Living With Paradox: Everything is One, Everything is Sacred
Unity Center Talk – May 5, 2024
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.
Unity Center Talk – May 5, 2024
Here’s a recent talk I gave at Unity Center in Norwalk, CT:
As a way to share some thoughts about multidimensional living, I’ll be posting small videos describing some of the ways I inhabit a multidimensional world, emphasizing all the reciprocal relationships we humans have with our world. I’ll also include some of the ideas and practices I draw from a more quantum-oriented worldview.
Video 19: Accessing New Information—the Optimal Future Self and Alternate Selves
In this video, I describe my experience with my first optimal future self and my interest these days in also accessing alternate selves. I now feel that this is a powerful way to access new information to support the unfolding of qualities, talents, and ways of being that we seek to live into. The primary elements of accessing these experiences are intention, an open curiosity and a willingness “not to know”, and an ability to “blend” with these selves so that our present-day body-mind can absorb the body states and states of mind that these selves live. My sense is that this new information becomes a new template around which the body-mind organizes itself and lives into these new, optimal qualities and states of being.
Video 19a – A bit of additional information to Video 19
In this video, I add a bit of information to Video 19. When doing this work, you’ll be taking an inner journey and meeting your optimal future self or alternate self rather than creating them in your imagination. They will approach you in your journey and you can then do the blending process.
Video 18: Intention Intersecting with Possibility
In this video, I share some thoughts about working with intention, and with optimal futures, being receptive to what arrives without getting in the way with preconceptions or ideas about how things need to look or work out. Remember that our intentions intersect with the quantum field of possibility to become probabilities that find their way into our lives. Also, when we touch into the realms of possibility, we access new information, and that new information becomes a new template in our body-mind being. These new templates generate and give life to our intentions.
Video 17: Asking for Help
In this video, I talk about asking for help from nature, from subtle helpers, from a wide array of what I experience as supportive presences that are always available, if we will only remember to ask. A key to this process is to ask and then let the question go, without trying to figure out anything or “work” at receiving a response. This process underscores the need to be willing not to know and also to be willing to receive. Then, when you receive, to be willing to act on it if what you received feels right to you. Also, not to do it if it feels wrong. We never relinquish the need or ability to use discernment to sense whether the input is truly helpful or if it comes from your own wishes or fears.
Video 16: Cultivating Intuitive Perception
In this video, I talk about things I learned from my grandmother about how to track intuitive awareness—learning to discern what is actually valid and useful and what is wishful thinking. An important skill that supports honoring intuition is to be receptive, along with cultivating discernment. Did the intuitive awareness I sensed turn out to be meaningful, supporting, useful, or important in some other way. It’s also important to keep from “chasing after” intuitive awareness or to try to figure it out. Allowing time to allow awareness of something that has dropped in to develop and reveal itself. And, there’s no right way to do this. Intuitive input may come as images, words, physical sensations, a movie or music, being physically nudged in a particular direction. Also, don’t ask it to make sense right away. The key is to be open and responsive and willing to see what develops.
Video 15: Quantum Experiences
In this video, I share some of my “quantum-like” experiences as a way to support and validate our expanding awareness that the linear reality that most of us have learned is only one version of how the world actually is. I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a multigenerational home with a grandmother who was a healer and who regularly worked with nature spirits. She taught me many things as my first spiritual teacher and, even though I couldn’t see these beings as she could, I was given a worldview that allows me to be open to experiences that are outside the materialistic scientific worldview. The fact that quantum physics keeps demonstrating experiments in which many spiritual realities are affirmed is expanding science to begin to include more of these realities as “normal”.
