November 2018 Meditation

I just watched a Netflix video of Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia.  I always enjoy Trevor’s humor, as it touches into cultural and racial issues that may be hard to talk about in other contexts.  In this particular comedy routine, he spends a good bit of time around how he feels when people call him the “N” word. Apparently, in his mother’s language, this particular word, or the sound of it, means “to give”, so it can bring a warm feeling to him when people shout it at him.

As I watched this video, it got me to thinking about how violent some words can be and how we might respond to these words without adding to the violent energy behind them.  Read More “734th Week: Meeting Violent Communication with Love”

 The other day, I puzzled over a dilemma I had with one of the cats who live with me. She needs an asthma inhaler twice a day and for quite a while she has been very cooperative with the process. About a month ago, she began to run away from me and the process became quite arduous. Over many years, I’ve had a habit of asking for help from sources I don’t see but assume are present in this wide world of many dimensions and synchronistic moments. What the sources of help are, I can’t begin to say, but I have found that there are times when helpful responses are available. It may be that they arise from my own intuitive non-conscious awareness, where my questions prompt my own internal knowing that allows answers to pop into the foreground of my awareness.

Whatever the source, one evening, I asked for help around how to invite this particular feline family member more gently into the bathroom in the morning and evening for her inhaler. I woke up the next morning with a new plan around how to engage her without all the running away. It worked that morning and has worked ever since and she now again goes to the bathroom before I do and waits for me. 

Again, I don’t know if the answers I tend to get when I ask for help are my own non-conscious wisdom popping up or if they are inspirations received from sources I can’t perceive. It doesn’t really matter. The key seems to be to ask and then to be open to receive input. I think that being receptive and then responsive, i.e., to act on the information received, supports a “conversation” with a wider source of inspiration, be that our own deep wisdom or some collective or other source.

Given the conflicted state of our human family, a state we’re more aware of than ever with our globally interconnected network on the web, practices that support a sense of relatedness are needed for all of us. I’ve written many times about how we are kin not only with every other human being on the planet but also with every other lifeform. All of us are born of this planet, which makes all of us part of one earth family.

I started to write a practice on lovingkindness, which I’ve written about many times, and then found myself shifting into thinking about a practice more focused on recognizing our kinship with one another from a particular perspective—from what Thich Nhat Hanh has described: we interare. He has coined a word, a verb, which is also a concept:  interbeing. Charles Eisenstein uses this concept in his work, as well, and I recommend watching videos of his on YouTube. Interbeingmeans that we are inescapably interconnected and interdependent, that there is no way for us to be separate from one another nor from the ecological framework of our source of physical life—from Nature, from every functioning aspect of our planet and all the lifeforms on it.

Walking across Central Park this morning, I was filled to overflowing with gratitude for all the years I had the privilege of soaking in the beauty, the life-giving vitality, and the spirit of this wonderful place each and every morning on my way to my office. This brought me again to the importance of noticing and experiencing gratitude. As I walked on familiar pathways, the presence of gratitude filled and inspired me.

This experience returns me to an awareness of the importance of gratitude as a frequency we can constantly bring into our lives, and of the health-affirming quality it conveys. I have an active and ongoing relationship with gratitude and I find it supports me during challenging experiences. An example is when I had some rather extensive dental surgery a week ago. After about an hour of what turned out to be a two-hour process, I found myself orienting to what I call the spirit of gratitude. You might think of it as the essence of gratitude, or the frequency of gratitude. I oriented to experiencing the presence and quality of gratitude to help myself continue to be settled and at ease in the chair. I found that choosing to resonate with this essence made all the difference in my ability to remain calm and gratefully open to the help I was receiving.

For this week’s practice, I invite you to find, in the course of the coming week, many moments to be aware of gratitude. You may already have a gratitude practice and, if you do, use this practice to increase the number of times you express your gratitude. You may discover gratitude in some unexpected places when you look for it, even as you may find yourself reinforcing an awareness of gratitude that is already alive and present in your experience.