July 2011 Audio Meditation

One of the great gifts of vacation time is to have an opportunity to do some reading. One of the books I had an opportunity to read over this year’s recent vacation is Pierre Pradervand’s book, “The Gentle Art of Blessing.”  In his book, Pradervand speaks of offering blessings as a powerful practice of presence. In part, this practice brings us back into presence because of the way it invites us to shift from reactions and judgments into offering blessings in a spontaneous, moment-to-moment way.

As I read his book, my feeling was that what he offers powerfully supports a shift from moving through the world from a mental perspective, drawing primarily on the brain in the head, to moving through the world from the perspective the heart.  Read More “724thWeek: The Practice of Blessing”

As I write this practice, I’m at a professional training outside New York City. The trainings are held in a hotel where we have been many times and it recently changed management.  What many of us experienced as we arrived for this training was a noticeable difference in the “feel” of the hotel, a noticeable change in how we were met by the front desk, and a noticeable change in the quality of service we have encountered along the way.

At this training, my job is to manage the assisting team, as well as deal with participants who have questions or issues about the team.  Each morning, we have a team meeting and take time to connect, settle in, and clear up any problems, questions, or issues that may have arisen during the prior day.  One of the things I do as part of our team meeting is to take time for all of us to connect to our individual core presence and internal steadiness and, then, to connect with our collective team presence and steadiness.  Our keynote is kindness, and I invite all of us to embody that particular quality as we move through the training days.  Our job is to offer supportive containment as well as teaching input.

One of the things I’ve asked the team to keep in mind is to extend that kindness to the hotel building and all its employees.  I ask this because we inevitably radiate into our environment the qualities that we carry with us as we move through the world.  I can imagine that the employees and building receive a good bit of negative input, given the ways in which the place has changed, and I want to ensure that we don’t add to a collective quality of dissatisfaction, annoyance, and other activating feelings that the changes tend to elicit.

As I write this practice, I’m sitting on a train headed for New York City from Connecticut.  I spoke at the Unity Church in Norwalk, CT this morning and some of the things I talked about there I’d like to share as this week’s practice.  

There were several themes to my talk this morning.  One was the over-arching practice of subtle activism, which may be done through use of prayer, affirmative thoughts and feelings about situations that need support, healing at a distance, and more.  The underlying theme that arises when talking about something like subtle activism is that of collective consciousness, and the fact that we are all interconnected whether or not we’re aware of it.

One of the things I asked people to sense into was how it felt to know and experience that all of us in the room were part of one energy organism, with each of us contributing to the radiating quality of presence that was the collective environment we generated together.  In past practices, I’ve invited you to pay attention to the focus and quality of your thinking and feeling, knowing that where you resonate becomes magnetic to what you attract.  This matters because resonating with a feeling such as gratitude supports an experience of well-being, where resonating with a feeling of anger or resentment supports those states of being. This is because we are part of collective fields of information and presence all the time and, because of this, we are affected by similar feelings and experiences of countless people all around the world.