Nature – Grow Mindfulness

Autumn: A Time for Reflection and Shedding

The Health Story Collaborative sponsors a monthly, online Creative Meetup for people anywhere in the world who are experiencing chronic illness or disability. The Meetup via Zoom is facilitated and is designed to enable participants to spend time writing while in a supportive community and, in the process, “to access and release our emotions, personal stories, and creative spirits”. The Health Story Collaborative was created by Dr. Annie Brewster, author of The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma and Loss.

During our Creative Meetup session in September, Jennifer Harris (our facilitator) guided us in reflecting on Autumn and the significance of the season in terms of harvesting and shedding. By way of stimulus, Jennifer quoted Mary Oliver’s Fall Song and the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall”. This led to a session for our creative writing around the themes of “harvesting” and “shedding”.

Autumnal reflections

The four seasons of the year are often used to represent times of transition. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – “four violin concerti giving musical expression to a season of the year” – epitomises the seasonal transitions we can observe in temperature, the migration of birds, changes in landscapes and in human behaviour. Autumn is associated with harvesting, the gathering of food and growing fur by animals to prepare for the impending winter and significant temperature/weather changes. Many cultures celebrate the arrival of autumn with rites and rituals, especially the Autumnal Equinox (when day and night are equal in length) occurring at the start of Fall (Autumn).

Autumnal rites and rituals often signify change and harvesting. In Japan, the National Autumnal Equinox holiday is a time dedicated to paying respect to “deceased parents, grandparents, and other family members”. In India, Autumn is a time of cleansing. There are various rituals involving shedding to reflect the falling of leaves and regeneration during this season.

Reflections on harvesting

Harvesting is a time of reaping what you have sown. Our reflections focused on the metaphorical meaning of harvesting in terms of abundance or achievements realised throughout the year. We were asked to reflect on blessings we experienced, tending/nurturing received, projects accomplished, and personal growth. Associated with these reflections was encouragement to express gratitude for what we had harvested in our personal life.

I noted the following in terms of my “harvest” during the 2024 year:

Joined the Creative Meetup group of the Health Story Collaborative and participated in the monthly sessions
Integrated the themes and discussion of the Meetups into my blog posts
Wrote poems that reflected the themes of the Meetups and related blog posts – giving creative expression to my feelings
Conceived and structured a book on management – for co-authoring with my colleague (co-facilitator of 80 longitudinal manager development programs, conducted over 16 years)
Organised a publisher for our book and signed a contract for assisted self-publishing
Completed the first draft of 20 chapters of our book on management
Wrote the following posts exploring ways to express gratitude and sharing my gratitude for what I have experienced and am experiencing:

In our discussion of harvesting we acknowledged that it was okay to “harvest less”, given that all participants in the Meetups are people suffering from chronic illness or disability who often experience setbacks in their recovery.

Reflections on Shedding

During autumn we can observe the trees and plants shedding their leaves and fertilising the soil with the decaying material – death generates new life.

There are many things that we can shed if they are holding us back from realising our potential – e.g. identity, old beliefs or expectations. During the Creative Meetup I became aware of the unrealistic expectations I was placing on myself in terms of output for my co-authored book on management. The expectations were not coming from my co-author who is currently consumed by her caring role for an ill relative. The expectations are my own – setting a timeline and trying to determine a daily output.

What I realised is that my personal output expectations needed to be shed in the light of the continuous disruption I am experiencing in relation to health-related issues and medical testing. I have been losing momentum in my writing because of the continuous need to undertake important health-related tasks. I have to accept that this is my current situation and shed my expectations about high levels of output in my writing. I have already changed my expectations of the frequency with which I produce a blog post. However, to date, I have failed to adjust my expectations concerning writing my co-authored book.

My participation in the Creative Meetup with the focus on the autumnal shedding theme, highlighted the need for me to shed my current expectations about output for our book in order to create the freedom and space for other important things such as maintaining good health and my connections with family and friends.

Reflection – a poem

The seasons can help us to grow in mindfulness by enhancing our observation of what is changing around us and cultivating gratitude for what we have experienced and achieved. Autumn promotes reflection on what we have harvested and what we need to shed. I wrote the following poem to reflect the process of shedding:

Autumnal Shedding

Autumn leaves falling softly
Silently seeking the soil.
Shaken from their anchor
Shrivelled, shrunken, distorted shapes.
Shedding, signalling rebirth
Death begets new life.
New growth, new possibilities
Transcending the past.

