February 2015 Audio Meditation

As a child, my grandmother was my first spiritual teacher and many of the things she taught me have stayed in my awareness over all these many years.  One of the things she taught me I’ve written about before—the raincloud of knowable things.  What continues to touch me about this concept is how vividly it reminds me that I’m never alone, that I am always and inevitably part of something much bigger than myself.  In this case, it reminds me that I’m part of a vast collective consciousness that contains the wisdom of all humans across all time and that I and everyone else contributes to and draws from this collective all the time.  This is an idea that has supported my work as a trauma specialist in psychotherapy and it is an idea that has given me hope even when things may have looked profoundly bleak.

It also touches into an experience that gets stronger for me as I age—that I am in community with a reciprocal environment all the time.  I saw an illustration of this the other day as I walked across Central Park.  I noticed a gentleman, early in the morning, taking cans and bottles out of the trash bins scattered throughout the park.  It was a Monday morning, so the bins had quite a few offerings and I began to think about how this man’s activities support recycling, and that he contributes something meaningful that I usually wouldn’t know anything about.  That got me to thinking about all the activities going on in my world that I don’t see and yet add to the quality and support of my life.  It reminded me of the fact that, even at subtle levels, we constantly contribute to and draw from our collective environment.

The contention around whether to wear masks or not during this pandemic brings into vivid focus what happens when we forget that we are all in this together and that we need to work together to help prevent unnecessary illness and death. So, this week’s practice in conscious living is going to be somewhat shorter and to the point:

• For the coming week, I invite you to notice what you are doing to contribute to the welfare and well-being of all of us. That might include wearing a mask, which infectious disease scientists have said again and again will reduce the spread of the virus. It might include donating money to a cause you care about, marching in a protest, or doing volunteer work in your community. It might mean checking in on elderly neighbors to make sure that they have what they need, or creating a friend network, if you haven’t done so already, so that everyone has someone to turn to in case of need.