THIS FIRE, TO BURN, TO PURIFY, TO RECEIVE

• Today's suggested practice: Day 10 of this month's practice... (see below)

• My playlist while writing today's meditation: Mirabai Ceiba with Mose, Agua de Luna 

• My morning practice: 90 minutes of physical, yogic, and meditative practice, including Linking with the Infinite mantra and pranayama, and Solving Communication Problems meditation

• My vulnerability practice: I am feeling my tenderness next to the fire, allowing it to burn away my certainties... wondering: Who am I?

—Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY'S MEDITATION This fire. Her testing, even in Her benevolence, I feel it: the burn of opening to receive beyond myself.

This I am becoming aware of: I am strong enough. I am strong enough to feel my tenderness. I am strong enough to let this life burn me. I am strong enough to sacrifice myself, that I may become more than myself, the man she knows me to be.

I stand at the edge of this fire of love and I step forward, leading into the burn, the tenderness, following her intuition. Her tenderness an extension of my nervous system. Her tenderness and her dark unknown my Oracle, leading me to this sacrifice, this moment of ashes and more, all of it beyond my imagining…

Today I stoke this fire. Today I welcome this testing. Today I burn with determination—and joy!

What comes next?

I do not know. I am beginning to understand that I don't need to know. I am beginning to know that "the future," what comes next, it is none of my business.

My business? To sacrifice myself to the fire of this moment. To breathe, deeply. To feel deeply, and to follow her tenderness and burn away all resistance to what she brings me. To enjoy this burning!

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS🌀Thus it was that older cultures widely believed—or should I say widely recognized—that the degradation and abandonment of their rituals portended the End of the World. .…The question of what we want to become may be premature, because our wanting bears the indelible tint of the delusions of our age. It is more a matter of listening for what we are to become. (Charles Eisenstein)

🌀.…you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

🌀When you anchor your attention in the vast, timeless emptiness from which it is sourced, She (the deep pulse of feminine life-love energy) is invited to reveal and express Herself most fully. (Nina Lombardo, @wayofdevotion)

🌀You are not like that now. (My beloved, my Oracle)

🌀Read today’s post on “iron” by Melissa Bloxham on Instagram. She's offered a beautiful story of how a single mother allows her sons to become more than they imagined themselves to be. This is how the feminine surrender creates masculine leadership.

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE Day ten of this month's practice, ten minutes to feel the fire as that which burns you to purity...

Please read through first, then ...

• Today, stillness with one question: Today’s question: What is your initial response to the burn of life, to a set back an obstacle, something that seems to be what you don't want in this moment? Does you worry or feel like giving up? Do you feel a fire within you to push back? (Thanks to Tim and Marieke, Kundalini Yoga School, Infinite Trust sadhana, Day 10 for today's questions.)

• Set your timer for ten minutes.

• Sit or stand. Align yourself by breathing slowly through your nose and down through your softened throat. Feel the "almost-snoring" of your breath as it passes into your body, filling your belly, your heart, pressing down into your pelvis. .... Close your eyes.

• Feel your breath opening your body and let today's question settle in your body. If you are standing, drop down a little into your knees. Feel the physical burn of your stance. You'll be here for 10 minutes. Don't go too deep to start. Just a little drop. The burn will appear... if it doesn't, drop a little more. If you're sitting, let your breath practice bring you to this burn...

• Breathe into wherever the question settles, or where it stirs, pokes, prods, irritates... Breathe into this with a long, slow inhale for a count of four or six or eight or ten or... (start with four, increase slowly until every stage invites the burn).

• Hold this inhale for the same count, feeling your full belly, noticing your edge... Exhale from this edge, pulling a "root lock," pulling up on your anus, sex organs, navel. Exhale for the same count. Hold yourself empty for the same count, holding the "root lock." Feel the "top of your heart" and the crown of your head. Now repeat, inhaling, holding full, exhaling, holding empty. ... Allow the discomfort of your breath practice (and your standing posture, if you're standing) to lead you deeper into yourself, past yourself... you are burning away the limitations you have for ourself, increasing your capacity to receive life, more life, always more life...

• As the timer signals the end of this short ten minutes of burning away your limitations allow your breath and your posture to relax. Take three gentle breath cycles. Notice what you feel. Notice yourself bigger and more powerful than you were ten minutes ago. Notice your awareness so much more than you'd imagined. Notice how you receive whatever life, love, the wind, the sky, the street... notice everything that comes to you. Let these moments of receiving life become joyful.

More meditations, practices, and inspirations at apprenticeshiptolove.com