This month, we continue with our theme of presence and the many reciprocal relationships we have with the world around us. We breathe in oxygen, a gift from trees who then breathe in our carbon dioxide. Bringing into awareness all the organisms and beings whose presence and activities contribute to what makes the world work for us, i.e., fungi, micro-organisms and more we don’t see and may not even recognize. Also insects, amphibians, reptiles, beings that fly, crawl, and swim and many other participants in the collective, interrelated system that creates your local environment and ecology. We have an opportunity to offer gratitude and blessings to everything in the environment with which we have a reciprocal relationship.
Please remember never to listen to these audio meditations when driving or operating dangerous machinery…
Whenever I go into Central Park, I take time to see what has changed, how the trees look, what wildlife is around. I enjoy listening to the birds and, also, to the many languages I hear on any given day in New York City. This Fall season, I have enjoyed watching the trees change from their brilliant colors to bare branches after their leaves have been released. For me, this time of year brings its own beauty, and during this season I can see the creative, complex, and varied ways that trees find expression in the shapes and reach of their branches. It’s magical to me and I discover new trees every year—trees I have only noticed during their leaf-laden seasons.
This process that is so familiar to me got me to thinking about the importance of looking for inspiration, beauty, and things that are new as part of nourishing our vitality and aliveness. I was surprised to discover that I had a link to the importance of “awe walks” in my notes that fits perfectly with what I’ve experienced this Fall as the trees have taken on their winter look. Here’s a link to that article. (You can click on the blank space and it will take you to the article. For some reason, the link doesn’t offer visible content, but it’s here…)
Article on “Awe Walks”
Even though this article refers to “older people” and some research that was done with this population, the effects of awe apply to us all. There’s been a good bit of research in this area. Here’s a link to an article reflecting the impact of small moments of awe on anyone’s overall health and well-being.
For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to engage in even more “awe walks” than you may already do. Pay attention to what happens in your body, emotional tone, and thoughts as you look for things that inspire, things you didn’t notice before, things that fill you with awe. If you can’t go outdoors, then do this practice in your home, taking time to notice what you have around you that inspires you and also to invite yourself to notice small details that you may have overlooked.
One of the things I’ve worked with for nearly 40 years is the concept of accessing the optimal future self and, drawing on ideas found in quantum physics, accessing my optimal life. What I like about working with intentions that focus on what is optimal is that it draws from the infinite range of probabilities, what some people call the “quantum foam”, those that offer optimal outcomes and input to my life.
Having called on various expressions of my optimal future self over all these years, my experience has been that my life has unfolded in ways I would never have anticipated and yet in ways that leave me, in my 70’s, deeply contented, even as I continue to be quite busy work-wise.
Over the years, I have offered many people journeys into their optimal futures, always explaining that it’s not actually about the “future”, since the Now is only and always the present moment. Instead, it’s about drawing from our underlying wholeness aspects of being that haven’t before come into the foreground of who we are in the world.
What I like most about this work is that it asks us to be willing not to know, not to have to plan or figure out how to live into our optimal life. I feel this because our planning or figuring out draws on only what we know already and the goal here is to get out of the way of our many preconceptions, beliefs, shoulds, and rules. Instead, it’s a process of being willing to be open to receive unexpected, unanticipated, and not always comfortable changes in how we move through the world and what we do with our time.
Walking across the park one morning, I passed a young father and his very young son. The boy was on a scooter that had pedals and he was working hard to figure out how to get the pedals to move correctly. At one point, he succeeded in getting the pedals all the way around and, as he did, his father began to say, “You did it! You did it!” Read More “Week 629: Catching People Doing Things Right”
