Everyone knows surrender is supposed to be a good thing, and yet there is all that stuff out there in the world that is just so objectionable. For the time being, we can just not worry about that stuff. This evening we will be working on surrendering to everything that arises within ourselves. There is probably enough of that to keep us busy for several lifetimes, so we may never need to worry about surrendering to all that “stuff out there.” :-)
Before we start, I’d like to announce a second opportunity for meditation next week. Someone living in Australia has reached out, another solitary practitioner, who would like to try meditating at a distance as we have been doing for some time. Due to the time difference our regular Monday evening time lands right in the middle of her Tuesday work day, so we have arranged to “meet” on our Friday evening, November 13, at 8 PM for one hour. I realize Friday evening may not be the most convenient time for a group meditation, but this is the best arrangement we could come up with, and it is only a one time sitting. Hopefully we will be able to pull together a number of participants.
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 11:00 PM Eastern Time. 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, 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."
Sangha Co-hosts for meditation are:
7:30 - 10:00 Ooooh and davehouck
9:30 - 11:00 thanatokephaloides
Note: You are also welcome to join us on Sunday mornings at 10:00AM for the Dkos Sangha Open Threads which are hosted by davehouck.
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Surrender becomes much more workable when we focus our practice to just what is arising within us. If anger is arising we let it happen, when happiness is arising we let it come and go, if we are feeling resistance in the moment we surrender to our resistance. This is a matter of saying, “Yes!” to everything that is happening within. That doesn’t mean we have permission to act out on all our emotions, it simply means we are going to allow them the room to rise and recede within us, rather than trying to shove down the unpleasant emotions, and attempting to cling to the pleasant emotions.
It might seem difficult to imagine how to do that, so just imagine bowing down to the emotion, try giving it an internal Namaste. If we think about how these emotions originate, the ego intends many of them as protective measures, so when we look at it this way we might even be able to be grateful for the protective intent.
For example, let’s imagine that your job requires you to speak to customers on the phone, however you have a supervisor who will bust in and issue new job assignments while you are on the phone and already engaged and focused on a phone call with a customer, and while you are unable to give your attention to the new instructions. It happens frequently, and it really irritates you, but you feel you are powerless to express your anger, so you resist it, and you feel resentful for hours after every time it occurs. Your supervisor is not a bad person, in fact you quite like him, it is just this annoying habit of his that really makes you miserable.
If we look at the situation, we can see there is some truth in that anger, isn’t there? Your boss should not issue new assignments when you can’t pay attention to him. There, bow down to that. Say, “Namaste,” to that. It really is OK to be angry over that; how could you not be angry at that? Now instead of resisting it, just be with that anger, let it expand, let the emotion express itself fully in you, meet it with tenderness, it is a crappy situation, your boss is being thoughtless and rude, you are doing the best you can. Thoughtlessness and rudeness happen a lot in human interactions, people fail each other in infinite ways. We can’t help becoming hurt and angry when that happens, but when we give it room to fully express itself in us, when we are able to meet it with tenderness and allow every bit of it, we find it dissipates on its own.
Emotions are messengers. When we honor them by accepting them and giving them our attention, they are free to express through their cycle of existence. If we can give them the room to fully express within us, we find they will arise, crest and fall away like a wave breaks, rolls up on a beach and then recedes back into the body of water from which it arose. Practicing in this fashion helps us to learn we are a vast space in which emotions arise, express and recede, and oddly enough once we allow the room for the emotions to fully express, we find there is no longer an impulse for a reactivity, since there is now room for appropriate actions to arise in response to the emotions.
Every day, moment by moment we can take the opportunity to to say yes to whatever happens to be arising within us, hold it in our awareness with tenderness, allow it to expand and deflate. It is actually resisting our emotions that causes us so much suffering. When we allow them room to express fully, to come and go in tenderness, it makes room for joy and equanimity to bloom in our lives.
Once we've really experienced how our un-resisted emotions have the liberty to come and go when held and met with tenderness, the door to freedom is opened to us.