819th Week: More About Focusing on Love

ByNancy Napier

I seem to be returning to a theme I’ve written about many times in recent weeks—the healing power of love and the benefits of living with an open heart. Those of us in the United States, as well as so many people all over the world, find ourselves living in a world of loss, suffering, and discord. I’ve spoken many times about my sense that our species is in a developmental crisis, where we have an opportunity to grow into a deepening sense of oneness and a recognition of our underlying interdependence. The question that is not yet answered is whether we will take this developmental step into recognizing that we are inherently responsible for one another, as well as having responsibility for how we treat all our other earth-kin, including the care and well-being of the earth itself.

Because I can’t begin to imagine what the answer is to resolving this developmental crisis, I have consistently turned to calling on universal love to enter the hearts of everyone and, there, to elicit whatever healing is possible. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I hold the intention that universal love will generate healing that serves the greatest good for the greatest number. I have some confidence in this particular intention because it draws on a wisdom well beyond my own that orients to serving the greater good, whatever that may be.

I recently ran across a YouTube video that speaks to the importance of, and need for, love. It offers sweet inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDTUJnGldGE&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0O_j5XNdQgxh1fz7R4jV2tHfFjsF92v1zc1PWnKcevhwjq3vbMHTQdBN4

For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to seek out sources of information and practice that support living from your heart and orienting your awareness to the essence, energy, and presence of love. Whether you choose a practice from HeartMath, or a Lovingkindness meditation, or orienting yourself to the essence of love, soaking in the qualities you find there, notice what it’s like to choose to engage your world from a stance of an open heart. Remember that an open heart is much stronger and more resilient than one that is closed or constricted by fear or other experiences of threat.

I mentioned in a recent post that each morning I fill myself with the rosy-pink color of universal love and I then spend some time imagining this color/essence/energy flowing down on the planet, filling and enfolding every living thing. For me, this practice allows two things: it nurtures my sense of possibility and hope, and it fills me with a deep and living sense of connection to everything and everyone in the world around me.

Whatever practice you choose this week, allow yourself to play with how it feels to you to experience a deepened sense of connection to everything and everyone around you, to touch even more deeply into a sense that we are all one earth family. Play with what I’m calling our current species-wide developmental opportunity—to explore more deeply a sense of oneness with all life, with everyone, with every earth-kin, with our beautiful and precious planet.

Please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise. Allow any judgments to move on through without your having to do anything about them. Remember, they are usually signs of activation rather than being useful information. Remember to bring as much love to yourself and you choose to offer to your world…

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901st Week: The Importance of Self-Compassion and Self-Kindness

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For many of us, the idea that we can’t truly love others until we love ourselves is a long-standing piece of advice. Lately, I’ve been hearing more about self-compassion and the research being done on it and its companion, self-kindness. When I heard someone talk about self-kindness, I began to think about how readily we will, at times, treat ourselves in ways we would never imagine treating someone else and that got me to thinking even more deeply about the importance of self-kindness. I also got to thinking about how, when we are accustomed to treating ourselves with compassion and kindness, we are more likely to automatically express these qualities to others. 

Without question, most of us walk around with a certain degree of negative self-talk going on, even when we don’t pay much attention to it. Developing a habit of orienting to self-compassion and self-kindness asks us to pay attention to our self-talk and intervene when we discover that we are treating ourselves in unkind ways, replacing critical or negative thoughts with those that reflect active expressions of self-compassion and self-kindness.

One of the things that helps support being kinder to ourselves is something I’ve written about before—the inevitability of our wholeness and the foreground/background dynamic that unfolds in our process from moment to moment. When we can accept that we have a wholeness that contains everything a human is capable of expressing or doing, we can recognize that our ongoing practice can be one of noticing how we move through the world and then learning ways to bring into the foreground of our experience those qualities and states of being that reflect and express compassion and kindness.

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671st Week: Intentional Living

671st Week: Intentional Living

ByNancy Napier

Each week, I post an inspirational quotation and a photograph of nature on the Devadana Sanctuary Facebook page, as well as on the Devadana Sanctuary website. I never know which posts will touch people and which won’t. It’s a daily experience of choosing something I think will be inspiring, finding a photograph that, for me, resonates with the quotation and I never know what will touch people. I’m often surprised by the number of people who respond to a given post, and that was the case with what I’d like to share with you here.

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856th Week: Returning to Steadiness

856th Week: Returning to Steadiness

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For quite a long while now, I have invited myself and others to find the fundamental and ever-present steadiness that is an inherent part of our core presence. Within this living presence of centered and grounded awareness, there is always a steadiness that is undisturbed by anything that may be happening in our lives. It’s a practice I’ve cultivated and returned to again and again, and the habit of orienting to the steadiness that cannot be disturbed has proven to be a powerful and useful resource.

One example of the benefits of settling into the underlying steadiness we all carry at the core of our being is a mundane one, but one that has had particular importance to me. As the child in my family who felt responsible for caring for my mother’s happiness (definitely a child’s perspective!), I developed an underlying anxiety around caregiving. Needless to say, this anxiety was readily present over the years whenever animal members of my family needed medication or some other challenging treatment. Inevitably, I would be anxious—anything but calm—and that never helped. What I discovered in recent weeks, when three feline members of my household had medical issues come up, is that my practice of orienting to my internal steadiness has offered an opportunity to meet these medical needs with a calm presence that I didn’t know was possible. 

For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to explore the following practice to see what it might offer to you. 

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