March 2010 Audio Meditation

As a general practice, I spend time each morning looking at videos, interviews, and professional talks that support a positive sense of connection and wholeness.  Beginning each day orients me to a perspective and sense of being that colors my day with a quality that nourishes my body and soul.  During one of these forays into cyberspace, I ran across an article, which touched me with its emphasis on a more mystical sense of our world.

The author, Michael Edwards, says the following: “…spirituality can give us an actual experience of the unity of all things.  This experience, when nurtured as a constant practice, roots quality-consciousness, non-discrimination, non-violence and reverence for all people and the earth deep into our core.”  Read More “706th Week:  Living With “Wide Open Eyes”

As I prepared to write this week’s practice in conscious living, it became clear that I needed to take two of my three feline family members to an emergency vet on different nights during the week. One of the things related to being in an emergency facility is that there is plenty of time to wait. It’s first come, first served and there’s no way to rush the attention needed in emergency visits.

To help keep my feline friends calm, I needed to draw on the calm part of myself—to bring the calm aspect of my wholeness into the foreground of my experience. This got me to thinking about offering a practice around the importance of embracing our wholeness so that we are able to remember that all aspects of being can shift from foreground to background and, also from background to foreground. In these emergency experiences, I remembered that I’ve developed a much deeper relationship with being calm and centered and that, even when this aspect of being drops into the background of my awareness, it’s always there to invite forward when I’m able to do so.

It’s helpful to remember that trauma can add an energy “punch” to some aspects of our wholeness so that when they move into the foreground of awareness we may find ourselves activated in ways we hadn’t expected and which we may have a hard time managing. A year-and-a-half ago, when one of my feline family members had a dental emergency, I found myself catapulted into a very young part of my wholeness. What I noticed this time around was that the efforts I invested over the last year dealing with what got pulled into the foreground last year made a noticeable difference, for which I have been very grateful. I was calm in a way I wouldn’t have predicted, given my previous responses.

As I write this week’s practice, we’re about a month into “sheltering in place” here in New York City. For all of us, the whole world of human beings, this is a time of challenge beyond what many of us would have imagined possible. The fact that we are able to be connected around the globe is a previously unimagined gift of being able to move through this experience as a connected human family.

I had an experience this week that touched me deeply and I want to share it as the theme of this week’s practice that I’d like to invite you to explore. I got an email through my website and it was from someone who had noticed that I hadn’t posted a practice last week. She hoped that I was okay and wanted to make contact to be sure everything was all right with me. 

As I read this unexpected email, my heart filled with gratitude and warmth that this person cared enough to be in touch and to check in with me. It got me to thinking about how powerful it is when we care about and for one another, what a balm it is to the heart, and how such an act can fill someone with a sense of connection, warmth, and gratitude.

I’ve written before about some of the basic teachings I received from my grandmother between the ages of 10 and 16, when she was my first spiritual teacher.  One of the important things I took from those years was my understanding of what she called “the raincloud of knowable things”.  Because she believed and lived in a sense of collective consciousness, her experience was that there is nothing in the world that “belongs” to any one person or group.  In the “raincloud of knowable things”, all ideas, creative possibilities, deep understandings are available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Read More “701st Week:  Revisiting the “Raincloud of Knowable Things””