November 2014 Audio Meditation

One of my daily tasks is to post an inspirational quotation and a nature photo to the Devadana Sanctuary page on Facebook each morning.  I’ve been doing this for a number of years now and obtain the photographs from bigstockphoto.com, where I have a subscription.  What this has created for me is a daily morning meditation looking through photographs of our beautiful planet, seeking the right one to go with that day’s quotation.  I have found that this process has deepened my love and awe for this amazing planetary home we inhabit.

Having a daily reminder that I’m a part of nature, not something separate from it, has been a support to my practice of orienting to heart intelligence and perception when I remember to do so.  Looking at the stunning creativity and beauty of this planet, of the creative and complex ecology that supports life of such diversity and intelligence, reminds me again and again that we are all in this together.  There is no other home, no other place, and everyone and everything we encounter along the way is kin.  We are all offspring of planet Earth.

Read More “742nd Week: Loving Our Earth”

I ran across the quotation on Facebook the other day, from Pema Chodron’s book, “The Pocket Pema”:

“Am I Going to Add to the Aggression?
Every day we could think about aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Darfur, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, ‘Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?’ Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, ‘Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?’”

This got me to thinking about how, in just about every moment, we face choices about how we move through the world, how we choose to express ourselves in a multitude of situations and circumstances. Even when we are in a situation like the current pandemic, where most of us stay at home much of the time. As we move through our daily experience even at home, endless moments arise, each offering choices about how we are going to respond to whatever may be unfolding.

Because I believe that we are part of a larger collective consciousness, one to which we contribute and from which we draw all the time, I also believe that it’s impossible not to affect ourselves and the collective through the choices we make as we respond to the world around us. I’ve written before about experimenting with orienting to heart perception and intelligence by asking ourselves, “What would my heart do right now?” Or, “How would my heart respond right now?” This doesn’t mean we will never be angry, distressed, embarrassed, or outraged. What it touches on is how do we choose to handle these feelings.

Read More “831st Week: What Do We Add to the World Each Day?”

Listening to a cooking show on NPR this morning, there was an interview with a man who has a restaurant in Houston, TX called Underbelly Hospitality.  I didn’t hear the very beginning of the interview, but the gist was that the owner/chef has a great interest in foods of every kind, from many different countries, and has spent a great deal of time with other chefs/restauranteurs in the area getting to know the in’s and out’s of their particular kinds of food, including Vietnamese and others.  What struck me most powerfully is that he is a man who practices what I call “mutual empowerment”.  At his restaurant, there was a time when the check for meals was accompanied by a list of other restaurants in the area where people could go, inviting them to explore how these foods tasted in various places. His goal was, and is, to share all the wonderful resources in his city and to cultivate his close relationships with other chefs in the city.

I’ve written before about the power dynamics of “power-over” and those of “mutual empowerment.”  In the “power-over” model, there are only two positions: who’s on top and who’s on the bottom, who has power and who is over-powered.  We see this kind of power relationship in many countries in the world right now, including the United States.  In the “power-over” model, only a relatively few people are granted the privilege to have power over a vast majority of people.  Many are left out…

Read More “767th Week: Practicing Mutual Empowerment”

During the process of putting together my breakfast smoothie for tomorrow morning this evening, I suddenly noticed that I had the face of a cat in my face, paws of more than one cat all over the kitchen counters.  I’m pretty strict about cats not being  involved directly in my food preparation, but the person who stays with them when I’m out of town clearly has different rules than I do.

What struck me this evening was the depth of humor I inevitably touch into when the cats (I live with three of them) show up when I don’t expect them.  The minute I realized that I had a cat’s head and paws in my immediate awareness, I noticed that I was spontaneously laughing and snuggling fur.

This got me to thinking about the benefits of cultivating a sense of humor over life’s inevitable glitches and moments of non-traumatic surprise.  So many moments in any given day don’t go how we expect or want them to go.  That doesn’t mean, though, that they can’t be moments of delight or fun.

Read More “766th Week: Cultivating a Sense of Humor”

In this time of intense social and global activation and distress, it behooves each one of us to be mindful not only of our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but also to keep in mind that, in a collective sense, our way of being in the world matters.  Here’s a quotation I recently posted on the Devadana Sanctuary page, and it got me to thinking about how we manage what becomes our contribution to the collective referred to:

“The world we are experiencing today is the result of our collective consciousness, and if we want a new world, each of us must take responsibility for helping create it.” 

~ Rosemary Fillmore

One of the most basic practices that can make a difference in the quality of our internal life is to notice what we orient to in our thoughts and feelings, and what “frequencies” we tune into as we move through the day.  For example, if you orient your self-talk and day-dreaming toward worry, you are—in a sense—dialing in the quality of “worry”, connecting with it not only in your own imagination but also in the collective worry carried by us all as a collective consciousness.

Read More “755th Week: Choosing Frequencies”