On the subject of LISTENING from the space of AWARENESS, witnessing awareness, Sakshi, Shravana, non-judgmental, healing, rejuvenating….SILENCE.

Sue read for us:

The Winter of Listening
David Whyte

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

All this trying
to know
who we are
and all this
wanting to know
exactly
what we must do.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
to the lit angel
we desire.

What disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true
to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

A silent meditation practice is simply an aspect of this intention to remember our true nature. We come together, to “just sit”. We listen to the silence. We listen to our thoughts, We listen to our feelings and emotions. When we “just sit” we just BE the witnessing awareness. And this continues as we get off our mats or chairs and DO what needs to be done to live the dailiness of our lives. The BEing and DOing, the inhalation and exhalation and the gaps in between, Having this understanding empowers us to choose the lens we perceive and experience our lives with. “Just sitting”, silent meditation, reveals the layers that veil the clarity and luminosity of our true nature and the gap between these layers. Glimpses of the background, the ground of awareness, reminds us to rest in our true nature that is the witness to all experience. 

A practical tool from the Yogic tradition was shared as an aid to alleviate anxiety and stress. Sometimes, aids to sitting meditation can be very helpful to calm the mind. this is one such tool. 

Brahmari in Sanskrit translates to bumble bee. In this prānāyāma, we are mimicking the sound of a bee buzzing, by closing off all of our senses and creating a humming sound. The “Bee’s Breath” soothes the nerves and calms the mind. During this practice, the breath makes a steady, low pitched ‘hum’ sound at the back of the throat on the exhale (like the humming of a bee). The bee goes to the flower and creates a humming 4 sound around the flower, and the flower opens its heart allowing the bee to get the pollen. There’s a beautiful romance going on between the flower and honeybee. Likewise, in the subtle body of humans per the yogic sciences, there is a beautiful lotus behind the breastbone. Through bhrāmarī prānāyāma the lotus blooms more and secretes divine nectar. Hum is the bīja-root sound of the ether element. Therefore, bhrāmarī breath unfolds the ether element in all bodily channels. It removes the occlusion of the channels so energy and prāna can flow freely.

Benefits:

• Calms and soothes the mind and nervous system
• Helps with throat and thyroid ailments
• Relieves stress and anger
• Reduces blood pressure
• Induces good sleep
• Improves the function of the thyroid, parathyroid, and thymus gland to support immune function
• Stimulates the pineal and pituitary glands
• Stimulates secretion of tryptophan, serotonin, melatonin, acetylcholine, and dopamine
• Harmonizes the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems
• Mind is dissolved into pure consciousness.

Enryu read from the book called Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo

Encouraged to remain unmoving and withhold any attempt to make it go away.

Whatever your experience is, open up around it, just make space for it. Be the space for your experience. This added inner space has the power to transform conditioned reactivity.

Christian Dillo received Dharma transmission through Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Many readers will know Shunryu Suzuki as the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, one of the most popular books of Zen spirituality ever published.

When talking about “liberation” from suffering, for instance, Dillo focuses on the positive more than the negative. Liberation is not only about what to avoid in or prune from one’s life; liberation is also about “the path of nourishment.” How can we make our experiences more nourishing to our lives? Allow them to “complete themselves and develop into bodily expression,” he explains.

He points to the example of crying: “We generally don’t like to experience sadness or grief. We tend to resist not only the painful sensations that come with loss but also the bodily convulsions involved in crying. Have you noticed the difference between a way of crying that feels purifying and one that leaves you depleted and distressed? The difference lies in the willingness to let the painful sensations sequence through your body.” Dillo then offers further teachings from the Buddhist practitioner who taught him this way to cry.

Taken from a review online:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59386092-the-path-of-aliveness

The practice of Zen Buddhism can transform your life in the direction of less suffering and greater vitality in this very moment. The Path of Aliveness presents a fresh Buddhist path of rigorous exploration of experience at the sensory, emotional, and cognitive levels. Christian Dillo offers four tenets as guideposts for this exploration. It is possible, he writes, to:

– Cultivate a path of transformation.
– Liberate ourselves from unnecessary suffering.
– Live in accord with how things actually exist.
– Work for the benefit of all beings.

Dillo revisits classic Buddhist teachings such as the Four Noble Truths and the foundations of mindfulness meditation, reconstructing them as forms of embodiment training that are essential for transformation. This contemporary reconstruction of the teachings is always in the service of helping the reader make experiential distinctions in their own body-mind. This secular approach respectfully plumbs Buddhist tradition while opening itself to dialogue with science, psychotherapy, and other aspects of modern life. From this vantage, Buddhist practices appear as intentional cultivations moving us toward freedom, wisdom, and compassion. Dillo demonstrates how the space opened up by such practices can lead to skillful responsiveness, whether toward the problems in one’s life or broader issues like the ecological crisis.