Similar Posts
845th Week: Cultivating the “Noticing” Brain
Without doubt, we live in challenging times locally and globally. I’ve written before about the importance of being able to return to the steadiness that is always at the core of our being as a way to manage the collective distress and suffering that can come into our awareness in any moment. It’s equally important to have access to what’s known as the “noticing” part of our brain, the aspect of our awareness that arises within our present-day observer. Janina Fisher writes about this part of the brain in her new book, “Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists”.
The observer function is very different from the internal critic or judge. It’s that aspect of our awareness that notices, that mindfully observes. This kind of mindful awareness offers us an opportunity to choose how we want to respond to what comes our way. It can allow us to do so in a non-reactive, or at least less-reactive, way.
Below is a brief practice for cultivating the “noticing” brain, especially focused on those times when you move toward becoming overwhelmed by all that’s going on your life, in our collective human family, and with our beleaguered planet.
Read More “845th Week: Cultivating the “Noticing” Brain”2022 December Meditation
This month’s meditation, the last of the year, focuses on connecting with the frequency of inspiration. It invite us to connect with the experience of the frequency, the quality, of inspiration.
Here’s the audio version of the meditation.
Here’s the YouTube version, if you prefer to see nature images as you move through the meditation…
690th Week: Meeting Challenges
I had an experience recently where a colleague brought to my attention that three years’ worth of postings to one of my websites had never actually shown up for the pubic. I mentioned last week that I post a daily inspirational quotation and photograph to the Devadana Sanctuary Facebook page, and I also post it to the Devadana Sanctuary website. What I discovered is that the posts to the website were incorrectly programmed by me and never appeared… Read More “690th Week: Meeting Challenges”
843rd Week: Returning to Home Base, Cultivating ”Noticing”
With the impact of the Delta variant of the Covid 19 pandemic, with suffering from effects of climate change all around the globe, and the intensity of the political polarization that affects much of our global population, it seems more important than ever to have available a practice that allows us to return to the steadiness that is always present in the core of our being, in our internal home base. Many times a day, I bring myself back to this awareness, when I find myself drifting into lines of thinking that either fuel activation or intensify feelings of helplessness in the face of all that is happening.
We know from work with trauma that cultivating the “noticing brain”—which is our present-day observer awareness—calms activation and helps the body and psyche to settle. “Noticing” is a lot different from “thinking”. It represents simply becoming aware of what is happening—what’s arising in this moment in our physical experience, our emotions, and our thoughts. Once we are aware, we have more choice. We can consciously choose to seek out sensations of settling, of steadiness—of whatever the qualities are that help us to center and ground ourselves.
For this week’s practice, I offer a brief approach that supports a return to steadiness and ease when you feel overwhelmed or captured by what’s going on in the world around you. As with all practices, play with this one so that it suits your sensibilities and style of settling. What follows are suggestions for how the process might unfold for you. You can do this standing, sitting, or lying down.
Read More “843rd Week: Returning to Home Base, Cultivating ”Noticing””873rd Week: An “As-If” Experiment in Conscious Living: Living in A World of Reciprocal Relationships
This week’s practice invites you to consider something that may be second nature to you, or it may be a new idea that seems way out there. One of the ways I move through the world is with the assumption that everything I encounter is conscious—not in the way I am conscious as a human but in the way that is unique and appropriate for whatever it is that I encounter along the way. I guess that’s another way of saying I believe we live in a conscious universe and that it’s impossible for anything that exists to be outside that consciousness.
I also believe that I am in ongoing and inherent reciprocal relationship with all the life around me, and I wonder if you would be willing to bring that hypothesis into this as-if experiment, as well. My belief is that I affect everything I encounter and that everything I encounter affects me, that it’s impossible not to be in relationship with the consciousness of my world.
At the very least, at the most basic level of biology, everything I encounter is comprised of the same kinds of molecules as those that comprise my body. We share an ecology that arises from the same carbon-based life and, even in that most basic way, we are part of each other.
I am also a believer in collective consciousness so, for me, we share not only our common biology but also our consciousness. (You will know from this that I do not believe that the brain generates consciousness…)
Read More “873rd Week: An “As-If” Experiment in Conscious Living: Living in A World of Reciprocal Relationships”