ALLOWING HER, ALL THE TIME… (Part 2)

• Today’s questions: How does my body feel this season?

• Today's suggested practice: Day 10 of this month's practice, to practice for yourself, your wants, the things you yearn for (see Kendra Cunov’s short “Notes Towards Self Practice” below)

• My practice: 5:30am; 75 minutes of yoga asanas, mantras, followed by Gayatri meditation

• My vulnerability practice: Allowing my nervous system to feel it all, to hold it all, just for this moment…

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Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY’S MEDITATION

This garden is in its “fast” season. Shooting upwards. Crowding spaces. Throwing out limbs and flowers. Reaching. Feasting on the sun and the earth and racing to create more and more and more, to flourish and flourish and flourish against the coming dark.

The apple trees are all heavy with green fruit. Blueberry bushes and raspberry bushes jewelled with the colours of ripening fruit. Grape vines twisting and turning their way all ways along every branch and fork they can reach, and beyond, over-reaching themselves and trailing the tiny green pearls with every stretch beyond themselves into this hot July sun.

I’m in the shade of my “garden office.” I watch it all, with —yes— awe and wonder. To play my part in all of this.

And this part I play? To toil and hoe and such?

No! It’s clearer to me every day and every year of this practice: my part is to do less and less. To enjoy, more and more.

I practice this: to create this space for flourishing, and then to hold it. To allow Her as the garden spirit, to dance as She needs, as She wants. And so I learn to be a husbandman. All of this is about love. And, all of it is about sex: not just the buzzing of the garden all the sunny day, not the birds singing sweet songs of courtship and happiness at dawn and dusk. Not just these portents, but these too. But something deeper too: the capacity to be awed, to be in a state of wonder in the face of what is such a powerful expression of feminine beauty. All of this summer day, and all the days that follow.

But the garden, I know, even in this powerfully fecund and flourid moment, it is also about death. Not so much today (though even now I see it).

The death that hovers is in my knowing that in not-so-many weeks all of this becoming will… Will become something else.

And that too is love.

It is, as my colleague Fabiola Perez tells me, quoting the poet Priebe (another Heidi), the “thousand funerals” of our committed relationships. And this garden an emblem of such relationships and such manifold and myriad deaths: the husbandman watches it all, receives it all, tends it all, with regrets and sacrifices and joys also manifold and myriad.

It is the not-resisting of this, Her dance in my life, through my garden. It is the enjoying of She comes undone, moving a different way, with a different beauty as the days and hours and seasons move. All of it about love’s blossoming, the many, many deaths that are part of loving in this life.

And always the question: I am the husbandman who has the depth the hold this holy space of love and death, of sex and becoming undone?

My thoughts and feelings about Heidi’s death have changed over the years. Especially in recent years, witnessing my own death and rebirth in the face of my narrowness.

My visits to the winter shores of her disappearance, to remember her and her death so many years ago, and to witness the sea folks who welcome me, these have helped.

Yesterday and today, in this week of remembering her birth, I am less weighed by grief than held by this feeling of —again— wonder and awe, grateful that this particular girl, my sister, this particular instance of the divine and infinite feminine, graced my life. Because that is what I recall: her sistership as a gracing of those eight years together, in some of my most vulnerable years.

Now, to let that grace linger, guiding what is left of this life.

A teacher recently said, You deserve nothing. The corollary: everything that comes to me, comes to be by Her graces, not by my efforts or claims. This I know, and it is a good thing to know as I watch summer deliver Her gifts.

It is still summer. It is a “fast” season.

I know that autumn, with its memories of difficulties yet still the season my heart holds most dear, is not too far behind. And I am glad.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀As with a bud, you must remember, time allows the blossom to flower...from a willingness and hope that ignites it.
…Patience is not waiting, patience is knowing...knowing this future view of the ultimate outcome [will] come...and spending the time for it to arrive. (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)

🌀And if I am speaking to a group of men, I will tell them it's their responsibility to become more sensitive to her, to learn to read her NO before she can, to soften their grip around control, and let themselves FEEL the power and tenderness in vulnerability.
We all have our work to do. (Nina Lombardo)

🌀The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland, Precept 7)

🌀You know how to sit. You know how to wait. It is the greatest art, to sit and wait for it to come. (Adapted from Yogi Bhajan)

🌀I’m beginning to trust “no expectations.” (My beloved, my Oracle & Siren)

🌀You deserve nothing. (Kendra Cunov)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Day 10 of this month's practice:

Please read through first, then ...

Today, set a time —at least five minutes, perhaps 15— when you can be alone and in stillness.

• Stand or sit or lie, with a beautiful and straight spine, firm but relaxed, feeling your feet or your sit bones or hips heavy and connected to the earth;

• Close your eyes;

• Inhale deeply into your belly, letting it become soft and round;

• Exhale by gently and slowly, much more slowly than your inhale, pressing your navel to your spine,

• And listen to Kendra Cunov’s few minutes on practice:

When you’re done, stand or sit or lie for another minute and breathe gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly. Here, as you breathe into your fullness, ask yourself, How does my body feel this season? Is it only the sun on my skin, or is there something more that brings a smile to my face and my belly and my sex?

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, open to the gifts it brings.

★ My full conversation with Kendra Cunov about Men & Women & the “No-Man Diet” is now on the podcast at sacredbodies.ca/podcast