Week 662: Nature’s Astonishing Intelligence

ByNancy Napier

Walking through Central Park in the rain one morning, I found myself pondering the astonishing fact that the planet figured out how to generate water, and then to evaporate it so it could come down as rain and nourish a wide array of life forms as they emerged into the ever-expanding family of planetary life. For the entire walk, I felt amazed at what our beautiful planet has created as its dynamic and ecology, with all the systems that generate and support such a diverse array of life forms. I felt the same way the first time I learned about the crucial role of bacteria in supporting life on our planet, and continue to be moved and inspired by the complex intelligence that keeps us all alive.

This got me to thinking about the theme of last week’s experiment, where we explored paying attention to moments that bring delight. For this week’s experiment, I find myself wondering what it would be like to spend a week orienting to the creative mystery that is our home, to the incredible intelligence and generativity of our planet, the source of our physical life.

So, for this week, I invite you to orient to moments of inspiration and flashes of insight about our amazing planet, about the complexity of the ecological processes and systems that have emerged over the course of billions of years. For me, this represents a mystery I don’t ever expect to understand, but for which I feel profound awe and gratitude.

Many of you have already seen these videos on youtube, but I wanted to include them here in case you haven’t. First are two videos of people who are working to restore nature to the abundance that used to be present, working with trees:

Replanting Redwood Forests:

The Forest Man of India:

Here are some videos of nature, narrated by Julie Roberts, Kevin Spacey, and Edward Norton. They are part of a series put out by Conservation International and are a call for people to wake up to what’s happening to our planetary home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmVLcj-XKnM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqMJzv4Cs8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dor4XvjA8Wo

Part of this experiment also includes noticing the quality of your relationship with nature and the ways in which you support nature’s health and well-being. It can feel overwhelming to think about what we can do as individuals, but when we seek to live consciously, we can take time to notice how we move through our world and how we treat the world around us. For example, do you recycle? Do you honor and bless the water and food you have available to you, giving yourself an opportunity to not take it for granted? Bringing a sense of the sacred and gratitude into interactions with food, the air we breathe, water, the life around us can enrich our experience in surprising and beneficial ways.

As with all these experiments, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion, as you explore perhaps a bit more deeply your relationship with our earth and allow yourself to feel maybe even a bit more awe than you already do. We are part of Nature’s Intelligence, and can enrich the quality of our inner lives by nurturing and promoting a sense of connection with, and interdependent relationship to, the world around us.

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668th Week: Breathing Ease

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When I was young, my grandmother taught me a practice called “breathing color” as a tool for healing and settling in. She was my first spiritual teacher, from whom I learned to meditate and to attend to the spiritual side of reality as a part of daily living and color breathing became one of the tools I called on regularly in those early years. Read More “668th Week: Breathing Ease”

784th Week: Being Part of a Community

784th Week: Being Part of a Community

ByNancy Napier

I feel very fortunate to have an opportunity to go to Central Park on some days to get exercise and to plop myself down on a bench where I have spent so much time over the years in meditation and contemplation with my tree friends. One of the things that I’ve noticed each time I’m in the park these days is how many people are jogging and walking without wearing masks. This got me to thinking about our participation as members of a community and how we have an ongoing opportunity to take responsibility for our part in supporting everyone around us.

As I pondered the question of why people aren’t wearing masks as they exercise and walk around Central Park, I could only imagine that they haven’t quite registered that we are wearing masks to protect one another. They aren’t really to protect ourselves, since most of us don’t have the kind of mask that will filter out viruses. The reason we are wearing them is because we could unknowingly be carriers of the virus and we are protecting everyone around us.

For this week’s practice, I invite all of us to be aware of our place within our communities. Wherever we live, we are part of a collective and we are responsible for our contributions to our community, however that might be arranged and however small or large those contributions. What I’d like to ask all of us to consider is how are we caring for our community? What practices do we bring to help support and protect those around us? In the building where I live in New York City we have active cases of the Covid virus, so all of us are asked to be sure to wear masks and gloves when interacting with the doormen and concierges in the lobby of this very large building and in the laundry room as a way to protect the people who work here, as well as to protect each other.

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854th week: Choose Your Frequency

854th week: Choose Your Frequency

ByNancy Napier

I’ve written quite a bit lately about frequencies and the foreground/background dynamics of our underlying wholeness. One of the practices that, for me, is an effective and useful tool in affecting the quality of both my inner and outer life experience is taking time to choose the frequencies with which I want to resonate. 

As I’ve described a number of times, what I mean by “frequency” is the tone and quality of what we experience and embody, and what we radiate into the world around us in every moment. For example, think of people you meet who seem to exude a sense of curiosity, delight, kindness, friendliness, etc. And, also, think of people you meet who seem to exude a quality of anger, fear, harshness, etc. These are all frequencies, and they are the tangible expressions of the qualities with which we resonate and which we radiate into our environment—both consciously and unconsciously. Most of the time, many of us—if not most—are unconscious of the these qualities, and we aren’t taught about how they tangibly affect our internal and external experiences. 

Another aspect of our relationship to frequencies is the fact of our wholeness. Everything we have experienced and are is ever-present as part of our underlying and inescapable wholeness. When I teach about wholeness, I emphasize the fact that there’s nothing about us we can “get rid of” or “erase”. Instead, our wholeness is always with us, with some aspects of self expressing in the foreground of our experience and others sliding into the background. In this work with frequencies, we aren’t being asked to get rid of negative or troublesome aspects of ourselves. Instead, we are invited to choose a frequency that we want to experience in the foreground of our experience even as we allow our awareness to enfold all of what constitutes our wholeness.

This is where I call on the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, which I’ve shared many times. When we turn the tube of a kaleidoscope, all the pieces shift into a new pattern. Sometimes, a color we haven’t seen for quite a while may pop into view while another drops away. This is the way I think of the dynamics of wholeness: aspects of ourselves slide into the foreground while others drop into the background.

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