April 3rd, 2025: Level 1 Planetary Dharma Class
Small group session outline
Group Check-In (1 minute per person)
Lecture on the Path (10 minutes)
Meditation on the Path (30-40 minutes)
Practice Reflections + Q&A (20-30 minutes)
Lecture on the Path - 10 MINUTES
Use the following questions, the Q&A top hits, and your own experience to create a 10 minute lecture on The Path of Reflection.
What is Attunement?
What are three ways we open to attunement in meditation?
What has supported the development of attunement in your practice?
How might being attuned to improve our lives?
Why is understanding the power of cause and effect so important?
How does sharpening your metacognition improve meditation and learning in general?
Q&A Top Hits
Attunement:
‘I’m not sure I know what attunement is’
What does it feel like when you are with somebody who just really gets you. What does it feel like when you sit with a friend or loved one and you really feel held in their presence?
‘It is difficult for me to feel attuned to’
If they say this it can be helpful to reverse perspectives. Sometimes these folk are very good at giving attunement and not so good at receiving. However, it's the same, just directed in a different direction. Help them to remember the pole that is easiest for them and then have them direct that experience towards themselves
Imagine you are sitting with somebody you love, perhaps a child, or even infant. You are wanting them to feel reassured in your presence. What does it feel like to hold them in a warm presence? What does it feel like to extend empathy to them? Now imagine directing that feeling towards all the parts within you. Imagine your experience is connected to everyone and when you give yourself attunement it spreads to all of us.
See if it is easier to receive the attunement from the Mother around us, or easier to give it to yourself by yourself. Some people are capable of self soothing and not used to relying on others.
The degree to which we are open to feeling longing is the degree to which we can receive attunement
Metacognition:
‘I’m not sure what it is.’
Imagine you are an owl in the forest at night. You are listening into the night. Listening to the slightest rustle that could be a mouse. Notice the quality of alertness. Now listen to the silence of your mind like that. Listening for a thought, bright and alert, ready to pierce it.
Qualities: Lucid, Vivid, Bright, Awake, Sharp
MEDITATION on the Path: 30 - 40 MINUTES
Meditation Script (40 minutes)
Posture (3 min)
Resting hands face down on the thighs
Beginning by releasing into the ground, letting everything go into the stability of the ground. The humility of letting go into the earth. Letting it all go.
Now keep releasing the body and slowly supported by your inhaling lengthen the spine, until you are upright and sovereign. Rooting and Sprouting
Balance letting go with reaching uprightedness. Finding the sweet spot of these two qualities at the heart
Allowing the heart to float upwards. Gently draw the head back so the brain center is in line with the heart and the heart inline with the center of your belly.
Sitting as your best self (1 min)
Sitting as your best self, your extraordinary self, bringing all your best qualities to this
moment.
Sitting with confident determination
Sitting with Energy
Sitting with Patience
Sitting with Love
Sitting with Humility and Sovereignty. Upright and Releasing
Connecting to the sangha circle (2 min)
Allowing ourselves to come into the circle of practice. Allowing our hearts to open and embrace our community.
Loving Awareness (3 min)
Allowing the attentional system to relax out of the head and into the heart
Letting the attentional system settle into the warmth of the heart center
The heart like a sun. Loving awareness.
Coming into relationship with the Ground (2 min)
Directing loving awareness to the stability of the ground beneath you. Allowing your heart to come into relationship with Earth.
Allowing yourself to feel the reciprocating resonance of the Earth. Allowing coherence with the stable Earth.
Continuously releasing into the ground
Trusting the ground’s stability (4 min)
As we are continuously aligning with gravity and releasing into the stability of the ground and encouraging our hearts to cohere with the earth now noticing the trustworthiness and safety of Earth, the trustworthiness of the stable ground of Being.
Resting into the stability beneath….. recognizing the quality of safety that arises from the stability…... .continuously releasing into the safe stability of Earth.
Allowing the quality of safety to saturate the body.
Attunement from the Mother (5 min)
Sitting upright, awareness silent and spacious, hearts networked together, continuously releasing into the stable safe coherence of the Ma.
(pause) 30s
Sitting upright, awareness silent and spacious, hearts networked together, continuously releasing into the stable safe coherence of the Ma.
(pause) 30s
Sitting on the floor of a subtle ocean. The warm ocean of the Mother. Pure waters all around…. waters within the body , a warm watery intelligence…..
(pause) 1
Sensing how this warm, watery intelligence is unconditionally attuning itself to the bodymind……Receiving the soothing feeling of safety as the bodymind is cohered by unconditional intelligence. The nervous system cohering itself to the loving receptivity of the Mother.
(pause) 1
Attuning to Self (5 min)
Becoming curious of where there might be resistance to coherence. Feeling into the internal field for any anxiety or tension? Attuning to the feeling tone. ….Allowing those hidden parts to feel felt, to feel unconditionally attuned to by loving awareness.
(pause) 30s
Becoming curious of where there might be resistance to coherence. Feeling into the internal field for any anxiety or tension? Attuning to the feeling tone. ….Allowing those hidden parts to feel felt, to feel unconditionally attuned to by loving awareness.
(pause) 30s
With loving awareness feeling deeper and deeper, more and more intimate with the feeling field of your experience.
(pause) 1
Sitting, releasing into the safe stability of the ground, receiving attunement from Mother Ocean all around, attuning to your own nervous system.
Attuning to the Interconnected Field (5 min)
Sitting, releasing into the safe stability of the ground, receiving attunement from Mother Ocean all around, attuning to your own nervous system.
Feeling into the field of your experience. Cohering intimately with the subtle reactivity,
Taking the perspective that your personal experience is interconnected with the field of humanity, deepen your intimacy and care, staying even closer and more attuned with what is arising.
So very attuned to every nuance that arises within experience. So very close to human suffering.
Allowing your full compassion towards humanity to draw you closer, more intimate, with what arises.
Allowing the depth of attunement to cohere the subtlest nuances.
Brightening the Metacognition of Loving Awareness and Catching Thoughts with Metacognitive Monitoring (10 min)
Loving Awareness listening from the heart. Listening to silent depths within the body. Allowing the heart to recognize the silence and feel the depth.
From the silent depth of loving awareness allowing the heart to receive all sounds, 360’, all external and all internal sounds received by the heart mind. Sensing yourself opening loving awareness completely open
Recognize the unbounded silence of loving awareness with no inside or outside. A warm wide open luminous silence, wide open and wide awake.
As the wide open loving awareness waiting and listening brightly to the inner field of the mind.
Waiting brightly for any thought to arise.
The moment you recognize any thoughts beginning to arise allow the brightness of loving awareness to immediately dissipate them.
Sharpening your loving metacognition so you are sharply knowing each instant before any thought arises.
Loving and Immediately here in each moment.
Practice cutting the flowering thought immediately. Interrupting the elaborating thought with the loving sword of metacognition.
Thoughts dissolving upon recognition, evaporating into the clear brightness of loving awareness.
Keeping the field of experience clear of all thoughts and images through bright metacognition.
You are bright awake attuned trusting loving awareness
Bright awake attuned trusting loving awareness
Practice Reflections + Q&A: 20-30 minutes
Lead your group through a 20-30 minute Q & A + Practice Reflections discussion.