Allow Everything Meditation - Adyashanti

In this form of meditation you are not leading the way,
you're not controlling.
It's almost like being a passenger in a car.

Instead of controlling your experience,
you're a passenger to your experience.

You're watching it and letting it be however it's going to be.
When you're more a passenger to your experience,
you can watch what naturally happens,
when you have no idea of what should happen
or where you're going.

You'll naturally come into more of a state of listening.
Listen, watch, see what happens.
Just allow awareness to flow wherever it wants to;
to be aware of whatever it wants to be aware of.

As you allow awareness to go where it wants,
rather than where you want it to go
it unwinds your thoughts, it unwinds your mind,
and your body.

So instead of seeing where you can direct awareness,
you're actually seeing where awareness will take you
when you let it go wherever it wants.

Nothing is held onto. Nothing pushed away.
Allow everything to take its natural course.

Make no effort to enhance or sustain anything.

Just have the notion that you will continue to allow
everything to be, as it is, as it wants to be,
and that you will continue to allow awareness
to go where it wants to go...

Adyashanti
An excerpt from his guided meditation.
from the CD set: "Spontaneous Awakening"
2005

Ebb and Flow - Ivan Granger

When the face of Ever-Presence is known,
all concreteness spontaneously fades away...
Kelsang Gyatso

The vivid appearance of the external world can become a trap
for the distracted mind.  We can get caught in constant reaction,
running after pleasure, running from pain.

In the truly natural state, awareness is at rest, perceiving without
tension, encountering reality without an overlay of stories,
without attraction or repulsion.
In that Pure Awareness, life becomes a flow of events and
interactions, not pushed by the self-will of likes and dislikes.

We are simply as we are...
Events simply unfold...

...life experience; its waning and waxing is simply its natural flow.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

~*~

Our lives are like rivers.
Eventually they go where they must,
not where we want
them to...

From the movie - "Empire Falls"

The Unutterable Space...

There is a clear
Space
within our
Heart of Hearts

Softly Fluid
Purely Still
Undisturbedly Content
Innocently Wondrous
The Illumined Space of
Pure Being...

"Ordinary temporal life" is allowed to be -
to happen -
within the context of
this Space,
allowing everything to pass through it.

Trust this that
sits in the Heart.
Touch into it,
and see where
it takes you.
Feel how it buoys you up
and floats you through time.

Turn awareness
inward - Listening...
Sense Its Presence,
as if there was an inner window
to this voiceless, timeless
Space of the Ineffable

For even when the mind is preoccupied with words,
this Ineffable Space
is still silently present;
in the wordless language
of the Heart.

Feel the nearly imperceptible movement
as it subtly reveals Itself as
Love...
The reverberation of our Eternal Being,
echoing ItSelf as Love
through the chambers
of the Spiritual Heart

Everything comes back to this Unutterable Space

the Space of
~ Love ~

Mystic Meandering
July 20, 2016

"Here" Is Your Heart - Papaji

"Enlightenment" is not about words
and thoughts and concepts
which can be doubted.
"Enlightenment" is always Here...

By "Here" I don't mean this present space.
Here is somewhere within where the mind cannot reach.
This here is not opposite of "there."
This here is nowhere, it is your Heart.
.....all comes back to the Heart.
All the cosmos is but a speck in your Heart.

Turn your mind over into this "Here"...
You have to take the last half-step
from Peace-Awareness-Bliss
and go deeper,
into the Mystery beyond...
Then - only Love remains...

Papaji
From: The Truth Is

Love In Its Own Way...

You pine for Love all your life,
seeking the Essence,
the purity of Love.
Your heart cries out for this Love so many times,
it seems endless - and unheard...

And then - when you least expect it -

Love reveals itself...
Not in big ways -
but in the little things.
Not in romantic ways -
but in the kindness of others.

The clerk at the grocery store and
the smile of a stranger
whose eyes tell you
they know -
they feel it too...

The voice of an estranged friend,
or loved one connecting once again.
Your heart sighs...

The sight of a bright yellow butterfly
playfully bouncing through your
backyard in pure delight of being alive.
The big, loving, black pool eyes of a puppy
eliciting your hidden love in return.
The trill of a Robin
singing for hours out your window
showing you the way out of
your self-imposed struggle.
Your heart lightens,
and sings its own song again.
Free...

