I BECOME MYSELF & HOLD ALL YOU GIVE ME

• Today's suggested practice: 7 minutes.... (see below)

• My playlist while writing today's meditation: Amrit Sadhana Singh, Mera Man Loche

• My morning practice: Two hours with warm-up for lower triangle, Linking with the Infinite ♾ mantra and pranayama, followed by Solving Communication Problems kriya  (please book a session if you’d like guidance in these practices for yourself …. http://sacredbodies.ca )

• My vulnerability practice: At another threshold and feeling afraid. So.... letting myself feel this fear, without closing, allowing myself to open into this new space She shows me, trusting my practice to hold me through this opening...

—Hans Peter Meyer

MY MEDITATION What happens to my nervous system when I meditate daily? I slow down. I become myself.

I am not a warrior going to battle. I am a man who has forgotten how to receive the love that is already here for me. I am a man who is learning to hold this space for myself, that I may hold this space for Her gifts, Her always-flowing current of unimaginable treasures....

Does She know whether I am ready to receive? Her flow is constant, as is Her testing. And so I practice. Not to resolve the testing, because it is a never-ending dialectic of following the follow... never-ending so long as I choose to open to life around me, within me. Every test an invitation to go deeper into myself, higher into myself, to become the man I love. The man my beloved yearns to hold her infinitely loving and infinitely tender heart.

What happens when a man meditates? Over time, with dedicated and daily practice, his nervous system resets. His body remembers the man he is, the man he loves, the man She trusts with Her treasures. The man she trusts with her infinite love.

There are, one of my teachers said —and I'm paraphrasing — three stages in a man's life. In the first third of adulthood, we are consumed with sex, money, with achieving and pursuing and conquest. In the second third of our lives, we become teachers, showing others (our children, younger men, colleagues, etc) how to achieve, pursue, conquer. In the final third of our lives we prepare for death. We prepare our legacy.

What is true for a man is really true for any of us who lives in their masculine energy, man or woman or otherwise identified. This is an energy that, without practice, will, eventually stumble from pursuing to reproducing to reflection and wisdom.

David Deida's stages of love offer another three-part description of deepening into ourselves. Conquest and accumulation (more is better) govern our first stage of romantic and sexual experience. Conscious and mutual sharing of love's pleasures and responsibilities is our second stage. Serving love, not ourselves or even each other, or even our union, is our third stage experience.

In neither of these three-stage outlines is "evolution" a given. It's just rare to experience the second stage of either without the first, the third without learning the lessons of the second. At any moment in my experience of third stage devotional love I am susceptible to "first stage" habits of conquest and accumulation. Even in this, the wisdom age of my life, I feel the tug of youthful preoccupation with "ejaculation," in all of its many forms (sexual, financial, political...). Nevertheless, I am aware that my soul calls me towards the third stage of wisdom and reflection. This is what this writing is about: reflecting on and somehow distilling whatever wisdom this apprenticeship to love may offer. My soul yearns only to serve love, to offer the deepest engagement and expressions of myself as a sacrifice to love. And what I am taught, by my teachers and by my experience, is that daily, dedicated practice of meditation helps me to be most truly the man I am loving more deeply as my daily practice continues.

I am always either opening or closing to the man I am, the man my beloved knows me to be, in spite of what she has experienced. She tests. I open, or close. Opening, she flows into the now-holy space I am holding. And dances the infinitely simple, infinitely complex dance of her beauty... feeling my limits to test me again. Am I ready to open, to dying a little deeper into the man I love, the man she yearns to trust, just a little deeper yet, a little more open to this dialectic of dying to become this man she knows I am? Today I practice to open, knowing it never ends. And I am grateful.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough. (Toni Morrison)

🌀...For us to hear, see and feel the heart’s will, in each moment, we must reduce the noise of our past and future thoughts and emotions.

Our prayer is for your moments of stillness. (Guru Singh and Guruperkarma Kaur, Quiet Stillness Clarity)

🌀The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland, Precept 7)

🌀You always impress me. (My beloved, my Oracle)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Day five of this month's practice, seven minutes towards becoming the diamond you are beyond struggle, beyond demand, beyond the "warrior marketing" that brands you as insufficient unless you learn to fight...

Please read through first, then ...

• If you don't have the Mera Man Loche on iTunes https://is.gd/uqOxd8 you'll find it here on YouTube:

You will listen to this while you...

• Sit (or stand) with attention to your spine, it is the structure that can hold so much more vulnerability than you can imagine —when you attend to it. Start by closing your eyes and tucking your chin, gently lifting and opening your chest. Let your hips and pelvis settle down, feel their weight held by the earth's gravity. Gently lift your spine out of your pelvis, as if the crown of your head were reaching for the heavens above, drawn upwards by the stars. Imagine your alignment as an elegant line extending from below the base of your spine to the infinite space above your crown. Feel your spine gently lengthening, pulled between these subtle polarities of the earth below, the stars above...

• Gently slow your breath, filling and softening your belly as you inhale, gently pressing your navel against your spine as you exhale. As your breath slows your spine becomes subtly more aligned...

• After three cycles of long and deep breathing turn the music on.... listening past the words to the devotional tone, a tone devoted to the journey of your wisdom, your truth, your experience, your surrender to yourself...

• Keep breathing slowly and gently into your aligned posture, making micro adjustments throughout the exercise, feeling yourself becoming more... noticing how your body feels the tone and pulse and tenor and the vibration of this song... 

• Breathe and receive. Imagine receiving everything you need, everything you want, all that you imagine... Then, notice your resistance to receiving... Notice your feelings of unworthiness, words that describe your unworthiness... Notice and let these thoughts and feelings move... They don't require an answer with words, or swords, or shields. They need only to keep moving... Let them move, and again, breathe into receiving... Simply hold yourself open to receive, without expectations. You are doing all that is required in this moment.

• As the song ends, relax any tension your breath and posture may be holding from the practice. Release your desire to receive, your resistance to receiving. Take three breath cycles, without effort, to transition into opening your eyes. As you step into your day know that all you need is here for you. How this is in your life, what it means in your life, is all beyond imagining. Just know, and walk into your day with your heart a little more open than it was seven minutes ago...

More practices and meditations at apprenticeshiptolove.com

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