911th Week: Orienting to What’s Good News, Honoring Wholeness

911th Week: Orienting to What’s Good News, Honoring Wholeness

With all the suffering going on around the world, and all the harshness and conflict on every front, it’s more important than ever to have sources of good news. Seeking good news doesn’t mean you want to ignore what’s going on. Rather, it acknowledges wholeness and the fact that even when things appear to be terribly wrong, there is always something right or positive, as well.

For this practice in conscious living, I invite you to explore some of the websites that orient to positive news and find the one, or the ones, that resonate with you. There are probably more than are on the list below, but these are sources of good news that I’ve discovered along the way. One of my favorites is Service Space, where you can find Daily Good emails, KarmaTube videos, and more. That said, all the sites listed below offer their own take on good news. I’ve listed them alphabetically…

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910th Week: Entanglement: Individual and Collective Well-Being

910th Week: Entanglement: Individual and Collective Well-Being

There’s a concept drawn from quantum research that resonates deeply with many spiritual traditions and also touches into ideas that are found in psychology. It is called “entanglement”, and it proposes that we are intimately connected to and affect the world around us in everything we do. It also proposes that we, as individuals, are part of a collective within which there is no real separation, even though our physical bodies lead us to imagine that we stand alone. In the Rig Veda, there is a saying that says something like: “We are all woven into Indra’s net, out of which we cannot fall.” According to quantum research, it appears that we are, indeed, all part of a living system out of which we cannot fall. In addition to that, as part of this system, everything we do has an effect on the larger collective system.

As I thought about writing a practice today, I found myself orienting to a deepening sense and understanding of entanglement. I think that part of me is also chewing on subtle activism practices for these times. And so, with entanglement in mind, here are a few subtle activism possibilities for you to explore.

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2023 April Meditation
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2023 April Meditation

This month, we continue our theme of the range of relationships we have with the world around us and how we bring our presence to these many connections, even those we may not think about often but are aspects of our everyday experience. In this meditation, we bring to mind the many people and life-forms who work behind the scenes to make our life possible. Those who make it possible for us to have food to eat; those who bring electricity, water, and other necessities into our lives. All the people who contribute in ay way to items used in daily life, including gadgets, household items, clothing, and more. In this meditation, we offer gratitude and blessings to all…

Below are two version of the meditation. One is audio only and the other is audio with images of nature. Please remember never to listen to these audio meditations when driving or operating dangerous machinery…

909th Week: More Gratitude Practice

909th Week: More Gratitude Practice

Walking across Central Park this morning, I was filled to overflowing with gratitude for all the years I had the privilege of soaking in the beauty, the life-giving vitality, and the spirit of this wonderful place each and every morning on my way to my office. This brought me again to the importance of noticing and experiencing gratitude. As I walked on familiar pathways, the presence of gratitude filled and inspired me.


This experience returns me to an awareness of the importance of gratitude as a frequency we can constantly bring into our lives, and of the health-affirming quality it conveys. I have an active and ongoing relationship with gratitude and I find it supports me during challenging experiences. An example is when I had some rather extensive dental surgery a week ago. After about an hour of what turned out to be a two-hour process, I found myself orienting to what I call the spirit of gratitude. You might think of it as the essence of gratitude, or the frequency of gratitude. I oriented to experiencing the presence and quality of gratitude to help myself continue to be settled and at ease in the chair. I found that choosing to resonate with this essence made all the difference in my ability to remain calm and gratefully open to the help I was receiving.

For this week’s practice, I invite you to find, in the course of the coming week, many moments to be aware of gratitude. You may already have a gratitude practice and, if you do, use this practice to increase the number of times you express your gratitude. You may discover gratitude in some unexpected places when you look for it, even as you may find yourself reinforcing an awareness of gratitude that is already alive and present in your experience.

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908th Week: Practicing with Frequencies
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908th Week: Practicing with Frequencies

I cannot say enough about frequencies and the role they play in our quality of life. One of the practices I use to shift frequencies touches on elements used by HeartMath, where breathing in and out through the heart is a standard aspect of their practices and I’d like to share it with you for this week’s practice in conscious living. I began this particular practice as part of my daily self-care routine. It originally arose as a means to help me invite my blood pressure into the numbers that I want to have at this stage of my life. What I noticed when I did this practice is that it not only accomplished what I had in mind, it also relaxed my whole bodymind being. That response reminded me of the importance of frequencies and how they affect the quality of our internal life.

So, here’s the practice and I invite you to see how it resonates for you. Also, I’ve chosen two frequencies—love and ease. These may not be the ones that touch you most powerfully, so see what works best for you as you explore this practice. Also, as a side note but a very important one, I think of spiritual teacher David Spangler’s comments about how useful it is to generate frequencies that are inhospitable to qualities we would rather not have in our lives and experience. That’s why it’s important for you to choose the frequencies that resonate most powerfully for you, in terms of what qualities you seek to experience internally.

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2023 March Meditation
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2023 March Meditation

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…