FollowThis week at Rites of Spring, my wife is going to join me in a intensive I took last year that changed my heart and spirit. Whispering Deer’s class on the overflowing heart. I wish I could link to CDs of her wonderful voice, to have us get out our heads and live with our heart. Our heart has energy, it can take so, so much more than our head can.
We pray for ourselves, the ones with us, the camp and the wider world. We pray for compassion, we pray for acceptance of ourselves and the world, we pray for love, we pray for grieving, we pray to learn to medidate, we pray, and we take it all in to our overflowing heart.
It’s an amazing exercise, since we do tend to live our lives in our head, living with the heart makes you look at the world differently. That it helps to love your friends, and ignore your enemies, something I saw again in the wonderful little book “Steal Like an Artist.” It helps you live your life more heart centered. To give prayers for ones in joy, and ones in crisis. It’s something I try to do every day.
One of my practice is heart prayers, which I blogged about back in January. For 2012 I made my goal a “Year of Spirit“, it’s been a challenging year, with the illness and death of a beloved father in law, who we miss terribly.
This makes it even more important to pray with your overflowing heart, and sometimes to listen and take it in. I am excited Lanna will be with me in my workshop this year, and that we continue it as a spiritual practice.
I am also thrilled that Rev. Christine Sillari at First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Portland, Maine, also has a yoga training and can do meditations coming from the heart. They are slower, they require deep breaths and drawing into the self. They are amazing.
If you try to meditate with your head, at least in my experience, you tend to drift through the thoughts and worries of your day.
I plan a follow up post next week on the same topic.
Edmund