River of Guidance Library

Recommended Daily Practices and Suggested Readings from Ziraat, Our Interconnected Nature

Please spend time with these for the duration of this series.

Class I Tues March 2, 2021 w Darvesha and friends Hamid and Arjun

Thanksgiving Prayer :This can be done it your Sit Spot or at another time.

“HERE are the ones who know how to say thank you.” Robin Wall Kimmerer (from Braiding Sweetgrass)

The prayer way of the First Nations on this continent of the Americas can be called “an open heart and free flowing prayer”. In it you just talk to the Great Spirit and Mother Earth as if they were your loving grandparents. No need to be elegant, clever or eloquent. Just very authentic and sincere, catching what arises in your heart in terms of gratitude and needs. You can try starting your day with gratitude for all which sustain us and even mentioning to grandma “how beautiful she looks today”, to later tell grandpa about your sincere aspirations. (Arjun)

Nature Meditations by Hazrat Inayat Khan

These can be done sitting. If done walking, take 1 step for each inhalation and 1 step for each exhalation. Here are 2 different meditations. They can be combined or done at separate times. (These can be done at your Sit Spot or at another time)

My heart is tuned to the quietness (breathing in) That the stillness of nature inspires. (breathing out)

I feel thy presence in this landscape (breathing in) Which draws my heart so close to thee. (breathing out)

Sit Spot Practice

This is really simple.

Find a single place outdoors to go daily to sit and listen.

Just be there with whatever is there.

Helpful guidelines

1. People have a variety of situations regarding outdoor access and physical ability. The most important consideration is to find a place and time outdoors you feel safe being still and alone.

2. Convenience is paramount after safety. In order for you to visit your sit spot daily, the place needs to be less than a five-minute walk from your kitchen and bedroom. A back yard will do, a nearby park, a small patch of woods, a bench, or even an apartment patio.

3. Comfort is OK! Bring what you need to feel comfortable sitting. A wool sit pad, a warm beverage, enough clothes or enough shade, a chair or bench. Find a place you feel comfortable sitting: a tree to lean against, a branch to rest on, a view of beauty… sitting on the earth is ideal, but sitting in a way that works for your body is more ideal!

4. Discomfort is OK too! It is ok to feel uncomfortable and to stay with it. Go in the rain, snow, hail, dark, light, sun, shade, cold, hot, humid, dry, etc.

A few more details you could try…

· Really do go to the same exact place every day. Really do go there every day.

· Try to be there, sitting, for at least 20 minutes. This gives the birds and animals a chance to relax and reset after your arrival.

· Give other beings respect and space and consider their needs and agenda at least as important as your own. For example, walk around feeding or singing birds rather than right at them. Be as still & quiet as you are able. Minimize disturbance.

· It can be helpful if this place is beyond the bounds of your normal everyday patterns of movement.

Complementary practices – what else you could “do” while you are there

Ø Practice a sense meditation. Tune into your senses of touch, taste, smell, and hearing as well as sight. Practice physical awareness. Notice who is around you… soils, plants, animals, birds, water, insects, sounds, light, shadow, breeze, sun, moon, stars…

Ø Give attention to your breath & heart while still observing the life around you.

Ø Be in gratitude. Call to mind and heart what you appreciate right now. Look towards beauty.

Ø Close your time with some sort of prayer for others as well as for yourself.

This is still really simple.

Find a single place outdoors to go daily to sit and listen.

Just be there with whatever is there.

“It’s all about the love and attention you bring to your place on earth.”

(Hamid)

Co-spiration Interbreathing. (This can be done at your Sit Spot or at another time)

Sit across from a favorite plant being (tree, flower, grass clump, scrub, vegetable: anybody from the plant kingdom). If you are inside and cannot be close to any plant, bring the being into your mind’s eye. As you breath out, offer your breath to this plant being knowing that she will take in your carbon dioxide as her greening power. As you breath in, know that you are breathing in the oxygen she is offering you. My plant being breathes out oxygen and offers it to me. I breath in her oxygen, and breath out for her carbon dioxide. We continue this exchange, in deep, loving reciprocation. This is a conversation on the breath.

When you feel complete, before stopping, take a moment to expand this to feel yourself breathing with the whole forest: an invisible communion of all breathing beings, co-creating our biosphere.