You read a poem or story that inspires you to look deeper,
feel deeper, and open the heart - more...
You follow the heart's opening...

And one morning you unexpectedly wake up "happy."
Your heart dances for no reason -
except you know that somehow Love has visited you
when you weren't looking for it...

You find the spot of grace
that lets you know that
everything is deeply okay -
despite life's heartbreaks and tragedies,
yours and others...

You suddenly realize that your fear
has dissolved...
Your heart giggles like a child,
never really knowing why
or where it went -
or why it comes and goes...
You only know that, for today, there is
a new openness,
and softness of Love...

You bask in the bliss...

How this all happens, I don't know.
Life and Love ebb and flow
in their own natural way...
Darkness and Light dance
in and out of time as one movement,
touching us in ways we cannot understand,
revealing Love - in its own way...

The Mystery of Existence:
Pure Love
Inexplicable Love
Unexpected Love
that has its own way of
Loving ~

Mystic Meandering
July 15, 2016

~

Love to all!

  

Silence is Prayer - Zensho Wolfgang Kopp

Awareness of the Divine Essence as our innermost true Self
requires silence.
It is turning toward what lies hidden within -
to the internal - the all-embracing totality of Divine Being.
It is the way of meditation,
the way of inner silence before Spirit.

Remaining quiet before Spirit is a prayer of silence,
through which we listen to what secretly speaks to us
in the inner room of the heart.

What is hidden deep in our inner most being
 lies in silence and stillness,
and in the silence of the deep
springs the eternal, inexauastable, original
source of being.

Where words fall silent, the everlasting begins...

Wolfgang Kopp

From: Free Yourself of Everything

A Dream of Wholeness - Matt Licata

As you fall asleep at night,
and look up into the moon -
It's just there waiting for you -
that vague sense that something is missing;
of disappointment in the way things are unfolding...

Perhaps at a much earlier time, with a star or a tree or water
as your witness, you made a prayer of wholeness.
The response to that prayer has come,
but not in the way you expected.
It has arrived by way of the shattering of an old dream,
the dream of how you thought it would all turn out.
While this dream is painful, it is alive, sacred and holy.

Heartbreak and disappointment are not easy.
They will pull the rug out from under you and remind you
of how [raw] it really is here, of how anything could happen,
and of how unresolvable life truly is.

These ancient feelings and emotions are not your enemies
working against you.  They are not evidence of your failure,
or that you have fallen off the path.
They are the path.
But they are not the path you thought.
They are of the unknown and seeded with creativity.

They are relentless in a way, these forms of love,
but will never give up,
they will never stop looking for you
and calling you home.

Matt Licata

Dissolving Conflict - Mark Nepo & Fred La Motte

When you dare to hear my fear in the recesses of your heart,

you recognize it as your secret that you thought no one else knew.

And that unexpected wholeness - that moment of unity
is.....the mysterious oneness of spirit.

Everything - you and I and the people we mistrust
and even the things we fear -
everything at heart follows the same beat of life
pulsing beneath all the distractions and preferences
we can create.

We must put down the burdens that we carry...
What we hold onto keeps us from being
fully aware of our Sacred Beingness...

Enter through the door of your worries, anxieties, and fears...

We each have an unencumbered spot free of fear,
an umbilical spot of grace.
To know this spot of Inwardness
is to know who you are - not by
surface markers of identity -
but by feeling the Infinite...

This is the only thing worth teaching:
how to uncover that original spot
and how to live there...

Allowing the current of another's Inwardness to connect
with your own is the beginning
of intimacy...

...we become each other,
...we all feel the same agony,
...we all see the same wonder,
though we all speak in
a different voice

Mark Nepo
Excerpts from: The Book of Awakening

I merely put them together into this format

~*~

You are space itself,
the ever-expanding infinity of
pure awareness,
where all points of view dance and dissolve
into silence...
When we realize we are that space
a deep Listening will pervade every atom,
and conflict will evaporate into compassion...

Fred La Motte
Uradiance

~*~

Your most secret wound is the doorway...

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

Culture of Fear - Krishnamurti

We have broken up the earth as yours and mine -
your nation, your flag and his flag,
this particular religion and
the religion of the distant man.
And for it we fight and wrangle,
and the politicians exult in their power
to maintain this division,
never looking at the world as a whole.
They haven't gotten the global mind.
They never feel nor perceive the immense
possibility of having no nationality,
no division...
They maintain the tribal attitude
towards life.
They do not have a mind that
steps beyond the division of race,
culture, and the religions
that man has invented.

