April 2014 Audio Meditation

As I prepared to write this week’s practice in conscious living, it became clear that I needed to take two of my three feline family members to an emergency vet on different nights during the week. One of the things related to being in an emergency facility is that there is plenty of time to wait. It’s first come, first served and there’s no way to rush the attention needed in emergency visits.

To help keep my feline friends calm, I needed to draw on the calm part of myself—to bring the calm aspect of my wholeness into the foreground of my experience. This got me to thinking about offering a practice around the importance of embracing our wholeness so that we are able to remember that all aspects of being can shift from foreground to background and, also from background to foreground. In these emergency experiences, I remembered that I’ve developed a much deeper relationship with being calm and centered and that, even when this aspect of being drops into the background of my awareness, it’s always there to invite forward when I’m able to do so.

It’s helpful to remember that trauma can add an energy “punch” to some aspects of our wholeness so that when they move into the foreground of awareness we may find ourselves activated in ways we hadn’t expected and which we may have a hard time managing. A year-and-a-half ago, when one of my feline family members had a dental emergency, I found myself catapulted into a very young part of my wholeness. What I noticed this time around was that the efforts I invested over the last year dealing with what got pulled into the foreground last year made a noticeable difference, for which I have been very grateful. I was calm in a way I wouldn’t have predicted, given my previous responses.

Read More “852nd Week: Wholeness and Shifting Foreground to Background and Background to Foreground”

897^th Week: Orienting to the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

I’ve mentioned often that I believe that each of us is a participant in a dynamic collective human consciousness (as well as a collective planetary consciousness) and, because of this, that we are both contributing to and receiving from this collective all the time. When we develop new skills, discover new understandings, master something that was a challenge before, my belief is that we contribute what we experience to our human collective. Then, people who are on the verge of similar accomplishments can spontaneously draw on what we have contributed to the collective through our experience. In the same way, I believe that we also draw from the collective to support our individual journeys.

One of the powerful realities of our collective being is that we are affected by both positive and negative events and responses happening within our human family. As a trauma resolution specialist, I’m keenly aware that groups of people can generate what is called a “trauma vortex” that affects people who aren’t directly involved. Deep suffering can touch all of us even if we aren’t consciously aware of it. We resonate with one another simply because of our participation in collective consciousness. It can be the same on the positive side of things, as well, as was demonstrated in research a number of years ago where people in large groups in a city doing transcendental meditation seemingly affected the statistics on lowered crime in that city during the time of these meditations. We affect one another whether we mean to or not and whether we are conscious of it or not.

During  the years that I taught Somatic Experiencing®, and whenever I have done workshops for the public or professionals over many years, one of the thoughts/wishes/intentions I have held was that the workshop or training would offer whatever amounted to the greatest good for the greatest number of those present. I would also hold the intention that the workshop or training would offer healing support in whatever ways was needed for each person present.

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I just watched a Netflix video of Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia.  I always enjoy Trevor’s humor, as it touches into cultural and racial issues that may be hard to talk about in other contexts.  In this particular comedy routine, he spends a good bit of time around how he feels when people call him the “N” word. Apparently, in his mother’s language, this particular word, or the sound of it, means “to give”, so it can bring a warm feeling to him when people shout it at him.

As I watched this video, it got me to thinking about how violent some words can be and how we might respond to these words without adding to the violent energy behind them.  Read More “734th Week: Meeting Violent Communication with Love”

I’m sure I’ve written about this many times, but here I go again. Where we focus our attention, what we think about, how we engage our imagination has a powerful impact on the quality of our inner life and on how we behave and act in our world. What we attend to matters. What we imagine matters.

This week I want to share some thoughts about engaging what’s called the “imaginal realm”. When we enter the imaginal realm, we aren’t engaging something “imaginary”. Instead, we touch into a kind of language or communication that uses visual and other sensory impressions rather than strings of words. Our culture tends not to privilege awareness that operates in the imaginal realm and yet it’s one of the most powerful creative forces we have available to us.

For example, spend a moment right now bringing into awareness either an image of some beautiful place you’ve been—a place that touched you deeply, or recall a sound, fragrance, or sensation that moves you in a way that is meaningful to you. Since images are my main language in this realm, I often “see” trees that have touched me, such as the giant Sequoia I’m imagining right now. This image generates a powerful felt-sense of awe and heart-filling expansion, with my whole body-mind responding to the memory of the presence of this magnificent tree. Or, I might bring into awareness an image of one of the cats who live with me doing something amusing, something that fills me with delight and touches my heart, as well as generating a smile and a chuckle.

We know from science that our brains register imaginal experience in much the same way as actual lived experience, creating a full experience in the body (sensations) and psyche (emotional and mental states). The only difference is that these experiences and awareness arise and unfold in the imaginal realm.

Read More “829th Week: The Imaginal Realm”