Video 14: Handling Objects with Care and Collaboration
In this video, I explore some thoughts about our everyday relationship with all the gadgets we interact with everyday. We have dynamic and reciprocal relationships with these gadgets. As strange as it may sound, we are in active. collaborative relationship with all the “objects” we have around us. We have an ongoing opportunity to acknowledge, respect, and thank all the “objects”/gadgets we interact with on a daily basis. When we call objects “it”, we imply that they are just stuff rather than consciousness in a form very different from what it means to be a human being. I suggest that it’s an interesting journey to befriend and get to know your gadgets and to notice what happens if you ask them for help. Also, remember to acknowledge all the people and earth resources that go into bringing these gadgets to us. Remembering this can become a practice that can remind you of our constant and inevitable interdependence with so many aspects of your earth life.
Video 13: Drawing on Collective Consciousness
In this video, I offer some information on the fact that we are always part of—contributing to and drawing from—collective information fields. An example is the global information field that contains the healing wisdom of humanity across all time, wisdom that those of us in healing professions draw from automatically and constantly. We touch into information, healing practices, interventions, and more that deal with our human kin and also with our more-than-human earth-kin. Whatever frequencies we resonate with, wherever we focus our attention, we are likely to be participating in collective information fields that resonate with us, whether these are collectives focused on creativity, scientific discoveries, prayer, sending love and blessings, offering supportive presence to groups that focus on healing the planet, etc. It’s also important to remember that the frequencies with which we resonate orient us to the information fields with which we resonate, as well.
Video 12: Awareness Gives Us Choice
This video focuses on the importance and gift of awareness. With awareness, we have choice, even when we can’t change what may be happening in our lives. Also, awareness draws on the noticing brain, which is distinct from an inner critic or self-talk. The noticing brain helps to calm the amygdala, the area of our brain where we experience activation. I mentioned in the video on frequencies that one of the gifts of awareness is that we can track the frequencies we’re resonating with and then choose whether to continue where we are or do some practice that enables us to shift to another frequency. Also, when we orient ourselves to our noticing brain, we create moment-to-moment opportunities to choose how to respond to what arises in our daily lives.
Video 11: We Are Energy Beings – Resonating with Love
In this brief video, I invite you to engage a brief guided process. Because we are energy beings, living within frequencies of the different dimensions of our body-mind being—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—the quality of energies we engage matters. In this particular video, I offer a brief experience of sending love, Universal love—a fundamental healing force—to each aspect of your body-mind being. And, when we can love ourselves, that love spontaneously flows out into the world around us.
Video 10: Asking for Help, Inspiration, and Guidance
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about asking for help and guidance from sources that are unseen and perhaps even unknown. Drawing on ideas like collective consciousness or my grandmother’s sense of the “raincloud of knowable things” that rains down on everyone all the time, I suggest that we can receive input from sources we don’t consciously perceive. I also underscore the importance of being open to receive rather than trying to figure out what will show up as a response. I share how my grandmother taught me that receiving intuitive responses is like having something arrive all at once. One moment you don’t know it and the next it’s as though you have always known something.
Video 9: Gratitude and Inspiration
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about the importance of gratitude and the impact it has on the quality of our inner and outer life. Taking the time to notice and express gratitude for the smallest things in our lives can become nourishment for our body-mind, allowing us to resonate with the frequency of gratitude. I also talk a bit about inspiration and of the importance of seeking out sources of inspiration as we also acknowledge the suffering in our world. At the end, I share a small practice of focusing on gratitude for ourselves—body, emotions, mind, and spiritual connections.
Video 8: Drawing on Optimal Futures and Alternate Selves
In this video, I share some information and experiences about accessing the optimal future self and alternate selves. Drawing on the relationship between intention and possibility, orienting to these other aspects of being offers opportunities to connect with capacities, healing, and other outcomes that we may want to bring into our present-day life and expression. Because we live in an information universe, a key to this kind of process is that the experience is embodied so that the body and psyche receive the information carried in the future self and in alternate selves. An information update offers the body-mind new options that find their way into our everyday lives as organically as morning finds its way into afternoon.
