November 2018 Meditation
If you’d like to experience this meditation with nature images, here’s a link to the youtube version:
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.
If you’d like to experience this meditation with nature images, here’s a link to the youtube version:
In our world at this time, the Internet allows us to see more vividly the impact and effects of how we aren’t figuring out how to be in a world that thrives on diversity. This is an unfortunate response that encounters disagreements about worldview and beliefs and turns them into a response that views people with whom we disagree as “other”. Because of my belief in, and experience of, a fundamental oneness underlying reality, it isn’t really possible to have anyone or anything be an “other”. Everything and everyone are kin within a context of oneness, or what Thich Nhat Hanh and Charles Eisenstein call “interbeing”.
What I’d like to offer this week is a practice that supports a sense of connection with everything around us. Deepening this sense of connection can have an impact on how we perceive and respond to the world and may serve to support more constructive responses when we are confronted by people or situations with which we disagree.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t many times when we come up against situations that need to be changed. This isn’t a call not to act on our own behalf and that of others. Instead, it’s an invitation to remember that, even when we may vehemently disagree with what someone is doing, or with a situation that is untenable, we still remember that we are all connected within a fabric of life that weaves us together as kin. And, our kin are comprised of every kind of life form we encounter along the way, not just human beings.
Read More “774th Week: The Space that Connects”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”It’s just about mid-week and I haven’t yet posted a practice for this week, which would usually be posted by Sunday. These times when I draw a complete blank become an invitation to relax and open my awareness to what might unexpectedly drop in. This process reminds me of the practice of “not doing”. Instead, it becomes a practice of “being” and “receiving” rather than figuring out or doing.
Then, this takes me to the importance of intuitive awareness and how our current consensus reality in Western thinking tends to devalue non-rational ways of knowing. For me, non-rational ways of knowing are equally present, if not dominant, in my usual way of moving through the world, so I’d like to share some thoughts and an exercise that offer support for intuitive ways of knowing.
Whenever I find myself with a conundrum, not knowing exactly what to do, I ask for help or input. It’s not important to think about where the information or support comes from. For example, I might ask for help from “cat intelligence” or “plant intelligence” if I have a question about how to help the felines who live with me or the trees that grace my small apartment. What comes to mind are all the varieties of collective consciousness that Rupert Sheldrake talks about in his work with morphic fields—fields of information that species contribute to and draw from all the time.
One of my favorite examples of a morphic field is where Sheldrake talks about small birds in England. Prior to World War II, these birds had a habit of flipping the lids off of milk bottles delivered and left on people’s stoops. The birds were after the cream just under the bottle’s lid. Milk then became rationed and not readily available during the war and several generations of these birds were born and died without having learned to take off the lids of the milk bottles. As soon as deliveries began again after the war, the birds were back, doing what they had always done. Sheldrake says that they are able to do this because of the information field of their species, their morphic field, which contains all the information of every member of the species that has ever lived.
Read More “892nd Week: Collective Information Fields and Intuitive Awareness”Even though I’ve given up my office and am now practicing psychotherapy at home on zoom, I still get into Central Park just about every day. On weekends, I go to a bench that’s under a gathering of trees and read and do writing such as this. This particular morning, as I think about our troubled world, I am also aware of the steadiness, presence, and seeming serenity of the large, towering trees around me. When I’m able to clear my mind and simply be with the trees, I find that my bodymind begins to fill with their essence of steady presence. These earth-kin, because of their size and stature, convey to me—whether this is my projection or something actually coming from the trees—a deep settling.
I also notice the boulders and large rock formations that are so much part of the park and can sense into their grounded stability, as well. Somehow, these earth-kin, along with the trees, speak to me this morning about qualities of patience and presence. In addition, the vivid greens of the trees speak to me of healing, health, well-being, and I soak those qualities in, as well.
When I’m not in the park, I can have the same kind of experience with the “trees” that live in my apartment and with all the stone people who also share my home. The three felines who are my animal companions also convey a powerful ability to totally relax and then immediately be available for play or alertness, as the situation may invite or demand.
Read More “807th Week: Nurturing Well-Being with Nature”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.
Read More “787th Week: Orienting to Solution-Focused Awareness and Helpful Archetypes”