Embodied Presence Exploration 2: Grace & Gratitude

We begin, as always, by taking a baseline.  Notice what is, in your body, in this moment.  Without changing your breath, become aware of the breath’s rhythm, where it travels to inside of you, it’s feeling tone.  Track sensation.  Where is your body most awake in this moment?  Open your to attention to what is inside your body, without judgment or effort to change it.  Take a Baseline now.  Pause this audio or step away from the computer if you wish. 

When you have your baseline, we attune to Source.  This, too, is not an efforting, rather an opening to what is and what wants to be.  We attune to Source simply by intending to do so.  Attune to Source now.  

Thank you for entering into this exploration. Each week’s exploration offers us an opportunity to practice presence and transmission. Write whatever you need to about your experiences in your Embodied Presence notebook.  Reading with presence.  Sharing with presence.  Calling into your being what you want to transmit --- what is your desired feeling state in that moment, and how can your post transmit that. 

We begin this week’s inquiry by bringing our attention to what has come before, to the foundation practice we are building upon.  This past week we Presenced Pace.  In the course materials, I invited you into Right Pace as Prayer, to Slowing Enough That Everything is Making Love.  What did you find this past week as you attuned to Pace?  Please call these learnings to mind now.

This week, we enter into an exploration of Presencing Grace & Gratitude.  Our primary practices in this exploration are practices of gratitude and of integration.  

What is grace, to you?  Perhaps it is connected to the energy you bring into the world, or how you respond to what comes your way.  Perhaps it is an energy that is between beings when we meet, that is given by spirit or is created by how we come together.  For some it may be a sweet flow, or an energy of synchronicity or being gifted with ease.  Perhaps it is a reprieve from a narrow place, into spacious possibility. 

Together, we attune to grace.  I invite you to attune to grace now, simply by intending to do so. Pause the audio or move away from the computer if you wish. 

From this place of attunement to grace, we proceed. 

Cultivating the Gratitude Body

The simplest way to cultivate the gratitude body is to begin everything with giving thanks, and to complete everything giving thanks.  May it be true for you this week that there is no such thing as saying too many thank you’s.  When you wake in the morning, thank you.  When you sleep in the evening, thank you.  All the in-betweens, interactions with every being, thank you.  If you are appreciating the stars in the sky or the shade of the tree, actually thank them.  If you are enjoying waters wash over you in a shower, give thanks - to Creator, to the waters, for those who crafted the pipes, or wherever your thanks call you.  Offer more thanks than you could imagine offering.  When you are challenged by an experience, find the window that offers a glimpse of gratitude, and open it.  Feel how that gratitude breeze shifts the direction, or adds new possibility into stuck patterning.

This exercise is not theoretical.  I actually want you to give thanks every morning and every evening and in as many moments in between as you can be grateful inside of.  Not just feeling the gratitude, but actually communicating the gratitude --- thanking Spirit, people or who and whatever else you are thanking.  I suggest - rather than a phrasing that is focused on you - “I give thanks for...”  that you focus on who or what you are thanking.  “Thank you for ....”. The conversation wants to be alive in you.  The communication can be in words, though it needn’t be.  You can gratitude-gesture or gratitude-dance or gratitude-cook or gratitude-eat or gratitude-walk or gratitude-see.  How does your body move when she is led by gratitude?  What food does she prepare and how does she offer or partake of it?  What does your day look like when it begins in gratitude practice?  How does giving thanks before sleep affect your dreams? 

Gratitude can be a practice of making love.  When you make love with or pleasure with yourself or another, what happens if you presence to gratitude in your sensory exploration?  Each touch, each gaze, each smelling or tasting can be a giving thanks.  When we make love, offering a thousand thanks -- in words or sounds or communication between pores -- is just a beginning, opening a portal to becoming divine. Gratitude as a practice of making love does not only mean giving thanks while loving or pleasuring, it means experiencing the act of giving thanks itself an act of intimacy.  Giving thanks is a perceiving and an offering.  Giving thanks is giving the gift of your presence in response to the abundance you are receiving. 

Cultivating the gratitude body means that you are so alive to the energy of gratitude that it reverberates from your being and becomes a massage for the universe.  How grateful can you be?   Play with this, this week.  Do this not for the results.  And, let yourself be astounded by and grateful for the results.  The universe wants to massage you back.  The flow of grace is ready for you in each moment you choose to immerse ... and she often sprinkles or douses you even when you’d forgotten her.  This week, we practice the return.  How much grace can you tolerate?

Attention as Grace

I prepared this lesson amidst days of tending and being inspired by my beloved collaborator, friend and teacher Ibrahim Baba, who at the time of this writing was Intensive Care.  Those days at the hospital, I have learned so much about presence from Ibrahim Baba.

Every single person who came into the room to attend him, whether to remove trash or administer tests, was greeted by Ibrahim Baba with deepest honor and desire to engage them fully, even when he barely had breath for words.  In this hospital system, each person is in a functionary role, and it could be easy to only bring awareness to them as such.  Ibrahim Baba was shocked by this way, and chose again and again presence to the wholeness of each encounter.  If someone were going to help him, he wanted to honor them, and wanted to be honored in his fullness & experienced as a whole being as well.  He greeted all who enter as if they are angels of the Holy.  

