You Are the Sky

Mantra
I am the sky. The storm will pass.

Opening Reflection
Welcome everyone. It is July in South Florida, which means every one of us has driven through a storm this week. The sky goes black at four in the afternoon, the rain comes down sideways, and forty minutes later the sun is out like nothing happened. Tonight we practice being that sky. Not the storm, not the rain, not the thunder. The sky that holds all of it and is changed by none of it. As we move, let the breath be your weather report. Notice what is passing through, and remember what remains.

Topic 1. Storms Are Guaranteed, Suffering Is Optional

Talk
Nobody who lives here is surprised by rain in July. We check the radar, we keep an umbrella in the car, we plan the cookout for the morning. We have made peace with the storms, so they cost us nothing. But notice what we do with the storms inside our lives. Those we take personally. We ask why me, we replay them, we let one bad hour cancel a whole day. The rain is not the problem. Our argument with the rain is the problem.

Metaphor
Watch how locals handle a summer downpour. Nobody runs out to fight the clouds. Nobody stands in the parking lot yelling at the sky. We pull over, we wait, we let it pass. Imagine bringing that same wisdom to the difficulties in your life. Not resignation, just the end of the argument with what already is.

Quotes
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Suffering usually relates to wanting things to be different than they are. Allan Lokos
If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good. Buddha
Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it. Charles R. Swindoll
Stress is not what happens to us. It is our response to what happens. And response is something we can choose.

Topic 2. You Are the Sky

Talk
When a storm rolls in, we say the sky is dark. But the sky is not dark. The sky has not changed at all. Something is simply passing through it. Our thoughts and emotions work the same way. Anger, worry, sadness, they are weather systems. They form, they move through, they dissolve. The mistake is believing we are the weather. You are not your worst mood. You are not the thought that kept you up last night. You are the awareness those things pass through.

Metaphor
Anyone who has flown out of Miami in the summer knows this. On the ground it is gray, rain hammering the windows. The plane climbs, shakes through the clouds, and then breaks into brilliant sunshine. That sun was there the entire time. The storm was never the whole sky. It only looked that way from underneath.

Quotes
You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather. Pema Chodron
Remind yourself that you are not your thoughts, you are not your feelings, you are not your memories, you are not any of the voices in your head. Brahma Kumaris
Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama. Ram Das
To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. Lao Tzu
The moment you start believing that something that is not you, as being you, is a big problem.

Topic 3. Rain Grows the Garden

Talk
The same rain we complain about on the drive home is the reason everything here is green. It fills the aquifer we drink from. It feeds the River of Grass. The Everglades does not merely tolerate the wet season, it depends on it. The whole ecosystem is built around the deluge. And so are we. Look back at your life honestly. The seasons that soaked you to the bone are usually the ones that grew you the most.

Metaphor
Think of your own front yard at the end of the dry season. The grass goes crispy and brown, and even running the sprinklers cannot keep up. Out in the Everglades it gets so dry that fires burn. Then the summer rains arrive, and almost overnight the green returns. All our watering could not do what a few afternoons of rain did effortlessly. Our lives work the same way. The hard seasons we would never choose, the losses, the setbacks, the tears, are often the very things that bring us back to life. What feels like a storm today may be the rain your growth has been waiting for.

Quotes
When it rains look for rainbows, when it is really dark look for stars.
The wound is the place where the light enters you. Rumi
Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it. Buddha
Sometimes when you find yourself in a dark place, you feel as if you have been buried, but often times you have been planted.
Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. Rumi

Topic 4. Be the Lighthouse, Not the Rescue Boat

Talk
There are storms in the sky, and then there are the storms other people carry. A coworker’s anger, a family member’s chaos, a stranger’s rudeness in traffic. We cannot control their weather, but we get to decide whether we let it become ours. The most generous thing you can offer someone in a storm is not to join them in it. It is to stay steady enough that they can find their way to calmer water.

Metaphor
A lighthouse does not sail out into the storm to save ships. It would be useless if it did. Its entire value comes from staying planted on the rock and keeping its light burning while everything around it rages. Steadiness is not coldness. Steadiness is the gift.

Quotes
Don’t let people pull you into their storm. Instead pull them into your peace.
Don’t ever forget that perhaps you are the lighthouse in someone else’s storm.
When you own your breath, no one can steal your peace.
Never be in a hurry, do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset. St. Francis de Sales
Nobody can hurt me without my permission. Gandhi

Topic 5. The Clearing Always Comes

Talk
Here is the promise every South Florida storm keeps. It ends. Every single one. The sky that was black at four is golden by five, steam rising off the pavement, everything washed clean and somehow greener than before. No storm in the history of this planet has lasted forever. Whatever you are in the middle of right now, it is weather. And weather moves.

Metaphor
Think of the hour after a summer storm. The streets are rinsed, the air is lighter, the light turns soft and gold. The world does not just recover from the storm, it is refreshed by it. That is what impermanence really offers us. Not just the end of what is hard, but the beginning of what is clean.

Quotes
Nothing is forever except change. Buddha
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Heraclitus
Accepting the reality of change gives rise to equanimity. Allan Lokos
There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope. Bernard Williams
You cannot force things to happen before their time. The Spring will come and the flowers will blossom, but you cannot force the Spring. The more patient you are, the quicker is the coming of Spring. Osho

Closing Reflection
As you settle into savasana, let the body become still the way the world becomes still after the rain. Whatever moved through you tonight, effort, emotion, resistance, let it pass the way the clouds pass. You are not what moved through. You are what remains. Rest here in the wide open sky of your own awareness, unhurried, unbothered, and completely clear.

Mantra
I am the sky. The storm will pass.