Sitting in Central Park on an absolutely beautiful morning, I find myself focusing on a daily practice I’ve taken up since the political situation in the United States became so contentious. I’d like to share it here, in case you, too, would like to engage a way to contribute each day to whatever healing may be possible for all of us.
Because of my history of growing up in a multidimensional reality, where my grandmother was a healer and collaborated actively with the “unseen world”, I have been deeply grateful to have been able to engage in what is called subtle activism. For some people, this means a practice of prayer and/or meditation. For others, it’s a practice of imagining positive energies and outcomes, offering healing energy to situations of trauma and distress, and more.
The practice I’ve taken on as a serious daily aspect of my spiritual life is to imagine the essence of universal love flowing onto the planet and into every living being, offering whatever healing and inspiration may be available. I also imagine this universal force as flowing into our human collective consciousness, touching our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs with the healing essence of love. My underlying intention is to support “the greatest good for the greatest number”. This intention allows me to be fully engaged without having to figure out how we will get to an outcome that serves the greatest good for the greatest number.
What appeals to me about imagining universal love touching and filling everything and everyone is that this force doesn’t come with any belief system. Every spiritual approach I’ve encountered has identified love as the most healing force in the universe and it comes with an open neutrality, content-wise, that appeals to me. One doesn’t have to believe anything in particular to have the healing benefits of universal love. One doesn’t have to do anything at all in order to receive love—it holds no prejudice, it expresses absolutely no separateness or tribalism.
And so, for this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to play with this kind of subtle activism. If universal love doesn’t appeal to you, you might explore what it feels like to imagine everything and everyone on the planet enfolded within the essence of compassion. Then, you might imagine our collective consciousness infused with this essence, offering the healing touch that compassion naturally brings. Or, maybe the essence or force of healing, just healing itself, appeals to you. Go with whatever arises naturally as you engage this practice.
It often helps to imagine a color that represents universal love, or a color that represents any essence you may choose as your focus. Drawing on a book focused on “color breathing”, I imagine a rosy-pink, although the color that comes into my awareness is more on the rosy-red side. I don’t think the color is the biggest element in the process. I use it because it makes it easier to imagine the flow of universal love touching everything. Go with whatever color comes to you naturally when you imagine universal love or any other quality you wish to draw on.
Any healing quality can be the focus of this kind of practice. The key thing is that it carries the intention to offer support to a suffering world and to our suffering human family. Our species is having a crisis everywhere on the planet and we are in deep need of healing. This kind of practice can offer us an opportunity to feel we are contributing even when we are across the world from a particular tragedy or conflict that has captured our attention and, perhaps, our heart.
As with all these practices, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise. The fundamental reality is that we’re all in this together and whatever practices offer a way to contribute to our collective well-being feels to me to be worthwhile, even when these practices don’t easily fit into our three-dimensional reality context. I hope you will enjoy exploring this one or, perhaps, creating one of your own with this post as a jumping off point.