As a practice of Embodied Presence this week, notice if and how you compartmentalize in encounters with others.  Do you choose to see only certain aspects of them, or address them differently than whole because of any role they are in, or your own less than full presence?  Do you compartmentalize any aspects of yourself?  What do you notice about encounters that are born from and steeped in an experience of Grace and graciousness?  What do those connections feel like in your body?  How are sensations different if you are perceiving and perceived as whole, rather than in fragment? 

Dayenu as Grace

In Judaism, Dayenu is a word we learn connected to gratitude for gifts given.  In the Passover seder we sing Dayenu - enough, as a way of acknowledging what we have received and of giving thanks for what is.  For me, spiritual practice includes a dance between enough and more than enough.  It is essential to give thanks for the abundance that is and the gifts we are given.  And it is essential to expand our capacity, to see and hold space for beyond enough-ness, that we revel in what is and allow, in that reveling for what is to become even more remarkable and blessed.  

My friend Eva recently shared a practice she has of directly addressing the universe, asking “How much better can it get?” She quoted her friend Stephen McLean to me - he says to the universe, “How much love can one man take?”  and “Give me your best shot.” At first I was a bit thrown, as someone who finds deep value in appreciating what is, and honoring the more-than-enoughness.  I wondered about the alignment of this question, if it was an abundance grower, or a critique.  And, I decided to try it out.  All I can say is Wow.  It feels to me like an advanced practice.  It’s not a question to ask from a place of scarcity-consciousness, nor is it a question to ask and then answer cognitively yourself.  It is an invitation for increased goodness, and, when you are already in a state of gratitude, full up and blessed and blessing, it is a powerful wave to ride.  I asked Eva about the impactfulness of this inquiry, and she spoke about the importance of the word “even” in this inquiry, and she spoke of it’s significance “in any moment as a springboard and in an abundant moment as a magnifier.”  This week, when you find yourself already amidst much good, ask, “How could this experience get even better?

Landing as Grace

Integrating that possibility and returning to a wave of appreciating the now.  A practice that is flowing me from our inquiry into Presencing Pace to this inquiry of Presencing Grace is a practice my movement teacher Shayna calls “Landing”.   Landing is allowing ourselves to integrate an experience before moving to the next.  

An easy way to envision landing is in the practice of eating.  To land while eating allows each taste of food is given space to be savor and to be integrated before a next taste begins.  While this could be described by some as eating slowly, I find this to be a practice of giving space to the integration of each experience before moving on to the next.  In last weeks material, I offered example of walking three times slower than googlemaps expected me to walk. Rather than understand this as walking slow, I am beginning to experience this as walking step by step.  Allowing each step to land, with grace, before moving to the next.  Beginning this practice had a moment of awkwardness for me, yet as soon as I click into it - in walking, or eating, or whatever it is I am doing, spaciousness opens, breath becomes full and body relaxed and aware.

Climbing As Grace

In my sleep-dream yesterday, I experienced being supported step-by-step by a new deep friend.  Here’s what I recorded it felt like to be met by them:  “Imagine a ladder and someone climbing and appreciating every single rung, needing to walk it like that for reverence sake and right-traversing, rather than skipping steps.”  In the dream, this attention to each point of meeting, allowing each step it’s right place rather than rushing or ignoring, choosing to attune to the subtle, mattered.  How does it change things to show up, and be shown up for, like that?  What supports you presencing to each rung, landing, with awareness and appreciation?

Integrating As Grace

When we explore ritual-craft, we learn that energy builds or dissipates in moments of transition. This is true in our embodied experience.  How we mind transitions - and allowing space for completion before jumping into the next experience- affects presence in profound ways.  Jewish customs of blessing before eating and blessing communally after a meal are practices that encourage attention to transition.  In the model I am suggesting here, the gratitude is offered after each bite, and comes in the form of presence, breath and space before the next.  I invite you to give attention this week to landing - to step-by-step / somatic integration before moving on.  

The practices of gratitude and integration dance with each other in a way that can be supportive and amplifying.  In some ways, they beget each other.  Giving thanks and integrating.  Integrating and giving thanks.  I am so grateful to be on this journey with you.  THANK YOU for your attention to this offering and for saying yes again and again and anew to Embodied Presence.  Thank you for co-creating this field with me.  Thank you for receiving this material ... the depth of the receiving allows the offering to be that much more full.  I am aware as I prepare this lesson of the ways it is already being called forth and welcomed by you and again, I give thanks and I presence to my body reverberating Thank You.  

As we land this lesson, pay attention to integration.  Before you move on to what comes next in your day, give space to breath and notice what your body wants.  Is there anything she needs to support your integration of or landing with this material?  Maybe it is giving thanks.  Maybe it is simply being with what has emerged.  I give thanks, and I wonder - How could this experience get even better?

With love.  Thank you.

Taya