June 2012 Audio Meditation

One of my daily tasks is to post an inspirational quotation and a nature photo to the Devadana Sanctuary page on Facebook each morning.  I’ve been doing this for a number of years now and obtain the photographs from bigstockphoto.com, where I have a subscription.  What this has created for me is a daily morning meditation looking through photographs of our beautiful planet, seeking the right one to go with that day’s quotation.  I have found that this process has deepened my love and awe for this amazing planetary home we inhabit.

Having a daily reminder that I’m a part of nature, not something separate from it, has been a support to my practice of orienting to heart intelligence and perception when I remember to do so.  Looking at the stunning creativity and beauty of this planet, of the creative and complex ecology that supports life of such diversity and intelligence, reminds me again and again that we are all in this together.  There is no other home, no other place, and everyone and everything we encounter along the way is kin.  We are all offspring of planet Earth.

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I ended last week’s practice with a suggestion to come back to the present moment and to this current breath as a way to manage some of the stress of this time in our collective lives.

One of the practices that I used to teach in the Somatic Experiencing® trainings was to invite people to notice how they “add fuel to the bonfires of activation”. Many of us have grown up in cultures that don’t focus on tracking how we allow our thinking to drag us hither and yon, an experience that generates enormous amounts of suffering. In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s more important than ever to be able to notice when we increase our suffering by allowing our fear-generated thoughts to dominate our attention and experience.

One of the practices that can be difficult but is powerfully important is to hold the intention to come back to the present moment, to the breath you’re taking right now, and to focus awareness on this breath, on this moment. In terms of self-talk, one of the things that’s helpful to say while doing this practice is something along the lines of, “In this moment, right here and right now, I’m okay enough.” 

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895th Week: Noticing the “New You”

In a recent class I took through Lorian.org, we were presented with the thought that each time we bring something into our lives, be it a job, a development, an object, an accomplishment, a relationship, an activity, what comes to us brings with it a “new you”. The underlying idea is that we are changed by the things that enter our life, whatever those “things” may be.

I’ve been very taken with this idea, as it invited me to pay more attention to changes I might notice as I move through experiences and situations. For example, for a number of years, I’ve read about quantum physics and have had a commitment to move beyond my conditioned linear thinking. Starting in 1982, I began to experience and work with the optimal future self and optimal futures, and I offered this process to people as an inner journey to meet their optimal future self. As a result of diving even deeper into quantum dynamics, I found myself thinking one day about the way in which the optimal future arrives and arises in our lives without our necessarily being aware of the process.

This shift in my thinking orients more, now, to being open to receive my optimal future, based on the fact that quantum physics appears to demonstrate that there is an infinite array of possibilities moving in and out of manifest reality all the time. (As I write this, I can imagine the groans of quantum physicists…) 

Anyhow, for me this is an example of the “new you” dynamic of allowing something to deepen into my life, to affect my awareness and perceptions of the world around me. There can be much more subtle shifts pointing to a “new you”, as when you have a thought you’ve never had before, experience an understanding that hasn’t been accessible until now, find yourself orienting to an activity that didn’t interest you before…that kind of thing.

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