February 2012 Audio Meditation

Whenever I begin any kind of group, I invite people to take a moment to follow the next out-breath down inside and find the place that is their natural landing place, their internal center of gravity. This is the place in us where we touch into a couple of very important aspects of ourselves. One is the steadiness that lives here. It is a steadiness that can never be disturbed. Another is arriving to an awareness of the quality and tone of our inherent core presence, the unique energy signature that we radiate throughout our bodymind being and out into the world around us in every moment, without exception.

We live in a world that appears to be solid and yet is actually comprised of an infinite variety of frequencies of energy. As Einstein says, “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. This is not philosophy. This is physics.” 

If our human senses were more attuned to these frequencies, we would be aware of ultra-violet light and color, x-rays, and so much more. We are aware of a very small range of frequencies that are present and part of our physical lives.

One of my daily practices is to post an inspirational quotation and nature photograph to the Facebook page of Devadana Sanctuary and to the Devadana Sanctuary website at www.portaltomdl.com each morning. A surprising gift that comes to me as part of this practice is to be able to look at our beautiful planet at the beginning of each day as I choose the photograph of the day. As I review the library of inspirational quotations that I collect along the way, each morning also offers an immersion in the wisdom of so many inspiring people.

As I prepared the posting for today, I came across a couple of quotations that stuck with me and I want to share them here. They touched me because they speak to the ways in which our moment-to-moment, day-to-day choices make a difference in how we move through our world and in what we contribute—or don’t—to our collective well-being. Here are the quotations that caught my attention: Read More “723rd Week: Making A Difference, Choice by Choice”

One of the books from graduate school that powerfully impacted me was “Blaming the Victim”.  I was in a class where I focused my work on shame—collective and individual—and got deeply immersed in how we tend to blame the victim as a way to validate our beliefs and actions.  The impact of that class, and particularly the above book, has never left me.  It started me on a 40+ year journey of tracking my own internal process of judging and blaming, catching myself when I can and challenging my own rationalizations about what’s happening to people locally and around the world.  Even with this practice, I know that there are countless times when I engage in blaming the victim, unaware of my own biases and limiting beliefs.

As I watch the current situation in the United States—and we are not alone in our mistreatment of people we consider to be “other”—I not only feel deep heartache and distress, but am also keenly aware of how vividly a “blaming-the-victim” mentality seems to have captured the minds of those in power.  That this stance lacks empathy goes without saying.  The deeper problem is that blaming victims allows us to remain unaware of our privilege, of our seemingly justifiable disconnection from the suffering of others. Read More “716th Week:  Blaming the Victim”