Home > Love & Joy > Sharing Meditation

Sharing Meditation

We held our first official meditation class last night from our home. I wanted to share a little bit about what it means for me personally. For a while now I have been wanting to express a creative urge that needed a certain kind of outlet and I think it’s beginning to find its platform.

I am passionate about spirituality, self-discovery, inquiring within, the meaning of life, the nature of things, consciousness. I love it. I love talking about it. I love sharing it with other people. I love contemplating the Mystery. I feel very fortunate to have dear friends in my life who feel the same. Engaging in this journey with them is a joy. It is a major source of my own growth and development. We are all genuinely attempting to live our lives according to the honesty, acceptance, love and care we recognize is who we truly are. And if you ask me, it’s working!

But there is something more that I have been yearning to get out. I feel that what is alive in our group is unique. There is a particular kind of openness, an unconditional acceptance of each other, of people, of those parts of ourselves that we are scared to look at. For many years now I have been inviting various people to participate in what is happening here. Many people have come along, few have stayed. I think that is partly to do with the level of openness and vulnerability that is required just to be in a group of people willing to be that intimate with each other. But it is also to do with our inability to gradually introduce people in to the process.

I was disillusioned by this. I teach yoga. It seemed to me so natural for people interested in yoga to want to fearlessly explore and dare to live their highest potentials. This is not the case. I began to realize that most people are terrified of living. Most people are terrified of simply looking into the eyes of another without feeling embarrassed. I also eventually realized that I wasn’t very compassionate or understanding about that fact. It wasn’t until I began to feel a deep existential fear in my own life that I could have any understanding and empathy for the amount of fear most of us feel most of the time.

From a militant radicalism, (“be present or die!”) I turned in a different direction. For the last few years I have not been personally inviting very many people into our group, feeling disillusioned and resigned to the idea that it might be too intense.

Still, I yearn to connect with people, with as many people as possible as deeply as possible. I feel an enormous amount of love and respect for the folks who attend my yoga classes. We see each other so often and yet have this strange relationship where I don’t even know their names. I don’t have a clue as to who is inside that head when they start talking because we never get that far. We come to class, share this practice, breathing, moving, postures, inward looking, but very little of anything else. All the juicy humanity is missing from the exchange.

And now there is a way in. There is a way to make that connection in the context of acknowledging this deeper reality. The response has been wonderful. All of sudden I am inviting yoga student-friends to my home to sit in silence, contemplate and discuss consciousness. It is a dream come true. This part of me desperate to connect and share with as many people as possible as deeply as possible has an outlet. It is an intimate setting, our home. It feels like we are all experimenting with something new. This is exciting and alive. For me, I am still working out many things, a real beginner here, feeling my way intuitively with people and with my own deepening understanding. As a Ashtanga Yoga teacher I could call myself a master, a joy to be able to offer that practice to others but with very few surprises. I love being at the beginning, being creative, not knowing what I’m doing and going for it anyway.

August 17, 2009 by Ryan

« A thin line | Alan Wallace »