River of Guidance Library
Meditation: Opening to Life
with Murshid Rahmat Moore
In this three-part series, we will explore basic sitting practice as a means for awakening to Life. The transformative power of meditation cannot be underestimated. Hazrat Inayat Khan says we are the cover over that which we seek. Meditation is a way to see through these veils. We all have basic goodness and true nature as our very being, and yet we do not remember this. This practice can help us open to this reality, so we can be intimate with all of life and love and be beneficent in the world.
Beneficence is a natural outcome of experiencing our nature. Thus, as we practice, our self-acceptance, compassion for the human condition, and our desire to be a compassionate force in this world also awaken naturally.
About Rahmat:
Murshid Rahmat grew up in the Rosicrucian tradition and started formal meditation practice at 14. At age 20, he found Universal Sufism and Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan. For the past 26 years, he has been a mureed of Pir Shabda and also a student of Indian classical vocal music with him. Rahmat has taught at the January Sufi Sesshin since its inception in 2002.
Rahmat practices awareness meditation daily and has studied meditation with a number of 'Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction'’ Vipassana and Tibetan teachers. He is trained as a physician and psychiatrist and integrates mindfulness and awareness into his work. He continues to work to deeply integrate Buddhist and Sufi teachings (which are genuinely simply different faces of the same Dharma) into all aspects of his life. He is passionate about the Path of Love and Presence wherever it is found and how it is practiced in its many forms.
Watch three 90-minute videos at your own pace
Supplemental Materials for Course
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Potential Practices for the week
1. Reflect on your motivation. What is my motivation for practice?
What are my aspirations for practice? What is the most important
thing? How does it relate to practice? Feel into these. Feel the
wish to be happy or the wish to be free from suffering. Note this is
an aspect of basic goodness. We may not have the wisdom to
know what will bring happiness or alleviate suffering but the
motivation is basic goodness and compassion. All beings share
this. Reflect on practicing to bring happiness and ease into your
own life and into the lives of others through this practice. When
you practice either use a prayer you know, one I have offered or
create your own aspiration to use before practice.
2. Keep it simple. Short times many times, practice. Do either the
Drop Open practice or follow the breath for 1 minute several
times daily. Work with a brief but dedicated practice.
Wholeheartedly commit to the brief tie of practice regardless of
how it seems to go.
3. Try the longer open awareness practice a few times this week
4. Try the breath and body practice focused on developing moment-to-moment attention/concentration.
5. Practice some form of dedication after practice this week.
Downloadable PDF Further readings:
Open Awareness Meditations.pdf
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Week 2 Practices and Readings
Three different styles of meditation practice (on the recording)
1) Working with body and breath, labeling.
2) Sitting as if in an amphitheater waiting for the next thought.
3) Mountain Meditation.
If you like, you can pair Wazifas with the 3 meditation practices.
1) Body, Breath and Labeling: Ya Raqib, Ya Wasia, Ya Waliya
2) Thinking: Ya Alim
3) The Mountain Meditation: Allah Hu Akbar
Practice: Bringing the same awareness we experience with meditation into our daily life. Pick one simple daily activity, lasting 5 min at the most, and try to bring awareness into that activity like we do with daily sitting practice.
Resources:
2 pdf’s of excerpts from A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life, by Jack Kornfield
Ch8_Difficult Problems and Insistent Visitors.pdf
Joseph Goldstein Insight Meditation chapters on thinking.pdf
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River of Guidance Rahmat’s Class Week 3
Dear friends and companions on the caravan.
Thank you for your participation and for your practice in this class.
It warms my hear to know that we help to make our world a healthier and more wholesome place with our practice. Simply cultivating the intention to be happy and free from suffering and making any attempt at these practices has a profound impact on our HeartMind Much Love and Many Blessings
Rahmat
We worked with a few practices today
Recognizing awareness
For this practice though we may effort at one prat of the practice our recognition likely lasts only a short time. That is usual. Short Times Many Times.
Notice experience rather than subject object.
Notice the spontaneousness of awareness.
Notice that from the perspective of awareness or experience nothing is outside the HeartMind.
1. Spend some time sitting with Body and Breath like previous weeks to cultivate some attention and settle in.
2. Rest at ease in the body. Open eyes to a full visual field. don’t try to look at any one thing. Take it all in at once. Let seeing appear spontaneously and naturaly. Feel a shift. If distracted come back to seeing like you would to breath.
3. Do the same for the felid of hearing
4. Do the same for the field of body sensation
5. Open eyes and use air breath. Look backward at thought and emotion and use thought and emotion to discover awareness.
Awareness is actually very simple. We take it for granted all the time.
We don’t need to make it complicated.
Is there knowing happening?
What is being known
The Second main practice for today was
1. Open your eyes and explore space. Maybe start panoramic and then look at space around things, above things, below things, in front of and behind things. Notice that things could not exist without space. All phenomena appear in space. Go back to being panoramic, opening so the visual field is taken in at once. Let things appear in space naturally.
2. Turn around and look inside. If you can, keep your eyes open. Feel sensations, thoughts, emotions, sounds on the inside. Notice that they, too, appear in space. After spending some time here, go to number 3
3. Let the inside and outside mingle. Inside and outside space is inseparable. Let go and leave it all alone. It might even feel like the drop practice we did in week 1. If there is any fixation or self-identification, then feel that as simply an appearance in space as well.
4. Rest open and allow everything to be without distraction and without attempting to modify anything.
After you have done this practice regularly for a while, you could to an inquiry, “What knows” the inquiry is brief, and then drop it. If a shift happens, rest in the shift.
I have also included in the pdf’s this week the poems I read
And two mindfulness class handouts, one on working with difficult emotions and the other on working with thinking.
rest-in-natural-great-peace.pdf
rahmat-working-with-difficult-emotions-and-mindstates.pdf
rahmat-some-hints-on-working-with-thinking.pdf
free-and-easy-a-sopntaneous-vajra-song-lama-gendun-rinpoche.pdf