We are entering thanksgiving week here in the United States. With the complicated history in mind, wounds still fresh in the land and in the collective psyche, it is good to shower the atmosphere with thanks and compassion, to recognize the abundance moving towards us constantly, to let it hit us like a wave crashing against the shore of our Being leaving its beautiful mark.
Take a moment right now to bring some gentle awareness to your feet on the ground, your head in the air, and your heart right there in the center of your chest. Together we can enter into and share a litany of gratitude and compassion.
Thank and offer compassion to the galaxies, universes, stars, planets, and moon acknowledging the vast mysterious unknowns and the reality that we share the same substance - star dust.
Thank and offer compassion to the whole earth, the atmosphere, the biosphere, every ocean, and every landscape that makes up this planet - remembering that we do not just live on her but are a part of, not separate for we are nature too.
Thank and offer compassion to the land you live on and all the people, animals, plants, insects, microbes in the soil, all life seen and unseen who have occupied the land before you - especially those who have been displaced - and all those who are to come.
Thank and offer compassion to the shelter you have which keeps you safe from the elements, the clothes that cover you, the food sources that provide nourishment for your body, and all the beings who are part of the process of creating and distributing these.
Thank and offer compassion to the relationships in your life, in widening circles from those closest to you to the strangers you pass on the street, recognizing we are all one human family.
Thank and offer compassion to your body, mind, feelings for all the ways they help you navigate this world and beyond, for their intelligences as well as protective mechanisms.
Thank and offer compassion to all of this because it is part of an interconnectedness that is not other than the Sacred, the dynamism which sustains you and you sustain, the relational field of Love of which none cannot fall out of.
I am so grateful for each and every one of you.
With Gratitude and Compassion,
Heather
Here are a couple of the Readings from this week's pauses:
“My anxieties are real; they are the result of a wide variety of experiences, some of which I understand, some of which I do not understand. One thing I know concerning my anxieties: they are real to me. Sometimes they seem more real than the presence of God. When this happens, they dominate my mood and possess my thoughts. The presence of God does not always deliver me from anxiety but it always delivers me from anxieties. Little by little, I am beginning to understand that deliverance from anxiety means fundamental growth in spiritual character and awareness. It becomes a quality of being, emerging from deep within, giving to all the dimensions of experience a vast immunity against being anxious. A ground of calm underlies experiences whatever may be the tempestuous character of events. This calm is the manifestation in the life of the active, dynamic Presence of God.”
— Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart
“Once you’ve learned where to place your inner observer, you automatically discover what it’s real purpose is. It’s there ‘to connect the two worlds in you.’ It is not, as frequently assumed, a way of bailing out of your small self into your larger self, escaping the horizontal axis of your being in favor of the vertical. Rather, it lives at the intersection of the two axes, and its purpose is to bring them into meaningful alignment. As I said earlier, its job is to be simultaneously present, ‘without prejudice,’ to both the contents of consciousness and the field itself. prejudice, to both the contents of consciousness and the field itself.
This is in itself an important corrective to our usual notion of what spiritual awakening is all about. It is commonly thought that the goal is to override or destroy the lower, or egoic, self and replace it with the higher self. But this is really not what is intended. What is intended is a ‘marriage’ of the two, so that the lower with its essential uniqueness and the higher with its transpersonal brilliance come together as a true individuality. The witnessing presence looks compassionately in both directions, allowing us to see the whole picture and be the whole picture.”
“Because of its primary function as connection, then, the witness is not about disassociation. It is not about “making a religion out of one’s better moments,“ using the higher self to suppress the lower self. In fact, as virtually all genuine spiritual teachers insist, it’s real function is to bring you into a state of presence, to back you down out of your mind into a full embodiment of your being, so you can feel that the “I am” that courses through God and Jesus is coursing through you as well.
Even more strongly, its purpose is to bring you into a state of ‘unconditional’ presence, so that you not only believe but know that no physical or emotional state has the power to knock you out of presence. It is not a matter of replacing negative emotions with positive emotions—only of realizing that through magnetic center, presence can be sustained regardless of what inner or outer storms may assail you. You do not have to make the terror or anger or grief go away; you simply have to hunker down in magnetic center and allow the surface of life to be as it is. Amazingly, you discover that at the depth Being still holds firm.”
— Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening
“Where I live my little segment of time, I must live it in the light of the fact that all of the vast complex of which my little segment is a part, gives to my little segment its meaning. Therefore, I cannot say about my life that it is of no account, I cannot say of the time that I am living that nothing seems to be happening, because this is not one of the great and tempestuous or creative moments in human history or in the history of worlds. My time is my time, and I must live my time with as much fullness and significance as I am capable of, because my little segment of time is all the time that I have. I cannot wait to begin living meaningfully when I will have more time, because all the time that I can ever experience is the time interval of my moment, so that my minutes, my hours, my days, my months, must be full of my flavor and my meaning.
Therefore, I will bring to my day, as commonplace and insignificant as it may seem, the fullest mind, the greatest purpose, and the most significant intent of which I am capable, because my time is not merely mine, but because my time is in His[Her/Their/God’s] hands as well.”
— Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas
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