled”
who is healed?
who is housed?
who is silent?
who speaks?
whose hopes?
whose fears?
whose values
whose justice?
— the art of barbara kruger,
on nyc metrocards《via performa 17: http://17.performa-arts.org/events/barbara-kruger21》
° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °
Sangha will reflect upon:
what we have turned away from and what we have turned toward following last year’s election and its devastating impact on the well-being of our bodies, hearts, minds, spirits and relationships.
We’ll look deeply into:
what is
arising × dissolving
compelling × challenging
enduring × transforming
in our relationship to justice, liberation and healing?
woman horizontal | indwelling
brave is in your spine. peace in your center. grace is in your heart.
— t.scott-miller
for + inspired by k.r
woman horizontal | spiritually bold + beautiful
trusting, delighting and abiding in
Divine Purpose
Divine Order
Divine Timing
Divine Placement
woman horizontal | done + been done
done and been done
still they appear in dreams
unsummoned
cords cut
but roots regrow
when memory whispers my name
new work to be done and done again
unhook and untether
call back my energy
reclaim my soul
i am not yours
to harbor in distorted reverie
no longer known to you
no longer held by you
no longer the light
by which you warm hands and heart
or take shelter from your own shadow
in my place, i seed
grace, gratitude
and the tenderness of mercy
then raze the tomb where you encased me
and seal the crack you slipped into.
15 sept 2017
new moon meditation | for reclamation + healing
Last month a highly-intuitive friend sent me this video for releasing ourselves from the karma and burdens of others, and it was a pure revelation!
First and foremost, this meditation arrived divinely-timed at the end of a season when I had discerned a need to reclaim pieces of my soul from those who were incapable of bearing witness to my growth and my wholeness. In that process of reclamation, I had also recognized the importance of leaving the blessing of grace and mercy to stand in for those old impressions/memories of me. And because healing is not one-time event, I was prepared for something more to eventually show up and support this new level of growth.
Second, with one simple metaphor — likening cutting cords to cutting weeds: they’ll grow back if you don’t pull them out — it shifted the paradigm of teachings I’d previously encountered on cutting energetic cords! In the past, I’d used cord-cutting visualizations to unfetter myself from people and situations whenever lingering unresolved issues were unlikely to be fully addressed and transformed, and reconciliation was not possible. I truly found it helpful. Still, as we get equipped with new tools and new understanding, we can go back and dive deeper in order to rectify, amend, clear out and transform the seeds of suffering.
Between the two full and new moon cycles since then, I have pulled it out of my medicine bag nearly a dozen times for myself and in prayer on behalf of others who asked for support with transforming conditions and circumstances that are a source of discord in their lives. And it has indeed been good medicine! So now, under the auspices of the new moon, I offer it to you. Make it your own (as you’ll see below the video that I have done).
May it open the gates to new possibilities for compassion, generosity, skillful understanding, and authentic connection.
May it release you from the exhaustion, worry, guilt and resentment of over-giving.
May it help you discern the difference between duty and obligation so that you are empowered to make skillful choices from a sense of honor instead of acting out of habit and expectation.
May you trust that by centering your wellness and unhooking yourself from those who lack the capacity to offer mutual care, opportunities for healing will deepen and expand.
May you trust that they will be guided to grow into skills, tap into resources, and call upon a larger circle of wise council for support.
May it restore you and fill you up with abundance.
Unhooking Meditation (with my expansions in italics):
I unhook myself from the ancestral burdens and adverse karma of all people, places and things that no longer serve me — sending them into the light with love, grace, and mercy to be healed and resolved as I am/ have been healed and resolved from them — and restore, reconcile, and redeem myself with the Divine Light nourishing me with love, peace, strength, grace, mercy, good health, free will and the optimum balanced flow of Divine energy. This wound is healed.
from “How to Remove the Cords, Karma & Burdens of Others”
— Rhonda Harris Choudry
woman horizontal | selfing
on cultivating doubt
“When there is great doubt” says a Zen aphorism that Kusan Sunim kept repeating,”then there is great awakening. This is the key. The depth of any understanding is intimately correlated with the depth of one’s confusion. Great awakening resonates at the same “pitch” as great doubt. So rather than negate such doubt by replacing it with belief, which is the standard religious procedure, Zen encourages you to cultivate doubt until it “coagulates” into a vivid mass of perplexity…
Great doubt is not a purely mental or spiritual state: it reverberates throughout your body and your world. It throws everything into question. In developing doubt, you are told to question “with the marrow of your bones and the pores of your skin.” You are exhorted to “be totally without knowledge and understanding, like a three-year-old child.” To pose a question entails that you do not know something…To ask “What is this?” means you do not know what this is.
To cultivate doubt, therefore, is to value unknowing. To say ” I don’t know” is not an admission of weakness or ignorance, but an act of truthfulness: an honest acceptance of the limits of the human condition when faced with “the great matter of birth and death.” This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.
~Stephen Batchelor, “Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist“
on refuge + resistance | reclaiming king’s dream
We begin this historic week with the commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Day of Racial Healing as we trudge toward the final day that our country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, will stand as head of state. Fueled and aflame, with our hearts and minds resting on justice, liberation and healing, we take refuge in the good works, legacy, and words of wisdom from emissaries of light.
In intimate circles, we draw closer, lean into, speak truths and listen deeply to one another — resisting the temptation to be pulled under by despair, fear, hate, and hopeless. En masse, we gather, convene, rally, and march — using our voices and bodies to resist the normalization of this new swell of injustice and violence that seeks to impoverish, divide, and oppress us. Wherever we are, we reclaim the integrity of King’s vision: to stand firmly in our commitment to serve, liberate, heal, love and cultivate, demand, and protect justice and equity in order to restore ourselves and our communities to wholeness.
_________________________
“You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?”
You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.”
I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. “
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
#ReclaimMLK
Movement for Black Lives ~
Resist + Reclaim | Schedule of Actions
March on Lansing ~
What We Stand For
Mashable ~ 8 Quotes
Take Part ~
‘Reclaim MLK’ Protesters Kick Santitized King Ideology to the Curb
Zenju ~
Now Is The Time We Have Been Waiting For
from the 3 Jewels Yoga dhamma shelf
toward wholeness: nurturing interdependence in honor of mlk jr
touching the earth | reflections on zenju’s “way-seeking mind of martin luther king jr.”
tscottmiller 