Meditations, experiments, books and guided meditations to assist with nourishing spirituality, healing childhood wounds, and living more consciously.
Meditations, experiments, books and guided meditations to assist with nourishing spirituality, healing childhood wounds, and living more consciously.
One of the things that our brains seem to do, usually without our conscious awareness, is to project our fears, shame, discomfort, beliefs, and maps of reality onto others. Think of the last time you assigned a motive to someone’s actions only to discover that you were completely off base about what you thought was going on with them. It’s a natural human tendency Read More “Week 643: Tracking Projections and Lovingkindness”
During this political season, we have experienced the emergence of an underlying polarization that has had more power and pervasive presence than I suspect many people would have anticipated. For me, above and beyond political considerations, this polarization expresses the fundamental difference in a stance that holds an assumption of oneness and a stance that assumes separateness. Read More “Week 641: Orienting Everyday Activities Toward Oneness and Kindness”
Given the tone of some of the political discourse these days, it seems worthwhile to revisit the importance of kindness as one of the primary qualities we can choose to express in our day-to-day interactions with other people. Read More “Week 626: Return to Kindness”
There will be a new, tall building going up on a corner across the street from my apartment building and it will block a significant portion of my view of the sky. This is the first time in many years that construction has had an impact on my quality of life and I am making plans to adapt to it in as positive a way as I can. Read More “Week 623: Increasing Compassion”
Excerpts from “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living” on the topic Lovingkindness followed by a Meditation Exercise
The journey into wholeness brings many unexpected gifts. One of these is compassion. This extraordinary state of being arises spontaneously when we allow ourselves to recognize that we have at least one thing in common with all beings: our capacity to suffer. This realization creates a bridge of understanding between ourselves and others. As we become more whole and acknowledge the inevitability of our inherent imperfection, our capacity for compassion increases. As it does, a sense of connection with others deepens and expands. Within a context of compassion, we tap into a collective human experience and realize that we are not alone in our suffering. The world becomes populated with people whose deepest yearnings for love, comfort, and security aren’t so very different from our own. For this reason, even as the sources of suffering may differ, depending on our culture and life circumstances, we are alike when it comes to the inevitable fact that we all can be touched by feelings and experiences that cause distress. . .
Read More “Lovingkindness Meditation”