___________________________________________

Image by Sven Lachmann from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Cultivating Gratitude Through Nature

Georgina Miranda facilitated a meditation on the theme of Awaken to the Flow of Gratitude in Nature. In her guided meditation on the 12-Minute Meditation podcast on 12 July 2024, Georgina takes us through a meditation practice that can be conducted anywhere in nature – it could be in our backyard, the local park, or our favourite place in nature. People typically have some favourite place where they experience nature – it could be at the beach, in the mountains or by a river or creek. Georgina encourages us to use nature to reset, to open ourselves to our unity with nature and to let a sense of gratitude flow through us as we experience its stimulation of our wonder and awe.

Georgina is an author, activist, mountaineer, transformation and leadership facilitator. She helps individuals and organisations globally to move beyond their comfort zone, expand their awareness and “shift mountains within themselves and the world around them”. Her activism focuses on protection of nature and our planet, and protection of women against violence. Through her social enterprise, She Ventures, she works consciously to “unleash the untapped potential of women around the world”, offering consulting, coaching and inspirational events designed to achieve self-realisation and effect positive global change.

Georgina herself uses nature, and especially her mountain climbing, as a way to move beyond life’s challenges and to achieve a different perspective on whatever is troubling her. For her, nature provides a “reset” – enabling a movement from emotional turbulence to emotional regulation and calm.

Guided meditation process

Georgina suggests at the outset that we take our place in nature – wherever that may be in terms of accessibility and convenience. She encourages us, for the purposes of this meditation practice, to avoid treating the activity in nature, e.g. walking, as an exercise (an act of “doing”) but as a mindful moment (an act of “being”). The focus is on connection with nature through our breath and sensory awareness.

Georgina begins by having us become aware of our own breath – its pace, its temperature (hot or cold) and its evenness or fluctuations. She reminds us of our connection with nature through our breath – our outbreath is nature’s inbreath. Also, we draw vital oxygen from the plants and trees that surround us.

Georgina then leads us on a sensory journey. We are invited to take in the sights that surround us at a macro and micro level – the broader terrain and the proximate features of nature. We can notice the undulations in the landscape or the flow of waves breaking on the shore; the small plants and larger trees; the cultured lawns and the wild bush. On a closer look, we can view the colours that surround us, taking in plants, water and sky (with the colours of clouds – black, white, blue and grey). With a closer inspection, we can observe the leaves (their form, distribution and colour), the veins coursing through the leaves and the lines or markings that are visible to the naked eye. We could be watching dragonflies flutter above tall grass, grasshoppers gnawing on leaves of citrus trees, butterflies flitting through the air with no apparent goal, birds descending on bottlebrushes to draw nectar, Pelicans gliding gracefully across the Bay in search of schools of fish, or ladybirds landing on roses in our garden to feed on aphids.

We can take in the smells that surround us. It could be the salt from the sea, the earthy smell from soil and fallen leaves, or the tree born odours such as eucalyptus or wattle. It could be the strong smell emitted by herbs such as basil, lavender, or oregano – each with its own distinctive aroma. There may also be the smell of approaching rain or the earthy smell of sodden ground.

We can attune our ears to the sounds in nature. It could be the breeze blowing and rustling the leaves of the trees, the sound of rain hitting the ground, the whistle or song of adjacent birds. In paying attention to the sounds of birds we can notice sounds above, below, beside and in front of us – sometimes as small finches flitter amongst small, colourful bushes. Along with the sounds of the birds, we can pay attention to the colours, size and form of the birds we observe.

Attention to nature through conscious awareness can engender calm and contentment, increase our resourcefulness and enhance our sense of connection with all living things. Through immersing ourselves in nature we can experience gratitude for the air we breathe, the sights and sounds we experience, and the feelings of awe and wonder. We can appreciate how nature helps us to reset, broaden our perspective, reduce our agitation and heal us. We can bathe in nature’s beauty, aliveness and adaptability.

