There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anaïs Nin
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation, we will be sitting from 7:30 to 10:00 PM EST. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you.
Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers of all stripes who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Lately I’ve been more than a little stuck wanting people and things to be different than they are.
This morning as I drove home from a short trip to Ann Arbor, I remembered a time when I worked with all men and I was judged for not behaving or responding to stimuli as a man would. I thought about how unfair it was that men expected me to act like a man in some subtle ways, when I was something completely different. And then I realized that I did the same thing with other people and things when I wanted ignorant people to act as if they were awake, when I wanted the world to act as if it was driven by compassionate, liberated individuals when it is actually driven by a combination of all of us.
We all see things outside ourselves that we don’t like, and it takes real courage to look at ourselves and see how we do the very same things we are reacting to. Maybe we get confused by the outer stories and don’t see our underlying thinking, or maybe we do the things we react to in a more subtle manner, and to a lesser degree. For example, we might feel comfortable judging a murderer; but then again, how many people can honestly say they have never wished to have some repellent individual gone, or taken out. How many times have I heard someone say, “Somebody ought to shoot that son of a bitch.” Right there at that moment, the murderous impulse was alive and well in that individual. It might not exist to the same degree as it does in one who actually acts on the thought and murders someone, but right there in that moment the murderous impulse exists, in a more subdued manor, in that violent thought.
So this evening, to encourage us on the path of our fearless self examination is a short video:
And an intention that we will all have the courage to open in full bloom.