September 2010 Audio Meditation

One of the practices I’ve followed for many years is to take time to notice that the space that we think separates us actually is what connects us to absolutely everything else. Notice what happens when you think of space as that which connects—everything to everything else. It can help to break the habit, the illusion, of separateness, the habit of thinking that we are disconnected from the complexity of relationships all around us.

Here’s a meditation practice to explore:

• To begin, find a place where you can sit up, supported and alert and yet also relaxed.

• Bring your awareness to the place in you that you recognize as your internal home base. Many people find this when they follow the next out-breath all the way down to the bottom of the breath and notice where they naturally settle.

• In your internal home base you also find your radiating core presence, the unique energy signature that arises from your core. 

• Take a few moments, now, to become even more aware of the quality and tone you radiate throughout your body-mind being and then out into the environment around you. We touch everything with our presence.

• Now, notice your body, this amazing, complex organism that allows you to be here in this world. Notice how your body supports your consciousness, your presence.

• Next, notice the surface under you and the way in which your body receives that support. Remember, support is a reciprocal process—it is offered and then it is received.

• Bring your awareness, now, to the environment around you and notice the quality and tone of that environment. It is comprised of the presence of everything in it coming together to create a particular quality.

• Next, open your eyes if they aren’t already open and look around your environment. Notice the space between you and something else. Notice what you experience when you remember that the space between you is actually what connects you.

• Take some time to experience the space that connects you to everything in your environment.

• Then, if this appeals to you, extend your awareness to the space outside your immediate environment and continue to expand your awareness, recognizing that there is nothing you are not connected with through the space around you.

• Spend some time, now, simply being present to this inescapable fact of being connected to everything because of the space that connects. That space is everywhere and connects you to everything.

• Notice what happens in your body, in your emotions, and in your thoughts as you take in this experience of connection. Be sure to allow any mixed feelings to arise to have a place in your awareness. Because of our wholeness, it’s normal, if not inevitable, to have mixed feelings from time to time and it’s a gift to make room for whatever arises. Your awareness can make room for it all, so you don’t have to leave anything out.

• Take a few moments to imagine how you might move through your daily activities if you were able to maintain an awareness of the underlying connection between you and everything else.

• When you’re ready, bring your awareness back to your core, to the radiating note of your unique energy presence. Feel the support of your body, of the surface under you. Then, wiggle your fingers and toes to bring yourself all the way back.

As with all these practices, 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. And, as always, explore this practice in whatever ways work best for you and be sure to change whatever doesn’t work for you in the way I’ve offered it.

Sitting in Central Park among my tree friends, I found myself asking the following question: How do I help people understand that the earth and everything on it isn’t inert, isn’t passive and lacking in consciousness? How to I offer a perspective that holds the awareness that everything is earth-kin and that everything is conscious, alive, and aware in its own ways? Many of us raised in the Western world were taught that our planet was filled with “resources”, available for our use, rather than the more indigenous-oriented position that everything on and of our earth is alive and is valued kin. 

Here’s a quotation from an enchanting book, “Becoming Animal”, by David Abram that captures some of what we modern people have lost in our relationship to nature, our earth, and our earth-kin:

“Our chest, rising and falling, knows that the strange verb ‘to be’ means more simply ‘to breathe’; it knows that the maples and the birches are breathing, that the beaver pond inhales and exhales in its own way, as do the stones and the mountains and the pipes coursing water through the ground under the city. The lungs know this secret as well as any can know it: that the inward and the outward depths partake of the same mystery, that as the unseen wind swirls within us, so it also whirls all around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds even as it lights our own sensations. The vocal cords, stirred by that breath, vibrate like spiderwebs or telephone wires in the breeze, and the voice itself, laughing and murmuring, joins its song to the water gurgling under the grate.”

Read More “805th Week: Everything is Alive, Everything is Earth-Kin”