April 2012 Audio Meditation

During times of extreme stress, such as those we collectively and individually face as a global community at this time, it can be a challenge to move through daily life with our hearts open. It can also be a challenge to feel centered and grounded, and I’ve written a few prior practices to support returning to a grounded center. 

One of the unfortunate side effects of the level of stress we collectively experience at this time is a tendency to constrict our hearts. More than ever, this is a time when, because of the pandemic and also the challenge of climate change, we need to awaken our hearts to ourselves, to one another, and to our planet. 

For this week, I’d like to offer a practice for cultivating an open heart. Many years ago, back in the early 1970’s, my first therapist often drew on approaches drawn from Psychosynthesis. Created by an Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis is a transpersonally-oriented psychotherapy which uses guided imagery and work with symbols, among other approaches.

 The other day, I puzzled over a dilemma I had with one of the cats who live with me. She needs an asthma inhaler twice a day and for quite a while she has been very cooperative with the process. About a month ago, she began to run away from me and the process became quite arduous. Over many years, I’ve had a habit of asking for help from sources I don’t see but assume are present in this wide world of many dimensions and synchronistic moments. What the sources of help are, I can’t begin to say, but I have found that there are times when helpful responses are available. It may be that they arise from my own intuitive non-conscious awareness, where my questions prompt my own internal knowing that allows answers to pop into the foreground of my awareness.

Whatever the source, one evening, I asked for help around how to invite this particular feline family member more gently into the bathroom in the morning and evening for her inhaler. I woke up the next morning with a new plan around how to engage her without all the running away. It worked that morning and has worked ever since and she now again goes to the bathroom before I do and waits for me. 

Again, I don’t know if the answers I tend to get when I ask for help are my own non-conscious wisdom popping up or if they are inspirations received from sources I can’t perceive. It doesn’t really matter. The key seems to be to ask and then to be open to receive input. I think that being receptive and then responsive, i.e., to act on the information received, supports a “conversation” with a wider source of inspiration, be that our own deep wisdom or some collective or other source.