Staying Grounded and Heart-Centered in Challenging Times
Let us continue to come together in the solidness of our commitment to stay grounded in care and compassion and to stay expansive enough to access wise action moment by moment. This Connection Gem is inspired by the desire to offer support as we face tragic political events and violence around the world. I hope to support our practice with what is happening so that we may continue to be a force of compassion, care, and wisdom.
In service to this, I offer three points of focus for shaping our consciousness. While these points may seem simple, they are not meant to ignore the many complicated layers of events and systems and all the actions we might be able to take to relieve suffering and support equity.
Here are the three points of focus offered for today:
The difference between fear and love - contraction and expansion
Ways to interrupt the conditioning of separation and scarcity
Cultivating trust in beneficence
The difference between fear and love - contraction and expansion
In this moment, I invite you to notice any contraction, fear, or anger present in you. Name just how they are showing up for you in your body, thoughts, or feelings. Expand around this. Invite your body to relax and feel the grief and pain underneath the contraction. Continue to expand by breathing deeply and slowly, closing your eyes, or looking out at nature and inviting something bigger to support you and the whole.
It can be helpful to remember that all violence is an expression of fear, which is contraction of the heart center. We are awakening to this truth and beginning to understand that any form of “fight” is still violence. We are finding new ways to hold and protect each other and show that we will not condone nor participate in violence. At a mass level, we are correcting the thinking error that force implies security.
I offer here three invitations that I hope will support the disarming of old ways of thought and a fundamental change in our mass guidance system so that we can access the power to choose an expansive consciousness, which is inherently life-serving.
Name that which triggers fear and orient to the present:
Naming that which triggers fear will help you expand around that fear. With this expansion, you can orient to the present moment. Ask yourself what is needed or helpful at the moment. What does compassion and wise-action feel like and look like?
Become intimate with your intuition and feel-sense of the truth. Release the habit of looking for truth in the content of what’s happening around you and instead look for the quality of consciousness underneath what is offered. Practice reading the energy of situations. For example, you might engage in media with the sound off and watch body language and facial expressions. You might pause what you are engaged with and scan your experience in silence, noticing your body sensations, emotions, impulses, expansion, contraction, and energy. Attend to and care for your reactions to what you perceive.
Affirm, articulate, and share your intuition. As you practice attuning to present-moment consciousness, you are learning to trust and affirm your own felt-sense of things. The more you practice this, the more you will experience positive results. Celebrate every positive result. Write it down. Share it with others. When you give more attention to your own capacity and that same capacity in others, you increase that capacity. Make this a priority in your life. As you learn to trust your inner guidance, you invite others to do the same, and as a collective, we become less vulnerable to being entranced by our conditioning. Root yourself in a deep confidence in your inner guidance.
Ways to interrupt the conditioning of separation and scarcity
In our practice, we are attempting to undo the conditioning of separation and scarcity. This means tending to regulation, accompanying our fear and the fear we see in others, and strengthening our capacity to return to warmth and care.
It is time to let go of the mind that looks for the bad guy. We are moving out of this paradigm. Choose not to participate in “us vs. them” by continually asking yourself where you would like to direct your care.
It may be helpful to set aside time to examine the most common sources of beliefs in separation and scarcity. How have these been passed on through the generations? How does it show up in your daily life? How do you see it triggering world events?
Choose a strategy for being with and disidentifying from the reactivity that arises with ideas of separation and scarcity. For example, you might:
Engage in regulation strategies.
Actively engage with people that affirm the power of connection and collaboration
Take action that expresses confidence relative to a given trigger. For example:
With money, you could give generously in ways that are meaningful for you.
When you perceive a threat in difference, you could actively seek connection with those who you perceive as different from you.
When triggered with fear, look for and celebrate acts of care and courage as you witness them around the world.
Cultivate a felt-sense of knowing beneficence as the foundation of our universe and our true nature.
When you locate in the confidence that beyond all tragic strategies to meet needs, you know that everyone wants to love and be loved. From this knowing, everything you do and say will be life-serving, because the place you are coming from is life itself.
The invitation here is two-fold. One, set your intention every day to live from love and compassion and to interrupt contraction with regulation and anchoring. Celebrate with others your expanding capacity to maintain regulation, groundedness, and the expansive perspective. (An expansive perspective is not an emotional state, but rather the capacity to be with and witness the whole range of your experience).
Two, set your intention to notice the goodness in others and celebrate either internally or externally, small acts of kindness and care.
Thank you for your practice. Your practice matters. When you shift your consciousness - the ground of your being; you help us all to shift.
Together we can remember and live from the truth of who we are!
Practice
Take a moment now to breathe through your heart and invite a felt-sense of love.