December 2009 Audio Meditation

Listening to the news recently, I found myself returning to a meditation from the Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s a very simple one and yet I find that, each time I do it, it invites me to more easily settle deeply into my grounded, embodied presence. So, for this week’s offering, I thought I would share this with those of you who haven’t learned it before and perhaps remind those of you who are familiar with it that it’s a very useful and helpful practice.

And so, for this week’s practice, I invite you to do the following at least once a day and perhaps to develop a habit of turning to it whenever you need support in returning to your heart space, grounding yourself, and/or simply taking some time to access quiet presence.

Read More “903^rd Week: Breathing In and Breathing Out“

As a child, my grandmother was my first spiritual teacher and many of the things she taught me have stayed in my awareness over all these many years.  One of the things she taught me I’ve written about before—the raincloud of knowable things.  What continues to touch me about this concept is how vividly it reminds me that I’m never alone, that I am always and inevitably part of something much bigger than myself.  In this case, it reminds me that I’m part of a vast collective consciousness that contains the wisdom of all humans across all time and that I and everyone else contributes to and draws from this collective all the time.  This is an idea that has supported my work as a trauma specialist in psychotherapy and it is an idea that has given me hope even when things may have looked profoundly bleak.

It also touches into an experience that gets stronger for me as I age—that I am in community with a reciprocal environment all the time.  I saw an illustration of this the other day as I walked across Central Park.  I noticed a gentleman, early in the morning, taking cans and bottles out of the trash bins scattered throughout the park.  It was a Monday morning, so the bins had quite a few offerings and I began to think about how this man’s activities support recycling, and that he contributes something meaningful that I usually wouldn’t know anything about.  That got me to thinking about all the activities going on in my world that I don’t see and yet add to the quality and support of my life.  It reminded me of the fact that, even at subtle levels, we constantly contribute to and draw from our collective environment.

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One of the things that comes to mind just about every day, as I listen to the news, is how powerfully fear motivates actions that cause suffering to so many. It might be fear of difference, fear of losing power, fear of the “other”. Whatever the focus of fear, it can become a motivator for lashing out, tearing down, striving to get rid of or destroy that which is feared.

One of the practices I’ve used over many years now is a derivation (my own “translation” of the process) of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen. As a trauma therapist, there have been many times where I’ve sat with someone working on an overwhelming trauma and what has offered me support in staying steady and present over all these years has been this practice of Tonglen. It allows me to keep my heart open in the presence of suffering and pain and has helped me not to be overwhelmed by what clients have shared over these years.

A number of years ago, I realized that Tonglen was a beautiful example of a subtle activism practice—of a practice I could use regularly to help metabolize collective fear and hatred. When I do this practice as subtle activism, I focus on fear because of my belief that this state of being is the source of hatred, violence, and so many other ways in which we harm one another.

And so, for this week’s practice, I invite you to explore the following guided process of using Tonglen (my derivation of it) to contribute to our collective healing. If you haven’t done this kind of practice before, let me say just a few things about it. Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher, has wonderful material on Tonglen. You can find her in her books and on YouTube. One of the things I heard her say early on in my explorations of Tonglen is that the light of the heart is fiery and is capable of neutralizing negative energy. She has also said that the more we do this kind of practice the brighter the fiery love in our heart becomes. I have found this to be true and, at this point in my life, I deeply trust the fire in my heart to be able to neutralize or transmute negative energy.

Read More “902^nd Week: A Practice for Healing Collective Fear“

I ran across the quotation on Facebook the other day, from Pema Chodron’s book, “The Pocket Pema”:

“Am I Going to Add to the Aggression?
Every day we could think about aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Darfur, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, ‘Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?’ Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, ‘Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?’”

This got me to thinking about how, in just about every moment, we face choices about how we move through the world, how we choose to express ourselves in a multitude of situations and circumstances. Even when we are in a situation like the current pandemic, where most of us stay at home much of the time. As we move through our daily experience even at home, endless moments arise, each offering choices about how we are going to respond to whatever may be unfolding.

Because I believe that we are part of a larger collective consciousness, one to which we contribute and from which we draw all the time, I also believe that it’s impossible not to affect ourselves and the collective through the choices we make as we respond to the world around us. I’ve written before about experimenting with orienting to heart perception and intelligence by asking ourselves, “What would my heart do right now?” Or, “How would my heart respond right now?” This doesn’t mean we will never be angry, distressed, embarrassed, or outraged. What it touches on is how do we choose to handle these feelings.

Read More “831st Week: What Do We Add to the World Each Day?”