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.
This year, we focus on frequencies and on the impact of resonating with particular qualities. The focus for September is on affection and the possibility of resonating with the heart intention of “I choose love”.
For those who prefer to have images with their meditation, here’s the link to the YouTube version of the meditation:
As I write this week’s practice, we’re about a month into “sheltering in place” here in New York City. For all of us, the whole world of human beings, this is a time of challenge beyond what many of us would have imagined possible. The fact that we are able to be connected around the globe is a previously unimagined gift of being able to move through this experience as a connected human family.
I had an experience this week that touched me deeply and I want to share it as the theme of this week’s practice that I’d like to invite you to explore. I got an email through my website and it was from someone who had noticed that I hadn’t posted a practice last week. She hoped that I was okay and wanted to make contact to be sure everything was all right with me.
As I read this unexpected email, my heart filled with gratitude and warmth that this person cared enough to be in touch and to check in with me. It got me to thinking about how powerful it is when we care about and for one another, what a balm it is to the heart, and how such an act can fill someone with a sense of connection, warmth, and gratitude.
Read More “783rd Week: The Gift of Caring”One of the truly challenging practices for many of us is to live with harmlessness, called “ahimsa” in Sanskrit. A question that arises is, how do we engage the world actively without causing harm? I remember someone once saying that the Buddha said it’s impossible not to cause harm in many small ways, simply by living. We eat other beings as food, we inadvertently step on insects when walking around, we use and then throw away many things throughout the course of our daily lives. And, when it comes to social action, how do we engage that if we have a commitment to ahimsa?
Read More “667th Week: Practicing “Ahimsa”, Harmlessness”
I’m in the process of preparing a webinar for professionals on the subject of cultivating a sense of connection with the world around us. One of the things we contribute ongoingly, but usually unconsciously, is the essence, the quality of being that emanates from us in every moment, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing. We add to the quality of the world around us by the qualities we radiate into our environment.
I’ve mentioned many times about the importance of the frequencies with which we resonate. So this practice will be a reminder to many of you, and I figure we can’t be reminded enough to pay attention to the frequencies with which we resonate in any given moment. For example, if we resonate with the quality of kindness, chances are that we will emanate that frequency into our environment and into the interactions we have with others along the way. Because of this, we may discover that we encounter kindness from others more often than we might otherwise experience. If we resonate with a quality of irritation or anger, chances are that we will emanate that frequency throughout ourselves and into our environment, and it will have an impact on the quality of our interactions with others as we move through any given day. Frequencies, qualities, essences matter.
I want to make a distinction between upsetting moments, jarring experiences, and blissful times of elation and the fundamental qualities/frequencies/essences with which we resonate on a deeper and more habitual basis. We all have moments of shifting emotions and up-and-down qualities of self-talk. That’s inevitable. What we can cultivate, though, is a foundation of qualities that we consciously choose, frequencies with which we want to resonate, frequencies/qualities we want to radiate within ourselves and out into the world around us.
Read More “846th Week: The Qualities We Engender in Our Environment”
As we experience the intense polarization and conflict in the United States, and also that which has arisen in so many other countries, it feels more important than ever to engage practices that remind us that we are one earth family and that we can’t survive independent from the countless contributions of our human family and our other-than-human earth family.
I’ve written before about the South African concept and practice of Ubuntu—“I am because you are”, which recognizes and lives into the reality that it is only through the support of the people around us that we are able to be. Here’s one reference describing Ubuntu, one among many: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ubuntu_(philosophy)
Another approach to this same idea comes from Psychiatrist Dan Siegel who has developed what he calls “Intraconnection”, where he describes our awareness as moving from “me to we to mwe”. Here’s a link to his new book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/IntraConnected-Integration-Belonging-Identity-IPNB/dp/0393711692/ref=sr_1_2?crid=N39CCKTAR989&keywords=Dan+Siegel+intraconnected&pldnSite=1&qid=1658667706&sprefix=dan+siegel+intraconnected%2Caps%2C124&sr=8-2
Then, there’s Thich Nhat Hanh’s coining the verb interbeing, where he says that we interare in every moment, that we cannot really be separate from everything around us. Here’s a link to an article by Thich Nhat Hanh on interbeing: https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/insight-of-interbeing/
These and other related approaches and concepts invite us to expand our worldview to move beyond U.S. culture’s (and the cultures of other countries, as well) emphasis on individual issues such as rights, freedom, and independence. For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to dive a bit more deeply into this subject than you may have done before and ask yourself, each day, to recognize your interbeing and interdependence in some way you might ordinarily ignore it.
Read More “883rd Week: Cultivating A Deeper Awareness of Interbeing and Interdependence”
Listening to the news and taking in the depth of suffering currently unfolding in our human family around the world, I was drawn again into an awareness of how our tendency to focus on the things that separate us leads to terrible possibilities. When we become mired in tribal reactions and beliefs, we end up harming one another in horrific ways.
For many years, I have committed myself to support and promote an understanding of our underlying oneness—the fact that we are related to one another and all other life on the planet. What has been a long-term support to this focus of attention has been the term coined by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, where he talked about interbeing, that in every moment we interare with the life around us.
Another concept that has been important to me is the idea of interdependence, that we cannot live without the range of relationships we have with each other and with the other life forms on this planet. Science is beginning to demonstrate that successful eco-systems are based on collaboration and cooperation amongst species and that competition is only one aspect of these complex relationships. And, in a very personal way for each of us, our physical bodies are communities comprised of trillions of non-human life forms that work together to keep our bodies alive.
Read More “868th Week: Revisiting Interbeing”