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November 2021 Audio Meditation
Here’s our November audio meditation.
In this month’s meditation, we focus on the wholeness of the earth and how each one of us, and everything else, is part of that wholeness, inseparable from all earth life.
If you would prefer to listen while seeing images of nature, here’s our YouTube version…
728th Week: Language of Separateness; Language of Interbeing
Early this morning, I turned on the radio and listened to a brief political report on WNYC, the local public radio station here in NYC. What I heard was a recording of a recent political rally where what I call “the language of separateness” characterized what was said by the speaker. In addition to the sadness I felt at hearing language that had a violent and aggressive tone, language that demonized the “other”, I also began to think about the difference between “the language of separateness” and “the language of interbeing’. Interbeing is a verb created by the Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, and is now used beautifully and often by Charles Eisenstein, a speaker who focuses on social, economic, and ecological issues.
Later, I listened to an interview with Krista Tippett in her On Being broadcast where she talked with a woman who described how she engages people on the opposite side of the spectrum from where she lives politically and socially as a way to discover what was of key importance to both her and to the other person. Read More “728th Week: Language of Separateness; Language of Interbeing”
840th Week: Offering Steadiness as Subtle Activism
Because of my interest in subtle activism—defined as those inner activities we undertake to support positive collective outcomes—I am always aware of the constant opportunity to contribute to our collective well-being through the attitudes, responses, and qualities we generate internally and emanate into our world in the course of our everyday lives. Just about every moment of any day, we can stop for a moment, take note of what we are radiating into the environment around us, and make a conscious choice to resonate with states of being that are positive, compassionate, and/or settling.
The other day, as I was settling into the steadiness I inevitably find within my embodied core presence, I was reminded of the fact that the steadiness I experience immediately flows out and into the environment around me and, from there, into the field of information that is our human collective consciousness. A while back, I realized that purposefully orienting to steadiness—or any other quality that supports self-regulation—can be a powerful and dynamic form of subtle activism.
It’s probably not hard to imagine how much our global human species currently needs steadiness. There is so much distress, chaos, and activation in the world that it seems to me that any added moments of steadiness might be a support in ways I haven’t imagined to people I will never know and yet who are people who share with me our connection within our shared collective consciousness.
For this week’s practice in conscious living, here’s a brief outline of a meditation on steadiness that can become a daily subtle activism practice:
Read More “840th Week: Offering Steadiness as Subtle Activism”786th Week: The Gift of Transmitting Love
One of the practices I’ve taken on even more actively these days is imagining that I am an open and always-available channel for the energy of universal love to flow through me as I move around in the course of my daily life activities. When I use the word “love”, I’m not referring to the personal kind but, instead, to my sense that the most potent healing energy in the universe is Love with a capital “L”.
It seems to me that this particular kind of “subtle activism” can be an addition to whatever else I, or we, may do to help heal our distressed world, our human family, and all our other earth kin. Imagining the energy of love flowing through me throughout the day doesn’t ask anything of me other than to bring my awareness to the process as often as I choose to do so. And, I feel somewhat confident in saying that choosing to be a channel for the healing quality of love probably doesn’t have a downside when we don’t personalize it…when we realize that we are, indeed, simply open channels for this universal energy to flow through us and into our world.
For years, I’ve had a practice of blessing everything around me. This particular practice became much more an ongoing part of my life when I went through seminary and was ordained as an Interfaith (now called Interspiritual) Minister back in 2003. In recent years, I’ve found that taking classes with David Spangler through his Lorian Association has helped me focus even more fully on these ways of moving through the world.
Read More “786th Week: The Gift of Transmitting Love”893rd Week: A Meditation on Our Earth Family
One of the themes that has accompanied me throughout most of my adult life is how to support a shift away from our everyday humancentered thinking and behaving and to move toward the recognition that we are part of an Earth family. This kind of shift offers us a perspective that invites us to honor and respect the vast array of our other-than-human earth-kin, all the life and beings with whom we share this planet.
So much of Western philosophical and religious thinking has divorced our physical lives from our “spiritual lives”, holding an attitude that part of our journey here is to transcend this physical world. Thankfully, I think that this is no longer a dominant attitude to the degree it used to be, but it has been a source of great harm to our planet and our other earth-kin.
Thankfully, people such as Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist who has become a dominant figure in the trauma resolution community along with others have developed approaches that challenge our tendency to put the individual before our collective. Here’s a link to a brief talk by Dan about his approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo8Yo4UE6g0
It orients us to our larger collective and is an important perspective to have in place when beginning to shift away from a humancentric and individualistic orientation. It invites us to collective well-being and it’s not a huge leap to include our other-than-human earth-kin as well as our human kin.
When I was in graduate school many years ago now, I wrote about what I called Psychoecology, focusing on the place of humans within the larger ecological context. I never developed it beyond that but there are many other people who offer perspectives that move away from humancentric thinking and behavior and I recommend exploring these more deeply if you are interested. Look up Animism, Pantheism and more on google.com. Here’s a piece from the BBC about humans and the natural world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gWGP34-4tY
And, many indigenous cultures have always experienced humans as part of Nature, as part of an earth family with whom humans must cooperate if we are to survive. Here’s a clip of the voices of young indigenous people who are involved in climate change efforts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm8Ctb2w81Y
For this week’s practice in conscious living, I offer the following guided meditation that offers an opportunity to explore shifting away from humancentric thinking:
Read More “893rd Week: A Meditation on Our Earth Family”