December Audio Meditation

I find myself continually returning to a commitment to express kindness as I move through each day. In a world filled with contention and disasters, it can be hard to remember to stand on a foundation of kindness rather than a foundation of fear or upset. There are a couple of concepts in psychology related to the developing understanding of what is called “memory reconsolidation”, which is how our brain adds new information to old learning. Drawn from the teachings of Juliane Taylor Shore, our experiences generate the “psychological floor we stand on” and the quality and tone of our “emotional knowing,” which I think of as a filter through which we understand self and the world. While I’m not going to go into these dynamics here, I want to draw on the idea of the “psychological floor we stand on” and our “emotional knowing” as we think about kindness and how we express it in our world. 

In the psychological sense, these dynamics are unconscious and automatic. For the purposes of this week’s practice in conscious living, I’d like to propose that if we consciously hold the intention to stand on a “psychological floor of kindness” and hold the intention that we will look at the world through a filter of kindness, our everyday actions and states of mind would more naturally orient toward experiences and expressions of qualities of kindness.

When you imagine internally standing on a psychological floor of kindness, what comes into your awareness and experience? Are there images that arise? What physical sensations do you experience when you imagine standing on this “floor” of awareness? Spend a few minutes simply resonating with the quality of kindness and notice what else comes into your experience.

When you imagine viewing and interpreting the world through a filter characterized by kindness, what kinds of thoughts and emotions arise in you? Do mixed feelings arise, as well? How do your thoughts and feelings register in your body? Do you find yourself more settled, your heart more open or do you find yourself pulling back from what you experience?

It’s just about mid-week and I haven’t yet posted a practice for this week, which would usually be posted by Sunday. These times when I draw a complete blank become an invitation to relax and open my awareness to what might unexpectedly drop in. This process reminds me of the practice of “not doing”. Instead, it becomes a practice of “being” and “receiving” rather than figuring out or doing.

Then, this takes me to the importance of intuitive awareness and how our current consensus reality in Western thinking tends to devalue non-rational ways of knowing. For me, non-rational ways of knowing are equally present, if not dominant, in my usual way of moving through the world, so I’d like to share some thoughts and an exercise that offer support for intuitive ways of knowing.

Whenever I find myself with a conundrum, not knowing exactly what to do, I ask for help or input. It’s not important to think about where the information or support comes from. For example, I might ask for help from “cat intelligence” or “plant intelligence” if I have a question about how to help the felines who live with me or the trees that grace my small apartment. What comes to mind are all the varieties of collective consciousness that Rupert Sheldrake talks about in his work with morphic fields—fields of information that species contribute to and draw from all the time.

One of my favorite examples of a morphic field is where Sheldrake talks about small birds in England. Prior to World War II, these birds had a habit of flipping the lids off of milk bottles delivered and left on people’s stoops. The birds were after the cream just under the bottle’s lid. Milk then became rationed and not readily available during the war and several generations of these birds were born and died without having learned to take off the lids of the milk bottles. As soon as deliveries began again after the war, the birds were back, doing what they had always done. Sheldrake says that they are able to do this because of the information field of their species, their morphic field, which contains all the information of every member of the species that has ever lived.

I posted this quotation to the Devadana Sanctuary website and Facebook page, as one of the daily inspirational posts that go up each morning:

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours. 
And so may a slow
Wind work these words 
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak 
To mind your life.

~ John O’Donohue

One of the things I seem to always experience with the poetry of John O’Donohue is how alive his words become as I live into them and allow them to touch me. This poem feels deeply relevant to our current experience of the Covid pandemic and reminded me of the importance of taking time to nourish ourselves in gentle ways.