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766th Week: Cultivating a Sense of Humor
During the process of putting together my breakfast smoothie for tomorrow morning this evening, I suddenly noticed that I had the face of a cat in my face, paws of more than one cat all over the kitchen counters. I’m pretty strict about cats not being involved directly in my food preparation, but the person who stays with them when I’m out of town clearly has different rules than I do.
What struck me this evening was the depth of humor I inevitably touch into when the cats (I live with three of them) show up when I don’t expect them. The minute I realized that I had a cat’s head and paws in my immediate awareness, I noticed that I was spontaneously laughing and snuggling fur.
This got me to thinking about the benefits of cultivating a sense of humor over life’s inevitable glitches and moments of non-traumatic surprise. So many moments in any given day don’t go how we expect or want them to go. That doesn’t mean, though, that they can’t be moments of delight or fun.
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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:
907th Week: Going with the Flow—Letting Go
A couple of weekends ago, I took a walk across Central Park to say hello to the office I had for 33 years. It lives on the corner of 90th and Central Park West in New York City, and for all those years I was able to look at trees in Central Park every day, all day long. That office and I had many powerful experiences together over those years and as I walked back across the park a practice came to mind that I spoke into the phone as an email and sent to myself to work on later. The process of creating that practice reminded me that for all the years I walked across Central Park each weekday morning, I often had my most creative inspirations during those walks.
A couple of days later, when I settled in to write up the practice, I discovered that it had disappeared into the mysterious realm of “where did that email I spent so much time creating go”? The email I sent to myself is nowhere to be found. No amount of searching has revealed it. So, that practice is lost somewhere in cyberspace and seems no longer to be in my head, either.
What this brought into my awareness was the importance of recognizing when there’s nothing to do but to go with the flow of what’s unfolding. And so, what arises from my experience is this practice that I’m sharing with you right now. Since I realized the email was gone, gone, gone, I’ve been having to accept that what I had wanted to share is no more, so I can now engage the practice of letting go of preconceived expectations and, instead, being present to what is.
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