May 2013 Audio Meditation

835^th Week: Finding Sources of Nourishment

As I sit in the park this morning, surrounded by large trees, I am keenly aware of what is a deep “relief of return”. Each year when the trees again wear their garments of green, my body and psyche go through the same kind of relief—almost a physical “sigh” as I settle into the visual and physical feast of taking in the green. The challenge is to remember to give myself this gift as often as I can.

This gets me to thinking, yet again, about sources of nourishment and how important it is to take time to nourish ourselves, body and psyche. Sources of nourishment are quite individual. For example, some people I’m close to are nourished by engaging in creative activities such as acting, singing, or crafts (severely curtailed during Covid but still happening on-line). Others have created regular zoom gatherings with friends, finding ways to keep up to date with each other and share experiences. Still others find ways to go hiking as often as possible, immersing themselves in the presence of nature as they exercise.

For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to bring to mind your most treasured source of nourishment and then to see how you might offer it to yourself a bit more often. For me, it means getting up early enough to be in the park before it’s crowded with all the people that flock here later in the morning and throughout the day, picnicking, exercising, walking, sitting—enjoying the park in a wide variety of ways. 

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I’ve written many times about the importance of being aware of the frequencies with which we resonate in any given moment, and of the impact they have not only on our internal quality of life but also on the quality of our engagement with our environment and the people and situations we encounter along the way. In every moment, we have choice as to how we respond to what’s happening to and around us. 

You can think of frequencies as qualities. What qualities do you like to resonate with in your life? Do you enjoy feeling delight, ease, quiet, compassion? Do you find that you often engage fear or anger? Most of us feel the whole array of possible frequencies, given the moments in time and the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

One thing I want to be sure to say at this point is that choosing the frequencies with which we want to resonate doesn’t mean not choosing to act when action is called for. I always think of the Dalai Lama when someone asked him if he ever gets angry. He said that he certainly did. Then he mentioned the importance of compassionate action when we experience injustice, for example, and that makes us angry. So, what I share here is not an invitation to passivity. Instead, it’s an invitation to more consistently notice the frequencies with which you resonate so that you have a moment of choice.

For example, when we find ourselves resonating with frequencies that are distressing or agitating, or when we lose awareness that we have jumped into one of these frequencies with both feet, we probably don’t end up feeling so good about our experience. A key here is to cultivate enough ongoing awareness to be able to notice when we become captivated or captured by a frequency that we don’t really like. Then, we can hopefully shift our attention to a frequency that feels more constructive. 

An example might be a time when you are moving into irritation. If you can catch that, you might decide to shift to an awareness of the steadiness you carry in the core of your body and take a moment to settle in. When I feel irritation coming on, I do one of two things. If it’s during the day when I’m up and about, I shift into an awareness of my heart space and choose a quality of ease or flexibility with which I want to meet the experience that was irritating me. A very mundane and not-at-all dramatic example of this is when one of my feline family members started doing something in the middle of the night that woke me up every night at about 3am. When I found myself getting irritated, I reminded myself that the only person that would hurt was me, so I shifted to imagining myself filling up with light, throughout my whole body, and that put me back to sleep. Fortunately, the next day I found a solution to stop the middle-of-the-night antics and I saved myself from a sleepless night stirred up by irritation.

Here’s a practice focused on choosing frequencies. It can be a daily or weekly practice. It’s based on something I learned in a metaphysical school many, many years ago.

Choose the frequency with which you want to resonate this week. I suggest focusing on it for a week in order to become very familiar with the quality and tone of the frequency, which will make it easier to elicit when you want or need it.

Then, four times a day, at least, return to that frequency and affirm it as your choice to resonate with throughout the week.

Do so:

          When you arise in the morning            
At noon
At dusk
When you go to bed in the evening

In addition, when you first bring the frequency into awareness and touch into its qualities, give yourself some time to orient to the following:

Notice your whole body-mind experience of resonating with the frequency you have chosen for this week:

            The sensations that arise in your body.
The tone and quality of your emotional experience.
The tone and quality of your mental experience.
The tone and quality of your spiritual experience.

Also notice the quality of your thoughts and behaviors throughout the week, becoming increasingly aware of how the frequencies with which you resonate have an immediate impact on your behavior and interactions with yourself and others. And, please remember that your self-talk is a form of self-hypnosis and the quality and tone of it truly matters.

Also, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise, allowing them to move on through without your having to do anything with or about them. 

Here’s the audio version of this practice if you’d rather listen to it. Also, please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.

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.

Read More “747th Week: Embodying Kindness”

Listening to the news and taking in the depth of suffering currently unfolding in our human family around the world, I was drawn again into an awareness of how our tendency to focus on the things that separate us leads to terrible possibilities. When we become mired in tribal reactions and beliefs, we end up harming one another in horrific ways. 

For many years, I have committed myself to support and promote an understanding of our underlying oneness—the fact that we are related to one another and all other life on the planet. What has been a long-term support to this focus of attention has been the term coined by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, where he talked about interbeing, that in every moment we interare with the life around us.

Another concept that has been important to me is the idea of interdependence, that we cannot live without the range of relationships we have with each other and with the other life forms on this planet. Science is beginning to demonstrate that successful eco-systems are based on collaboration and cooperation amongst species and that competition is only one aspect of these complex relationships. And, in a very personal way for each of us, our physical bodies are communities comprised of trillions of non-human life forms that work together to keep our bodies alive.

Read More “868th Week: Revisiting Interbeing”