We carry on like machines with our
tiresome daily routine.
How eagerly the mind accepts a
pattern of existence,
and how tenaciously it clings to it!
As by a driven nail, the mind is
held together by idea,
and around that idea it lives
and has its being.
The mind is never free,
for it is always anchored
within the radius
of its own center.
It is lost in fear...

Fear is not of the unknown,
but of the loss of the known.

One wonders how long it will take
for man to learn to live on this earth
without wrangles, rows, wars and conflict.
Man has created the conflict by his division
of the earth, linguistically, culturally, superficially.
One wonders how long man,
who has evolved through so many centuries of
pain and grief, anxiety and pleasure,
fear and conflict,
will take to live a different way of life.

J. Krishnamurti

(his words, my format)

This is a newspaper clipping from the Boston Globe from the late 1960's
It reads:

There is no mind more open or
heart more willing to love than
that of a young child.
But teach a child hatred and
prejudice and the mind begins to
close, the heart to harden. Until
finally, a bigot is born.
Sometimes what we don't teach
our children is more important
that what we do.

Learning to Live Together.
The Unfinished Task.

Upon Waking...

I woke this morning - Untroubled...
I awoke this morning with a heart of Gratitude...

It was just there -
undisturbed by the mind...

I was just Peace.
I was just Awareness,
Empty Pristine Awareness...

There was only Openness -
with/about life...
I didn't want to start thinking - I thought,
for fear I would contract;
and laughed at the thought...
It dissipated...

I became aware again
of
Open Awareness...


I woke this morning feeling FREE;
not Freedom FROM anything -
just Freeness - unencumbered...
I was Freeness Itself...

I woke this morning feeling LOVE;
as if I could reach out to everyone and Love them!

This could be dangerous - I thought...
Had I ever felt this way before!?

I didn't contract in the thought.
Instead -
there was a natural urge for love and kindness
that kept bubbling up
from somewhere inside...

I awoke this morning feeling  - JOY!

Quiet Joy...

Internal Joy...

I did not conjure any of these up!
I did not meditate on them,
or practice them...
They were already there...
They just happened!
I was graced - unexpectedly
when I wasn't looking...

I didn't want to lose this -
this gratitude, this joy for life;
this unfettered Freeness.
Yet I didn't want to grasp at it either;
this new way of experiencing life.
I let it sit inside,
aware that it was not happening TO me,
but was taking place inside...
It had nothing to do with me at all!
Something was coming alive within...

Was this "The Kiss of The Mystery"?
Most assuredly...
unbidden...

And the realization arose from the Silence:
One cannot "Awaken" one's self.
One's self does not "awaken" - but
Something inside us
 Opens
for no apparent reason,
spontaneously...
and creates in us a new way of seeing and being
in the world...

Good Morning!

Mystic Meandering
July 5, 2016

~

Photo taken by my brother

The Kiss of The Mystery...

There is an intimacy in deep Silence
that is indefinable, inexplicable, inexpressible
and hauntingly sublime...

A fluidity of

~ s p a c i o u s n e s s ~

A movement of Awareness,

a w a r e ~ i n g...

Everything is open

Pure 

BE ~ ing ~ ness

There is depth and breadth,
yet no boundary.

There is substance and fullness
yet - Emptiness...

It is a subtle, rhythmic

intimacy
of
the Unheard

embracing,
surrounding, and filling
every crack and crevice of existence...
Unwinding the contractions
of
body and mind.

There is a "sanity" in this Silence
that bestows a soundness of heart through Grace
that is beyond mere mental comprehension ~
beyond cognition...

Finding the deeper Rhythm within
one loses a sense of "self"
and becomes
The Silence ~

Breathing ItSelf...

"knowing" it is

The Breath of the Infinite

The Whisper of Love

The Kiss of The Mystery

*

Mystic Meandering
June 2016

~

Photo - Aurora Borealis
from the South Pole

The Aurora seems to take the shape of a round face
looking down, kissing the earth ~
The Kiss of The Mystery :) 

The Temple of the Prairie...