Reflection

I’ve been reading Kate Legge’s novel, Kindred: A Cradle Mountain Love Story, that traces the story of Gustav Weindorfer and Kate Cowie who fell in love with each other and with Cradle Mountain in Tasmania. They were both amateur botanists and members of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria, established in 1880. They set about establishing eco-tourism in Cradle Mountain and Gustav is credited with strongly promoting (and achieving) the development of a national park in the area so that its beauty could be enjoyed by all nature lovers. Cradle Mountain is now visited not only by thousands of tourists but also by scientists from all over the world.

Kate Legge gives us a glimpse of Cradle Mountain and its surrounds through the eyes of dedicated botanists, Gustav and Kate, as they travelled the mountains collecting, documenting and preserving plant specimens some of which they sent to Germany, Austria and Britain. In 1903, before Kate and Gustav were married, Kate presented a paper to the Naturalists Club about Mount Roland in the region of Cradle Mountain. She expounded on the magnificent view from the top of the mountain and contended that botanists and geologists alike “must pause to admire it, with that silent outreach of the soul toward eternal beauty”.

Gustav himself frequently recorded his travels and discoveries as he indulged his “wanderlust” through nature. He wrote letters for his botanist colleagues around the world, reports for the Naturalist Club and articles for newspapers. One such article published in 1910 in The Weekly Courier describes Holidays in the Cradle Mountains in these effusive words, capturing sights and sounds of the mountain as he gazed in awe and wonder:

…through the silent darkness of this supreme mountain solitude stole the murmuring sound of rippling water leaping from rock to rock, gladly escaping from the sombre shadows of the lake to the sunshine of the valley. [Notice how the alliteration with the letter “s’ evokes silence penetrated by awesome sights and sounds]

Kate Legge, herself a mountaineer as well as author and journalist, found inspiration for her writing in walking mountain trails. In a chapter in her later book, Infidelity and Other Affairs, Kate discusses her “walking life”. She likens walking to writing – “walking is one foot in front of the other, just as writing is one word before another”. Other similarities she identifies are obstructed progress, concentration and shifting attention, movement towards and away from a destination. For Kate, walking is “thinking time” that provides a “fresh perspective”. She maintains that walking “rejuvenates the body and the mind and gives rise to rumination”. Kate shares the perspective of naturalist Henry David Thoreau who advocates “sauntering” and who communed with nature “on daily rambles, rarely taking the same path twice”. She suggests that with this approach we can succumb to a “meditative trance” as we scan the horizon or focus “on small miracles”, such as a “leaf curled in a web”.

So often “shoulds” get in the road of our communion with nature – the “doing” deadlines that are often self-imposed. However, when we make the time to grow in mindfulness through natural awareness, we can really appreciate the benefits of nature and our connection with our natural environment.

___________________________________________

Image by Penny from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Deprivation Can Engender Gratitude

We take so much for granted – that we can breathe, walk, talk, see, and hear. Deprivation makes us aware how privileged we are to have these functions and other functions such as choosing what we want to eat, achieving basic elimination functions with ease or being able to write or key (not encumbered by arthritic pain and distortion). The recent Reversing Mast Cell Activation and Histamine Intolerance Summit 2.0 brought home the stark realities of how Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and/or histamine intolerance can impact the quality of our life.

As I listened to various expert speakers who themselves had experienced these conditions, I became more aware of what I do have in terms of quality of life and daily functions. Some of the speakers had periods when they were super-sensitive to smells (such as the perfume of their daughter), unable to eat a wide range of foods because of allergies) or were sensitive to mold in their homes. Others spoke of the symptoms of histamine intolerance and the impact this had on their daily life and their capacity to choose what they would like to eat.

Hope and social support

Parental and social support build hope and agency and enable people with chronic illness or disability to rise above their health challenges and achieve a successful recovery, often beyond peoples’ wildest dreams.

Alexa Leary’s story – from tragedy to triumph

The recovery story of Alexa Leary, Australian Paralympic Swimmer destined for Paris 2024 Olympic Games, is a hugely inspiring account of how parental support and social support have helped her to achieve her goals. Three years ago Alexa had a very serious accident on her bike as a world-class triathlete – causing traumatic brain injury and multiple other significant injuries. She was not expected to live, and, even if she did survive, she was not expected to be able to talk or walk. Alexa’s parents set aside their own lives and spent six months by her bedside in hospital to support her recovery.

