October 2018 Meditation

Often as I walk through Central Park, I thank workers along the way for the help they offer in keeping the park a wonderful place to spend time. Yesterday I thanked a worker and he said, “We love this park, so we love this work.”  This morning I thanked a garbage man for helping to make our city more livable.  I always thank the postal carriers at both my office and at home when I see them, along with people from all the various delivery services that bring packages filled with things that make my life work.  Without these people, life would be very different.  

As I move through New York City, I pay attention to people whose job it is to support the rest of us, people who help make our lives easier to navigate.  For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to do the same and, if you are already someone who thanks people along the way, ramp it up a bit and see how that feels.  Gratitude brings its gifts not only to those we thank but to us, as well. It has the power to lift our spirits, as well as those who receive gratitude from us.  

Our sense of well-being is nourished when we engage in expressing gratitude to the people around us.  We are more likely to remember that we are part of a community and that, without the whole community, we wouldn’t be able to live our lives in the ways we do. This awareness of community can also remind us of the underlying interdependence that is fundamental to human existence.  We depend on one another for just about every aspect of our lives and taking the time to thank people we don’t know and may never see again helps to reinforce an awareness of just how much we need one another.

Each morning, I post a daily inspirational quotation and nature photograph on the Devadana Sanctuary Facebook page and the one I put up recently has stayed on my mind.  I thought I’d share it as this week’s practice, given the amount of contention and negative feelings and events happening in so many of our human communities around the world.

The quotation is from the work of Pierre Predervand, who writes about the powerful practice of offering blessings as an aspect of, and activity in, daily living.  I include gratitude in this practice because, for me, both offering blessings and expressions of gratitude are powerfully related.  Here’s the quotation from Pierre Predervand  (from his book, The Gentle Art of Blessing) that I posted the other day:

One of the practices I’ve taken on even more actively these days is imagining that I am an open and always-available channel for the energy of universal love to flow through me as I move around in the course of my daily life activities. When I use the word “love”, I’m not referring to the personal kind but, instead, to my sense that the most potent healing energy in the universe is Love with a capital “L”.

It seems to me that this particular kind of “subtle activism” can be an addition to whatever else I, or we, may do to help heal our distressed world, our human family, and all our other earth kin. Imagining the energy of love flowing through me throughout the day doesn’t ask anything of me other than to bring my awareness to the process as often as I choose to do so. And, I feel somewhat confident in saying that choosing to be a channel for the healing quality of love probably doesn’t have a downside when we don’t personalize it…when we realize that we are, indeed, simply open channels for this universal energy to flow through us and into our world.

For years, I’ve had a practice of blessing everything around me. This particular practice became much more an ongoing part of my life when I went through seminary and was ordained as an Interfaith (now called Interspiritual) Minister back in 2003. In recent years, I’ve found that taking classes with David Spangler through his Lorian Association has helped me focus even more fully on these ways of moving through the world.

As I thought about what kind of practice in conscious living to share this week, I found myself thinking about the fact that we are part of a variety of fields of collective consciousness. Most of us are generally unaware of this dynamic, even as we constantly affect the world around us, as it also affects us.

In my world, I’m aware of many fields of collective consciousness. There’s the collective consciousness we share as a human species. There’s the field of consciousness that is part of our individual families, our communities, our nations, our world as one organism, and also any groups to which we belong. In all these fields of information, fields of consciousness, we constantly contribute to and draw from the quality of these collectives.

Just as we are keenly aware of the impact of living in a physical environment that has pollution and toxic elements, there are aspects in some of these fields of collective consciousness that have a similar impact. This brings me to the subject of frequencies, which I’ve written about before, and of the importance of the frequencies with which we resonate. Within a context of collective fields of consciousness, it’s all about frequencies. For example, if we are anxious, the quality and tone of that anxiety in ourselves automatically resonates with whatever anxiety exists within our collective field of consciousness and actually amplifies our feeling. On the other hand, if we are grounded and steady, those will be the qualities with which we resonate within the collective and those which we spontaneously contribute, as well.

A key thing to remember is, again, we constantly contribute to and draw from these collectives and the frequencies/qualities with which we resonate play an important role in the quality and tone of our psychological life.