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September 2021 Audio Meditation
This month’s audio meditation continues with our theme of wholeness–the wholeness of our individual self, the wholeness of nature, the wholeness inherent in our planetary being. It supports our experiencing these ever-expanding expressions of wholeness as an embodied reality.
For those who would prefer images from nature with the audio meditation, here’s our YouTube version:
2023 January Meditation
This year’s theme is reciprocal relationships–that we are in relationship with the world around us in every moment. For this month, we focus on the relationship we have with the community of collaborative organisms that comprise our body, offering gratitude and blessings to all of them.
The fidelity on this January meditation isn’t great, but it improves starting in February.
Please remember never to listen to these audio meditations when driving or operating dangerous machinery…
Here’s the YouTube version if you’d prefer to see images of nature as you move through the meditation.
805th Week: Everything is Alive, Everything is Earth-Kin
Sitting in Central Park among my tree friends, I found myself asking the following question: How do I help people understand that the earth and everything on it isn’t inert, isn’t passive and lacking in consciousness? How to I offer a perspective that holds the awareness that everything is earth-kin and that everything is conscious, alive, and aware in its own ways? Many of us raised in the Western world were taught that our planet was filled with “resources”, available for our use, rather than the more indigenous-oriented position that everything on and of our earth is alive and is valued kin.
Here’s a quotation from an enchanting book, “Becoming Animal”, by David Abram that captures some of what we modern people have lost in our relationship to nature, our earth, and our earth-kin:
“Our chest, rising and falling, knows that the strange verb ‘to be’ means more simply ‘to breathe’; it knows that the maples and the birches are breathing, that the beaver pond inhales and exhales in its own way, as do the stones and the mountains and the pipes coursing water through the ground under the city. The lungs know this secret as well as any can know it: that the inward and the outward depths partake of the same mystery, that as the unseen wind swirls within us, so it also whirls all around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds even as it lights our own sensations. The vocal cords, stirred by that breath, vibrate like spiderwebs or telephone wires in the breeze, and the voice itself, laughing and murmuring, joins its song to the water gurgling under the grate.”
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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: