758th Week: The Importance and Power of Presence

ByNancy Napier

I taught a workshop the other day and was keenly aware of the importance and power of presence as it affects not only ourselves but the space and people around us.  This professional workshop focused on helping clients become more grounded and have the ability to re-center after becoming activated.  As we all came together for the day, I could feel the qualities of our combined presence and found myself emphasizing the presence of the practitioner as the main element in any healing process.

On a more general note, I’m also always aware of the importance and power of presence as we move through our everyday lives. There isn’t a moment that we aren’t radiating the qualities of our personal and collective presence, and our personal presence inevitably impacts not only our own experience but that of everyone we encounter along the way.

This got me to thinking of the ways in which we can become more mindful of the qualities of our personal presence, and of the importance of being able to notice when we radiate negative or hurtful qualities and need to make available the choice to reorient ourselves and “dial in” a different mood state, quality of consciousness, or focus of our attention.

For this week’s practice in conscious living, here are a few practices that may be helpful when you find yourself radiating or expressing qualities that don’t feel healthy to you, or when you find that you want to add something positive to a collective context within which you may find yourself:

  • Notice where you may experience tension in your body and invite yourself to soften.  Softening automatically reduces activation and stress in the body and your presence, when you are softer, will radiate gentler energies and qualities.
  • If you find that you are irritable or impatient, take a few moments to focus your awareness in your heart (an adaptation of HeartMath), bring to mind an image, sound, or other representation of something you love or for which you have affection, and then gently breathe in and out of your heart for a few minutes.  The radiating presence of an open heart is quite different from the radiating presence of a tense mind or body.

A personal practice I engage in at the beginning of each day is to focus my awareness in my heart, breathing in and out through my heart space, and mentally say to myself a number of times, “I choose love.”  I find that this brings me fairly quickly into a heart-centered presence that I would like to carry throughout the coming day.

  • Notice where you focus your awareness.  If you find that you are mentally chewing on some resentment or argument you had, or think you may have, with someone, notice what it’s like to deliberately, yet gently, shift your awareness to thoughts that offer you a sense of support, inspiration, awe, or some other positive state of mind.  This shift in state of mind will automatically shift the state of your body and emotions and, thereby, shift the radiating presence that you bring into your world.

Here, again, an internal statement or mantra that brings a positive state might be worth having in the back of your mind so you can pull it forward at times like these. The statement might be something like, “A part of me is irritated but I am fine and I choose equanimity,” or something that resonates as true for you.

  • If you find that you are constricted and tense over situations in your life, or about your life in general, notice what happens if you take on a gratitude practice, allowing yourself to bring to mind two or three things for which you are grateful, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant. Gratitude has a distinctly different “tone” and radiating a quality of gratitude can powerfully affect the quality of your presence.

A close companion to gratitude is a practice of generosity.  You might explore this, as well, and notice what qualities it brings to your presence.

It’s helpful to remember that the world around us is all about energy and frequencies, and the different qualities your presence radiates are frequencies that can be shifted if you discover you don’t like what is moving through you into the world.

There are other practices that you can choose, as well, such as Lovingkindness, Tonglen (about which I’ve written quite a bit recently), breathing exercises that help you to settle, and more.  The key thing isn’t which practices you choose. Rather, the important thing is that you develop the capacity to sense the quality of your presence and then have the option to choose to shift to a different quality or add some qualities you’d like to carry in and with you. 

As with all these weekly practices, there’s no right way to do this one.  Instead, my intention is to offer you an opportunity to become more consciously aware of the importance and power of your personal presence and its impact on you and the world around you.  Please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise, allowing them to move on through without your having to respond to them or do anything with or about them.

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2023 April Meditation
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2023 April Meditation

ByNancy Napier

This month, we continue our theme of the range of relationships we have with the world around us and how we bring our presence to these many connections, even those we may not think about often but are aspects of our everyday experience. In this meditation, we bring to mind the many people and life-forms who work behind the scenes to make our life possible. Those who make it possible for us to have food to eat; those who bring electricity, water, and other necessities into our lives. All the people who contribute in ay way to items used in daily life, including gadgets, household items, clothing, and more. In this meditation, we offer gratitude and blessings to all…

Below are two version of the meditation. One is audio only and the other is audio with images of nature. Please remember never to listen to these audio meditations when driving or operating dangerous machinery…

892nd Week: Collective Information Fields and Intuitive Awareness

892nd Week: Collective Information Fields and Intuitive Awareness

ByNancy Napier

It’s just about mid-week and I haven’t yet posted a practice for this week, which would usually be posted by Sunday. These times when I draw a complete blank become an invitation to relax and open my awareness to what might unexpectedly drop in. This process reminds me of the practice of “not doing”. Instead, it becomes a practice of “being” and “receiving” rather than figuring out or doing.

