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786th Week: The Gift of Transmitting Love
One of the practices I’ve taken on even more actively these days is imagining that I am an open and always-available channel for the energy of universal love to flow through me as I move around in the course of my daily life activities. When I use the word “love”, I’m not referring to the personal kind but, instead, to my sense that the most potent healing energy in the universe is Love with a capital “L”.
It seems to me that this particular kind of “subtle activism” can be an addition to whatever else I, or we, may do to help heal our distressed world, our human family, and all our other earth kin. Imagining the energy of love flowing through me throughout the day doesn’t ask anything of me other than to bring my awareness to the process as often as I choose to do so. And, I feel somewhat confident in saying that choosing to be a channel for the healing quality of love probably doesn’t have a downside when we don’t personalize it…when we realize that we are, indeed, simply open channels for this universal energy to flow through us and into our world.
For years, I’ve had a practice of blessing everything around me. This particular practice became much more an ongoing part of my life when I went through seminary and was ordained as an Interfaith (now called Interspiritual) Minister back in 2003. In recent years, I’ve found that taking classes with David Spangler through his Lorian Association has helped me focus even more fully on these ways of moving through the world.
Read More “786th Week: The Gift of Transmitting Love”759th Week: The Choices We Make
Listening to the news these days can be an invitation to concern, suffering, compassion, action, and many other responses. I’ve been thinking lately about the power of the moment-to-moment choices we make as we move through our daily lives, whether our choices lead to action or non-action, and how that reflects the quality and nature of those choices. Here’s a quotation from Joanna Macy that speaks to what I’ve been thinking about:
“The obvious choice, then, is to extend our notions of self-interest. For example, it would not occur to me to plead with you, ‘Don’t saw off your leg. That would be an act of violence.’ It wouldn’t occur to me (or to you) because your leg is part of your body. Well, so are the trees in the Amazon rain basin. They are our external lungs. We are beginning to realize that the world is our body.” ~ Joanna Macy, Greening of the Self
I would add to this quotation that this also applies to every one of our brothers and sisters in our global human family, as well as to all our kin of every species within every form of life on this planet.
Read More “759th Week: The Choices We Make”863nd Week: Exploring “Asset Framing”
Listening to an interview this morning with Krista Tippett and Trabion Shorters, the subject they explored resonated deeply with me. Shorters describes his approach as viewing people, institutions, and society within what he calls “asset framing” instead of the usual “deficit frame” we draw on to think about and perceive people who may be in need or are in a challenging situation. It reminds me of the solution-focused psychotherapy approach where we are encouraged to see what’s going right rather than focusing on what’s going wrong. It also reminds me of the way that our brain’s default mode network. It’s the part of the brain that—when nothing else is going on—drifts into daydreams, thoughts, or questions about ourselves and our world. If our fundamental beliefs are negative, this is where our default mode networks hangs out. If they are positive, that’s where our awareness will go. Fortunately, if we find ourselves mired in negative or deficit thinking, we can talk to our default mode network and create shifts toward the positive or asset frame.
Listening to the interview, I could sense how important it is to actively promote an “asset frame” as part of our fundamental assumptions about the world and about the people around us. Instead of thinking of people in terms of their poverty or lack of opportunity, we can begin with focusing on what’s going right in their lives, on what they have accomplished, what their dreams are. For me, this also touches on connecting more realistically with the fact that we all—regardless of our culture, race, socialization, gender identity, or any of the other aspects that support our diversity—want much the same things in terms of quality of life. It reminds me of the Buddhist Lovingkingness meditation where we ask that all beings be free from suffering and be happy.
For this week’s practice, I invite you to first listen to this interview if you haven’t already heard it. Here’s the link from Tippett’s On Being website: https://onbeing.org/programs/trabian-shorters-a-cognitive-skill-to-magnify-humanity/
Read More “863nd Week: Exploring “Asset Framing””Week 636: Supporting Cooperation and Collaboration
Sitting in Central Park the other day, a whole crew of volunteers worked on the hill in front of me. They worked with wheelbarrows, rakes, and shovels, spreading a new layer of soil on the hill. As I watched them work together, my deepest response was one of gratitude that so many people showed up early on a weekday morning to offer their services to the park. Read More “Week 636: Supporting Cooperation and Collaboration”
Week 644: Feeding the Outcomes You Seek
I recently read an article written by a brain scientist, explaining a dynamic that we all would do well to understand more deeply. It has to do with the ways in which our brain resonates with particular words and concepts, strengthening them even when they may be something with which we consciously disagree. Read More “Week 644: Feeding the Outcomes You Seek”