January 2014 Audio Meditation

Sitting in Central Park one morning, I thought about an On Being interview I heard about the importance of hope when looking toward what needs to change in our collective world of human presence and activity. As I listened, I thought about the war in Ukraine and about the powerful polarization that exists in my country, the U.S., and also in other countries around the world.

From a spiritual perspective, I interpret this polarization to involve those who, perhaps because of fear, orient to a stance of individual rights, discomfort with “difference”, and what I would call an orientation to separation. And, on the other hand, there are those who orient to collective well-being, interdependence, and an underlying sense of oneness within our human family and with nature. I’m sure there are many people in the middle, but in our seats of power it seems that the polarization expresses itself in fairly distinct ways.

I’ve written before about a dynamic in Nature, emergence, that has given me hope over the years, even in times like these where our human family seems to orient to short-term goals and tribal kinds of interests. What emergence refers to is the tendency of Nature to generate unexpected and unanticipated solutions, creating new options to meet and shift existing conditions. The example I usually offer is how Nature somehow brought together molecules of air that, when combined, created liquid—when oxygen and hydrogen came together to create water. I don’t think anyone could have imagined that air could create liquid and yet our lives depend on this moment of emergence from so long ago.

I think of emergence, in a sense, as Nature’s creative intelligence grappling with and solving challenging problems and issues that arise in the course of life’s unfolding itself. When I look around the world at this time, I find myself thinking a lot about emergence and wondering how to “call on it” to help us resolve all the various ways in which our human family is harming ourselves and the planet.

For the past few days, as I’ve pondered what I wanted to share this week, the living presence of kindness kept coming into my awareness. I experience all the qualities of life to be expressions of frequencies, qualities that have, as their foundation, particular frequencies with which we resonate.

Listening to the news these days, one of the qualities that seems to be in short supply in the news reports we hear about is kindness. I’m sure that there are countless acts of kindness happening every day, but we don’t tend to hear about them. This got me to thinking about the importance of choosing to resonate with, and express, the qualities and frequency of kindness. 

I’ve no doubt shared before one of the experiences I had with frequencies that convinced me of the power and efficacy of choosing to resonate with chosen qualities. When my sister and I used to take our mother out for a day’s activities, I began those mornings with my usual attunement/meditation time and, as an additional piece, I asked the Spirit of Affection to fill me with its essence, its frequency, all day long. On those days, I found that I was much more patient and attentive to my mother in even more positive ways and the experience oriented me to a practice of choosing frequencies with which to resonate in various situations and contexts.

You may notice that I think of these frequencies as embodied Spirits, such as the Spirit of Ease, the Spirit of Comfort, the Spirit of Love, etc. You can just as easily think of them as archetypes or energy patterns. Or, you can simply think of them as qualities that are available to us at any time. Whatever works best for you is all that matters, so take a moment to touch into what is, for you, the most comfortable way to think about accessing frequencies—qualities of being and expression.

As we experience the intense polarization and conflict in the United States, and also that which has arisen in so many other countries, it feels more important than ever to engage practices that remind us that we are one earth family and that we can’t survive independent from the countless contributions of our human family and our other-than-human earth family. 

I’ve written before about the South African concept and practice of Ubuntu—“I am because you are”, which recognizes and lives into the reality that it is only through the support of the people around us that we are able to be. Here’s one reference describing Ubuntu, one among many: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ubuntu_(philosophy)

Another approach to this same idea comes from Psychiatrist Dan Siegel who has developed what he calls “Intraconnection”, where he describes our awareness as moving from “me to we to mwe”. Here’s a link to his new book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/IntraConnected-Integration-Belonging-Identity-IPNB/dp/0393711692/ref=sr_1_2?crid=N39CCKTAR989&keywords=Dan+Siegel+intraconnected&pldnSite=1&qid=1658667706&sprefix=dan+siegel+intraconnected%2Caps%2C124&sr=8-2

Then, there’s Thich Nhat Hanh’s coining the verb interbeing, where he says that we interare in every moment, that we cannot really be separate from everything around us. Here’s a link to an article by Thich Nhat Hanh on interbeing: https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/insight-of-interbeing/

These and other related approaches and concepts invite us to expand our worldview to move beyond U.S. culture’s (and the cultures of other countries, as well) emphasis on individual issues such as rights, freedom, and independence. For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to dive a bit more deeply into this subject than you may have done before and ask yourself, each day, to recognize your interbeing and interdependence in some way you might ordinarily ignore it.

One of the things the Internet has given us is more access to connecting and communicating with one another.  This is all to the good when the communication promotes the well-being of everyone.  It becomes a problem when it allows people to feed their fears.  We see this phenomenon around the world in those groups that seek to oppress or eliminate other groups of people who may be different from them or in some way represent a threat.

As a trauma specialist, this got me to thinking about how important it is to be conscious of our fears and to cultivate ways to become even more conscious of, meet, and process this powerful emotion.  So much of what creates division and conflict among human beings—be they in a one-on-one relationship, a family, a community, a country—is the presence of underlying, and often unrecognized or disowned, fear.

For this week’s practice, I’d like to offer a practice that can be helpful in recognizing and dealing with the presence of fear.  Fear isn’t an emotion we can eliminate because it’s an important survival response that we need throughout life.  It’s essential that fear can motivate us to jump out of the way of a bus we hadn’t seen, or remind us not to walk down a dark alley alone in the middle of the night.  The problem is that we are often afraid of things that aren’t threatening and, when we act on these kinds of fears, we often generate even more trauma in ourselves and others.