Wanted to share this beautiful scenery from the prairie we visited yesterday, just after a storm passed through.  There was nothing but Pure Quiet, as if one had entered a sacred temple...  The air was pungent with sage and sweet grass - Nature's Incense! :) - delighting the senses, igniting the spirit of Life within.  The words under the photos are the words of Kabir.  Many of us know the "secret sound" that he refers to as the Primordial Silence within...  At the end I have added a quote from a person named Christina Harris that I found years ago...

If you want the truth...

Listen to the secret sound,

the real sound,

which is inside you...

The music from the strings
no one touches...

~ ~ ~

What remains is the child I was...
All other images once living here
have stepped away.
With each leave taking
the view is simplified.

Christina Harris

The Infinite is Everywhere - Danna Faulds

I am everywhere present
said the [Infinite.]

Seek me in the stately trees,
or the melodies of sparrows
and you will surely find me.

Look for me in the Buddha's smile,
the countenance of Christ,
the words of the Koran and Sanskrit prayers.
I am always there.

Turn your attention to the sky
where the movements of the moon and stars
trace my beauty...

Experience true emptiness
and my presence permeates the void.
Now bring your focus closer
to your heart.

Grow still and find me within you.

Separation dissolves like salt water
when you experience your true identity as me.

Practice devotion and let go into the ocean
of my love,
or be the open space from which all things arise.

One and two,
duality and union,
are both true.

So I say be jubilant
and be at peace,
for inside you is the seed and the fruit,
the tree and the root.

Choose to be in communion with me
and see the whole of this
creation infused with one energy...

Danna Faulds
Yoga Practitioner and Poet

Excerpt From:One and Two are Both True
From: Prayers to the Infinite

Simply - Silence...

In the midst of chaos there is always Silence...
In the midst of complexity there is the simplicity of Awareness...
Being in the Rhythm of Silence unwinds the mind - unwinds the fears.
It unwinds the contracted body, thoughts, emotions, and feelings
that have become an habituated response to life.

Silence is the medicine that brings us back into the current of Life
again; into the Infinite Presence that lives us...

It is not "mother earth" pulsing through us,
but That which also pulses through "mother earth" -
the cosmic pulse of Life that infuses all things...

Reach deeply into the Stillness of Silence
within you - the Primordial Space of Silence
and thrive there...

In this Stillness is the congruency of Life...

Feel the Stillness,
the Sacred Silence...
Awaken to its Rhythm...

Go behind the mind,
to the Essence of Existence -
Silence...

Sweet, Sweet, Silence...


Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings
2006

*

Photo - Fall leaves remaining on a branch
color inverted digitally giving this wonderful
oriental, zen-like affect of simplicity...

Fear Not the Pain - Rilke

You who let yourselves feel;
enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins;
Fear not the pain, the suffering.
Let its weight fall back
into the earth...

The trees you planted in childhood
have grown too heavy.
You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air,
to what you cannot hold.

Rainer Maria Rilke

~*~

...recognize that life is not in our control.
We are a small part of a great dance.

Jack Kornfield
Buddhist Teacher

~*~

Both light and shadow
are the dance of Love.

Rumi

~*~

Photo - reflection of Light on the floor

Simply - Love...

Come into Peace...

Even in the midst of chaos there is Love...
Even in the midst of complexity there is Love...
Even in the midst of confusion there is Love...

In everything there is Love...

In life and in death
we are held deep within the Great Heart.
All that matters is that we know
we are loved...


Mystic Meandering
2006

~*~

It is not the work of love to change people,
or force their growth in our direction.
The work of love depends on giving
others a sense safety, nurturing their
confidence to lean into life
and into the unknown...

Mark Nepo
From: A Thousand Ways to Listen

What Remains - Danna Faulds and Rashani

Despite illness of body or mind,
in spite of blinding despair or
habitual belief, who you are
is whole...

Let nothing keep you separate from that truth.

The soul, illuminated from within
longs to be known for what it is.
Undying, untouched by fire or storms of life,
there is a place inside where stillness
and abiding peace reside.

You can ride the breath to go there.

Despite doubt or hopeless turns of mind,
you are not broken.
Spirit surrounds you, embraces, fills you
from the inside out.

Release everything that isn't your true nature.

What's left...

the fullness -
light, and shadow,
claim all that as your
birthright.

Danna Faulds
Yoga Practitioner and Poet
the Poem: "Birthright"
From: Go In and In

~*~

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.

Rashani Rea

The Other Window - Mark Nepo

[.....]

