November 2018 Meditation
If you’d like to experience this meditation with nature images, here’s a link to the youtube version:
Meditations, experiments, books and guided meditations to assist with nourishing spirituality, healing childhood wounds, and living more consciously.
Meditations, experiments, books and guided meditations to assist with nourishing spirituality, healing childhood wounds, and living more consciously.
If you’d like to experience this meditation with nature images, here’s a link to the youtube version:
We’re going to return to what we did earlier this year and I invite you to notice any change in your experience over this time of recognizing the living presence of relationships, collaborative communities, that are everywhere in your life and that your radiating presence touches everyone and everything you encounter along the way.
Connect with the community that is your body and orienting to noticing the quality of interactive relationship with that community, affirming that it is a community of collaboration and cooperation amongst trillions of organisms. Offer gratitude and blessings to all the organisms and to the body as a whole, honoring the body’s intelligence (i.e., healing cuts, digesting food, creating waste, etc.) Send love to all the organisms in the community that is the body;
send love to every organ, with gratitude for the work it does for you. Honor your skeleton, this internal infrastructure of support for your body. Send love to all the fluids in your body. Honor your muscles and the work they do for you. Acknowledge your fascia, the connective tissue in your body. Honor the largest organ of your body, your skin, sending it love and gratitude.
Notice your experience in your heart space as you do this.
Please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.
Here’s the YouTube version if you’d like to do the meditation with images of nature…
As I’ve written about before, I’ve been noticing the tangible impact of practicing offering blessings as I move through the world. One of the most important is the ongoing practice of blessing water. Water carries memory, as demonstrated in the work of Masaru Emoto, where he looked at the crystalline structure of frozen water molecules before and after they were blessed, as well as when they were sent love, gratitude, hate, or “you’re a loser”. It’s quite compelling research and, in case you haven’t seen it, here’s a link to a YouTube video about water and memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOp-bxNug5A. There are many other related videos, as well, if you are interested.
Many people don’t believe that water carries memory, or that it matters if water is blessed before taken into the body. Many of us forget that our bodies are up to 65% water and, when we take into account the images that come from Emoto’s work, we can better appreciate why blessing water is an important practice for our overall sense of well-being.
I am also a proponent of expressing a great deal of ongoing love and gratitude for my body, as it’s the means by which I’m here in the world. I include my awareness that the water in my body will carry my love and gratitude within it as it circulates. Whether it directly affects my body, I don’t really know but, even with the inevitable changes that come with aging, I know I feel better when I actively engage this practice.
Read More “765th Week: Blessing Water”Often as I walk through Central Park, I thank workers along the way for the help they offer in keeping the park a wonderful place to spend time. Yesterday I thanked a worker and he said, “We love this park, so we love this work.” This morning I thanked a garbage man for helping to make our city more livable. I always thank the postal carriers at both my office and at home when I see them, along with people from all the various delivery services that bring packages filled with things that make my life work. Without these people, life would be very different.
As I move through New York City, I pay attention to people whose job it is to support the rest of us, people who help make our lives easier to navigate. For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to do the same and, if you are already someone who thanks people along the way, ramp it up a bit and see how that feels. Gratitude brings its gifts not only to those we thank but to us, as well. It has the power to lift our spirits, as well as those who receive gratitude from us.
Our sense of well-being is nourished when we engage in expressing gratitude to the people around us. We are more likely to remember that we are part of a community and that, without the whole community, we wouldn’t be able to live our lives in the ways we do. This awareness of community can also remind us of the underlying interdependence that is fundamental to human existence. We depend on one another for just about every aspect of our lives and taking the time to thank people we don’t know and may never see again helps to reinforce an awareness of just how much we need one another.
Read More “744th Week: Expressing Gratitude”I ended last week’s practice with a suggestion to come back to the present moment and to this current breath as a way to manage some of the stress of this time in our collective lives.
One of the practices that I used to teach in the Somatic Experiencing® trainings was to invite people to notice how they “add fuel to the bonfires of activation”. Many of us have grown up in cultures that don’t focus on tracking how we allow our thinking to drag us hither and yon, an experience that generates enormous amounts of suffering. In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s more important than ever to be able to notice when we increase our suffering by allowing our fear-generated thoughts to dominate our attention and experience.
One of the practices that can be difficult but is powerfully important is to hold the intention to come back to the present moment, to the breath you’re taking right now, and to focus awareness on this breath, on this moment. In terms of self-talk, one of the things that’s helpful to say while doing this practice is something along the lines of, “In this moment, right here and right now, I’m okay enough.”
Read More “782nd Week: This Breath, This Moment”Continuing with our focus on the frequency of Love, this month we emphasize sending Love to the whole of this beautiful planet, to all of nature, all of the beings of nature, to all the people you know, to all beings. Radiating love to Gaia, to the Spirit of planet Earth, imagining the entire planet enfolded in the frequency and qualities of Love.
Please remember never to use guided meditations while driving or operating dangerous machines.
Here’s the YouTube version of the meditation, if you prefer to experience it with images of nature…