Live Session Summary, Sunday, January 19, 2025: It was good to be with you today for our live session as we celebrate in the U.S. the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The focus of the session was how poetry can support our meditation practice and bring us into presence and aliveness.
I spoke of how poetry can help wake us up out of being on autopilot and caught up in habitual thoughts and actions; open us to beneficial states and emotions—like joy, wonder, peace, connection, and compassion; see the world and our life in new ways; and point to truths we may have forgotten or not yet seen.
I spoke of the work of poet and meditation teacher John Brehm, the author of ‘The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy’ and two anthologies: ‘The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy’ and ‘The Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence.’
I shared these quotes from Brehm’s book, ‘The Dharma of Poetry’:
“This is the beauty and magic of poems: they help us see and feel the beauty and magic of the world when we allow ourselves to hit pause on our habitual thoughts and behaviors. And when we enter poems fully, when we experience them rather than think about what they mean, they can release us from our sense of separateness and from the kind of obsessive self-concern that leads inevitably to suffering… A great poem can stop that momentum [of reactivity of the mind] for a moment and help us see that any moment, fully experienced, is a gateway out of the realm of time and change into timeless awareness.” (p24)
“By focusing on what they’re showing us—what ways of being in the world they are recommending—we see that poems can serve as spiritual teachers and the teachings they offer are both simple and profound: pay attention; walk through the world with reverence and wonder; look closely at extraordinary experiences and even more closely at ‘ordinary ones’; see the likeness in seemingly dissimilar things; delight in the world’s impermanent delights; feel into the joys and sufferings of others; treat all beings with respect; love the earth and know that you are not separate from it; talk to animals, plants, rivers, mountains, trees; listen for what they say back to you…” (p5)
We had two periods of meditation where I shared these poems:
• Li Po, Chinese poet (701-762), ‘The birds have vanished…’
• Wu-Men, Chinese Zen master (1183-1260), ‘Ten thousand flowers in spring…’
• Jellaludin Rumi, Sufi mystic, poet and scholar (1207-1273), ‘The Guest House’
• William Blake, mystic and poet (1757-1827), ‘Eternity’ and ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (extract)
• Dorothy Hunt, meditation teacher and poet, ‘Peace is this moment without judgment’
• Wendell Berry, farmer and poet, ‘The Peace of Wild Things’
• Mary Oliver, American poet (1935-2019), ‘The Journey’ and ‘The Summer Day’ (extract)
• Muhyiddin Ibn Al-’Arabi, Muslim mystic, philosopher, and poet (1165-1240), ‘There was a time I would reject those..’
• Pesha Joyce Gertler, American poet and teacher (1933-2015), ‘The Healing Time’
• John Brehm, ‘Wanting, Not Wanting’ (I didn’t share this, but meant to), And here is his poem ‘On Turning Sixty-Four’: “The slowing down // Is speeding up.”
Wishing you and all of us resilience and courage as we enter the difficult times ahead. Please check my website hugh-byrne.com for the two upcoming programs on ways of responding with compassion and wisdom in these challenging times. May we all—and all beings—be held in loving-kindness. I look forward to our next live session on Sunday, February 9 (I misspoke in today’s session and said March). Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
