It Floats Us - Ivan Granger

The vast flood
Rolls onward
But yield yourself,
And it floats you upon it.

Ikkyu

Day after day, experience after experience, terrors and tragedies,
joys and victories, everything  - life.  It can feel like an onslaught.

Most of us learn to dampen down the awareness in order to cope
and mimic those around us.

Yet even with dimmed senses we feel overwhelmed.

But yield yourself,
And it floats you upon it.

This is the liberating wisdom of surrender.

Most of our intense efforts in life, whether directed toward work,
family, even spirituality, are about trying to control the flow
of life.  We want to master the flood, bring it under our will.
We want to tame it so we can be safe.

But it never really works.

The lifelong effort is like a duck on a great river who imagines
he controls the current by the action of his paddling feet.

When he happens to face downstream - Amazing!  The river goes
just where he commanded!  When he turns left or right, he imagines
that he needs to increase his effort and improve his technique to get
the river flowing where he wants.  And when he turns downstream -
Calamity!  He has lost control of the river.

Or...  he can just sit on top of the river and let its current carry him.

Yielding ourselves to this great river, no longer imagining that we
can control it, we can finally begin to discover its true nature and
direction - and beauty.  We come to see its flow as a unifying harmony
and not a threat. Importantly, we notice our natural buoyancy.  
We are built to float upon it.

Commentary by Ivan Granger
at Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
(didn't have a picture of a duck :)

 

Yielding and Allowing - Kathleen Knipp

[What if we]...let go of the need to hold ourselves up.
Become familiar with the sense of yielding and allowing.
Realign and connect with that which feels most important,
that which our heart most deeply desires and yield to the
pull...

[What if we]...sense what if feels like to feel safe.  Access
somatically the feeling of letting go, surrendering, giving up
the struggle, even if only momentarily; releasing into the
Eternal Embrace.  Feel the sense of relief - simply being.

[What if we]...just feel what's here, without any sort of
commentary.  Sense the entirety of this moment: body, breath
thoughts, emotions - all the stuff of human experience, just as
it is; the changing landscape of emotions and thoughts.

It's okay to fully let go and to feel very deeply the human experience.

The Infinite and the finite are just different facets of the same gem.
There's no contradiction.  Infinite and finite simultaneously.
Vast and condensed at the very same time.
What a mystery.

Fully living this mystery; the experience of being human
and being Divine...

Kathleen Knipp

Excerpts from a Yoga Nidra meditation
called "Receiving"