September 2019 Audio Meditation

I’ve written many times about the importance of being aware of the frequencies with which we resonate in any given moment, and of the impact they have not only on our internal quality of life but also on the quality of our engagement with our environment and the people and situations we encounter along the way. In every moment, we have choice as to how we respond to what’s happening to and around us. 

You can think of frequencies as qualities. What qualities do you like to resonate with in your life? Do you enjoy feeling delight, ease, quiet, compassion? Do you find that you often engage fear or anger? Most of us feel the whole array of possible frequencies, given the moments in time and the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

One thing I want to be sure to say at this point is that choosing the frequencies with which we want to resonate doesn’t mean not choosing to act when action is called for. I always think of the Dalai Lama when someone asked him if he ever gets angry. He said that he certainly did. Then he mentioned the importance of compassionate action when we experience injustice, for example, and that makes us angry. So, what I share here is not an invitation to passivity. Instead, it’s an invitation to more consistently notice the frequencies with which you resonate so that you have a moment of choice.

For example, when we find ourselves resonating with frequencies that are distressing or agitating, or when we lose awareness that we have jumped into one of these frequencies with both feet, we probably don’t end up feeling so good about our experience. A key here is to cultivate enough ongoing awareness to be able to notice when we become captivated or captured by a frequency that we don’t really like. Then, we can hopefully shift our attention to a frequency that feels more constructive. 

An example might be a time when you are moving into irritation. If you can catch that, you might decide to shift to an awareness of the steadiness you carry in the core of your body and take a moment to settle in. When I feel irritation coming on, I do one of two things. If it’s during the day when I’m up and about, I shift into an awareness of my heart space and choose a quality of ease or flexibility with which I want to meet the experience that was irritating me. A very mundane and not-at-all dramatic example of this is when one of my feline family members started doing something in the middle of the night that woke me up every night at about 3am. When I found myself getting irritated, I reminded myself that the only person that would hurt was me, so I shifted to imagining myself filling up with light, throughout my whole body, and that put me back to sleep. Fortunately, the next day I found a solution to stop the middle-of-the-night antics and I saved myself from a sleepless night stirred up by irritation.

Here’s a practice focused on choosing frequencies. It can be a daily or weekly practice. It’s based on something I learned in a metaphysical school many, many years ago.

Choose the frequency with which you want to resonate this week. I suggest focusing on it for a week in order to become very familiar with the quality and tone of the frequency, which will make it easier to elicit when you want or need it.

Then, four times a day, at least, return to that frequency and affirm it as your choice to resonate with throughout the week.

Do so:

          When you arise in the morning            
At noon
At dusk
When you go to bed in the evening

In addition, when you first bring the frequency into awareness and touch into its qualities, give yourself some time to orient to the following:

Notice your whole body-mind experience of resonating with the frequency you have chosen for this week:

            The sensations that arise in your body.
The tone and quality of your emotional experience.
The tone and quality of your mental experience.
The tone and quality of your spiritual experience.

Also notice the quality of your thoughts and behaviors throughout the week, becoming increasingly aware of how the frequencies with which you resonate have an immediate impact on your behavior and interactions with yourself and others. And, please remember that your self-talk is a form of self-hypnosis and the quality and tone of it truly matters.

Also, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise, allowing them to move on through without your having to do anything with or about them. 

Here’s the audio version of this practice if you’d rather listen to it. Also, please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.

When I actively taught Somatic Experiencing, one of the themes that I passed along from my first SE teacher and good friend, Diane Poole Heller, was the distinction between expressions of “power over” and those of “mutual empowerment.” Diane embodies and expresses mutual empowerment in her relationships with the people around her and her influence and modeling have had a powerful impact on me. The distinction between power over (where there are only two options—you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom) and mutual empowerment (where no one has to lose power in order for things to work out) has stayed with me as an active intention to support mutual empowerment in every way I can. I have lived that not only as a teacher but also as a mentor. When people talk about the “new Earth” that needs to arise from the breakdown of the old institutions that are now being challenged around the world, what comes to mind for me is a fundamental shift from power-over styles of leadership and dominance, including our relationship with the planet and all our human and other-than-human earth-kin, to styles that embody and express mutual empowerment within every aspect of our lives.

A key thing about mutual empowerment is that it has, as its foundation, the belief and experience that your having power doesn’t automatically take away from anyone else and their having power doesn’t automatically take away from you. A stance of mutual empowerment tends to naturally engender respect, as well as wishes for others to have as much success, happiness, satisfaction—whatever—as is possible for them.

For this week’s practice, I invite you to pay attention to those times when you encounter people or situations that express “power-over” dynamics and those where you see, or experience, styles of “mutual empowerment”. Also notice these dynamics in yourself so that if you have slipped into a power-over style of interaction you’ll be able to choose whether you want to continue in that mode or if you want to experiment with shifting into a mutual-empowerment style.

Read More “872nd Week: Noticing Mutual-Empowerment and Power-Over Dynamics “

As I write this practice, it is vigorously snowing outside and I am deeply grateful to be tucked in and warm. As I watch the snow fall, I find myself pondering something that came up recently and that is the relationship between, and differences around, being and doing. 

This got me to thinking about the importance of how we be and that our being is so much more important than our doing. That doesn’t mean doing doesn’t play a significant role in how we engage and impact the world, but it seems to me that the bottom line really focuses on the quality and tone of our being.

I’ve said before that our internal self-talk is a form of self-hypnosis and that the quality of our self-talk plays a major role in determining the quality of our internal life, of our felt-sense of who and how we are in the world. There are many practices that invite us to track our self-talk, along with suggestions as to how we might shift from self-critical internal conversations to those that reflect acceptance, support, and gratitude for who and how we are. Some are from cognitive therapy approaches and some are from the ever-expanding influence of mindfulness practices.

For this week’s practice, first, I invite you to become even more aware of the internal conversations you have with yourself and to notice how these moments of self-talk affect you. Do they lift you up and make you feel more able to engage the world, to dive into activities and projects that nourish you, to help you settle into a deeper sense of comfort with yourself? Or, do these moments of self-talk drag you down, generate shame, or make you feel that you want to avoid connecting with your world?

Read More “826th Week: Being, Doing, and Self-Talk”

Without doubt, we live in challenging times locally and globally. I’ve written before about the importance of being able to return to the steadiness that is always at the core of our being as a way to manage the collective distress and suffering that can come into our awareness in any moment. It’s equally important to have access to what’s known as the “noticing” part of our brain, the aspect of our awareness that arises within our present-day observer. Janina Fisher writes about this part of the brain in her new book, “Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists”.

The observer function is very different from the internal critic or judge. It’s that aspect of our awareness that notices, that mindfully observes. This kind of mindful awareness offers us an opportunity to choose how we want to respond to what comes our way. It can allow us to do so in a non-reactive, or at least less-reactive, way.

Below is a brief practice for cultivating the “noticing” brain, especially focused on those times when you move toward becoming overwhelmed by all that’s going on your life, in our collective human family, and with our beleaguered planet.

Read More “845th Week: Cultivating the “Noticing” Brain”