ASHES & GIFTS

Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 247, August 12, 2024

• Today’s questions: Ask your heart, What is it that you would like me to know, what you would like to tell me, what you would like me to remember? (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: 5am, asanas, Knowing Heart pranayama and meditation

TODAY'S MEDITATION

There is a common confusion, that I will know love only from another. Sometimes —more and more, as I walk this crooked path— I understand this strangeness: that the only love I can know begins with loving the man that I am.

If I cannot love myself, if this heart will not hold itself, how can I receive what another offers me? But how to learn this art?

...

I was invited to share my wisdom with a young man yesterday. The invitation, a gift. The sharing of whatever I have to offer, an act of revelation. Listening to myself as if listening to a stranger, wondering what gifts might lie in the muck and mud of my confused and crooked walking of this life.

...

I have so much to share that he left me, my wise and dear and now departed friend. It's his birthday today. He is one of the many Leonine friends who've been the bearers of sunshine in my life. Light. Laughter. A playful (and also often earnest) wisdom.

Even as I begin to think about my own leaving and my usefulness in this life I am reminded that I have a torch, perhaps several, to pass on before I'm done. Torches he passed to me.

Today we scatter his ashes.

...

It's not the content of our wisdom that has value for younger generations, it's how we are with this content. At least that's how I understood what Stephen Jenkinson had to say about wisdom and how it is passed on. It's my experience that this is a personal transference. Another apprenticeship-type experience. I need to be in the company of those who are wiser than me, to feel the cadence of their words and laughter. To see their tears, feel the beating of their hearts, the tremours of their doubt to know beyond the content of their stories and ways.

She told me yesterday she didn't want more stories; she needed to spend time with her own stories. Though she did say there were times when my stories were worth the listening.

The stories I tell are not meant to instruct. They are not "how-to" stories. I'm too confused for that. Instead, they are a demonstration. Not answers, but perhaps ways to receive the questions that life and love ask, obliquely.

Always, it seems, the receiving involves some kind of slowing down. Breaking the momentum, Jenkinson would say. Or, from a yogic perspective, coming into alignment with myself and the world around me. Becoming resonant.

This is what I had to offer my young friend yesterday. A story of my own difficult learning to slow down to know the river that was my life, to slow down to feel the flow, and let it carry me, as I am needed to be carried. He told me his story, or stories within his story. To me it suggested that, even in his confusion, the flow that he was wanting was occuring. He'd need to slow down, to stop seeking, to know it.

...

She has accepted my invitation for a day trip into a geography that enchants me. I will have stories. Many. The geography is one that inspires my love for and curiousity about my father. I will have to listen, to hear her above the noise of my enchantment.

...

One of the John Wineland's precepts for men is to develop the capacity for wonder and awe. Another way of thinking about this is, to develop the capacity to always see through the familiar to the strange, and to prepare myself to host this strangeness, as I would host a guest.

When I work with couples I ask them to see the other, as the sutra says, as themselves. And, to simultaneously honour this other who is so familar as a stranger, as a guest bearing unimaginable gifts.

We are strangers to ourselves. Those with whom w are most intimate and familiar are always bringing the strangeness of ourselves to our attention. Of course, we don't see this. We see only the other, becoming uncomfortable to ourselves. We do not want to see either ourselves or our strangeness or our gifts. We want what we think we want, our comfort. We want to be loved in a way that dulls us to ourselves, and especially our strangeness.

How can we prepare ourselves to receive this stranger, who is ourselves, who appears in the eyes and arms of the ones we love but do not recognize? We know only one thing: this gift is poison to our comfort; why would we welcome it into our arms, our beds, our bodies, our hearts?

Where do we find the capacity to receive the stranger, as a gift-bearing guest whose otherness is welcomed?

What rituals can I make for myself, that I open to receive the stranger that is me, in her? To receive the gifts that are for me, alone?

...

Today his ashes are spread. I will remember, and revere, and regard his presence. He was and is a holy presence. A stranger whose gifts I learned to welcome.

Slow down, he said to me. Then he showed me how he slowed himself down, to receive the world, the love of this world. Slow down, he said, and let it come to you.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀 Why are you knocking at every door?
Go knock at the door of your own heart. (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:
  • Ask your heart, What is it that you would like me to know, what you would like to tell me, what you would like me to remember?
  • 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.