THE LONG GAME CONTINUES ...

• Today's suggested practice: Three minutes ... (see below; with an invitation to practice with me)
• My playlist while writing today's meditation: Jeff Beck, Love is Green
• My morning practice: 45 minutes: Short warm-up followed by Sat kriya, with Linking to the Infinite pranayama and mantra later in the forest...
• My vulnerability practice: A softness at my edges, allowing something unknown, unimaginable to enter...

—Hans Peter Meyer

MY MEDITATION

The long game of love is only played with an "open deck" — with my heart wide open.

What have I learned? That this thing called "love" that I seek and to which I am, now, in a conscious apprenticeship to know, it is always an invitation to dissolve myself....

And, because I'm learning to stay conscious, I become a witness to my dissolution.

And, fitting for this Easter time of year, I am also a witness to my resurrection.

And, being the conscious witness, I become increasingly aware that this resurrected self is also always dissolving in Her always moving, always wearing-down, always testing ocean.

All that remains: my awareness. Less afraid of losing this thing I've clung to as "myself." Allowing this "myself" to be revealed as a series of self-deceptions and self-protections. This long game requires me to play with an open hand, not so that my beloved knows my heart. No! I play with an open hand and allow myself to be successively dissolved and reduced so that I may know my heart. So that, knowing myself and knowing this open hand of my heart, I may play this long game with confidence, with trust in myself. Trusting myself, my beloved is, finally, able to trust me.

But the game doesn't end with this. She will always be testing me, inviting me to reduce and dissolve and become truer to myself. To release myself from the self-deceptions and limitations that my as a boy and as a man has trained me for, that perhaps my entire history and pre-history and evolution has trained me to be: instinctively defensive, guarded, not-knowing- and not-trusting the man I am. Yes, I fear my nakedness. I am afraid that I will suffer.

And so I learn to play with an open hand, because this is, as far as I can tell, the only game I am here to play.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀...To receive... give with your heart.

..Our relationships will be successful when we are willing to be committed and patient. Dare to follow your intuition and take initiative... (Marieke, Kundalini Yoga School, How to Successfully Navigate the Upcoming Solar Eclipse in Taurus)

🌀Our nervous systems are built for relationships. (Anon)

🌀 I'm always impressed by you. (My beloved, my Oracle)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Three minutes to sit with your self-deception...

Note: If you'd like a help with this exercise or any other practice in this series, I'm here to be your witness or guide, as needed. You can set that up via this (no-charge) link to a 15-minute session

Please read through first, then ...

• Sit or stand in front of a mirror, or in front of your beloved. If with yourself, look at yourself, your posture, your breath, your wariness, your openness.
• If with your beloved, look into their left eye and feel into their assessment of your trustworthiness, your transparency, the open hand of your heart —they will see this in your posture, your breath, your openness, not as a rejection, but as an estimation of their capacity to trust you.
• Stay with yourself or with your beloved for just three minutes and allow yourself to dissolve into the process of more opening, more vulnerability than you may have ever allowed. Remember to breathe. Whether with yourself or with your beloved, your breath is what allows your defensiveness to dissolve, allows your heart to be felt.
• When the timer signals, relax your gaze and nod or bow to yourself or your beloved. Having no expectations of yourself or your beloved, remain in your posture (sitting or standing), and release the other to move however they wish, allowing yourself, after three long, deep breath cycles, to resume your day. Without expectations. Without want. Grateful that, for three minutes, you moved towards showing your open hand in this long game of your life.