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A Healing Meditation from Molly
This four minute healing meditation is a great example of the fact that meditations do not have to be long to be effective in bringing peace of mind. It is followed by a 20 minute talk I gave at Unity Church of Grand Rapids entitled “Is the Invisible World the Real World?”
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A meditation on weeding
When I purchased my first house over 15 years ago, I was pretty darn excited. About everything, even weeding.
I do know that, in the bigger picture of things, weeds are simply plants that we don’t know the use for. . . yet.
But sometimes they grow where we don’t want them. And what’s to be done, but … weeding!
Being in Southern California, I studied drought resistant plants and took pride in doing all my own landscaping.
I remember a friend being over one day and as we sat on the patio I saw a few weeds in the flower bed and reached down to pull them out. She made some comment about weeding and I said, “Yes, I’ll be weeding the rest of my life.”
We laughed at the time, but it was an off hand comment that was truly prophetic.
So what does it mean to be weeding for the rest of our lives. I’m not going to go into the esoteric teachings of removing negative thoughts and habits from our lives, though that is a good analogy.
I’m really going to talk about weeding an outdoor garden and how to make the best of it.
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Expand your mind with meditation
Meditation is perhaps the easiest way to expand your mind, other than using drugs.
I played around with LSD and marijuana on my college weekends and it always gave me a good high. But I reached a point where I didn’t want to rely on something artificial to make me feel good. I wanted to feel good on my own. So I discovered meditation.
My meditation path was brought with ups and downs, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. But now that I’ve settled into a meaningful practice that’s the right one for me, it works like a charm.
Here are the ways it can benefit your mind, body and spirit.
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Meditation: even swans need to do it!
Last spring as I was walking around the lake near my home, I came upon a family of swans by the shore: two beautiful, huge adults and 10 little baby swans. Ten!
[Yes, I know they’re called cygnets but that word isn’t cute enough to do them justice].
The two parents were putting up a very loud squawk and, as I got closer, I saw that one of the babies had become stranded on the shore side of a big log and the parents were encouraging it to climb over.
The baby kept trying to get over the log but the log was too big and the baby too small. So the parents took turns stepping up on the log, turning around and squatting in the hopes the baby would grab on to them and be pulled out. After about a dozen attempts, they succeeded.
The irony was that if any of them had looked to the baby’s left, they would have seen it could easily have swum around the log to freedom! But they were all too focused on the problem right in front of them to look for other solutions.
It struck me that this was a perfect example of the benefits of meditation. Stop, take a break, relax, regroup and look around for a fresh perspective. That usually allows inspiration and new ideas to flow in.
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Asking for what you want – here’s how
There is an old saying that, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. It certainly was true for me. I’m frequently asked how I got involved with the Native American spiritual path. The short answer is: “I asked the universe.”
During college, I experimented with the usual recreational drugs and had an epiphany one day on a hillside in the Santa Monica Mountains.
High on mescaline, I saw a mountain breathe and immediately knew two things:
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How Love Can Change Our World
[quote]“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” Mahatma Gandhi[/quote]
Any life coach will tell you not to watch the news because it will just bring you down. Salesmen know not to watch it in the morning; it gets your day off to a bad start. So I don’t follow the news closely, although I do scan headlines to have a general idea of what’s going on in the world.
But in the past 24 hours some things came to my attention I couldn’t ignore. I watched Eve Ensler’s riveting talk on TED.com in which she spoke of the atrocities against women in warring third world countries. Then I saw George Clooney’s film, “Three Kings” which, under the guise of entertainment, made a powerful statement about atrocities against the people of Iraq by Saddam’s Royal Guard.
There’s so much more, but I don’t need to list it all; we all are aware of the inhumanity going on around the world. The question is: what’s to be done about it?
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Have you listened to the wind lately?
A few months ago I did something I’ve never done before. I ate my lunch without simultaneously reading or working; instead I ate on my screened porch and listened to the wind. Then I sat and listened some more.
It was a very strong wind; there were no other sounds to be heard over it. The birds that are usually so vocal during the day were relatively silent, perhaps holding onto tree branches for dear life.
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