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825th Week: Offering Appreciation to Nature
As I did some exercise in Central Park the other day, I came to a tree that I wanted to greet, so I put my hand on it and kind of leaned in and thanked the tree for being such an important presence in my life. I also asked the tree to extend my appreciation to all the other trees in the park. Together, they create an environment in which we humans can find a degree of comfort and inspiration. As I talked with the tree, a woman walked by and said, “I do that, too!” As I turned to face her, she said it again and we both commented on how lucky we are to have the park as a living part of our urban lives.
Continuing on, I noticed how many other elements of the park speak to me and offer a sense of belonging to something so much more than my individual human self. I noticed, and have as park friends, some of the large boulders that are found throughout Central Park. I also noted and appreciated, as I always do, the earth under my feet, this precious earth. Then, there are the squirrels, hawks, pigeons, rats, and other wildlife who inhabit the park and who appear here and there as I walk along. No insects to honor at this time of year, but they’ll be back come Spring.
Read More “825th Week: Offering Appreciation to Nature”768th Week: More Reasons Why Tracking Your Self-Talk is So Important
In a recent article entitled, “Your Brain Has a Delete Button—Here’s How to Use It”, the authors, Judah Pollack and Olivia Fox Cabane, talk about research that’s been done on the presence and function of the brain’s “microglial” cells that are the “gardeners of the brain”. These cells prune and remove synapses while we sleep. Most importantly, they remove those synapses we don’t use very much. In fact, the brain marks the unused synapses with a protein that signals the microglial cells to go ahead and prune them.
Because all self-talk is self-hypnosis, and because where we focus our thinking activates the synapses related to these thoughts, it behooves us to be mindful about where we’re spending our internal self-talk time. One example in the article is this:
“If you’re in a fight with someone at work and devote your time to thinking about how to get even with them, and not about that big project, you’re going to wind up a synaptic superstar at revenge plots but a poor innovator.”
They go on to say:
“To take advantage of your brain’s natural gardening system, simply think about the things that are important to you. Your gardeners will strengthen those connections and prune the ones that you care about less. It’s how you help the garden of your brain flower.”
Read More “768th Week: More Reasons Why Tracking Your Self-Talk is So Important”739th Week: Re-centering, Re-centering, Re-centering
There is no question that we live in stressful times and that the challenges facing humanity and the planet are of global proportions. Those of us who pay attention to science reports and environmental conditions understand the dangers we have helped to generate around environmental degradation. Those of us who pay attention to social sciences and to social movements understand that humanity is currently going through a powerful time of polarization between people who are deeply afraid of, and feel threatened by, certain “others” and people who are comfortable experiencing connection to all members of their global family.
Collectively, we are in a time of intense activation, from a trauma perspective, and one of the key antidotes to this kind of activation is finding out how to re-center, re-ground, and re-stabilize ourselves. When our brain is triggered into a threat response, we perceive through that lens and it can be very challenging to re-center and settle ourselves down. Fortunately, there is help available, as many people currently share ways to help ourselves find that place inside us that is always steady, even when we feel quite unstable.
Read More “739th Week: Re-centering, Re-centering, Re-centering”689th Week: Seeking Inspiration
Each morning, I post an inspirational quotation and a nature photo to the Devadana Sanctuary website and also to the Devadana Sanctuary page on Facebook. This morning, as I looked through all the photos I have available to post, I again felt so deeply moved by the beauty of our earth. This got me to thinking about all the various quotations I find that have to do with loving our earth as our mother, as our true home.
As I looked through prior posts, I became aware of how important it has become to me to take in something inspiring at the beginning of each day. For me, looking at images of our beautiful planet touches an important place in my being and helps me orient to the love I have for our earth and all the life within and on it. For me, taking time to love our planet, to love the nature that gives us life, automatically invites us to shift into heart awareness. The perception and intelligence of the heart (the heart-brain, actually), tends to naturally offer a different perspective than does the brain we carry around in our heads.
I am also moved by beautiful music or by the sound of birdsong, stories about acts of kindness, encountering a fur-friend, and more. Sources of inspiration might be different for you. For this week’s experiment, I invite you to pay even more attention to what brings you inspiration and deepens your heart awareness. Also, notice what happens when you remember to shift to something inspiring if you begin to feel overloaded by the challenges, suffering, and hardships you either experience personally or see happening in your world. If you don’t already start your day with inspiring input, notice what may be different about your experience of entering the day if you include something in your morning routine that offers you inspiration.
It’s helpful to remember that finding inspiration needn’t require anything special. There may be a plant in your living room that gives you pleasure and it may be inspiring to see new growth there. Or, you may have a piece of artwork or an object that brings a smile each time you look at it. It’s a matter of orienting to the quality of inspiration and then to noticing how you feel in your heart space when you engage this quality.
As with all these practices, there is no right way to engage this one. It is one more opportunity to become more deeply aware of how the quality of your consciousness, of where you orient your attention, affects the quality of your inner life. Bringing along curiosity as your constant companion supports discovering new sources of inspiration along the way. And, remembering to pat judgments on the head as they arise, move through, and move on, letting them go without having to engage them, can support an ever-deepening connection with whatever inspiration may offer itself to you.
7l7th Week: Thinking with Your Heart
Sitting in Central Park listening to early morning birdsong, surrounded by the gift of lush green and inhaling the fragrance of Locust trees laden with their summer flowers, I find myself soaking it all in with a grateful heart. With so much strife and suffering in the world, these quiet moments with nature represent a powerful gift, a time of restoration and deep nourishment.
