April 2020 Audio Meditation

As I wrote this practice, I was on vacation and had planned not to do any work-related activities while out of town.  I spent the first week in a family-oriented resort that touched me in a way that has stayed with me and left me wanting to share what I feel is the underlying dynamic that brought a vividly heart-centered experience to me.

One of the themes I’ve written about many times is the importance of recognizing that every quality we express is its own frequency.  We radiate qualities and frequencies as we move through the world and this is true of individuals, groups, and places.  I’ve written before about how it can be a powerful experience to tune into the quality of a building or a place in nature and to resonate with what you find there.

At this particular family resort, there was a pervasive quality of what I can only call “happiness”.  As a trauma specialist, it was heart-opening and heart-nourishing to watch parents with children of all ages interacting with kindness, interest, and a focus on fun. Again and again, I saw parents engaged in play with their children, and families engaged in enthusiastic and laughter-filled “team” activities.  Even the trees and many animals around the property—deer, chipmunks galore, birds, geese, fish, and the occasional bear—seemed to also resonate with a fundamental and underlying experience of being welcomed and at ease.

Walking to an appointment the other day, I passed a man who carried a large manila envelope filled with what looked like x-rays.  Whatever they may actually have been, I imagined that he was going to or from a doctor’s appointment.  That got me to thinking about how everyone has a story, everyone has experiences and circumstances at some point in their lives that challenge them as I imagined this man might be being challenged in his life right now.

This also got me to thinking about how important it is to remember that everyone—every human and every other living being—has the capacity to suffer and wants to be free from suffering.  I found myself thinking about the importance of cultivating and strengthening my capacity for empathy, to nurture a habit of remembering that even people with whom I fervently disagree also want to be free from suffering, just as I do.  What I find, again and again, is that insisting on orienting to empathy—which has nothing to do with agreeing with someone—can be very hard at times.

One of the themes I’ve explored and lived with over many years now is my experience of the importance of acknowledging and honoring all aspects of our wholeness. I’ve also been keenly aware of the fact that life on this planet thrives most efficiently within communities, ecologies of diversity. We know from science that natural environments thrive most dynamically when they contain a wide diversity of life forms, working together as a complex community. I think it’s the same with our own, individual selves. Our wholeness contains and expresses the unique diversity of characteristics, talents, challenges, qualities, expressions that each of us embodies. Through our unique wholeness, we contribute to the “ecology of life” within which we live.

Over the years, I have also found myself orienting to an experience of “being lived” by life. My sense has been, and continues to be, that each of us—whether human or some other-than-human, more-than-human earth-kin being—represents an opportunity for life to have a unique experience within and through each of us. Our unique wholeness offers life the opportunity for diverse experiences and expressions, honoring this planet’s seeming preference for diversity.

For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to explore the following guided meditation and see how it feels for you to imagine “being lived” by the life that expresses itself within and through everything on this planet, as well as acknowledging, honoring, and embracing the wholeness within you, leaving nothing out. It’s your wholeness that makes you unique in all the world and it’s your wholeness that allows you to contribute to the diversity that our human family offers to the planet’s ecology.

One of the things I’ve worked with for nearly 40 years is the concept of accessing the optimal future self and, drawing on ideas found in quantum physics, accessing my optimal life. What I like about working with intentions that focus on what is optimal is that it draws from the infinite range of probabilities, what some people call the “quantum foam”, those that offer optimal outcomes and input to my life.

Having called on various expressions of my optimal future self over all these years, my experience has been that my life has unfolded in ways I would never have anticipated and yet in ways that leave me, in my 70’s, deeply contented, even as I continue to be quite busy work-wise.

Over the years, I have offered many people journeys into their optimal futures, always explaining that it’s not actually about the “future”, since the Now is only and always the present moment. Instead, it’s about drawing from our underlying wholeness aspects of being that haven’t before come into the foreground of who we are in the world. 

What I like most about this work is that it asks us to be willing not to know, not to have to plan or figure out how to live into our optimal life. I feel this because our planning or figuring out draws on only what we know already and the goal here is to get out of the way of our many preconceptions, beliefs, shoulds, and rules. Instead, it’s a process of being willing to be open to receive unexpected, unanticipated, and not always comfortable changes in how we move through the world and what we do with our time.