Weekly Practice in Conscious Living

887^th Week: Orienting to Lovingkindness

Note: At the end of this written practice is a recording of the Lovingkindness meditation. Please remember never to listen to recorded meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.

The practice at the center of this week’s offering is heart-oriented. I’ve written many times about the importance of accessing and listening to the “heart-brain”, as it has a different take on many things compared to what the “head-brain” perceives and understands.

In our current political climate, characterized by a style of interaction that began 30 to 40 years ago, there is a new habit of thinking about the “other” in deeply negative terms with labels such as “devils”, “traitors”, “enemies”. This style of interaction has moved about as far from heart-centered styles of perception and interaction as possible. In the years before the current style of political conversation started, people understood that there are disagreements about policies, but this didn’t lead to a direct attack on the characteristics and attributes of colleagues. 

All this got me to thinking about the importance of remembering that we are one human family and that we need each other in order to survive. It also orients me to the practice of lovingkindness, where I can remember and affirm that all living beings want the same thing—to be free from suffering and to be happy. It’s sometimes hard to access this awareness when it feels like we have lost the ability to disagree with one another without an attack and alienation as part of that disagreement.

For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to orient to lovingkindness, if you aren’t doing this kind of practice already. This means to remember that anyone and everyone you encounter along the way wants the same thing. It can be helpful to remember that people who tend go attack are often being driven by fear. 

Here’s one version of Lovingkindness practice that I have on my website:

How to use this Meditation Exercise:

It’s been my experience that doing this meditation once or twice a week, when you have time to really sit with it and enter into the spirit of what it touches, can have a powerful healing effect over time. Doing it regularly in this way creates a state of mind that promotes greater self-acceptance, compassion, tolerance, and ease with ourselves and also with others. It also offers a way to experience and honor mixed feelings while continuing to open your heart. (Note: Doing this practice doesn’t preclude feeling outrage or the need to take action on behalf of social and environmental justice…) If you choose to experiment with this meditation, give it several months to have an effect and notice how you feel as you use it over time.

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I’ve written many times about the importance and impact of the frequencies/ energies/qualities we resonate with, and which we radiate as we move through our daily lives. It’s equally important to notice the qualities that affect our body-mind experience—that impact our moods and thoughts, along with our physical sensations. Equally important are the qualities we spontaneously and automatically contribute to the world around us in every moment. This process is often outside our conscious awareness—the fact that we constantly affect the world around us with the energies we naturally radiate as we move through our everyday activities and interactions. 

When we remember that we live within a context of collective consciousness (if this is an idea that resonates with you), we can remind ourselves that in every moment we contribute to and draw from this collective, most often outside our conscious awareness. We also aren’t usually aware of the ways in which our own thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations are also affected by collective consciousness. For example, if something is happening in the world that creates a lot of fear, any fear we may hold as individuals is amplified by the collective experience of this same emotion. If we are in a group of people expressing deep love and support, our personal experience of comfort or well-being will also be enhanced.

This presence of collective consciousness is the field within which subtle activism finds its impact. It is within this context that practices that invite us to radiate love, compassion, kindness, and other positive emotions finds its place. Also (again, if this resonates with your own belief system) there are many forms of collective consciousness, from our global human family to Nature itself, from the smallest, most intimate environment to earth’s varied landscapes and grand natural wonders. We are connected to, and affected by, all these collective fields of consciousness, even as we are usually not conscious of these connections and their impact on us and ours on them.

Read More “886th Week: Radiating Frequencies as Service and Subtle Activism”

885^th Week : Exploring Your Unique Energy SignatureThis practice continues with the theme of frequencies and their impact on the quality of our own being and of the collective family of lifeforms that are our earth-kin of every kind. One of the fundamental qualities about our beautiful planet is that it seeks to create, and thrives on, a magnificent array of diversity. We know that ecological systems that are the most diverse are also the healthiest and most robust. Within all kingdoms of nature and environments, we see diversity as a fundamental quality. In our human family, nature has expressed this creative impulse toward diversity in countless ways. We have diversity in skin color. We have diversity in facial features and body types. We have diversity in languages and cultural norms, diets, spiritual practices and everyday routines and activities, to mention just a few of the areas of human diversity.