As I sit here, my thoughts turn to a conversation I had recently with a group of colleagues. We were talking about practices that enhance a focus on heart intelligence and heart perception, and how different a heart-based orientation is when compared to experiencing the world primarily through a head, or brain-based, orientation. Read More “7l7th Week: Thinking with Your Heart”
#919: A Practice: Supporting our Collective Well-Being
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a practice for this section of my website, and I do so now because of the quality of our collective human experience and expression at this time. Speaking from a perspective of frequencies, the collective frequency of our human family is expressing a quality of emotional experience that would be considered quite “dense.” Frequencies of fear, anger, hatred, suspicion are all quite intense and “thick” in the air.
Because I focus on frequencies quite a bit these days (see my video #5 in my Videos on Multidimensional Living on my website), I find myself deeply concerned about the current quality of our collective emotional well-being. Following is a variation on the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, a heart-based practice of breathing in distressing or negative frequencies, allowing the fiery Love in the heart to neutralize those frequencies, and then breathing out something more constructive or positive, be that love, peace, ease, harmlessness, etc. I think of this kind of practice, altered significantly from the actual Buddhist practice, as akin to what oysters do. We’re filtering out toxins in order to allow our collective consciousness to resonate with more positive frequencies.
As I’ve written about before, we are all affected by our human collective consciousness in every moment, even as we automatically contribute to that collective also in every moment. Quantum research has now demonstrated that we are inextricably entangled, interconnected, with everything else and that goes for our human collective presence, as well. So, the quality of the energies with which we are entangled truly and deeply matters. What we contribute to those energies through the quality of our own being and also our way of moving through the world truly and deeply matters, too.
Here’s the practice and I’ll offer some additional suggestions that you can explore if you’re not comfortable with the way the practice is set up:
- Begin by settling in and taking a moment to ground yourself so that you are present, aware, and settled.
- Bring your awareness to your heart space and in whatever ways make sense to you notice that your heart is filled with the light, energy, and frequency of Love. This Light is ever-present because it arises from an infinite source of Universal Love. It cannot run out, you can’t use it up.
- Take a moment to also notice that this is a fiery Love. It is a purifying energy.
- Now, become of aware of the distress in humanity in whatever way is comfortable for you to do so. You might focus on fear or anger or suffering. Any and all of our human negative feelings contribute to the density of our collective, shared consciousness. Choose what feels right for this time.
- Breathe the negative frequency into your heart space, knowing that the fiery Love will immediately neutralize and cleanse what you have breathed in. Then, imagine that the neutralized energy is filled with, becomes, a quality, a frequency you have chosen to breathe out into the world this time—love, ease, peace, harmlessness, kindness—whatever resonates for you this time.
- As you breathe out, notice that you first fill yourself with the quality/frequency of what you have chosen to breathe out. Then notice that your out-breath continues to carry the quality out to the world around you and recognize that it also becomes part of our human collective consciousness.
- Do this for as long as you would like but be sure to track your comfort level. It’s always best not to over-do a practice like this. It’s more powerful than we usually realize and helping to shift the quality of our human collective is not a marathon—it’s a moment-to-moment, day-by-day process of taking the time to orient to qualities that express positive and constructive frequencies.
- When you’re through, again notice your heart space. The presence of fiery Love is always there for you to experience and to share when you feel moved to do so.
- When you’re ready, bring yourself all the way back, orienting to the sights and sounds of the environment around you.
If you are uncomfortable breathing in negative energy, you can begin this practice by imagining that you are surrounded by white light and that the white light begins to neutralize the negative quality right away, well before it reaches your heartspace.
If the whole practice makes you uncomfortable, here’s another one you might explore:
- Begin by settling yourself in as you would do whenever you are going to have an inner experience. Be sure to give yourself a moment to become grounded and comfortably present.
- Bring your awareness to your heartspace and gently breathe in and out through your heart for a few moments.
- Next, imagine in whatever way makes sense to you, the dense field of our collective human emotional consciousness, a field of awareness that is shared by all of us. Allow a representation of its density to come into awareness. If you use imagery, allow an image to come. If you work more in the realm of words, let words come. If you work more in the arena of felt-sense, notice the felt-sense of the field of density.
- Then, if it works for you, imagine that small points of light begin to show up here and there within the density and hold the intention that these small points of light bring the positive and constructive frequencies described in the practice above. Whatever mode of awareness you draw on to do this kind of work, the key is to notice that the density begins to fill with points of light that carry positive and constructive qualities into this collective field of consciousness.
- If you don’t do imagery, perhaps there could be a sound, a word, a sensation or a feeling that you could imagine begins to penetrate our collective emotional field, conveying more positive and constructive frequencies/qualities into that field.
- Take as much time as is comfortable for you to imagine more and more points of light showing up within the density and notice how that feels to you.
- When you’re ready to come back, bring your awareness to the environment around you, noticing sounds, perhaps smells, and whatever you notice when you open your eyes.
These practices are forms of subtle activism, which we can all do even when we can’t go out into the world and actively work to help create a positive shift in our collective human experience. There are countless other practices in subtle activism that you can explore by simply googling “subtle activism practices.”
As with all these practices in conscious living, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise, allowing them to move on through without your having to do anything with or about them.
Here’s the audio version of this practice if you’d rather listen to it. Also, please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery. You may find that you need to pause the recording when you are doing the practices, as I didn’t leave a lot of time between the various steps.