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Guided Meditation: Arriving in This Moment

Good morning, it's good to see you. I thought we'd start with a sit here, since that is your tradition, and I'll do a little bit of guidance. I'm so glad you're here with me so I don't have to sort of look at a screen by myself.

I like to start my sits with a poem because I have found that I think constantly every time I sit down to meditate, and so I have trained myself that if I'm going to think about something, I want to think about the last thing that I heard. If it's a poem, it kind of helps me allow the thinking to help me settle more. So, I'm going to start by reading this little poem with you, and then I'll read it again at the end before the bell. I'll read a poem, ring a bell, we'll sit, I'll do a little bit of guidance, and then I'll read the poem at the end of a half hour.

This poem is entitled Blackbirds by Julie Cadwallader-Staub^[1]. And this is what Julie says:

I am fifty-two years old, and have spent truly
the better part of my life out-of-doors.
But yesterday I heard a new sound above my head:
a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air.
And when I turned my face upward,
I saw a flock of blackbirds rounding a curve
I didn’t know was there.
And the sound was simply all those wings,
all those feathers against air, against gravity,
and such a beautiful whirring^[2], the whole flock
taking a long, wide turn as if of one body and one mind.
How do they do that?
If we lived only in human society,
what a puny existence that would be.
But instead we live and move and have our being here,
in this curving and soaring world that is not our own.
So that when mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives,
and when, even more rarely, we unite and move together
toward a common good,
we can think to ourselves:
Ah, yes. This is how it is meant to be.

That's what we're going to think of. Remember that this is how it is meant to be. So whatever is happening in your sit—we spend the better part of our lives sitting—in this moment, something might be anew.

All right, so let us get started here. Let's find ourselves a comfortable place. When you're ready, you can close your eyes.

Just let whatever sounds happen to be around you just come to the foreground. Here where I'm at, I can still hear the resonance of the bell, and it's very faint. I have a fan on; I can hear that. I hear little creaks in the house. And I hear silence. See if you can just tune into what you hear without the judgment of it, just hearing. We're just sitting here, hearing. Allowing the ears to do what ears do on their own without our help. We don't need to do anything. We can just notice.

Gradually, you can notice the body sitting. It's like shifting your attention from the hearing to the body just sitting here, the posturing. Maybe noticing how heavy the body is. The skin and the flesh of the body just sitting here, wherever you're at or lying down. Just the weight, that felt sense of the weight of the body.

And if you sense that you're maybe holding yourself up, see if you can just let the weight of your body be as it is. Release the belly, release the arms, maybe the tightening of our torso. Release our thighs and our legs, and just let the weight of the body be held by whatever you are sitting on.

Maybe notice the weight of your arms from the underside of your arms, or the weight of your legs from the underside of your legs. Phillip Moffitt^[3] points to this. You just feel this heavy body. There may be a sense of hardness. You can feel the bones in the body, the bones of the feet connecting with the softness of socks, or carpet, or the floor. You can feel that hardness. Even the sit bones sitting in a cushion or chair, you still feel the hardness of bone. Bones in the arms and the body, torso, head.

Just arriving in this moment, here and now. Preparation for our sit. The poem speaks of being interested in whatever is happening right now as a new experience, the way it's supposed to be. Getting grounded in our seat, here and now, and allowing the experience of this moment to unfold however it unfolds. It could be thinking, talking. It could be irritation, unpleasantness, pleasantness—it doesn't matter what it is. When you establish a sense of groundedness in this moment, point your view towards curiosity and interest. Just sit with whatever arises^[4].

Now you might notice the breath, the body breathing. You might also notice the mind just getting lost in a lot of thought. So use this anchor of arriving in this moment. It could be the anchor of sound that helps you remember where you're at. It could be the anchor^[5] of sitting here, feeling the heavy body just sitting here, hard and steady. It could be the movement of breath, in and out, up and down. Whichever anchor works for you, it helps you remember to come back to this present moment. We can steady our attention, like in the poem, so that we can see something unusual, see something unique, and see something real, and experience something for the first time.

So we'll sit here and now. Maybe every so often, just drop in a little reminder. And trust that what you're seeing, what you're experiencing, what you're noticing, is all part of the process. Nothing to get away from. It is something to be understood, to be noticed.

Don't forget. Remember the sound. Remember the body. Remember the stillness^[6] of the body, or the movement of the breath, to anchor and keep your focus^[7] tethered to now.

Allowing the moment to unfold, however it unfolds. Our little mantra: this is how it's meant to be^[8]. I just want to know that we know what is arising.

I'd like to read the poem again, now that we've had thirty minutes of quiet to kind of settle ourselves:

I am fifty-two years old, and have spent truly
the better part of my life out-of-doors.
But yesterday I heard a new sound above my head:
a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air.
And when I turned my face upward,
I saw a flock of blackbirds rounding a curve
I didn’t know was there.
And the sound was simply all those wings,
all those feathers against air, against gravity.
And such a beautiful whirring, the whole flock
taking a long, wide turn as if of one body and one mind.
How do they do that?
If we lived only in human society,
what a puny existence that would be.
But instead we live and move and have our being here,
in this curving and soaring world that is not our own.
So that when mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives,
and when, even more rarely, we unite and move together
toward a common good,
we can think to ourselves:
Ah, yes. This is how it is meant to be.