Weekly Practice in Conscious Living

881^st Week: Adapting with “Attitude Adjustments”

I just returned from a week away for vacation. I was at an all-inclusive spa-type location, surrounded by the beauty of nature. On the third evening there, a powerful thunderstorm came through, some said bringing it with it a “small tornado”. The storm brought down three transformers in the area, so all the power flicked out in a moment and didn’t return for a bit over 24 hours.

The loss of power ended every imaginable kind of activity and the employees at the resort were really quite creative and focused in coping with the loss of power, especially around how they managed a kitchen that needed to feed three meals a day to a lot of people.

An immediate effect of the power outage was the dwindling power in every kind of gadget. Because of this, many of us searched for the few outlets that were connected to the generators and this led to a group of five of us hanging out in a room that had four connections wired into the floor. Sitting together for several hours, we discovered new friendships we wouldn’t have had time to create had the power not gone out.

All this got me to thinking about the powerful impact of the choices we make when faced with challenging or disappointing circumstances—although, admittedly, this was a challenge of privilege and not a challenge of survival or even of need. I started thinking about the importance of being willing to have an “attitude adjustment” when faced with unexpected developments, and that awareness demonstrated how our attitudes generate the filter through which we experience and interpret our world and our experience.

In these times of such challenge, I have found myself having to return to an underlying steadiness and calm again and again. This month, in my monthly posting of an audio meditation on my website, the focus is to attune to, call on, and embody the frequency of steadiness. I have understood and experienced steadiness to be a natural aspect of our deep core presence, the place in us that cannot be disturbed, no matter what may happen in our own lives or in the world at large. This doesn’t mean that we don’t register and respond to what’s happening within and around us. Instead, this place of steadiness that we carry deep inside offers an internal place of “refuge”, an aspect of our internal home base that is always steady, no matter what.

Another aspect of orienting to steadiness is that it allows us to contribute to the steadiness of our human collective consciousness. At this time, many countries around the world are embroiled in internal conflict between differing factions, religious and ethnic groups, between people fighting for rights and those in power working to limit freedoms of various kinds. So, when we look at what’s happening in our own countries, wherever we may live in the world, it’s helpful to remember that we are experiencing a global human-species crisis.

One thing I’d like to say about my belief in and experience of our human collective consciousness is that our moment-to-moment contributions matter. Whenever we experience a particular emotion or response, that experience is enhanced or intensified by the impact of all the people all over the world who are feeling the same way. Where we resonate matters, both in what we offer and in what we receive. For me, each time one of us is able to resonate with being centered, grounded, steady, or in any other way solid and stable in the presence of hurtful experience, I believe our experience offers to those who are teetering on the edge finding their center something like a foothold that helps them step into their own steadiness. We have an opportunity to support one another in every moment.

During challenging times, it’s more important than ever to be able to move through whatever feelings might arise and eventually return to center. When we embrace the idea of our inevitable wholeness, where we make room for everything that is part of our body-mind being as human people, it helps to be able to cultivate a strong and reliable center as our internal home base. This home base becomes a place to reorient ourselves when we are activated without having to do battle with or banish what we feel.

For many of us at this time, there are feelings of grief, disbelief, and anger over issues that reflect societal inequities and injustice. In this week’s practice in conscious living, there’s no request not to feel whatever you are feeling. Instead, there’s an invitation to orient to your grounded center in addition to what you feel so you can carry with you a place to land and rest when you need to do so.

878^th Week: Appreciating the Life Around You

In a recent practice, we explored what it would be like to notice that everything we encounter is conscious in its own way and that we are in relationship with everything around us. I wanted to offer some examples of those relationships here, as well as another practice. This week’s practice adds another element.

One of the things that has added profound levels of richness to my life across my adulthood has been my sense that everything I encounter is a companion along the way. For some people, my way of living is too far out there and would land in a category of “fantasy”, I’m sure. I say this because I have relationships not only with the humans, felines, plants, and stone people who are part of my life, but I also have very active—and interactive—relationships with all my gadgets. My computers are always my friends and I bring a great deal of gratitude to them whenever we work together. My kitchen has a deep sense of how much I appreciate it and my vacuum cleaner has my constant appreciation and gratitude.

This may sound way out there or even silly, and I can understand that, but I can only say that to live in relationship with all that I encounter offers me a number of gifts. First, it invites me to stay conscious of how I’m interacting with my world and orients me to stay centered, grounded, and present even when doing mundane tasks. Because I feel I’m interacting with everything around me, I’m mindful of being attentive and present to what’s unfolding. Secondly, it keeps me oriented to a sense of gratitude, which is always a gift, as it is such a heart-opening state of awareness to be in. Thirdly, it nourishes a sense of relationship, which is also heart-opening and heart-nourishing as an internal state.

I’ve been reading a lot about social justice lately, as well as the challenges of moving out of the assumptions and institutions of white supremacy. The process has been yet another reminder of the importance and impact of unexamined perceptions and beliefs. I’ve written many times about engaging in acts of kindness and my recent reading has brought to the foreground of awareness the importance of cultivating and orienting to thoughts and self-talk focused on and arising from kindness.

Our habits of mind matter more than we may realize. In a sense, they are a form of ongoing self-hypnosis through which we program ourselves and emit the quality and tone of awareness and being that characterize how we move through the world and how we feel about, and treat, ourselves. The goal of the following practice isn’t to create an internal battle, argument, or conflict when noticing the unkind thoughts and actions that we may do without awareness. Because I have such a deep belief in wholeness, I understand that there will always be things arising in me that I may not enjoy experiencing, but they are part of an unbroken wholeness that is true of everyone.

Many times, I’ve written about the foreground/background dynamic of our wholeness. Sometimes something pops into the foreground of our thinking or behaving that we don’t particularly like, something that arises as one of the habits of mind that comes with years of conditioning. The good news is that anything that pops into the foreground can be invited into the background and replaced by something we would rather experience and/or express. It’s a matter of cultivating the kind of awareness that can compassionately notice when we’ve gone off track and that can then gently call us back to ourselves.