Meditations, experiments, books and guided meditations to assist with nourishing spirituality, healing childhood wounds, and living more consciously.
Meditations, experiments, books and guided meditations to assist with nourishing spirituality, healing childhood wounds, and living more consciously.
In this month’s audio meditation, we continue with the year’s theme of wholeness and connecting with an array of our other-than-human earth-kin, imagining the wholeness that lives within all life we encounter along the way.
If you’d rather listen to the meditation with images from nature, here’s our YouTube version:
Early this morning, before the world was really up and going, I awakened to hear fire engine sirens going down Second Avenue here in New York City. As I listened, I found myself filled with gratitude for all the people who have worked to take care of the rest of us during this time of the pandemic. I thought about the firefighters on the trucks I heard outside my window. I thought of the people who collect garbage, all the workers in my apartment building who have traveled back and forth from home to work throughout the pandemic. I thought of police officers (those who serve with care), grocery workers, street cleaners, the amazing health-care workers who have given their all during this time, those people working to offer vaccines to the rest of us—the list goes on and on and on.
Without all these people, life in the city—pretty much life anywhere—would not be possible and I am filled with gratitude overflowing for their service to the rest of us. I have been safe in my apartment, working on zoom throughout the past year, and because of countless people, most of whom I will never meet, I’ve been able to have food, electricity, water, medical care if needed.
For this week’s practice, I invite you to pay even more attention to expressions of gratitude than you may already be doing. These expressions needn’t be out loud. The important thing is that the contributions of so many people can live in your heart and generate the internal experience of gratitude. That said, I have a tendency to thank people as I see them, which includes those I mentioned above, as well as the people who take care of Central Park so the rest of us can enjoy some time there.
Read More “828th Week: Gratitude, Gratitude, Gratitude”
Whenever I go into Central Park, I take time to see what has changed, how the trees look, what wildlife is around. I enjoy listening to the birds and, also, to the many languages I hear on any given day in New York City. This Fall season, I have enjoyed watching the trees change from their brilliant colors to bare branches after their leaves have been released. For me, this time of year brings its own beauty, and during this season I can see the creative, complex, and varied ways that trees find expression in the shapes and reach of their branches. It’s magical to me and I discover new trees every year—trees I have only noticed during their leaf-laden seasons.
This process that is so familiar to me got me to thinking about the importance of looking for inspiration, beauty, and things that are new as part of nourishing our vitality and aliveness. I was surprised to discover that I had a link to the importance of “awe walks” in my notes that fits perfectly with what I’ve experienced this Fall as the trees have taken on their winter look. Here’s a link to that article. (You can click on the blank space and it will take you to the article. For some reason, the link doesn’t offer visible content, but it’s here…)
Even though this article refers to “older people” and some research that was done with this population, the effects of awe apply to us all. There’s been a good bit of research in this area. Here’s a link to an article reflecting the impact of small moments of awe on anyone’s overall health and well-being.
For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to engage in even more “awe walks” than you may already do. Pay attention to what happens in your body, emotional tone, and thoughts as you look for things that inspire, things you didn’t notice before, things that fill you with awe. If you can’t go outdoors, then do this practice in your home, taking time to notice what you have around you that inspires you and also to invite yourself to notice small details that you may have overlooked.
Read More “858th Week: The Importance of “Awe””
One of the practices I’ve taken on even more actively these days is imagining that I am an open and always-available channel for the energy of universal love to flow through me as I move around in the course of my daily life activities. When I use the word “love”, I’m not referring to the personal kind but, instead, to my sense that the most potent healing energy in the universe is Love with a capital “L”.
It seems to me that this particular kind of “subtle activism” can be an addition to whatever else I, or we, may do to help heal our distressed world, our human family, and all our other earth kin. Imagining the energy of love flowing through me throughout the day doesn’t ask anything of me other than to bring my awareness to the process as often as I choose to do so. And, I feel somewhat confident in saying that choosing to be a channel for the healing quality of love probably doesn’t have a downside when we don’t personalize it…when we realize that we are, indeed, simply open channels for this universal energy to flow through us and into our world.
For years, I’ve had a practice of blessing everything around me. This particular practice became much more an ongoing part of my life when I went through seminary and was ordained as an Interfaith (now called Interspiritual) Minister back in 2003. In recent years, I’ve found that taking classes with David Spangler through his Lorian Association has helped me focus even more fully on these ways of moving through the world.
Read More “786th Week: The Gift of Transmitting Love”