October 2010 Audio Meditation

With the recent passing of Ram Dass, I am even more aware of something I read in his most recent book, “Walking Each Other Home”. A practice he took on and used every day touched me when I read the book, and I have taken it up as a regular practice of mine. I would like to share it with you. At the moment, I can’t remember if he used this mantra in conjunction with his breathing, but he constantly repeated the words “I am loving awareness.” I mentally say it to myself on the out-breath.

What touches me powerfully about this statement is how it automatically orients me to my heart awareness, which is something that our world desperately needs at this time. I’ve mentioned many times that we affect our environment all the time, whether we intend to or not. As you move through your daily activities, where you place your attention impacts both your internal quality of life and the quality of our collective human consciousness. You cannot not radiate into our human collective the quality of your inner life.

Given the conflicted state of our human family, a state we’re more aware of than ever with our globally interconnected network on the web, practices that support a sense of relatedness are needed for all of us. I’ve written many times about how we are kin not only with every other human being on the planet but also with every other lifeform. All of us are born of this planet, which makes all of us part of one earth family.

I started to write a practice on lovingkindness, which I’ve written about many times, and then found myself shifting into thinking about a practice more focused on recognizing our kinship with one another from a particular perspective—from what Thich Nhat Hanh has described: we interare. He has coined a word, a verb, which is also a concept:  interbeing. Charles Eisenstein uses this concept in his work, as well, and I recommend watching videos of his on YouTube. Interbeingmeans that we are inescapably interconnected and interdependent, that there is no way for us to be separate from one another nor from the ecological framework of our source of physical life—from Nature, from every functioning aspect of our planet and all the lifeforms on it.

I recently saw a brief video about a man in Brazil who, through his focus and efforts over many years, restored a rainforest to an area that had lost its vegetation and water. As I watched the video, it reminded me of something that many people think is only fantasy but that, for me, is an ever-present reality. In my mind, this man was guided by Nature’s Intelligence to plant vegetation in a process that spontaneously returned water to the region where he lives. Here’s a link to his brief, inspiring documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndWyBU9mWlM

The other thing this video brought to mind is how powerful one person’s daily commitment and activities can be. During all the years this man planted vegetation on his land, his neighbors didn’t understand why he was doing so, and yet—through his persistence in heeding the call he felt from the land—he restored an entire ecosystem one small act at a time. For me, this speaks to the ways in which each of us can play an active role in caring for, and restoring, our world. Read More “722nd Week: One Person Can Make A Difference”