"Yin: Beloved Dark" by Jeannie Zandi
While your eyes are closed, I want to invite you to let your whole body soften. Let your attention sink into your felt experience. You might take a few long breaths. Focusing on the exhale, just to let the whole body settle. And gentle. Noticing the weight of the body sinking into your chair, into the earth. Letting your root soften open to the earth, as much as it can. Letting your belly be fat. Inviting the solar plexus to soften with breath. The heart to soften. The hands. The face. Let every expression just droop off of your face. Just here. Softy. Letting breath travel around your body. Softening as it goes. Softening all around the things that are tight, letting them be here. Letting them float along in our soft pool of being. Little nuggets of tenseness floating in this soup of being. And this is the voice of yin. The voice that invites softening, the voice that invites sinking, the voice that invites receptivity, availability. The voice that calls us to soften and dissolve. Give into gravity.
SUPPORT MS. ZANDI INSPIRING WORK
“The Heart is Infinite” by Amoda Maa
The heart is infinite—like a bottomless well.
The heart can absorb and allow everything—including what you perceive as a grievance, as an attack, as an offense.
The heart doesn’t reject anything, and neither does it invest itself in anything. Everything can be thrown into that well, and in that tenderness it is purified.
“The Offered Heart” by Jeannie Zandi
I invite you to close your eyes and imagine that the quiet and sweet darkness you sit in is the cave of your own sacred heart. Let your attention drop into the feel and texture of your heart area, letting it rest about two inches deep inside. Notice the feel, keep your attention there, as though there is a small object about the size of a quarter that are you are focusing on. And imagine the dark cave all around you, a cave whose air is alive with breath and life and energy. Turn away from the external world and the world of the mind and take sweet shelter in your own heart, with the reverence that you would treat any temple, mosque, church, hogan, or zendo. There you sit in the center of your innermost being sanctuary. Precious chalice of the Holy. Simplicity. Quiet. Ground. Breath.
"The Way of the Heart" by Cynthia Bourgeault
From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind
Put the mind in the heart…. Put the mind in the heart…. Stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart.” From page after page in the Philokalia, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. Whatever that exalted level of spiritual attainment is conceived to be—whether you call it “salvation,” “enlightenment,” “contemplation,” or “divine union”—this is the inner configuration in which it is found. This and no other.
BE A SUPPORTER OF MS. BOURGEAULT’S WORK
“A Sacred Marriage” by Amoda Maa
There is a tendency on the spiritual path to focus on the mind-qualities of illumination—such as clarity, insight, and wisdom—and to perpetuate the idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing God-like state as the pinnacle of self-realization. This emphasis on mind-illumination is prevalent in both old and new spiritual teachings of enlightenment. But a great error is made when supreme wisdom is upheld as the most precious prize. Not only does it keep the carrot of awakening just up ahead and never quite reached, but it also ignores the vital importance of the heart. It is only through the tenderness of the heart that an illuminated mind can flow into our humanity.
The heart is what feels, and feelings must be felt in a direct way—otherwise all sorts of imbalances arise. I’m not talking about the drama of emotions—I’m talking about the tenderest of feelings, those subtle whispers of doubt and confusion and failure and rejection and loss that are inevitable parts of the human experience. Even enlightened beings have a human experience.
BE A SUPPORTER OF AMODA MAA’S WORK
"Sweep Out the Chamber of Your Heart" by Jeannie Zandi
Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.
Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
~ Mahmud Shabistari, 13th-century Sufi
When I was 10, I was in love with Miss Walker. After a series of wrinkly and stern grandma types who had been teaching for decades, in fourth grade there was twenty-something Miss Walker. Miss Walker at the chalkboard. Miss Walker in short skirts that showed her beautiful legs, Miss Walker with her electric-curler-created brown curls bouncing as she walked briskly down the hall. I would sign her name as if it was mine: Miss Nancy J. Walker. It was the first year I got straight As, and that was out of my deep adoration which demanded expression — I wanted to give something to she who seemed to lack nothing.
BE A SUPPORTER OF MS. ZANDI’S GRACIOUS WORK