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2024 May Meditation
This month, we continue with our theme of radiating love. This time, we orient to the country each of us lives in, sending love to the Spirit of that country. Then, include all the people and other earth-kin who inhabit your country. Also radiate love to the Nature of your country, including every life form, including lakes, rivers, wetlands, deserts, mountains, waterfalls, prairies, forests, jungles, the ocean–whatever expressions of Nature are part of your country’s essential physical being.
Week 648:Finding Your Inherent Steadiness
One of the things that has always made sense to me is an awareness that, at the core of us, we are whole. We may not feel all the aspects of ourselves at any given moment but, just as a kaleidoscope doesn’t reveal all the pieces of glass in any one design it creates, all the pieces are still there, even when they aren’t visible. Read More “Week 648:Finding Your Inherent Steadiness”

894th Week: Self-Talk and Your Worldview
One of the things I often share with others, and have no doubt written about in these practices a number of times, is how our ongoing flow of self-talk is a form of self-hypnosis. We program ourselves with our self-talk and it’s worthwhile to notice how it affects, if not shapes, the quality of our internal lives.
This week, I want to take a particular orientation to tracking and engaging self-talk. Because our self-talk so deeply reflects our beliefs about ourselves and the world around us, for this week’s practice I would like to focus on the impact of self-talk that focuses on kindness. And, in the same way, to invite you to notice the quality of your internal experience when your self-talk focuses on unkind statements about yourself and/or others.
For most of us, the flow of self-talk is automatic and pretty much unceasing. It moves along on the stream of consciousness that constantly flows by and, even though we may not pay particular attention to it, this flow of self-talk affects the quality of our body-mind being from moment to moment.
And so, for this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to track your self-talk around the theme of kindness. Notice when you become aware of thinking unkindly about yourself or someone else. Have you noticed that we will sometimes talk to ourselves in ways we would never think of doing with someone else? That’s a key self-talk habit to change, by gently refusing to talk to yourself in ways you wouldn’t talk to someone else. In addition, I invite you to notice what happens when you talk to yourself gently, with kindness and comfort or encouragement. If what you say doesn’t feel authentic at first, that’s normal. Keep it up and notice over time how, when your heart becomes involved, you discover that you actually care about how you treat yourself.
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769th Week: The Raincloud of Knowable Things
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.
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2025 June Meditation
This month, we begin with a focus on timeless stillness, a frequency and state of being that offers deep quiet, a refuge in the core of our body-mind. Then, I invite you to notice your relationship with choice, given that our choices orient us to particular qualities of experience and being, and to choose a frequency for this meditation. Then, notice what it’s like to resonate with it. I also invite you to take time to deeply experience the impact of your choice of that particular frequency and then, after some time, to return to the timeless stillness for a few minutes.
The audio version is here:
If you’d rather do the meditation with images from nature, here’s the YouTube version, here’s the link to that video:

845th Week: Choosing the Frequencies We Radiate
Sitting in Central Park, in the presence of the majestic and beautiful trees that surround me, my awareness again drifts to our current world condition, to the immense suffering in Afghanistan and in so many other places around the world, including all those who are suffering here in the United States. One of my primary practices is to check in with myself many times a day to notice what qualities/frequencies I’m emanating and radiating not only into myself but also into the world around me. And, importantly, whatever radiates from me—from any and all of us—immediately becomes part of the human collective consciousness that we all share.
For most of us, we don’t pay much conscious attention to the quality of collective consciousness that affects us in every moment and we may not fully realize how powerfully we are affected by it. It’s this lack of recognition that prompts me often to say something about it because whatever we may be feeling personally, the frequencies with which we resonate in any given moment is amplified, magnified by that same feeling and the frequencies it represents that exist in our collective.
For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you, as I have so many times, to pay particular attention to where you resonate during this time of so much suffering. And, below is a practice to play with to support your offering to the collective qualities of consciousness that offer support rather than feed activation.
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I’m wondering if you are the same Nancy Napier who attended University High School in the mid-1960s?
Hi Tom – Nope, I didn’t. There are a lot of Nancy Napier’s out there…