Love, Mirabai.
While I was away, Mirabai sent me this link to a video recording of the “Just Like Me” meditation she led for 2,000 people (online) in celebration of World Kindness Day, which apparently was Nov 13th. (Who knew!)
And check out this photo from the retreat in Maui she’s leading right now with Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Trudy Goodman, and Krishna Das.
Oh, and what about the t-shirt she’s wearing! Is that great or what!!!
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(Mirabai’s meditation begins at the 33:32 point of the recording; her photo can be found on Facebook; the t-shirt is from Black Lotus Rising.)
Solids are not Solid
The Gaps
by Frances Leviston,
courtesy of Pome
And then they revealed that solids were not solid
That a wall was not solid
That it consisted of molecules fixed and vibrating
Some distance apart, as did the flesh
That solidity was really the likelihood
Of stuff not falling
Between two chairs, down the gaps
And that walking through the wall was not impossible
That it could be like
Slipping between pine trunks into a forest
Which had looked from the road impermeable
But was where something lived
And that one could peer back from the gloom towards the light
A different creature
With tender eyes, with an ear for water.
***
image credit: My Heart is Dancing into the Universe, by Yayoi Kusama, published in The Strand Magazine, 2018/10/15
Introducing: Tuesday Night Insight Group!
Beginning January 7, Jan Rosamond will lead a new, weekly meditation group — Tuesday Night Insight — which will offer teachings from the Early Buddhist (Theravada) tradition, practice instructions, silent meditation, and group discussion. Both new and experienced students are welcome.
The group meets on a “dana” (generosity) basis. There is no fee and no need to register in advance. Chairs are provided, but if you prefer a cushion, please bring your own.
Where: First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, 5007 Waterman (at Kingshighway), 63108. Free parking in the church lot.
When: Tuesdays, 7:00 to 8:30 pm
Note: The front door will be locked. If you are running late, please text 314-210-8820 BEFORE 7 pm so we can make sure someone will be in the lobby to let you in.
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Jan Rosamond has competed four years of formal training through Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where she is certified as a Community Dharma Leader.
Jan has practiced in the Early Buddhist (Theravada) tradition for more than 20 years with a variety of teachers including Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg. She’s sat more than 500 nights of silent retreat including several 1- and 2-month intensive meditation retreats in the U.S., South Africa, and Burma (Myanmar). Her mentoring teacher is Phillip Moffitt.
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For more information, contact Jan by email here or text 314-210-8820.
Just Protect It from the Breeze
If you grasp a leaf on a tree and try your hardest to hold it still, no matter how hard you try, you’ll never succeed. There will always be some vibration caused by slight tremors in your muscles. However, if you don’t touch the leaf and just protect it from the breeze, the leaf comes to a natural state of stillness. — Ajahn Brahm
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I didn’t want to fly on the day before Thanksgiving, so I stayed over at this lovely AirBnB — which has a private deck — and held my own little after-retreat retreat!
2019
For Myself and for the World
Just a quick post to say that I’m back (and totally psyched!!!) from a very deep (and very sweet) retreat kicking off the start of a year-long Teacher Training in the Nine Bodies — explorations in the nature of consciousness — taught by Phillip Moffitt.
This is a photo of our group (except for one of us who had to catch an early flight). Our training will continue throughout the year, including individual meetings with Phillip during the month-long retreat at Spirit Rock in March.
If I look a little dazed in this photo (that’s me with the pink hair), it’s because I’m still reeling from the incredible good fortune of having been invited to be a part of this group.
I won’t let you down, Phillip.
May my efforts be for the welfare of myself, for others, for both, and for the whole world.
Confess What You Are Smuggling
I leave tomorrow morning for the next Advanced Practitioners Program retreat at Spirit Rock followed by the first Nine Bodies Teacher Training retreat. I return on Thanksgiving Day, so most likely I won’t post again until December.
In my absence, I leave you with this excerpt from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which is my all-time favorite guidebook for those about to travel:
“…So then, yours is truly a journey through memory!” The Great Khan, his ears always sharp, sat up in his hammock every time he caught a sigh in Marco’s speech. “It was to slough off a burden of nostalgia that you went so far away!” he exclaimed, or else: “You return from your voyages with a cargo of regrets!” And he added, sarcastically: “Meager purchases, to tell the truth, for a merchant of the Serenissima!”
