2023 November Meditation
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2023 November Meditation

Returning to what we explored earlier this year, notice any change in your experience over this time of recognizing the living presence of relationships, collaborative communities, that are everywhere in your life and that your radiating presence touches everyone and everything you encounter along the way. This meditation invites you to expand the everyday relationships you have with the world around you, acknowledging the inevitability of relatedness, of community every time you go in or out of a store, a park, any kind of community gathering place.

Below is the audio version and, below that, is the YouTube version with images of nature that accompany the meditation…

2023 October Meditation
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2023 October Meditation

Returning to what we explored earlier this year, notice any change in your experience over this time of recognizing the living presence of relationships, collaborative communities, that are everywhere in your life and that your radiating presence touches everyone and everything you encounter along the way.

Bring to mind all the many people and life forms who work behind the scenes of your everyday experience to make your life possible; think of farmers and what they produce to contribute to what you eat and enjoy; imagine all the people who make and repair farm equipment; imagine the people who participate in communities that bring you electricity, water, garbage pickup, mail and packages; imagine all the people who contribute in any way to items you use as part of your daily life, including gadgets, household items, clothing, and more; each time you do this meditation, think of more people who are part of this community, people with whom you are in relationship even when you don’t recognize it; offer gratitude and blessings to all of them—acknowledging that without them your life would be very different. Notice your experience in your heart space as you do this.

Please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.

Here’s the YouTube version if you’d like to see images of nature as you listen:

Practice #916: Change and the Power of Choice

Practice #916: Change and the Power of Choice

Over the last four months, I’ve gone through an experience that many people have had—the slow decline of a feline animal companion with acute kidney disease. He made it known when it was time to help him leave his body, which fortunately was able to happen at home. 

As the time progressed in this shared experience, I found myself delving more and more deeply into loving acceptance of what was happening, allowing grief to accompany love every step along the way. The challenge of this time was to constantly choose love and to be fully present to what unfolded day by day. Throughout this time, I was keenly aware of the countless other people who have been, or were, in exactly the same process I was, slowly shepherding a beloved animal companion from this life. I was also aware of how many of us have taken whatever action was required to meet the unfolding experience, even when those actions were completely outside of our previous experience—our willingness to do whatever was needed to offer comfort and support to our loved ones.

The practice this brought to mind is the presence and power of choice, moment to moment, day by day. The choice I came back to again and again was to meet this experience with my heart—to let love guide each action, and with a deep commitment to honor the needs and experience of my animal family member. I also made the choice to honor the grief I felt and to allow it to be present during those moments when there was nothing else to do but enfold my sweet feline in my arms and my love.

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2023 September Meditation
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2023 September Meditation

Returning to what we explored earlier this year, notice any change in your experience over this time of recognizing the living presence of relationships, collaborative communities, that are everywhere in your life and that your radiating presence touches everyone and everything you encounter along the way.

Notice again your physical relationship with the environment around you: breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide, exchanging resources with trees who emit oxygen and take in carbon dioxide; becoming aware of all the organisms and beings whose presence and activities contribute to what makes the world work for you, i.e., fungi, micro-organisms you don’t see and may not even recognize, insects, amphibians, reptiles, water beings, and many other participants in the collective, interrelated system that creates your local environment and ecology; offering gratitude and blessings to everything in the environment with which you have a reciprocal relationship. Notice your experience in your heart space as you do this.

Please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.


Here’s the YouTube version if you’d like to see images of nature as you listen:

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2023 August Meditation

With this meditation, we again return to what we explored earlier in the year. Here, I invite you to look around at, and feel to, the environment around you. Notice the radiating presence of everything you see and notice how it is to recognize that you are in relationship with your environment and with everything in it. Offer gratitude and blessings to everything around you and to the collective that arises from the fact that everything around you is in relationship with each other and with you. 

Here’s the audio version of the meditation… Please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.


Here’s the YouTube version with images…


915th Week: A Practice in Sending Universal Love

915th Week: A Practice in Sending Universal Love

A colleague and I were talking about the polarization currently expressing in human communities all around the world. I mentioned that I have a practice of sending universal love to people who are caught up in the kinds of fears that generate aggression, harsh laws, nationalism, and other similar responses. As we continued to talk, I also mentioned something that I learned in a class with David Spangler: When we find ourselves encountering energy or behavior that we experience as negative or threatening, remember to generate a frequency that is inhospitable to that energy or quality of being. 

In my experience, the most positive frequency or quality of energy is universal love. Every spiritual tradition I’ve explored speaks to the power of universal love, that it is the most essential healing energy in the universe. Because of this, I’d like to offer a practice this time that orients to offering the essence, the frequency, the light of Universal Love to our beautiful planet and all beings on it. In this practice, not only do we imagine Universal Love pouring into our precious planet but remembering that this energy naturally conveys blessings and healing. Gaia, Earth’s intelligence, then decides where healing is needed most.

For many people, doing this kind of practice means imagining the light of Universal Love, usually a white or golden light, but see what color comes to you, flowing into the body perhaps through the back of your heart, filling your entire heart space, and then out through your heart to the planet. For this practice, I invite you to imagine a place on the Earth that you experience as a sacred place. It may be a mountain, a lake, a forest, or some other natural setting that calls to you. Hold in your awareness that this sacred place accesses the intelligence of Gaia, of our Earth, and that Gaia receives the healing energy and will distribute it as needed most.

In addition, and I offer this only as an additional suggestion, I also hold the thought that all humans on the planet who suffer from fear, and who act in violent, repressive, and/or aggressive ways, even when they don’t realize that it’s fear that drives them, will also receive an inflow of universal love, along with the blessings and healing that this powerful energy automatically conveys. I don’t qualify the blessings or healing in any way, other than to hold the thought that these people can be healed from the grip of the kind of fear that leads to hatred and division.

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