Chaya: This week’s meditation will navigate different ways of becoming grounded. We’ll explore spaciousness within the body, and the strange notion that each of us has a unique way of “fitting” into our different bodies, of both wearing them and being them. And so we settle, into our practice and into ourselves.
Avi: Our bodies contain multitudes. Our culture imposes an artificial gap between soma and psyche, between the body as a material object and the mind as the centre of meaning. In tonight’s practices, we’ll try to move beyond this gap, to unspool some of the hidden magic our bodies contain.
Erin: In palmistry, which i know very little about, each hand has a head line to represent our intellectual path and a heart line to show the emotional path. Except my hand, which has the head and the heart lines merged as one, a deep slash across each palm. Meaning, I’m told by very reputable internet sites, that my thoughts and feelings are inexorably linked. Like everybody else, I’m pretty sure, no matter what the lines on their hands have to say about it. For this meditation, we’ll tune into the connection between our thoughts and our feels, our heads and our hearts, noticing how they work together and where (if) they come apart.
Jeff: There is some interesting new research emerging from the field of smart-people-in-lab-coats that suggests we have more agency around our emotions than many of us realize. The key isn’t in the suppression; it’s in the reframing. We can choose HOW we want to experience our various tugs and tingles. And if we choose to experience them in an empowering light, it seems they no longer cause us the same kind of suffering. Hey – that’s not meditation, that’s neuroscience! This Monday night, we’ll boil down all our body sensations and thoughts and emotional tugs into two primordial categories, and give them each a new name. Like Allan. Or Perry. Perry is nice.
James: This is the first step onto the shifting ground of our emotional body, where it’s held, what it feels like. During the first part of the sit, we are going to parse out some of the territory, the general conditions of its creation, and in the interactive, we are going to sit with some of the emotions, colour them onto a map of ourselves, and see where they fit.
