Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow Morning at 10am EST ~ Compassion and Stuckness
Join me tomorrow for the second meditation on stuckness, this time focused on the moving medicine of compassion.
Dear Friends,
Last week we worked with the experience of “stuckness” in the body and in life experience. This topic seemed to really resonate with many of you on the personal level, and I see so much of it in the stalemates and polarization of our collective culture wars. We had a profound experience of noticing how much movement is always happening in the body and in our environment. How movement IS life. And then we noticed where there are parts of our energy body and our psychic experience that feel stuck, immobile, inert.
In nature, stuckness can be a problem…I think of the birthing process and how stuckness can lead to dire complications or the illnesses that can be bred in a stagnant pool of water. Movement is medicine. Movement is Nature’s way. Stillness is something different than stuckness. Stillness is also Nature’s way. But, stuckness happens when something that should be in movement isn’t. Where there is stuckness, we have to ask what is the impediment to movement? What is stuck? Usually, it’s something we’re avoiding, like feeling difficult emotions or surfacing information that will change things in ways we don’t feel ready for. Our resistance to seeing things as they are, our inability to be in acceptance and surrender, these are stances that keep things stuck. Our need to feel “in control” of things or forcing things to be other than they are can also lead to stuckness. This is often the case in relationships. We are reluctant to accept the changes in our fundamental relationships and so we pretend nothing has changed. We ignore the signs of change. We will things into stuckness in order to feel safe, but this is not LIFE.
Emotions want to move. When we tuck them away into little stagnant places in the energy/emotional/auric body, we invite disease and discomfort. Trauma creates a rigidity/contraction in the auric body where energy doesn’t move or infuse new life. It’s a stagnant pool or block of ice. The flow of information is ceased where the trauma is in residence. Even the smallest bit of movement, a focus on where things ARE moving, can begin to thaw the trauma and remind our system that things change and this is GOOD. We are constantly shifting and changing. This is our Nature and it is the Nature of things. Embracing movement is a beautiful way to restore it.
Which brings me to COMPASSION.
Compassion is really alive in my field right now. Just a few days ago, His Holiness the Dalai Lama offered a very special Tantric empowerment publicly. This empowerment or initiation can be found on Youtube. What a miracle of our times! It is a transmission that readies us to receive the wisdom of compassion through the magnificent bodhisattva and patron of the Tibetan people, Avalokitesvara (Sanskrit: avalokita, “looking on”; ishivara, “lord”).
(This video is just the preliminaries/Day One. The actual empowerment/Day Two is here. Watching both is recommended.)
Compassion is a deep topic to unpack, but as it relates to stuckness I will say this: Compassion for self, warmth towards self is the beginning of a movement towards compassion and warmth towards others, which is necessary to experience the interconnectedness that is the fabric of our existence. And you cannot experience interconnectedness without feeling and knowing the fundamental place of movement and change in life. With each move we make, we create ripples through the fabric of reality…each THOUGHT we have changes everything to some degree. We are never actually inert…we are constantly moving or resisting a movement that wants to happen.
Avalokiteśvara is the embodiment of the compassion of all the Buddhas. The Dalai Lama is, himself, an emanation of this bodhisattva. So, receiving this empowerment is a direct connection to a vast reservoir of compassion, whether you are Buddhist or not. It heals. It moves things. It softens you.
The more we resist the less we can flow, or be in intimate communion with life and its emergence.
Finally, I enjoyed reading this chapter on Compassion, or munay, in Arkan Lushwala’s beautiful book, The Time of the Black Jaguar. Arkan is an Andean/Lakota teacher. Arkan talks about compassion as being a power that comes from the heart and moves things, people.
Tomorrow I’d like to stir compassion, invoke compassion for ourselves and others in order to move things in our energy body and in our lives. What feels stuck in you that could use some compassion. Let’s bring it to the field we create together and find a deep compassion for each other. We can hold a space of healing where things can shift and move to be more open to the flow of life.
Join me here at 10am EST. Please note the time change as I am spending the next two weeks in California and I just can’t get up that early!
See you there tomorrow!