Saying “Yes” to Spirit: Being Lived into the Fullness of Your Potential

In these times of such challenge, I have found myself having to return to an underlying steadiness and calm again and again. This month, in my monthly posting of an audio meditation on my website, the focus is to attune to, call on, and embody the frequency of steadiness. I have understood and experienced steadiness to be a natural aspect of our deep core presence, the place in us that cannot be disturbed, no matter what may happen in our own lives or in the world at large. This doesn’t mean that we don’t register and respond to what’s happening within and around us. Instead, this place of steadiness that we carry deep inside offers an internal place of “refuge”, an aspect of our internal home base that is always steady, no matter what.

Another aspect of orienting to steadiness is that it allows us to contribute to the steadiness of our human collective consciousness. At this time, many countries around the world are embroiled in internal conflict between differing factions, religious and ethnic groups, between people fighting for rights and those in power working to limit freedoms of various kinds. So, when we look at what’s happening in our own countries, wherever we may live in the world, it’s helpful to remember that we are experiencing a global human-species crisis.

One thing I’d like to say about my belief in and experience of our human collective consciousness is that our moment-to-moment contributions matter. Whenever we experience a particular emotion or response, that experience is enhanced or intensified by the impact of all the people all over the world who are feeling the same way. Where we resonate matters, both in what we offer and in what we receive. For me, each time one of us is able to resonate with being centered, grounded, steady, or in any other way solid and stable in the presence of hurtful experience, I believe our experience offers to those who are teetering on the edge finding their center something like a foothold that helps them step into their own steadiness. We have an opportunity to support one another in every moment.

A friend of mine has been pretty consistently putting posts on Facebook that ask people to focus on what they are forrather than what they are against. These posts have been very helpful in reminding all of us that what we feed grows and that, when we spend our internal time fighting against something, we actually feed the very thing to which we object. From an energy perspective, it’s as though we’re actually turning up the volume on things we’d rather not hear at all.

One example that comes to mind at this time is the pervasive presence of expressions of lack of empathy for each other. Decisions by some lawmakers, treatment of neighbors by other neighbors, seeming lack of concern for one another’s well-being if we aren’t “part of the tribe” are found on every side these days. Rather than spending time expressing helpless rage at these conditions, I want to invite us to explore some alternatives.

First, there are approaches that convey the message, “What you fight, you feed.” This doesn’t mean not to take action when action is needed to change things or to intervene. Instead, it speaks to the habits of mind and self-talk we carry around with us internally every day, all day. From a Solution-Focused perspective (solution-focused therapy is a more modern branch of psychology), we are invited to look at, and to look for, what’s going right. For our practice here, I would add that we can ask ourselves to pay attention to the qualities we would like to see expressed more generously in ourselves and in the world around us.

Early this morning, I turned on the radio and listened to a brief political report on WNYC, the local public radio station here in NYC.  What I heard was a recording of a recent political rally where what I call “the language of separateness” characterized what was said by the speaker. In addition to the sadness I felt at hearing language that had a violent and aggressive tone, language that demonized the “other”, I also began to think about the difference between “the language of separateness” and “the language of interbeing’.  Interbeing is a verb created by the Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, and is now used beautifully and often by Charles Eisenstein, a speaker who focuses on social, economic, and ecological issues.

Later, I listened to an interview with Krista Tippett in her On Being broadcast where she talked with a woman who described how she engages people on the opposite side of the spectrum from where she lives politically and socially as a way to discover what was of key importance to both her and to the other person.  Read More “728th Week: Language of Separateness; Language of Interbeing”