At the edge of winter, open the window
of your heart, see your breath,
how what you bring up becomes
the air.

When you're ready or pushed,
close your eyes and the other window
will appear,
the one that faces all of time.
What flies there never lands,
but hovers, dropping the seeds of
infinity in the breaks we can't heal.
So open the window of your pain,
though the whispers tell you
to nail it shut, and let in everything
that's ever lived.

What flies and never lands
has been waiting.
Be brave.
Don't run.
Let the fire
around your window
burn until you become
the opening.

Mark Nepo
Excerpt from the poem: "Love Your Window"
From the book: Inside the Miracle

The Forest Knows - Wagoner and Berry

Stand still.  The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost.  Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost.  Stand still.  The forest knows
Where you are.  You must let it find you.

David Wagoner
From "Lost"

~*~

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirrings become quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it.  As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

Wendell Berry
"I Go Among Trees"

Adrift - Chuck Surface

All the words I have written...
May have given you the illusion that I
have my bearings, and an understanding
of all that is unfolding...
When I am simply adrift
Without a compass...

Rudderless

Here...

In this Great Mystery

Excerpted from "Adrift"
by Chuck Surface
In the Garden of the Beloved

~*~

I woke up recently with this realization:
It is only this sense of me that feels adrift, lost, floundering -
not the Eternal Being that I am...
And, it is all happening within
the vast Ocean of the Great Mystery...
Everything happens within the Great Mystery...

And so it is all really okay, this floundering...
I accept it... Embrace it... Trust it...
It is simply where "I" am in time...

When I meet and embrace the feeling with acceptance
the grip of fear and lostness inside me lets go...
I then am able to float in the soft embrace of The Great Mystery,
and wait for the Inner Movement of
The Ineffable again...

Photo - taken by my brother...

~*~

Roam aimlessly
and find
What-Is

Wu Hsin

Let the Mind Be the Mind - Danna Faulds

Let the mind be the mind...

Behind its restless activity,
just one layer deeper is stillness,
and beneath even that,
is an ocean of mystery and truth.

Swim in this eternal sea
until you know yourself
to be infinity,
and bring that knowing
back into your day.
Why struggle to be what
you already are?

Let the mind be the mind,
but don't bind yourself
to its limited reality.

Trust your experience of vastness.
Trust the truth that never
loses potency
or disappears
in fear.

Let the mind be the mind
and identify not with thought
but with Silence...


Danna Faulds
Yoga Practitioner and Poet
From: Limitless

~*~

Still your mind in me,
still yourself in me,
and without a doubt
you shall be united in me,
Lord of Love,
dwelling in the heart.

Bhagavad Gita

Come... Sit...

My heart, sit only with those who know and understand you.
Sit only under a tree that is full of blossoms...

Rumi

~*~

Come...  Sit...
The UnUtterable said,
inviting me deeper
into Its Infinite Silence -
into the enduring Mystery that
Illuminates and Enlivens...
Breathing Life into existence...

Come...  Sit...

Among the clutter of the mind,
between the chaos and confusion,
amidst life's disturbances and obstacles
that are hard to navigate...

Just listen

...in Stillness...


Come...  Sit...

In the respite of The Great Silence
revealing all that is true
in this life experience,
and the Great Reality
beyond...

Come...  Sit...

emptied out...
humbled...
opened...

Remembering the Eternal Being that you are...

Receding again into the UnBirthed
that birthed you...

Come...  Sit...

Befriend the Luminous Silence...

Come...  Sit...

Mystic Meandering
May 2016

The Silent Thread - Stafford

There's a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt and die;
and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford
Poem: "The Way It Is."

1998

Interpretive Note:  There is a deep thread that runs through all of us.
It is not our beliefs, political views, or our "spirituality."  It is the
thread of Silence of our Eternal Being; that Ineffable, Unmanifest
Being, that never changes.  I experience this in times of meditative
Silence.  Some may call it the Tao.  I don't know that this is what the
author was alluding to in his poem, but it is how the words spoke to me,
based on my own experience..  It is the thread of the Ineffable that we
can never be separate from, because it *is*, in essence, what we really
are - the Ultimate Reality...

~*~

We go on pilgrimages to the
edge of our lives
to see what life is like
on the other side....

...I paddle the sacred river
to touch what is sacred inside...

Rod MacIver
Rod MacIver Art
excerpted from:
"Wild Waters and The Tao"