A SUBTLE SHIFT
Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 268, August 27, 2024
- Today’s question: What is your gift to the world? How are you sharing this gift?
- My practice today: 4am, asanas, Healing Hum mantra and meditation
TODAY'S MEDITATION
The season changes. By the calendar of my garden and the forests and the clouds we are in that in-between season. By the astrological calendar we've moved from Leo season to Virgo. This has often been a season of great change, rarely welcomed. Still, I feel myself more at home here than in the heat and the bright of summer.
There is a milonga this evening. I will be there. My first tango in a long time. The seasons change everything.
...
It is work, to become so lost in the call that I am disappeared. To become aware of only the call —love. And how I impede its flow.
...
Yesterday the rains were here. Today, the morning wears the sun a little less sharply than a few days ago.
Summer has passed its zenith. It's not over. Not yet. But for the moment the garden relishes the cool and the wet and earth soaks. The harshness of heat and bright sun will return. But for this moment I relish the cool and the wet and allow myself to be soaked in it. Nourished in it.
...
I had allowed myself to assume, to have expectation. And so, for a little while the other day I was disappointed. Even disturbed in my dreaming. I woke and felt the need to sit. To breathe. To realign myself with the flow, the call. To become as nothing and lose myself in it..
...
I do have an expectation. Despite my efforts to be sin expectativas I do have an expectation: that with proper husbandry there will be blossoming.
What does my "proper husbandry" look like?
What does her blossoming look like?
This is what I am here to learn. To study. To trust.
What is my expectation but that love —this thing Rumi refers to as the call, what others call God, or flow— is what I am here to experience and know?
...
This I know: husbandry is more than a set of techniques; it is an art.
I am grateful she lets me practice. I know it is painful, to be the one on whom another practices. I see this in every marriage I observe. As well as the impatience of the feminine there is a deep and often unappreciated willingness to endure the discomfort of masculine practice as it becomes —we all pray— an artful husbandry.
I am grateful for her patience as I practice and learn my art.
I am grateful that she tells me and shows me that she is grateful for my commitment to practice.
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It's easy for me to think I've mastered the art. It's also too easy for me to think that, mastering the art, there will be a familiar flowering, a return of the flow and beauty of an earlier stage in our relationship. What beauty I was able to know (and I know that I knew but a small part of what she offered me), that was. The radiance I sometimes glimpse now, this is a faded memory of what has passed, an unreliable forecast of what is to come. I do not know. Still, I can stand in reverence: this glimpse is worthy of my wonder and awe, worthy of me deepening my practice to learn to hold the memory and the promise of beauty a little more surely, a little more tenderly. I can appreciate my practice, and her permission for me to practice.
...
The momentum was broken. Necessarily so.
I am slowed. Stopped. Was disappointed. Made to breathe and remember myself, who I am, now. Why I am. And to trust this.
And especially to trust my practice and my persistence with the little rituals of reverence, my husbandry. Allowing myself to be stilled, and soaked. Nourished in a moment that, in its interruption, felt like disappointment.
...
My! How we "level up!" How surprising it can be. Or: felt, allowed, with grace.
I think I was a little more graceful yesterday. And even during the night in my dreaming. A little more graceful than I have been and than I might have been. I used to be so afraid when the texture of love, of the flow of it in my life, changed.
A thousand funerals, Fabiola Perez might remind me. A thousand reminders to become aware of a death and a need to grieve —and to practice this art of husbandry, an art of preparing and grieving and opening and receiving.
I once read that, "It is resistance to love that causes all the problems." And I have been so resistant. My beloved tells me I am not like that now. I am better at grieving and breathing and receiving. But, my habits die a hard death, hard for me and hard for those whom I love and who love me.
So, I practice. And, grateful, I am allowed to practice. So long as I am breathing there is practice, and art. Tonight I will transmute my grief and my wonder into tango. Tonight I will breathe, become still, and I will feel the flow as the follow moves in my arms. There are many ways to nourish this art.
TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS
🌀Virgo, ruled by earth and Mercury, embodies themes of healing, self-worth, and growth. This season invites us to compassionately accept ourselves where we are while remaining open to expansion.
Embracing Virgo’s nurturing energy helps us release self-doubt... and share our gifts with the world. (Kundalini Yoga School, Inspiration Sunday, August 25)
🌀...the woman [is] not just a follower, she [is] to whom the tango [is] dedicated. (Cacho Dante, The Tango and Trapeze Acts)
🌀Remember God so much that you are forgotten... Let the caller and the called disappear; Be lost in the call. (Rumi)
🌀You gave me something I understand
You gave me loving in the palm of my hand
I can’t tell you how I feel
My heart is like a wheel
Let me roll it
Let me roll it to you… (Paul McCartney & Wings)
🌀 The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland, Precept 7)
🌀Thank you. I appreciate you. (My beloved, she who must be seen and held and known by my powerful and unwavering presence)
TODAY'S SUGGESTED SHORT PRACTICE
Today's practice, to breathe and feel the confusion of life —the tension, pressure, friction, and stress that makes everything possible— and then allowing this confusion to become more beautiful than you can possibly imagine:
Please read through first, then ...
- Set two alarms, for times of the day when you have a five-10 minutes to become conscious of who and how you are in this day.
- When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take a few moments to follow the short practice here:
- Stand, or sit, or lay yourself down, and bring your attention to your body.
- Feel the ground beneath you. Allow the earth to hold you with gravity. Feel how dense and heavy you are. Feel also how lightly you sit or stand or lay on the earth. Feel yourself between the pull of earth's gravity and the subtle but persistent pull of the sun, the stars.
- Slow your breathing so that it is long and deep into your belly. Slow the inhale to a count of four or six. Slow your exhale to a count of six or eight or ten. Repeat three to five cycles of breathing, going a little slower with each cycle. Continuing to notice yourself held by the earth, raised by the sun and stars and sky above. Feel the subtle tension and pressure and friction and stress that allows you to be and rest and move in this body. - When you’re done, take another minute or two, breathing gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly. Here, as you breathe into your fullness, ask yourself, What is my gift to the world? How am I sharing this gift?
- Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.
- Continue with your day until the next alarm sounds, and repeat.