September Audio Meditation

I write this practice on the first weekend of the new year. The year just passed brought many challenges, not the least of which has been our global, collective experience with Covid 19. Other challenges arose, as well, bringing with them an inescapable awareness of cultural beliefs and norms that need to be updated, changed, eliminated, or transformed depending on what they represent and what they support in our social consciousness and behavior. 

I’ve also been thinking about the intersection between deeply held intentions and what has been called the “quantum foam”—the arena in which an infinite array of probabilities may be found. In quantum research and theory, it has become apparent that probabilities dance in and out of reality all the time, responding in part to the “observer effect”. For me, this equates with how our deep choices interact outside our conscious awareness with the emergence of particular probabilities and I find this a much more dynamic and creative idea than our usual “New Year’s resolutions” type of activity.

What I want to share this week invites us to engage the idea that we are all part of a collective information field, what we might call our collective human consciousness, and that we have an effect, an impact, on one another even when we are separated by physical distance. Within the context of our collective information field, our quality of emotional, mental, and physical presence affects our collective and all the individuals in it. We touch each other whether we are aware of it or not. Because of this, I’d like to offer a practice this week that speaks to the fact that, collectively, we are one energy organism and our presence matters.

One of the things that I emphasize in my work as a psychotherapist, and also in what I teach, is a focus on our wholeness. Within a context of wholeness, I also emphasize paying attention to what aspect of that wholeness is currently in the foreground and what has dropped into the background of awareness. Someone once said, I think the French philosopher Emile Coué, something along the lines of whatever is in any human being at any time in history is also in me. This is a statement of wholeness, that we all contain everything and anything that is part of being human across all time.

Nothing can be deleted from our wholeness. The key is to become increasingly aware of the quality of our presence so we can choose what we want to express in our everyday lives. If we find that we are in a frightened or angry mood, those are the aspects of wholeness that have moved into the foreground of our expression, while our steady presence has shifted into the background.

What the world needs now from as many of us as possible is for us to bring into the foreground of how we move through the world a quality of steady presence. That’s what the following practice invites you to explore:

I ended last week’s practice with a suggestion to come back to the present moment and to this current breath as a way to manage some of the stress of this time in our collective lives.

One of the practices that I used to teach in the Somatic Experiencing® trainings was to invite people to notice how they “add fuel to the bonfires of activation”. Many of us have grown up in cultures that don’t focus on tracking how we allow our thinking to drag us hither and yon, an experience that generates enormous amounts of suffering. In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s more important than ever to be able to notice when we increase our suffering by allowing our fear-generated thoughts to dominate our attention and experience.

One of the practices that can be difficult but is powerfully important is to hold the intention to come back to the present moment, to the breath you’re taking right now, and to focus awareness on this breath, on this moment. In terms of self-talk, one of the things that’s helpful to say while doing this practice is something along the lines of, “In this moment, right here and right now, I’m okay enough.” 

I am, without question, a creature of habit.  There is a place in Central Park where I sit on weekend mornings and do a lot of the writing that shows up here as weekly practices.  Because I’m pretty much a regular during seasons that encourage being outdoors, I have come to know others who are also regulars on weekend mornings.  One man who works at the restaurant in the park comes by each weekend morning and we have a bit of a chat.  One morning, because it rained the day before, he mentioned that he missed seeing me on his way to work… Read More “703rd Week:  Supporting A Sense of Connection”