2021 March Audio Meditation

As I thought about what to write for this week’s practice in conscious living, my mind drifted to the importance of remembering to include our heart’s intelligence and perceptions as we move through daily life and, especially, as we move through challenging times.  And, these are challenging times, indeed, all around the planet.

From a spiritual perspective, I experience our current national and world situation to be an expression of our need to mature as a species.  On all sides, I see examples of people and countries making choices between recognizing and acting on our inevitable interdependence—our underlying oneness—versus grasping onto individual satisfaction and gain at the expense of others and the environment.

One of the ways I help myself return to an awareness of my relatedness to, and dependence on, all the life around me is to orient to my heart’s intelligence and perception.  To support this perspective and direct experience, I regularly tap into sources of inspiration offered by people who live within an awareness of oneness, with the recognition that all life on this planet has the same mother/source, has inherent value, and has a right to be as free from suffering as possible.

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.