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March 2020 Audio Meditation
For those of you who would prefer a meditation with images of nature, here’s the youtube version:
September 2018 Audio Meditation
Here’s the YouTube version of this meditation, with video accompaniment:
672nd Week: Nurturing Compassion
For this week’s experiment in conscious living, I draw from my book, Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition, from the chapter on “Compassion and Lovingkindness: Living with An Open Heart”. Here’s a quotation from that chapter:
“For many people, the process of awakening to a greater sense of compassion initially feels overwhelming. A question many ask is, “What can I, one person, do in the face of so much suffering?” The answer is, perhaps surprisingly, quite a lot… Read More “672nd Week: Nurturing Compassion”
779th Week: Embodying the Ethics of Practices We Engage
Listening to a recent conversation on Buddha at the Gas Pump (www.batgap.com), the host, Rick Archer, and guest, Roger Walsh, talked about the ethics that relate to spiritual practice. This got me to thinking about the ethics of many kinds of practice, among them kindness, gratitude, generosity. As I listened to the interview, it seemed to me that an active expression of ethics is inevitably found in the ways we live, how we move through the world, the values we embrace and embody, what we do that relates to what we believe.
As this week’s practice, I invite you to focus on whatever quality speaks to you most powerfully and then explore what values, ethics, and behaviors arise from that quality. For example, if you choose kindness as your focus of the week’s practice, ask yourself what broader values encompass a life expressed with or through kindness. What beliefs and attitudes emerge naturally from expressions of kindness? What everyday behaviors arise within a context of actively expressing kindness. When you bring this exploration into the foreground of your awareness, what’s different in your interactions with others and in the quality of your thoughts about them and yourself? Keep in mind that your relationship to kindness, your ethics and values around this theme, are in addition to acts of kindness. Here, you are exploring how kindness lives in you, how it affects not only your actions but also your thoughts, attitudes, and values.
Read More “779th Week: Embodying the Ethics of Practices We Engage”
702nd Week: Befriending Silence
I’ve run across a number of articles recently that speak to the physical benefits of silence. One I just read a few days ago talks about how silence generates new cells in the hippocampus of mice. This is an intriguing finding, given that we know that trauma shrinks the hippocampus. Here’s the link to that article: http://www.lifehack.org/377243/science-says-silence-much-more-important-our-brains-than-thought
Another article, which I read a while ago, speaks to a number of benefits that arise from spending time in silence, Read More “702nd Week: Befriending Silence”