August 2009 Audio Meditation

With all the suffering going on around the world, and all the harshness and conflict on every front, it’s more important than ever to have sources of good news. Seeking good news doesn’t mean you want to ignore what’s going on. Rather, it acknowledges wholeness and the fact that even when things appear to be terribly wrong, there is always something right or positive, as well.

For this practice in conscious living, I invite you to explore some of the websites that orient to positive news and find the one, or the ones, that resonate with you. There are probably more than are on the list below, but these are sources of good news that I’ve discovered along the way. One of my favorites is Service Space, where you can find Daily Good emails, KarmaTube videos, and more. That said, all the sites listed below offer their own take on good news. I’ve listed them alphabetically…

I find myself continually returning to a commitment to express kindness as I move through each day. In a world filled with contention and disasters, it can be hard to remember to stand on a foundation of kindness rather than a foundation of fear or upset. There are a couple of concepts in psychology related to the developing understanding of what is called “memory reconsolidation”, which is how our brain adds new information to old learning. Drawn from the teachings of Juliane Taylor Shore, our experiences generate the “psychological floor we stand on” and the quality and tone of our “emotional knowing,” which I think of as a filter through which we understand self and the world. While I’m not going to go into these dynamics here, I want to draw on the idea of the “psychological floor we stand on” and our “emotional knowing” as we think about kindness and how we express it in our world. 

In the psychological sense, these dynamics are unconscious and automatic. For the purposes of this week’s practice in conscious living, I’d like to propose that if we consciously hold the intention to stand on a “psychological floor of kindness” and hold the intention that we will look at the world through a filter of kindness, our everyday actions and states of mind would more naturally orient toward experiences and expressions of qualities of kindness.

When you imagine internally standing on a psychological floor of kindness, what comes into your awareness and experience? Are there images that arise? What physical sensations do you experience when you imagine standing on this “floor” of awareness? Spend a few minutes simply resonating with the quality of kindness and notice what else comes into your experience.

When you imagine viewing and interpreting the world through a filter characterized by kindness, what kinds of thoughts and emotions arise in you? Do mixed feelings arise, as well? How do your thoughts and feelings register in your body? Do you find yourself more settled, your heart more open or do you find yourself pulling back from what you experience?