March 2020 Audio Meditation

During my morning stroll through Facebook, I came upon the following story, posted by Upworthy. As I read it, I began to think about how important and uplifting it is when we can adapt to adversity, change, or unexpected developments with new, creative, and compassionate responses. Here’s what I read on FB:

“My dad has a massive vegetable garden and it is his life. Whenever I ask how things are going, he tells me about the garden. Periodically he will text me a picture of the things he’s harvested and ask when I’m coming to pick them up. And for a while, the biggest bit of garden gossip has been his nemesis, the gopher. This gopher was consistently ruining his day by pilfering the best of everything just before my dad could harvest it. Anytime I talked to him, all he had to tell me about was ‘that damned gopher.’ He dreamt about killing the gopher, his truest enemy. He tried to train the dog to hunt the gopher, but the dog is a pacifist. He led some of the barn cats to the holes, but the barn cats have unionized and refused his offered rate. He then laid no-kill traps (can’t risk having poison near the crops) with eventual gophercide in mind, but then suddenly he was faced with a cute and terrified animal and didn’t have the heart. He released it. ‘He was SO scared, he’ll never come back.’ The gopher was back the next day, with a vengeance. That was some weeks ago. Today, my dad sent me pictures of his garden, and I saw a squash gently laid by the gopher’s hole, like a package left on the doorstep. I said ‘Dad, what’s that squash doing there by the gopher hole?’ He said ‘Oh, he likes squash best.’ In an effort to appease the gopher, my father now gives him a little squash everyday, like leaving an offering for a garden spirit. This apparently works well as a compromise; the gopher has stopped stealing, content to have his meals delivered to his door.” Originally posted on FB by filmnoirsbian.

Notice your response to reading this story and, in particular, notice the response of your heart-based awareness. Next, imagine how your life would be, or how our collective life would be, if we all could arrive at this kind of resolution. In the story above, a response that embraced collaboration rather than combat arose, with some compassion thrown in.

This story reminds me of the inescapable fact that we live on a planet that thrives on cooperation and active collaboration. For sure, there’s also competition but as Elisabet Sahtouris, the evolutionary biologist found, while young species may emphasize competition, more mature species move toward expressions of cooperation and collaboration. 

Whenever I have to go to a doctor or any other kind of practitioner, I spend time resonating with gratitude around the fact that they can do something for me that I can’t do for myself. I started this practice many years ago and find that it makes even challenging medical and dental visits easier to move through.

When I think of resonating with a specific frequency, it reminds me of putting on particular clothing appropriate to what I’ll be doing. For me, frequencies are “energy garments” which we take on and these energies affect both our own perceptions and responses as well as the environments we enter. They “set a tone” that then supports a particular quality of experience.

This has gotten me to thinking about the effects of resonating with the frequency of gratitude. With my background in working with trauma resolution and my understanding of somatic aspects of healing, I find myself wondering if the frequency of gratitude generates a quality that conveys to the body that there’s no threat, that all is well, that there’s nothing to struggle against. 

What I want to offer in this practice is an opportunity for you to experiment with the effects of resonating with gratitude in a variety of situations, especially in those where you are dependent on some kind of practitioner to offer healing opportunities that you can’t offer to yourself. You can also explore your experience when you attune to gratitude before entering a store, a business, an educational setting—anyplace. I often attune to gratitude when I come into Central Park, where I am now as I write this practice. I am deeply grateful to the Spirit of Central Park for all that it offers to so many of us in this crowded urban setting.