March 2008 Audio Meditation

As I thought about what to share as a practice this week, a recent webinar I offered for professionals came to mind. It focused on the wide variety of reciprocal relationships we have with everything we encounter in the course of our everyday lives. One of the subjects I didn’t spend a lot of time on in the webinar was to focus on the reciprocal relationships we have with our physical bodies.

Over the years, I have had a relationship of gratitude with my body—gratitude for the fact that it allows me to be here, gratitude for all the organs that make it possible for my body to function, gratitude that my body is healthy. For me, love—the frequency and energy of love—is the most powerful healing frequency we can access and I draw on it liberally in my life. One of the practices I’ve engaged over the years has been to send love to my body each day, as part of my gratitude practice. 

I may have mentioned before that our bodies are actually comprised of many organisms that are non-human. Here’s a quote from the BBC News: “Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.” The American Museum of Natural History says that, “Your body is an ecosystem” and that, “An ecosystem is a community of living things.” Because of these facts, I seek to have a cooperative, collaborative, and loving relationship with the organisms that populate my body and that support my daily functioning. I include these organisms in my gratitude practice and regularly send them love.

As I’ve written about before, I’ve been noticing the tangible impact of practicing offering blessings as I move through the world. One of the most important is the ongoing practice of blessing water.  Water carries memory, as demonstrated in the work of Masaru Emoto, where he looked at the crystalline structure of frozen water molecules before and after they were blessed, as well as when they were sent love, gratitude, hate, or “you’re a loser”.  It’s quite compelling research and, in case you haven’t seen it, here’s a link to a YouTube video about water and memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOp-bxNug5A.  There are many other related videos, as well, if you are interested.

Many people don’t believe that water carries memory, or that it matters if water is blessed before taken into the body.  Many of us forget that our bodies are up to 65% water and, when we take into account the images that come from Emoto’s work, we can better appreciate why blessing water is an important practice for our overall sense of well-being. 

I am also a proponent of expressing a great deal of ongoing love and gratitude for my body, as it’s the means by which I’m here in the world. I include my awareness that the water in my body will carry my love and gratitude within it as it circulates.  Whether it directly affects my body, I don’t really know but, even with the inevitable changes that come with aging, I know I feel better when I actively engage this practice.

We know that different languages generate different world views, different ways of experiencing the world around us, and different expectations of what we can expect from our world.  Several times now, I’ve run across the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and each time I experience her worldview I am deeply moved. She is a botanist who is also has a Potawatomi heritage and a perspective that is much more inclusive and honoring of our planet and our global family of relations with whom we share this home.

I’ve written before about Robin’s very wise and powerful sharing of the need for pronouns that are inclusive of all the life on this beautiful home we share with so many other beings. Read More “721st Week:  Grammar Shapes Our Worldview”