One of the areas I have focused on exploring with humans in mind is the place of core presence that resides within the internal home base of every human being. It is the place in us where we touch into an inherent steadiness that is never disturbed. It is deeper than our conditioning and everyday reactivity. What we can also touch in this place of core presence is a sense of the energy that our presence radiates throughout our body-mind being and into the world around us in every moment. I think of this radiating presence as our unique energy signature. 

My experience and belief are that life’s emphasis on diversity points to the fact that each one of us is a unique expression of life and that each one of us in an irreplaceable expression of that life. Our unique energy signature cannot be replicated by anyone else and it matters that we are here. Even though it’s hard to put into words, my experience is that life lives me rather than I live life.

Read More “885th Week : Exploring Your Unique Energy Signature”

884^th Week :  Orienting to Frequencies

I’ve talked recently about the importance of noticing the quality of energy with which we resonate, the frequencies we bring into our lives and experiences. This year’s monthly audio meditations on my website focus on frequencies and the subject of the quality and tone of energy comes up often in my work with the people who come my way.

Not only do I think that it is vitally important to track which frequencies we bring into the foreground of our awareness, but I also invite people to notice the tone and quality of the unique energy signature that emanates from their core presence, from that place inside each of us that is our internal home base.

I woke up one morning saying the following to myself: “I am a living expression of radiant health.” What struck me as I heard myself saying this in my mind was the quality of energy inherent in the words, radiant health. Since that morning, I’ve been saying this to myself every day, with an occasional alternate version that goes something like, “I am the living essence of radiant health.” Whichever way I say it, the key is the frequency, the quality of the words, radiant health.

Also, when I say radiant health, I’m not just focused on my physical being. I can sense into radiant psychological health, or radiant creativity, or radiant emotional resilience. For this practice, I recommend using the general statement of being a living expression of radiant health, but be sure to adapt this practice to what works best for you.

My sense is that frequencies, that all frequencies/energies/qualities of being, have a direct impact not only on our state of mind but also on the state of our physical being. Because of this, one of the ways I engage my explorations of frequencies is to call on certain qualities to accompany me throughout the day. An example that I may have shared before was very powerful for me when my mother was alive and needing a lot of support. On days when I would be with her, I would call on the frequency of kindness, what I think of as the Spirit or Archetype of Kindness, asking this quality to fill me throughout the day. What I discovered was, when I remembered to do this, the day would unfold with an experience of patience and kindness in me that were more accessible and easier to express than what was usual for me.

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As we experience the intense polarization and conflict in the United States, and also that which has arisen in so many other countries, it feels more important than ever to engage practices that remind us that we are one earth family and that we can’t survive independent from the countless contributions of our human family and our other-than-human earth family. 

I’ve written before about the South African concept and practice of Ubuntu—“I am because you are”, which recognizes and lives into the reality that it is only through the support of the people around us that we are able to be. Here’s one reference describing Ubuntu, one among many: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ubuntu_(philosophy)

Another approach to this same idea comes from Psychiatrist Dan Siegel who has developed what he calls “Intraconnection”, where he describes our awareness as moving from “me to we to mwe”. Here’s a link to his new book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/IntraConnected-Integration-Belonging-Identity-IPNB/dp/0393711692/ref=sr_1_2?crid=N39CCKTAR989&keywords=Dan+Siegel+intraconnected&pldnSite=1&qid=1658667706&sprefix=dan+siegel+intraconnected%2Caps%2C124&sr=8-2

Then, there’s Thich Nhat Hanh’s coining the verb interbeing, where he says that we interare in every moment, that we cannot really be separate from everything around us. Here’s a link to an article by Thich Nhat Hanh on interbeing: https://www.garrisoninstitute.org/blog/insight-of-interbeing/

These and other related approaches and concepts invite us to expand our worldview to move beyond U.S. culture’s (and the cultures of other countries, as well) emphasis on individual issues such as rights, freedom, and independence. For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to dive a bit more deeply into this subject than you may have done before and ask yourself, each day, to recognize your interbeing and interdependence in some way you might ordinarily ignore it.

Read More “883rd Week: Cultivating A Deeper Awareness of Interbeing and Interdependence”