2022 March Audio Meditation

Sitting in Central Park listening to early morning birdsong, surrounded by the gift of lush green and inhaling the fragrance of Locust trees laden with their summer flowers, I find myself soaking it all in with a grateful heart. With so much strife and suffering in the world, these quiet moments with nature represent a powerful gift, a time of restoration and deep nourishment.

As I sit here, my thoughts turn to a conversation I had recently with a group of colleagues.  We were talking about practices that enhance a focus on heart intelligence and heart perception, and how different a heart-based orientation is when compared to experiencing the world primarily through a head, or brain-based, orientation. Read More “7l7th Week:  Thinking with Your Heart”

During the process of putting together my breakfast smoothie for tomorrow morning this evening, I suddenly noticed that I had the face of a cat in my face, paws of more than one cat all over the kitchen counters.  I’m pretty strict about cats not being  involved directly in my food preparation, but the person who stays with them when I’m out of town clearly has different rules than I do.

What struck me this evening was the depth of humor I inevitably touch into when the cats (I live with three of them) show up when I don’t expect them.  The minute I realized that I had a cat’s head and paws in my immediate awareness, I noticed that I was spontaneously laughing and snuggling fur.

This got me to thinking about the benefits of cultivating a sense of humor over life’s inevitable glitches and moments of non-traumatic surprise.  So many moments in any given day don’t go how we expect or want them to go.  That doesn’t mean, though, that they can’t be moments of delight or fun.

I recently went on vacation with my sister for our annual time away together. As part of my preparation for the trip, I did a meditation in which I chose the qualities I wanted to resonate with throughout the trip. The primary frequency I chose was “flexibility”. During my daily life, I often choose the frequency of “kindness”, along with “flexibility”. What I want to share here is an interesting experience I had that I think makes consciously choosing frequencies with which to resonate in any given situation much more appealing.

At one point in the trip, a situation arose that in the past would have had me feeling constrained and a bit irritable. What I discovered was that I was relaxed and “going with the flow” in a way I hadn’t anticipated and in a way that required no self-management on my part. A response of being flexible naturally and spontaneously arose and then, the important thing I want to share here, is that I noticed that the quality and tone of my self-talk was different from how I would have expected it to be. I found myself telling myself that, “It’s all fine. No problem.” As I listened to those internal words, I found myself even more relaxed.

This all got me to thinking about how useful it is to have supportive self-talk spontaneously arise without having to exert any conscious effort for it to do so. I can only attribute the quality of the self-talk to my resonance with the frequency of flexibility. That tone and quality seemingly pervaded my psychological experience, along with my body, in ways that allowed me to move through the whole week with flexibility at the forefront of my responses.

During times of extreme stress, such as those we collectively and individually face as a global community at this time, it can be a challenge to move through daily life with our hearts open. It can also be a challenge to feel centered and grounded, and I’ve written a few prior practices to support returning to a grounded center. 

One of the unfortunate side effects of the level of stress we collectively experience at this time is a tendency to constrict our hearts. More than ever, this is a time when, because of the pandemic and also the challenge of climate change, we need to awaken our hearts to ourselves, to one another, and to our planet. 

For this week, I’d like to offer a practice for cultivating an open heart. Many years ago, back in the early 1970’s, my first therapist often drew on approaches drawn from Psychosynthesis. Created by an Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis is a transpersonally-oriented psychotherapy which uses guided imagery and work with symbols, among other approaches.