September Audio Meditation

As I write this practice, I’m at a professional training outside New York City. The trainings are held in a hotel where we have been many times and it recently changed management.  What many of us experienced as we arrived for this training was a noticeable difference in the “feel” of the hotel, a noticeable change in how we were met by the front desk, and a noticeable change in the quality of service we have encountered along the way.

At this training, my job is to manage the assisting team, as well as deal with participants who have questions or issues about the team.  Each morning, we have a team meeting and take time to connect, settle in, and clear up any problems, questions, or issues that may have arisen during the prior day.  One of the things I do as part of our team meeting is to take time for all of us to connect to our individual core presence and internal steadiness and, then, to connect with our collective team presence and steadiness.  Our keynote is kindness, and I invite all of us to embody that particular quality as we move through the training days.  Our job is to offer supportive containment as well as teaching input.

One of the things I’ve asked the team to keep in mind is to extend that kindness to the hotel building and all its employees.  I ask this because we inevitably radiate into our environment the qualities that we carry with us as we move through the world.  I can imagine that the employees and building receive a good bit of negative input, given the ways in which the place has changed, and I want to ensure that we don’t add to a collective quality of dissatisfaction, annoyance, and other activating feelings that the changes tend to elicit.

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.

It goes without saying that these are stressful times and we all are having to dig into the strategies that we have for finding and accessing our internal steadiness and sense of centeredness. One of the practices I’ve written about many times over the years has to do with recognizing, and then playing with, the constant process of choosing what is in the foreground of awareness and what is in the background.  Our culture tends to favor putting activation, emotional intensity, and drama into the foreground, while experiences of being centered, steady, and internally quiet slide into the background, often not to even be acknowledged as present.

Another dynamic I’ve written about many times is the metaphor of the kaleidoscope—that we are all complex beings comprised of many aspects or parts of ourselves.  Sometimes we’re fully focused in our present-day adult self, thinking, responding, and behaving in centered and rational ways.  Other times, we are triggered into different kinds of activation and find ourselves acting from impulses that arise deep within unhealed and uncentered parts of us. Read More “729th Week: Foreground/Background Revisited”

In times of personal and collective distress, it’s important to have ways to re-center ourselves as we move through daily life, as we hear news reports of terrible things happening to people and the planet, and as we face the ordinary challenges and stresses of everyday life. One of the things I do each morning is take time to settle myself, even if I don’t have time to meditate or do my regular attunement process.  Each of us may have a different way to settle ourselves. The practice that follows organizes itself around what I think is the fundamental importance of not only having a reliable way to ground yourself but also to have a commitment to do so each day.

One of the reasons I feel it’s so important to re-center and settle ourselves each day is because of the powerful impact of collective consciousness on all of us.  Read More “718th Week:  Supporting Re-Centering”