April 2020 Audio Meditation
For those who prefer a visual meditation along with the audio, here’s a link to the YouTube version of this month’s guided meditation…
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A Meditation on Wholeness and Core Presence
This meditation offers an opportunity to tap into a deeper sense of wholeness and of core presence. It is drawn and adapted from an offering in a class with David Spangler through the Lorian Association and is used with permission.
During this time of the Corvid-19 virus, having ways to access a stronger sense of our core presence, and an ability to tap into a living sense of our body-mind wholeness, can help support a much-needed and stabilizing sense of steadiness.
For those of you who would prefer to access this meditation on YouTube, here’s the link:
749th Week: Offering Blessings and Gratitude
Each morning, I post a daily inspirational quotation and nature photograph on the Devadana Sanctuary Facebook page and the one I put up recently has stayed on my mind. I thought I’d share it as this week’s practice, given the amount of contention and negative feelings and events happening in so many of our human communities around the world.
The quotation is from the work of Pierre Predervand, who writes about the powerful practice of offering blessings as an aspect of, and activity in, daily living. I include gratitude in this practice because, for me, both offering blessings and expressions of gratitude are powerfully related. Here’s the quotation from Pierre Predervand (from his book, The Gentle Art of Blessing) that I posted the other day:
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677th Week: Nurturing Mutual Empowerment
In my years of teaching about trauma resolution, I’ve drawn on something one of my dear friends and teachers, Diane Heller, taught me many years ago. It was the distinction between a power model that encompasses only two options—power over or overpowered—and a mutual empowerment model that says one person’s power in no way diminishes the power of anyone else. Since learning about this, I have done my best to interact with others from a mutual empowerment model.
I’ve also spent many years helping psychotherapy clients notice how comparing themselves to others almost always leads to suffering, as does the habit of taking things personally. Read More “677th Week: Nurturing Mutual Empowerment”
2022 August Meditation
We continue this month with our exploration of frequencies. Our focus is on pleasure and delight–the qualities and energies inherent in these frequencies and states of being.
Here’s the audio of this month’s meditation:
If you’d rather have images with the meditation, here’s our YouTube version:
716th Week: Blaming the Victim
One of the books from graduate school that powerfully impacted me was “Blaming the Victim”. I was in a class where I focused my work on shame—collective and individual—and got deeply immersed in how we tend to blame the victim as a way to validate our beliefs and actions. The impact of that class, and particularly the above book, has never left me. It started me on a 40+ year journey of tracking my own internal process of judging and blaming, catching myself when I can and challenging my own rationalizations about what’s happening to people locally and around the world. Even with this practice, I know that there are countless times when I engage in blaming the victim, unaware of my own biases and limiting beliefs.
As I watch the current situation in the United States—and we are not alone in our mistreatment of people we consider to be “other”—I not only feel deep heartache and distress, but am also keenly aware of how vividly a “blaming-the-victim” mentality seems to have captured the minds of those in power. That this stance lacks empathy goes without saying. The deeper problem is that blaming victims allows us to remain unaware of our privilege, of our seemingly justifiable disconnection from the suffering of others. Read More “716th Week: Blaming the Victim”