Alexa’s rehabilitation efforts are starkly illustrated in the video story, Triumph Over Tragedy. Her incredible sporting accomplishments since the accident reinforces the value of the social support she received from organisations such as the global Pho3nix Foundation, dedicated to helping young people through sport and activity to develop a “sense of purpose, focus and possibility”. Alexa was a participant in their Athlete Program designed to enable underfunded, aspiring Paralympics and Olympic athletes to compete in the Olympic Games. When sharing her story of recovery through radio, television and social media, Alexa emphasised the critical role music played in her life and recovery.

Specialised Support through ADDA

Duane Gordon, President of Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA), elaborates on the benefits of social support and shares multiple stories of how ADDA’s many support groups have facilitated the recovery of its members. Tom, an accomplished engineer, experienced overwhelm in everyday tasks such as shopping but was able to gain support and ADHD-friendly strategies through ADDA’s Healthy Habits and ADHD Brain Group. People with ADHD typically experience relationship difficulties but ADDA’s support group Loving and Living with ADHD: Partners Connecting helped Mark and his partner to rise above the challenges of this condition and strengthen their relationship. ADDA’s support group, ADHD @ Work> Survive and Thrive Support Group, helped James recover from the loss of his job caused by ADHD challenges such as confusion, meeting deadlines and remembering tasks.

Reflection

I was recently diagnosed with early stage, normal tension Glaucoma which has reduced my peripheral vision. I am undertaking a series of tests to determine what the cause is and what kind of treatment is required. The diagnosis has forced me to face the prospect of increased loss of sight, retraction of my driver’s licence and loss of the associated independence. The social support provided by the Creative Meetups, sponsored by the Health Story Collaborative, is particularly critical at this point in time.

I wrote the following poem as a way of reflecting on my present circumstances with the possibility of increased loss of vision:

Losing Sight

Sight lighting my way,
expanding my horizons,
disclosing people and cultures,
revealing nature’s beauty,
enabling enjoyable activity.

Playing a game of tennis,
writing a book,
driving a car,
watching a video,
reading a book,
creating a poem,
developing a blog.

Encroaching blackness,
moving in from the edges.
Losing sight a real prospect.
Rescinding of independence.
Storing recollections for future reference.

A long-playing internal videotape,
of my best tennis shots,
played over the years.
Now categorised by tennis stroke –
forehand, backhand, volley, serve and smash.

A rich palette of memories of nature’s beauty –
blue and white, purple and brown,
red and orange, yellow and green,
grey and black.

Moving from sight to sound,
from reading to listening,
from writing to recording,
from driving to walking.

Feeling my way.
Testing to understand.
Exploring my options.
Appreciating what I do have – while I have it.

As we grow in mindfulness through reflection, meditation and time spent in nature, we can increase our appreciation and gratitude, fortify our hope and strengthen our resilience.

______________________________________

Image by Shan from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Deep Listening: A Lost Managerial Art

Managers report that many things act as barriers preventing them from listening effectively in the workplace. Distractions from external sources such as endless emails, busyness at work, noise from “open office environments” and time pressures, are high on the list as impediments. Managers also identify what can be described as internal barriers to listening – preconceptions about an individual staff member, assumptions about what the individual wants to talk about, anxiety when the speaker is sharing difficult emotions, and absorption with their own personal issues. Managers report, too, that they tend to try to solve problems before they really know what the employee’s problem is, interrupt people to tell their own stories and have difficulty maintaining their focus on a speaker when they are perceived to be “rambling on”.

Added to these difficulties experienced by managers is what Johann Hari describes as our “lost focus” – an ongoing decline in our ability to pay attention for any length of time because of the “fire hose” of information flooding our minds through emails, social media and news broadcasts. In his book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, he highlights our inability to stay-on-topic, be truly present and achieve flow. Research shows that our attention span is diminishing rapidly, making it all the more difficult for managers to engage in “deep listening”. In a recent podcast, Gloria Monk PhD drew on this research to explain “Why our attention spans are shrinking”.

The essence of deep listening

Joan Halifax, in her book, Standing at the Edge, describes deep listening as truly listening in the present moment with openness and curiosity. She explains that this requires us “to step out of self-absorption, self-deception, distractions” and move away “from the trance of our technological devices”. Joan maintains that deep listening involves “really hearing” someone else by listening “with body, heart, and mind”. In her words, it also involves being able to “listen past the filters of our personal history and our memories” – it involves self-lessness. Too often, we have to tell our stories to legitimate ourselves in the eyes of the other person.