Video 7: Foreground/Background and Wholeness
In this brief video, I talk about wholeness and the foreground/background dynamics that we all experience within our wholeness as we move through the world. It’s inevitable that at times we’ll become triggered by something or another and an aspect of our wholeness pops into the foreground of awareness. Perhaps we are angry, sad, or scared. With the gift of awareness, we have an opportunity to notice what state we’re in, to respond to it in whatever way we need to, drawing on the presence of choice that our awareness makes possible. We can’t get rid of our wholeness, but having access to our noticing brain gives us an opportunity to choose how we want to move through whatever has popped into the foreground. Within a context of acknowledging and accepting our wholeness, we can meet ourselves with compassion and love.
Video 6: Orienting to Possibility
In this video, I share information about the optimal future self and the possibility of blending with that body-mind in order to bring back into this dimension what has become actualized in that “future” dimension. This way of looking at the world involves quantum ideas about intention, possibility, and probability. One practice: each day to affirm or hold the intention that your optimal life is arriving and arising each day. Then, being willing not to know what that means but to be open and notice what comes into your awareness and your life. I also talk about holding a sense of an optimal life for the planet and to explore what it’s like to hold this intention along with all the people around the planet who are currently doing so. And, again, being willing not to know what this all means. Instead, trusting that the intention to call on one’s optimal life will generate something and, to remember that change, even positive change, can be temporarily uncomfortable.
Video 5: Frequencies – Resonating with Qualities and Tones of Energy and Being
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about the importance of the quality of frequencies (the energies) with which we resonate. Because we are part of a human collective, whatever frequencies we resonate with in any given moment are augmented by the presence of those same frequencies in our global human collective. And, our individual, unique presence, our unique energy signature, radiates its frequency throughout our own body-mind being—affecting the quality and tone of our physical self, our emotions, and our thoughts, then on out into the world around us, and also into our human and Gaian collective information fields.
Video 4 Synchronicity – Dancing with Possibility
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about synchronicity and how it constantly dances in our lives, bringing into our experience moments of “meaningful coincidence”, as Carl Jung defined it. I also invite us to be willing “not to know” and to embrace non-rational experiences as sources of guidance and inspiration. Then, to be willing to be open, to acknowledge, and to respond to those moments when we feel internal nudges in directions we may not yet consciously understand.
Video 3–Acknowledging and Honoring Spirits of Place
In this video, I talk about the fact that everything around us expresses a living presence, just as we do, that we are part of collective fields of information, intelligence, and connection—that we are never alone, and that separation is an illusion. There is a living presence in buildings, homes, places in nature, sacred spaces, and I think of these living presences as the Spirits of place or space. Honoring and acknowledging Spirits of place is a powerful and nurturing practice. Also, my grandmother taught me about what she called “the raincloud of knowable things”, raining down on everyone all the time, a source of information and inspiration. (The name I couldn’t remember on the recording is John Bradshaw and his writings on working with the inner child.)
Video 2—Entanglement, Separateness is An Illusion
In this short video, I talk about the quantum concept of entanglement, which has been demonstrated in experiments in quantum physics, revealing that everything is connected to everything, that we impact our world in every moment. We are part of countless fields of collective information to which we constantly, and usually unconsciously, contribute and from which we constantly draw. I also share some ideas about living from the heart, moving through the world oriented to the frequencies of love, kindness, and care for ourselves, our earth-kin, and our world.
Video 1 – Being Lived and Quantum Realities, Intention, Possibility
In this short video, I share my experience of not wanting to say to life, “I’m sorry I was too afraid.” Here, I talk about holding the intention that you are receiving and living your optimal life—drawing the best possibility to you; being willing not to know what is arising and arriving ahead of time and instead being open to allow inspiration and impressions to drop in without needing to figure everything out ahead of time.
This is a guided meditation on connecting with the frequency/energy/quality of radiant health. The meditation is an invitation to experience the essence of radiant health and to recognize that we radiate the energies we embody throughout our entire body-mind system and out into the environment around us.