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.

Going through old files from my office, I came across an article from 1972 which described a process created by Yvonne Martine and taught to me by my mother and grandmother when I was a young person. It’s about a process of “breathing color” to create healing, physical and emotional vitality, and other outcomes. When I reread the article, I decided to begin to use the process more regularly as a form of “energy hygiene” for personal use, as well as a form of subtle activism for collective healing. 

Reading the article reminded me that various colors relate to healing and nourishing different aspects of the body and psyche. My limited understanding of working with color is that each color represents a particular frequency and I know from my experience that shifting frequencies/qualities can shift a mood, a physical symptom, the quality in a room, and more. My first recent experience with breathing pink, which is the most fundamental of Yvonne’s color breathing exercises, arose recently when I woke up two mornings in a row feeling discouraged and in a funk over our collective situation. It’s very unusual for me to go into a funk, so I was glad to have a practice I could engage  that might make a difference. After two days of breathing pink, I awoke on the third day and was back to my usual self. I could only imagine that breathing pink shifted the frequency with which I was resonating and allowed me to return to my more normal way of being.

My experience is that this particular color—rosy pink, specifically—naturally stimulates and orients itself to our heart intelligence and perceptions. As I’ve explored the heart’s perception and intelligence over recent years, it’s become clear to me that the heart sees and interprets experience quite differently than does the head brain. I sense that rosy pink supports cultivating the heart’s perspective and I feel that’s one of the most important things any of us can do at this time. The more I have spent time breathing and imagining rosy pink, the more at ease I have become, even in the presence of challenges. The effect is tangible and noticeable and I can’t shake the feeling that it has to do with having an even more open heart as a result of resonating with the frequency of the rosy pink.

As I write this practice, I—along with most other people in the U.S. and in many places around the world right now—am at home practicing “social distancing”. Because of the current coronavirus pandemic, I’m not having my daily experience of crossing Central Park, to and from my office. I have to say that I miss the powerful and inspiring emergence of Spring in the park as well as the quiet presence of so many trees.

A couple of weeks ago, before we were all asked to stay home, I was in daily amazement at the beautiful colors of this season in the Northern hemisphere, the emergence of abundant, colorful life after the quiet grays and dun colors of winter. As I write this, I’m sitting at a bench I often inhabit on weekend mornings. This is a cool morning and it will be raining soon, but I wanted this early-morning opportunity to touch into this favorite place where I feel deeply connected and attuned to the nature around me.

As I sit here, I find myself wondering, yet again, how did nature ever know to create the brilliant yellows, pinks, and whites of Spring? All around me, trees are in bloom and all over the park are daffodils and other bulbs showing their wonderfully enthusiastic yellows, blues, whites, and purples. These colorful displays speak to my bodymind in ways that bring me alive, that remind me that life seems to always be waiting to express in creative and energetic ways.