I SURRENDER (THIS TIME, BECAUSE I AM, AGAIN, A SLOW LEARNER)

• Today’s questions: Do you know how to surrender? Are you willing to surrender? Do you resist surrendering? There is a simple yogic approach to surrender that I’m happy to share with you in a short, no-charge call. If that’s helpful, please set that up at sacredbodies.ca/chat
• Today's suggested practice: Day 17 of this month's practice, to notice where I stand, with coach Leroy Gordon (see below).
• My practice today: 3:15am: 90 minutes: yoga, with breathwork, mantra, and Meditation for Healing
• My vulnerability practice: I have done my practice, and I am open to receive. All of it.

Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY’S MEDITATION

In so many things I take pride in how quickly I learn things, master things. My mind is a powerful instrument and I bend the world to my will.

That is the story I’ve told myself, and that has been told me, since I was very young. It hasn’t always been a good thing.

When it comes to Her gifts, Her ways, I am too often a slow learner. But it isn’t that I’m incapable of learning, that my slow is the kind of pace that encourages deep learning. No. My slow learning has to do with resistance. With hubris. I think I know better. I think I know the pace at which the world must bend to my will, my desires.

What happened so recently? It was a “big day,” as one of my teachers commented. A storm was gathering. A series of events arriving on the following day, arriving and in advance inviting me to be a little more of myself —a little more, by being a lot less of what I believe myself to be.

There is something about the way Stephen Jenkinson says things that resonates for me. Perhaps I am, at this stage of my life, ready to hear these things, to take them in? One of these things is the idea that what diminishes me is often what I need, that diminishment reveals the man I am.

This is not a new idea. It’s the wisdom of yoga, as I understand it and as I teach it. But then Jenkinson applies it to the practice of apprenticeship, saying words to the effect of: In the apprenticeship to learning something I think I desire, all of what I know of this something (in this case, love, my beloved) needs to be stripped away for me to *know.* To really know.

The fortune cookie told me this: that romance is on the horizon, only waiting for me to make the first move. And what, pray tell, is this “first move?”

The conventional wisdom of the masculine-identified man is that the “first move” is pursuit. Action! Stepping towards the object of desire, conquest as the intention.

But I’ve learned a few things, and instead I wonder: What if this “first move” is to become more still. More silent. More open. More vulnerable. Without foreknowledge —or foreboding? Without a plan? Without intention, even?

Well, perhaps then love arrives on its own terms, is known and experienced on its own terms. Perhaps that?

The storm of events gathered, and broke. And —because I’d done my practice to slow down, to open and receive, despite my resistances of the day before? Perhaps— and every breaking of these events was pleasure. A beautiful surprise.

“You’re always surprised,” she said to me in recent years. A comment on my unreadiness for the moment. And yes, it’s true. For so long I’d been hostage to the beautiful machinery of my mind. Planning. Scheming. Conquering. Achieving. So I was ill-prepared to to receive what, if I’d slowed and stilled myself, would be less surprising. Perhaps more beautiful.

Perhaps.

What I know is that surrendering to the storm I allowed others to bring themselves, in their own time, in their own ways, to me. What they brought, every one of them in their own way and time, a blessing. Unbidden.

There is, in this experience of “being in love,” so much of the “edge.” What some call the “liminal” experiences. What I experience as so much wanting. A deliciousness that I both want to extinguish by “having,” and want to extend and deepen. That means a different kind of “having.” This is the opening to the feminine experience of pleasure: the never-ending, always-on-the-edge vulnerability to sensation and feeling… Something I am afraid of. Something I believe all of us who are masculine-identified, whether men or women, are afraid of: it asks too much of us, is too much unknown, too much mystery, too vulnerable, painful even. I think, more and more as I open myself to this kind of experience, and as I invite students and my beloved to hold themselves in this space, that it takes a profoundly powerful and grounded masculine presence to hold this much tenderness to the world. To hold it safe, and wide open. This demands attention to our nervous system and its capacities. This is why I practice, and why I encourage my students to practice. Daily. Incrementally building this capacity to hold beauty, to know a deeper experience of love.

A year or so ago I asked by men, in the context of a series of conversations about men and women and sex and love, “Where is the how-to manual? We are,” they told me, “exhausted by the mystery of the feminine. We do not read poetry. We do not like poetry. Give us the three-to-10 steps that we can take to know and love the feminine.”

Here it is. One step: train your nervous system to deepen. Find a practice that connects you with your ground. This is the advice I give myself daily: practice, so that I can feel the wonderland, the awesome experience, of Her beauty. Breathe. Open your body. Allow the storms to be my nourishment, giving me exactly what I need. Exactly what I cannot imagine.

I don’t say this lightly. This is work I do every day. Religiously. Because I want to feel that love that flows through me and around me and to me. Not to conquer it, but to let it be the energy of every moment.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀You deserve nothing. (Kendra Cunov)

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

🌀A great teacher once insisted that one must never ask for the instructions of ‘how’ before this journey unfolds, for such a request will break the subtle connections to your intuition. Create a compelling reason why the journey must take place -- "an absolute must," they would say, “and the 'how' will be delivered with each step you take.”

…Now begin the journey; sense your directions; respond to your intuition; maintain the compelling reason with your unreasonable knowing...the path unfolds before you. (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)

🌀Yes yess please. (My beloved, my Oracle & Siren)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Day 17 of this month's practice:

Please read through first, then ...

• Today, set two alarms, one for the early part of your day, one for late afternoon when you may be feeling low energy.
• When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take less than three minutes to do this short practice with coach Leroy Gordon:

https://youtu.be/kvwU_BBTwmw

• When you’re done, stand for a minute and breathe long and deep, consciously and slowly filling and emptying your belly.
• 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.

Ps. Thank you for reading. Please share where appropriate.