Day Two continued (Section 21)

Barbara: This is a very powerful practice. Besides doing it with another, you can do it with yourself. I taught this once to an elderly Catholic woman at a weeklong retreat. She had been walking slouched over and sitting slouched. She complained that she had chest pain and couldn't breathe. I kept working with her, trying to get her to sit up. We talked about her feelings of unworthiness and how she had been badly abused as a child.

So, I asked her to try this practice with her own self there as the one who is suffering, to breathe in that suffering and to release it to Jesus. She knocked on my door, after about three days, late one night about eleven o'clock. She was radiant. She was standing up straight. She just smiled at me and she said, 'Jesus took it.'

It's a very powerful practice. Release it to whoever it feels appropriate to release it to. Work with yourself. Work with others. Often, when I'm working with people who are very sick, dying, I'm just sitting with them and I do this. I find it very helpful.

I'm sure there are a thousand questions left unanswered. You have all the answers inside of you. Trust yourselves. I want to thank you for being here with me for these two days. Tomorrow we're going to have a day with much more silence. There will be some instruction and discussion, but we're going to focus on meditation. So, those of you who will be there will have more chance to take this practice deeper.

I want to close by reading you a very favorite poem of mine, which really talks about what meditation means to me. This is by Kabir, a Sufi poet of the fifteenth century.

The Guest is inside you, and also inside me;
you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed.
We are all struggling; none of us has gone far.
Let your arrogance go, and look around inside.
The blue sky opens out farther and farther,
the daily sense of failure goes away,
the damage I have done to myself fades,
a million suns come forward with light,
when I sit firmly in that world

I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,
inside 'love' there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light.
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.
How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies!

Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word 'reason,' you already feel miles away.

How lucky Kabir is that, surrounded by all this joy
he sings inside his own little boat.
His poems amount to one soul meeting another.
These songs are about forgetting, dying, and loss.
They rise above both coming in and going out.

Aaron: I am Aaron. Please continue to go deeper into who you are. Let go of your myths of your brokenness, your limitation. Find the truth of yourself, your wholeness, your exultant beauty and perfection, and begin increasingly to enact that in the world. This is the gift that you can give to all beings, your own deepest truth and beauty. I salute and honor you all. That is all.