IT IS NEVER TOO LATE
Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 253, August 18, 2024
- Today’s questions: What mistakes do you still need to forgive yourself for?
What would you do, or stop doing, right now in your life if you would drop all fear of making mistakes?
(from Kundalini Yoga School, The Knowing Heart sadhana) - Today's suggested practice: to sit with your own resistance to learning what you already know & receive as love... (see my "Short Practice,” below)
- My practice today: 5:30am, asanas, Knowing Heart pranayama and meditation
TODAY'S MEDITATION
I was once given the image of my life as a river. I could knowits source and its ending and still never draw a straight line between them. It is the nature of the river to flow. It will find its way to obstacles. It will find its way around, or under, or over, or through.
I live to learn to live this river. It is almost never what I would understand as a life of direction or destiny. Yet this is what it is: flow as direction, flow as destiny.
So, I learn to relax. To experience the seeming obstacles and allow them to be that which gives shape and necessary detour to this thing I call my life.
...
I have a friend, a dear man, who delights in teasing me. He helps me to remove the stiffness from my sometimes too-earnest approach to living. It is a good thing, that he helps me. Though I could be a little more gracious in receiving his lessons.
...
I am, in recent years, exercising my capacity to open. To offer. To make a gift of myself. To be generous, without expectations that my offerings will be consequential or have a return. This was a way of being suggested years ago, decades ago. But it is only with my beloved that I am drawn to take this practice deeper.
My teasing friend understands what I am doing, in a way. He may even have a glimmer of understanding about the why of my doing. But he also questions whether this is possible, to be and to offer without expectations. So he prods me. Tests me. Teases me. I am learning to be grateful for his provocations. They prove me.
As I was preparing for this past week, to spend time with the woman I love, my friend, with kindness but also the twinkle of his eye, kidded me. How well, he wondered, would I do, to live this week without expectation of the woman I love? He is himself strugging to find a way, not with romantic love, but with parental love. Sometimes my words rub him with irritation. His teasing then feels like, not just a provocation, but a searching for an answer. As if how I respond to the testing of my love will show him a way —or confirm his stubborn attachment to his way.
His stubbornness is familiar to me. I know it well in my own body, in my own relationships. With wives. With children. With friends, and colleagues. Always I know better, I think. This does not help me or make these relationships more pleasurable.
Stubbornness has a comfortable familiarity. I am learning to welcome the stranger as a guest.
A much-loved mother-in-law once said to me, apropos my stubbornness: Do not fight the river.
...
There is a way. A flow.
The sutra says, There is a way through every block.
The way, one teacher says, is to become the solution, the fluidity that finds its way. I become this solution only by slowing myself. Attuning myself. Feeling into this moment. Receiving all that it brings.
This is the work of welcoming the stranger, the She whom my masculine training finds discomfiting. Too often finds unwelcome. Difficult. Inscrutable. Complicated.
...
Am I hard to understand? my beloved recently asked. Yes, I said. But that is one of the reasons I love you. The art of attending to you makes me the man I love. I would not trade your difficulty for all the ease I've known.
...
We went for a day. Did small things that brought quiet connection and joy. Smiles. We allowed large things —a long and beautiful drive; a long a nd beautiful boat trip; the sun; the pulse of the engine; the smooth pebbles of a Pacific-facing beach; our dogs— we allowed these to be enough. Then, unbidden, an intimacy of words and feelings.
She stayed for more time together. Again, unbidden. Unexpected.
I often felt the block of my resistance. My struggle to be calm. To be quiet. To receive. She gave me her trust. Her tears. Her fears.
Then it was time for her to go.
...
This river, flowing, with less and less interruption from me. I swam in the the ocean last night and watched the Purple Martins above me. Darting and circling. I sat by the shore and watched the sky become dark. Later I saw the moon, filling the southern sky.
In a few months she will travel again, across the country. Some place she's found sanctuary in. The river flows.
Before that, in a few weeks, we will travel again to a Pacific-facing shore. What then? Breathe. Feel into the moment. Welcome the flow of it.
Always this river takes me deeper into myself, deeper into the mystery between us. I am grateful. I am less and less inclined to be distracted by my wants. The beauty of this life reveals Herself as I become slow, as I learn to attend to the wonder and awe of it all.
I am, today, less concerned with the obstacles, more content, and more curious in what these obstacles reveal.
It is, I am learning, never too late to slow down, to begin to savour the gifts of this life.
TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS
🌀Of course this doesn’t mean that it is not painful to come to terms with certain acts you have done that may have hurt yourself or others. But this pain is your wake up call to drop all the judgements (fear in disguise) so that you can realize that truly only love exists. Mistakes are like Grace knocking on the door of your heart to open up, to feel and to allow your inner wisdom to flow through. A wisdom that is beyond phenomenal knowledge, beyond personal knowing. It’s actually an invitation to let go of the person you think and believe yourself to be. It’s an invitation to forgive and let go. (Kundalini Yoga School, The Knowing Heart sadhana day 3)
🌀 Soul, if you want to learn secrets, you must forget about shame and dignity. You are God’s lover, yet you worry what people are saying. (Rumi)
🌀 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 and:
- What mistakes do I still need to forgive myself for? What would I do, or stop doing, right now in my life if I would drop all fear of making mistakes?
- Then, 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, Do I feel right? Am I in alignment with the man or woman I am? Do I even have an inkling what that might feel like? Do I even have an inkling of what it feels like to be out of alignment with myself?
- 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.