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832nd Week: We Are All in This Together
Whether we orient ourselves to climate change and the environment, racial injustice, species degradation, power grabs, hunger, or disease, our global Internet connections bring into awareness the immensity of suffering happening on our planet at this time. It also underscores that we are all in this together, given that we travel around the world, share economic and cultural activities, that we are one human family living with countless other earth-kin, on our precious planet that has its limits.
It can become overwhelming to recognize that there’s nowhere to go to escape our interdependence and interbeing. The fact is that we are bound to one another. As the African word “ubuntu” states, “I am me because we are.” Ubuntu invites us to treat others with respect and to acknowledge that we are irrevocably dependent on one another. Here’s a Ted-x talk that speaks to actions that arise from an awareness of ubuntu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrnhdY0B7Cg
For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to explore the principles of Ubuntu more deeply, in whatever way works for you and within whatever philosophical or spiritual orientation resonates with you. Because ubuntu focuses on humanity, I also invite you to expand your definition and experience of family to include all our earth-kin, all the life that arises from the natural world that is our true home.
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842nd Week: Interbeing: Connection, and Interdependence
Listening to the news these days can be a challenge with all the reports of rabid polarization, anger, and fear. This got me to thinking yet again about processes of subtle activism—things we can do within our own body-mind being that might add something positive and, at the very least, not add to the distress going on all around us.
This morning, as I sit in Central Park taking in the green of trees and abundant birdsong, I remember that we all “interare”. The word “interbeing” was created by Thich Nhat Hahn, the Buddhist monk and teacher, and he offered it as a way of reminding us that we are not only dependent on each other and on every other life form that is part of our ecological niche, but we are also related to everyone and everything on the planet. Even when we violently disagree with one another, we are related, part of an earth community of interbeing.
For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to spend some time living with this idea. If it’s already natural to you, then take it a step deeper and find even more earth relations you may have left out of your experience of connection. In a world of interbeing and interdependence, no one and nothing can be omitted. We are part of one global ecosystem and we deeply depend on this earth family with which we are connected.
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859th Week: Each Small Act Matters
I’ve mentioned a number of times that I post a daily inspirational quote and photograph of our beautiful earth in two places. One is the Devadana Sanctuary Facebook page and the other is on the Devadana Sanctuary side of my Portal to Multidimensional Living. I’ve done this for a number of years now, as the process of choosing the quotation and photograph each day has become a form of meditation for me.
Two recent quotes, one I posted through Devadana Sanctuary, the other posted by someone else on Facebook, touched into a practice that I engage in daily and I wanted to share it with you at this time of the ending of one year, one cycle, and the beginning of the new. First, here are two quotations that touch on what I want to share in this weekly practice:
“I do not think that it is naïve to think that it is the tiny, particular acts of love and joy which are going to swing the balance.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet
“We live at a time when the greatest form of courage is to act as if our lives made a difference.”
~ William Sullivan, The Secret of the Inca

May 2018 Audio Meditation
Here’s the YouTube version of the audio meditation with images: