Sunday Morning Meditation, February 15th

David Oromith

Hello, good morning, everyone. Wonderful to see you all.

So we’ll begin as we always do with our practice for 20 minutes. Then we can turn to our talk and discussion. So I invite you all to please find a comfortable posture.

Meditation

Taking a moment as we get comfortable to bring to mind our most meaningful motivation for this practice.

Then inviting in a few slow, deep breaths. Breathing in through the nose, filling the belly, filling the chest, and releasing out through the mouth gently with a sigh. Take two more slow, deep breaths in your own time. Re-extending that exhale as you soften, relax, and release.

Then just letting your breathing return to its natural rhythm as you lower your attention now down into the body and start to connect with the immediate experience of the body, the sensations coming and going.

As you maintain this full body awareness, really inviting in this sense of softening relaxation.

Really connecting not only with your immediate experience of the body but your body in contact with your immediate environment. So the sounds around you; perhaps, if your eyes are partially open, any visual appearances, any sights, any smells, tastes.

Just being aware of what it is like to have this human body. To be alive,

welcoming everything equally as it is.

Turn your attention to the experience of the breath. Which includes, of course, the sensations at the nostrils and the expanding and falling back of the belly in the chest. There are resonating sensations throughout the entire body.

Can you perhaps sense the beating of your heart, or just the energy, the warmth around the chest?

As we connect with the body in this way, let us invite in a sense of warmth, appreciation and gratitude for this body that we have. There may be aches, pains, things that are wrong, but there’s so much here that is right.

Think of all the things that you get to do because of your body. Not necessarily paying attention to any limitations right now, though they may be a real part of your experience. We’re just trying to bring attention to and recognise the gifts that our body offers us.

Part of our immediate experience, of course, is our mind, our conscious experience; without which, of course, there would be no experience but our mind and its ability to think and feel.

Start to think about the environment that you live in, your home; this place that provides safety and comfort.Think about your home. What does it mean to you? Imagine moving through your home and recognising, as if for the first time, all the things that make your life easier, more convenient. Does that make your life more comfortable and pleasant? Of course, we recognise how all things are impermanent. All things are eventually subject to change. Yet we can invite this sense of appreciation and gratitude for this place in which we dwell, the things that we have. Again, our mind does often focus on what is missing and what could be better, yet there is so much here.

Now let us think about our connections with other people, other sentient beings, animals, and humans. Close connections, close relationships, connections with groups, communities like this one. All the connections that you have that make your life what it is today. All the connections you have had in the past that have shaped who you are in the life that you have today.

Sure, of course, life may not be perfect, but is this not precious, beautiful, your life? So just thinking about those connections and those people that you’re most grateful for and allowing yourself to think about why you have this sense of gratitude and appreciation, what is it that you most appreciate?

Now opening up to think about our natural environment, the natural environment that we are connected with, that which is close to us, our immediate environment that sustains us in many different ways. You might have been recognising and seeing the changes into spring as they start to appear around us.

But the natural environment, even afar, that which you don’t see day to day, this entire planet sustains you. Thinking about where our food and nourishment come from, how we survive and thrive. Each of us here – we don’t need to grow all our own food, create all our own clothes, build our own homes, and all our furniture and all our possessions, we don’t have to make our own electricity, purify water; we are the recipients, the beneficiaries of so much kindness.

So just allow yourself to develop this sense of gratitude and appreciation for what is for the gifts that you have in your life.

Teachings

So for this morning’s talk or topic, I was inspired yesterday evening – Manu and me were out, and we were listening to some live music and they covered a song by a Scottish band called the Waterboys from 1985. The song, I found, was quite contemplative; it was almost meditative in a way, particularly the way that they performed it. The main lyric, or the punch line in it, was ‘that was the river, and this is the sea’. It was framed in a way that all those difficult things that we have been through and right up to the harshest kind of circumstances and pain that we’ve experienced in our life, the idea is ‘that was the river’ and this, now, today, your life, ‘this is the sea’: it really resonated with me.

The image that was in my mind was, during those times when things are difficult- and you think, maybe, of that being the river. The image in my mind was like being on a water slide – we’ve all probably at some point been on a water slide – you’re steaming down, and sometimes the slides are quite easy, quite simple, right? You can see the end, and you can just ride the wave, as it were. Other times you’re being thrown side to side, your skin has rubbed against the edge, you’ve got water in your mouth and you can’t really see.