This was the target of all Kublai’s questions about the past and the future. For an hour he had been toying with it, like a cat with a mouse, and finally he had Marco with his back to the wall, attacking him, putting a knee on his chest, seizing him by the beard: “This is what I wanted to hear from you: you confess what you are smuggling: moods, stages of grace, elegies!”
These words and actions were perhaps only imagined, as the two, silent and motionless, watched the smoke rise slowly from their pipes. The cloud dissolved at times in a wisp of wind, or else remained suspended in mid-air; and the answer was in that cloud. As the puff carried the smoke away, Marco thought of the mists that clouded the expanse of the sea and the mountain ranges and, when dispelled, leave the air dry and diaphanous, revealing distant cities. It was beyond that screen of fickle humors that his gaze wished to arrive: the form of things can be discerned better at a distance.
Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is scattered, the hood of miasmata that weights over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer floats, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey.
Why Not Become the One
With That Moon Language
by Hafiz (translation by Daniel Ladinsky)
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise, someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,
With that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to hear?
No, They Whisper
The Moment
by Margaret Atwood
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around.
Aware, I Stand and Vow….
At the close of most retreats in the Western Insight tradition, the group recites the Five Lay Precepts, which in English are usually translated as:
- I undertake the training precept to refrain from killing.
- I undertake the training precept to refrain from taking that which is not freely given.
- I undertake the training precept to refrain from sexual misconduct.
- I undertake the training precept to refrain from false speech.
- I undertake the training precept to refrain from intoxicants that cause heedlessness.
At the retreat I just attended at Spirit Rock, we closed with a more contemporary and expansive version of these precepts (first developed for use at Manzanita Village):
- Aware of the violence in the world and of the power of non-violent resistance, I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate the compassion that seeks to protect each living being.
- Aware of the poverty and greed in the world and of the intrinsic abundance of the earth, I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate the simplicity, gratitude, and generosity that have no limits.
- Aware of the abuse and lovelessness in the world and of the healing that is made possible when we open to love, I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate respect for the beauty and erotic power of our bodies.
- Aware of the falsehood and deception in the world and of the power of living and speaking the truth, I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate the ability to listen and to speak with clarity and integrity in all I communicate — by my words and by my actions.
- Aware of the contamination and desecration of the world and of my responsibility for life as it manifests through me, I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate discernment and care in what I take into my body and mind.
2019
Steps We Can All Take to Eliminate Racial Inequity
I’m meeting today with one of the White Awake discussion groups I’ve been leading and we’ll be talking about How to be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (which I highly recommend — along with his previous book Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.)
Of his research into the history of racism Kendi writes, “Over time, the source of racist ideas became obvious, but I had trouble acknowledging it. The source did not fit my conception of racism, my racial ideology, my racial identity. I became a college professor to educate away racist ideas, seeing ignorance as the source of racist ideas, seeing racist ideas as the source of racist policies, seeing mental change as the principal solution, seeing myself, an educator, as the primary solver…
“My research kept pointing me to the same answer: The source of racist ideas was not ignorance and hate, but self-interest.
“The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate…
“Racist policies,” Kendi writes, “lead to racist ideas, not the other way around, as we have commonly thought. We must eliminate racist policies if we ever hope to eliminate racist ideas.”
To that end, Kendi has founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where he envisions bringing together teams of scholars, policy experts, journalists, and advocates to focus on the most critical and seemingly intractable racial inequities.
He writes, “These teams would model some of the steps we can all take to eliminate racial inequity in our spaces:
- Admit racial inequity is a problem of bad policy, not bad people.
- Identify racial inequity in all its intersections and manifestations.
- Investigate and uncover the racist policies causing racial inequity.
- Invent or find antiracist policy that can eliminate racial inequity.
- Figure out who or what groups has the power to institute antiracist policy.
- Disseminate and educate about the uncovered racist policy and antiracist policy correctives.
- Work with sympathetic antiracist policymakers to institute the antiracist policy.
- Deploy antiracist power to compel or drive from power the unsympathetic racist policymakers in order to institute the antiracist policy.
- Monitor closely to ensure the antiracist policy reduces and eliminates racial inequity.
- When policies fail, do not blame the people. Start over and seek out new and more effective antiracist treatments until they work.
- Monitor closely to prevent new racist policies from being instituted.