Larissa Behrendt, in her novel After Story, has one of her characters describe deep listening as “listening with respect” – not trying to hurry the other person to finish, paying full attention without interrupting the speaker. She reinforces the need to be “ready to listen” – “to prepare the space and listen” so that you can take in the wisdom of the speaker and the story they have to tell. Larissa, Distinguished Professor of Indigenous Studies and Research at UTS, maintains that deep listening has its origins in the ancient cultural ways known as Winanga-Li, where “the silences are as powerful as the words”.

Deep listening for Richard Wolf, author of In Tune: Music as a Bridge to Mindfulness, occurs when we “not only hear music but feel it”. This involves feeling the music “with your body and soul”. For Richard, music can help the listener/musician overcome internal barriers to listening by “filtering out” distorting elements such as biases, prejudices, blind-spots and false assumptions.

Benefits of deep listening

There are many benefits from deep listening that accrue to the listener as well as the person being listened to. I have summarised some of the key benefits that are identified in literature that I have been reading lately:

Facilitating the healing power of storytelling: deep listening enables a person to share their story of pain, suffering and trauma. Annie Brewster details the way this can happen in her book, The Healing Power of Storytelling: Using Personal Narrative to Navigate Illness, Trauma and Loss. It is because of the healing power of storytelling that Annie has established the Health Story Collaborative. Jana Pittman, in her biography Enough: accept yourself just the way you are, highlights the destructive impact of keeping painful things bottled up – you can lose yourself. As someone who has experienced deep pain and suffering – through three miscarriages, a marriage breakdown, media taunting and bullying, “a cervical cancer scare”, multiple injuries destroying her Olympic Dream, battling with financial difficulties and an eating disorder – Jana can readily attest to the healing power that facing her pain and sharing her story has provided her. She maintains that running away from pain can be a “heavy burden” because “bottling it up” is like “carrying it round like a ball and chain”. By facing her pain, embracing it and sharing it, she has found a new release to achieve even greater goals; the alternative, avoidance strategy, “leaves you with a whole lot of defensive walls and only a short ladder”. Larissa Behrendt, in her After Story novel, has one of her characters comment that there is “strength in saying things” because “it’s like a curtain being lifted”.
Achieving resonance: `Ginny Whitelaw, innovator in leadership development, contends that leadership is about achieving resonance with followers, and that it is through listening that leaders capture the energy of followers and thus focus and amplify the collective energy of a team. She explains her underlying principles, and supporting neuroscience, in her book, Resonate: Zen and the Way of Making a Difference. Deep listening for Ginny involves getting on the “same wavelength”, instead of “talking past” the other person. This means, in effect, that energy vibrations of the leader and follower become aligned and therefore amplified. The sensitivity involved in such deep listening changes the listener and enables healing of the storyteller.
Developing empathy: Joan Halifax contends that deep listening develops empathy, motivates compassionate action and obviates self-absorption. She provides examples of deep listening in her book, Standing at the Edge, while recognising that empathy is an “Edge State” – that can lead to significant personal and social contributions, but potentially lead to “empathic distress”. This latter downside of deep listening and the attendant empathic feelings can arise where a person is unable to separate themselves from the sufferer – they effectively “own” the other’s suffering. In her book, Joan describes situations where she has experienced empathic distress, however momentarily, and offers ways to overcome this other-absorption, including her G.R.A.C.E. technique.

Ways to develop deep listening

There are multiple ways to develop deep listening and, like any art, “practise makes perfect”. However, we each have our personal and historical impediments to achieving deep listening at any point in time. Actively working to cultivate deep listening can be very beneficial for ourselves and others we interact with on a daily basis. Several authors suggest different ways to develop deep listening (apart from consciously practising it in the present moment):