But eventually, it’s the ‘woosh! You’re spat out of the end of this water slide into some bigger body of water and then there’s some calm, a chance to catch your breath.

And you know… what just happened? Everything feels okay again for a moment, but it’s a different okay. It’s not the same place – it’s not the same body of water where you started out. You’ve travelled in your life in some way. So we’ve been through some difficulty: we’ve travelled down this river and perhaps we’ve travelled a great distance. In your surroundings now, your life might feel quite foreign, maybe there’s been some real major change to your life circumstances. But it’s your new norm, and it’s okay. But we often don’t see it as okay, we get fixated and we cling on to our older life- ‘How it was when I was this way’ or ‘when I was that way…’ or ‘Before this thing happened to me’, or ‘How my relationships used to be back then’. And this, of course, is like looking back at that river, maybe even trying to swim up it to get back to how things were, when they felt more familiar, when they felt more how we wanted it to be. So we’re clinging on to a life that no longer exists, and we’re rejecting the reality that is. And well, ‘that was the river’, and ‘now this is the sea’. My circumstances as they are; we’re somewhere else now. And I like the idea that the water that was part of that unpleasant experience and the water that was with you before, wherever you were, is here with you now in the sea, right? It travelled with you. And all that water has shaped you, has shaped your life.

I think some of us have a tendency to look back at certain periods in our life and think, ‘Gosh, I wish that hadn’t happened to me’. Or we replay old dramas or say ‘I regret doing this’ and ‘I regret doing that’. We get stuck in the past a lot, you know- about the resentments that we have, the grudges that we hold or maybe the guilt that we feel and so on. But personally, now I think that all of the breakups that I’ve had and all of the rejections that I’ve had and all of the losses, my depression – those were all rivers that led me to the sea, where I am today; they’ve all shaped me in some way. All that water has travelled with me, and so they’ve shaped my abilities and my thoughts and my emotions today and my personality. It shaped who I am and it shaped the sea that I’m in: the life that I now live. And so it’s all here with me, right? It’s all here with me, and who knows where I would have ended up without each and every single one of those, both the good and the bad. Each and every single one of those things has shaped who I am today

and meaning I’m around the people that I’m around and I have the life that I have. I am grateful for the people around me and the place where I live and the life that I live, it’s precious, but it’s none other than all of those experiences – all that water that was with me before is here with me now.

It’s none other than that.

I think we often think of ourselves as a kind of a fixed ‘me’, with a fixed history, ‘This is who I am’. And we hold onto a version of ‘me’, and we protect that- that one, you know, who ‘I’ am. But that version of me might be too small, you know? This image of ‘the river to the sea’, to me, it’s all about recognising that, ‘Yes, there’s that continuity of all these different versions of me’ but then seeing how now it opens out, it all meets here in the life that I live today. So it sparked a bit of a contemplation for me and I think the more I think about it, there’s many messages, many teachings within it.

And so it was offered to me and now I re offer it to you for your contemplation. Just this idea. In a way, I think it’s about a releasing, isn’t it? It’s about a renewal, it’s about throwing off, shedding the old and what no longer serves us and stepping into to something that feels larger. We often hold on and try to keep things with us, we’re terrified of letting go: letting go of that version of ‘me’ and letting go of what that meant and so on. But you can’t enter this new sea with your hands full. And you know, at some point, there needs to be this kind of shedding and opening and accepting and releasing.

I think, as I reflect, there are many rivers and many seas. I think you enter periods of your life where you feel calm, periods of your life that feel okay. We might feel almost resigned: that ‘this is it’, right? ‘I can work with this, it feels okay. Life’s never perfect, but I have a lot to be grateful for. I’m happy. Things feel settled and we’re okay’. And then life throws you another curve ball, and… who knew it? You’re on another water slide, you’re in another river, and you’re headed right for another sea, and who could have predicted it really? ‘The conditions have changed, and so must I’.

So those are my ramblings for this Sunday morning. So thank you all very much for your time, your reflections this morning. So I look forward to seeing you again next time. That can be our topic of ‘letting go’.

So see you all then. Please take care. Much love to you all.