Bodhisattva Vow and Refuge Prayer: (This can be done it your Sit Spot or at another time.) REPEAT 3 X

I take refuge in the unfathomable web of interdependence, our profound teachings, and this community of which I am a part.

Through my practices and positive actions of body, speech and mind, may I participate in the cause of the awakening of all sentient beings.

~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~

My Octopus Teacher is a 2020 Netflix Original documentary film which documents a year spent by filmmaker Craig Foster forging a relationship with a wild common octopus in a South African kelp forest. It is touching beyond belief! https://www.netflix.com/title/81045007

“Nourished by these ancient teachings, I find the only way to return, to embrace reality, is through what is most simple, most ordinary. By baking bread and cooking soup, by smelling herbs, by gardening, or walking and watching in nature, reconnecting to wild places. By noticing what is around me, the sound of the wind, the rain falling. There is a Cherokee practice that is similar to mindfulness, but different because it is grounded in the earth, called “the sound of the green forest humming”: “…the awareness of the sound of the forest, the sound of the water and our breath. When people are very well attuned they hear a certain sound and are mindful of that sound. When they don’t hear it they realize they have stepped into a place where their thoughts have become imbalanced.

Ordinary, everyday awareness can return us to a place of balance, where we are part of the living community to which we really belong. A community not of internet bubbles, but of the earth and the clouds and the sun on the water. Whether this is an answer or merely a refuge I do not yet know. I am reassured to find this primal awareness described centuries ago, in teachings and poems that remain outside of time. Today, watching a little ruby-crowned bird looking for food at my feet, I feel true kinship. Focused on her own search, she allows me to come close, without fear or concern. Walking through this gate that is always open, we can return to a quality of consciousness beyond truth and lies, one that is more primal, spontaneous. Here an old man in his garden watching a little green bird can leave behind a strange fractured world of distortions and breathe an air that is not toxic, walk on a land that is still singing.” Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, from “A Ghost’s Life”

“I went to the woods, because I wished to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach. I did not want, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.”

—Rose Bird, Chief Justice of California Supreme Court (1936-1999) Henry David Thoreau,1854 ‘Walden'

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe” John Muir

“We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it, chopped down its forests, leveled its hills, muddied its waters, and dirtied its air. That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.” —Rose Bird, Chief Justice of California Supreme Court (1936-1999)

Keeping the World in Being - Meditations on Longing by Fred Bahnson: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/keeping-the-world-in-being/

Please continue with the practices recommended from our first session.

Additional Practices

Sensory Awareness meditation: This can be done in Sit Spot and/or walking. Spend a few minutes each day sensing in each of the senses, one at a time. Then spend some minutes with whatever arises, whereever it arises (in whichever sense gate) but noting with each phenomena which sense is being activated.

“ The world is full of magic things…patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper” ~William Butler Yeats

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” ~Simone Weil

Sensuous during life

Do not deny me in death!

Wash me with scent of apple blossom.

Anoint me with essence of lilac.

Fill my veins with honeysuckle nectar.

Sprinkle me with perfume of purple violets.

Envelop me in shroud saturated with fragrance of freshly mown meadow hay. Rest me in moss-velvet earth.

Cover me with soil exuding flavor of maple and oak leaves.

Command a white birch to stand guard! ~Lois Wickenhauser

ELSA ~ Four Actions to take whenever and wherever reactivity arises Embrace: Know/open to/embrace/FEEL the sensations of the suffering that is arising in your reactivity and your craving for the suffering to cease.

Let Go: Let go of the thoughts that drive it.

Stop: Notice (feel) the gradual fading of the sensations of reactivity and craving, and then finally, as they cease, enjoy the taste of freedom and liberation.

Act: Act from this place

Once Dogen was asked, “What is the deepest truth? What is the wisdom that liberates?” His response was, “I am always close to this.”

‘The Whole Creation wakes with the waking of my heart.’ ~Hazrat Inayat Khan

Jane Goodall: To fix the environment, fix poverty. The legendary primatologist and environment activist says it’s time ‘to rethink our relationship with the natural world’

CLICK TO VIEW

David Attenborough: “A Life On Our Planet” Netflix

A man saved a she wolf from a trap, a few years later she saved his life. WATCH HERE

Ziraat Practices and Reading Class III (1).pdf