REMEMBRANCE. RITUAL. RECEIVING IT ALL

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• Today’s question: Where do you struggle? How do you release the struggle, to receive all the love and beauty this life offers?

• Today's suggested practice: Day 1 of this month's practice with Leroy Gordon (see video, below)

• My playlist while writing today's meditation: Puccini, Che Gelida Marina https://music.apple.com/ca/album/la-boh%C3%A8me-act-1-che-gelida-manina-rodolfo/208832871?i=208833006

• Practice: 2am: 60 minutes of yogic practice, including Meditation for Purifying the Elements

• My vulnerability practice: These fears are welcome and I allow them to move as unnamed terrors, letting myself trust the strength of my practice to keep me safe in every darkness.

Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY'S MEDITATION

Remembrance: Twenty-four years ago today, the beginning of a new life with the all-too-painful expulsion.

Ritual: My daily obsequies, grieving my lack of veneration, making sacred, this moment.

Receiving: All of this She brings to me, so tenderly —and not-so-tenderly, as need be— stirring me to myself.

This path is as long as I breathe…

This practice, of being a masculine-identified man, of meeting limits within myself and in the world and in life, and opening them, only to be met by limits, again and again and again. This too is as long as I breathe… Time to be OK with this.

…

You may know this about me: I do not take things lightly. I may laugh at life’s gifts-dressed-as-struggle. I may laugh at myself. But these things, I let them penetrate me. I let them tear me open. Reveal me to myself.

Why am I like this when the world is clamouring for “moving on,” for “letting go,” for “no regrets,” etcetera?

Perhaps because I take the opportunity of this apprenticeship to heart. Why else am I here?

I knew this about myself a long time ago. But I needed to have it hammered into me, needed to feel the tearing of my protective skins away from me.

Is this what it is to be born? All the things that are a comfort, taken. Plunged into the heartbreak of being alive to the world? To life? To Her, in all of Her terrible beauty, Her seething ocean of love?

…

I deserve nothing. This breath, Her gift. This awareness, His gift. Between these divinities I am born to be whatever kind of man I can imagine myself to be, and allow myself to be taken into the darkness, again and again, to re-imagine and re-imagine. Not to “let go,” and slip back into comforts. Not to “move on,” really a moving back, into comforts.

I remembered the word yesterday: the crucible. This place of transformation that I choose. And the rituals of practice that I use to sustain myself within this crucible.

…

I don’t ever want to be taking her for granted again. She to whom I was released. Into whose womb space I was led.

And so the rituals and the remembrances, that I may receive. No longer struggling or evading who I am. The man that I am.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀You deserve nothing. (Kendra Cunov)

🌀 All we do is confront limits and open them. (Deida)

🌀 You cannot convince a flower to open by arguing with it.

When you care for a flower and consistently provide what it needs, it will blossom in time.

The same is true of the human heart. (Justin Patrick Pierce)

🌀You are beautiful. (My beloved, my Oracle & Siren)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Day 1 of this month's practice, to release the “Warriors” before re-entering your sacred “heart” spaces (eg. Family, marriage, etcetera), with  men’s coach and teacher Leroy Gordon

ps. For the full conversation, about the “Warrior” archetype in men’s work, please see the podcast soon to be posted at http://sacredbodies.ca/podcast

Please read through first, then ...

• Today, sit (or stand) in stillness as you listen to your heart, your belly, your sex, your root and let this question stir within you…. Where do you struggle? How do you release the struggle, to receive all the love and beauty this life offers? All of us, however we identify, use our “Warrior” energy to struggle. Take these few moments to relax so that you may receive…

• Set your timer for 6 minutes or listen to or watch Leroy:

• As the timer signals or the video ends allow your eyes to slowly open. Take three, relaxed breath cycles, no pressing, no effort, and feel yourself full, without thoughts, open. Safe to receive. Then, step into your day, letting the mantra echo as a nourishing vibration whenever you become still. You don't need to DO anything. Let the world come to you with its demands, its complaints, and yes, its endless tide of gifts and blessings.

***Yoga for Lovers, a new online and IRL offering for Valentine’s date nights, and beyond. FMI see sacredbodies.ca/events