Then, this takes me to the importance of intuitive awareness and how our current consensus reality in Western thinking tends to devalue non-rational ways of knowing. For me, non-rational ways of knowing are equally present, if not dominant, in my usual way of moving through the world, so I’d like to share some thoughts and an exercise that offer support for intuitive ways of knowing.

Whenever I find myself with a conundrum, not knowing exactly what to do, I ask for help or input. It’s not important to think about where the information or support comes from. For example, I might ask for help from “cat intelligence” or “plant intelligence” if I have a question about how to help the felines who live with me or the trees that grace my small apartment. What comes to mind are all the varieties of collective consciousness that Rupert Sheldrake talks about in his work with morphic fields—fields of information that species contribute to and draw from all the time.

One of my favorite examples of a morphic field is where Sheldrake talks about small birds in England. Prior to World War II, these birds had a habit of flipping the lids off of milk bottles delivered and left on people’s stoops. The birds were after the cream just under the bottle’s lid. Milk then became rationed and not readily available during the war and several generations of these birds were born and died without having learned to take off the lids of the milk bottles. As soon as deliveries began again after the war, the birds were back, doing what they had always done. Sheldrake says that they are able to do this because of the information field of their species, their morphic field, which contains all the information of every member of the species that has ever lived.

Read More “892nd Week: Collective Information Fields and Intuitive Awareness”
673rd Week: Living with “Wide Open Eyes”

673rd Week: Living with “Wide Open Eyes”

ByNancy Napier

Recently, I read an article by a man named Michael Edwards, about the mysticism of living with “wide open eyes”. Edwards is a social activist, so the meat of the article focused on social transformation. The part of his writing that related to these experiments in conscious living had to do with what happens to the quality of life when we experience ourselves as part of a collective life filled with mystery and beauty.

Here are some of the quotations drawn from that article: Read More “673rd Week: Living with “Wide Open Eyes””

2023 January Meditation
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2023 January Meditation

ByNancy Napier

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.

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September 2016 Audio Meditation

ByNancy Napier

898th Week: Adapting with Compassion

898th Week: Adapting with Compassion

ByNancy Napier

During my morning stroll through Facebook, I came upon the following story, posted by Upworthy. As I read it, I began to think about how important and uplifting it is when we can adapt to adversity, change, or unexpected developments with new, creative, and compassionate responses. Here’s what I read on FB:

“My dad has a massive vegetable garden and it is his life. Whenever I ask how things are going, he tells me about the garden. Periodically he will text me a picture of the things he’s harvested and ask when I’m coming to pick them up. And for a while, the biggest bit of garden gossip has been his nemesis, the gopher. This gopher was consistently ruining his day by pilfering the best of everything just before my dad could harvest it. Anytime I talked to him, all he had to tell me about was ‘that damned gopher.’ He dreamt about killing the gopher, his truest enemy. He tried to train the dog to hunt the gopher, but the dog is a pacifist. He led some of the barn cats to the holes, but the barn cats have unionized and refused his offered rate. He then laid no-kill traps (can’t risk having poison near the crops) with eventual gophercide in mind, but then suddenly he was faced with a cute and terrified animal and didn’t have the heart. He released it. ‘He was SO scared, he’ll never come back.’ The gopher was back the next day, with a vengeance. That was some weeks ago. Today, my dad sent me pictures of his garden, and I saw a squash gently laid by the gopher’s hole, like a package left on the doorstep. I said ‘Dad, what’s that squash doing there by the gopher hole?’ He said ‘Oh, he likes squash best.’ In an effort to appease the gopher, my father now gives him a little squash everyday, like leaving an offering for a garden spirit. This apparently works well as a compromise; the gopher has stopped stealing, content to have his meals delivered to his door.” Originally posted on FB by filmnoirsbian.

Notice your response to reading this story and, in particular, notice the response of your heart-based awareness. Next, imagine how your life would be, or how our collective life would be, if we all could arrive at this kind of resolution. In the story above, a response that embraced collaboration rather than combat arose, with some compassion thrown in.

This story reminds me of the inescapable fact that we live on a planet that thrives on cooperation and active collaboration. For sure, there’s also competition but as Elisabet Sahtouris, the evolutionary biologist found, while young species may emphasize competition, more mature species move toward expressions of cooperation and collaboration. 

Read More “898th Week: Adapting with Compassion“

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