Sounds as an anchor in meditation: meditation often involves choosing an anchor that can enable us to re-focus once we experience distractions during meditation. While our breath is often used as an anchor, sounds can be an alternative. Richard Wolf suggests that focusing in on the sounds of our breath along with the gap between breaths, can effectively cultivate deep listening. We can also tune into our environment, including what he describes as the “room tone”. Richard also encourages the development of “dual awareness” where we not only focus on the sounds of our breath but also become consciously aware of our associated bodily sensations.
Music to quiet the “inner voice”: Richard maintains that playing a musical instrument or listening to music can cultivate deep listening because of the sustained concentration required. You are effectively training yourself to tune into the music (by fully attending to the sounds) and experiencing the music emotionally and bodily. Richard argues that the concentration required quiets the self-critical inner voice and prevents contamination by our “cognitive limitations”. He contends that music enables us to achieve an alignment of mind, body and emotion. Richard suggests that playing an instrument for others not only develops deep listening for the musician but also provides a “stunning variety of sonic, emotional and musical elements” for a discerning audience – a catalyst for deep listening on their part. One can readily picture a young child dancing in a totally uninhibited way to music played by a street performer who is totally absorbed in his or her art.
Tuning into nature: nature provides silence and unique sounds that enable us to experience our interconnectedness to everything, including people who are attempting to gain a “hearing”. Gordon Hempton reminds us that silence in nature does not mean the absence of sounds but “an acoustic state, free of intrusions of modern, man-made noise”. Gordon has recorded his journey as an activist for nature’s “silence” in his book, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet. Through his work as a sound recordist and an acoustic ecologist, he has encouraged people to heighten their auditory awareness of the unique “soundtracks” that surround us in nature and to observe “the quiet between the notes” (so that we can better appreciate the value of silence and stillness). Gordon’s crusade for silence and listening to nature is mirrored in the work of Christine Jackman, author of Turning Down the Noise: The Quiet Power of Silence in a Busy World. In a chapter on nature, she highlights the healing power of nature and the need to tune into nature to reduce our “emotional inflammation” and regain our capacity to be quiet and listen. Like Gordon, she contends that when we listen to nature “our listening horizon extends”. Polar photographer, Camille Seaman, maintains that spending time in the stillness and silence of nature “dissolves the veil of separateness” and increases our understanding of, and respect for, our connectedness.
Adopting a “not Knowing” mindset: Joan Halifax recommends cultivating a “beginner’s mind” – the stance of “not knowing”. She maintains that we can never really know and understand the complex mix of emotions another person is experiencing, or the precursor events at different points in their life, or the unique interplay of triggers that were the catalyst for their current psychosomatic state. This perspective accords with the advice of Frank Ostaseski to cultivate a don’t know mind. Robert Wilder discusses the challenges and benefits of living a “not knowing” life in his podcast, The Not-Know-It-All: The Struggle of Not Knowing.
Reflective practice: reflection on our communication experiences can help us to gain insight into the barriers we put in the way of deep listening. If we are honest in our reflections, we can improve our awareness of our habituated behaviours (such as interrupting others) that act as blockages to our deep listening. I have posted a sample of questions for reflection on personal interactions in a previous post.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness by spending time observing and listening in nature, reflecting on our interactions, meditating on internal and external sounds and undertaking other mindfulness practices, we can gain awareness of our personal impediments to developing the art of deep listening. For me, some of these impediments are a tendency to deflect the conversation when emotions become intense (on either side of the conversation), to divert the conversation to my own story or to demonstrate knowledge and experience to prop up my sense of self-worth or external credibility.

A further reflection (25 August 2023)

Reflecting on my behaviour when interrupting somenone’s conversation, I realise that sometimes I come from an “I know” position, not a “don’t know” perspective. I feel I have to explain that I have experienced (directly or indirectly) what they are talking about, read about it or heard someone else talking about it. The net effect is that I don’t reflect back the communicated emotions and divert the conversation onto my issue and away from challenging emotions. I wonder whether this habituated behaviour has resulted from my academic background (the need to be seen to know).

________________________________

Image by Monika Iris from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site and the resources to support the blog.

Developing a Reciprocal Relationship with Nature – Nurture and Stewardship

In the recent Nature Summit, Roshi Joan Halifax –writer, teacher, artist and activist – stressed the need for a reciprocal relationship with nature. She suggests that too often mindfulness practitioners focus only on the nurture that they can obtain from nature but overlook the “imperative to steward where we are’ – to look after, and care for, nature in our immediate environment. Joan contends that this reciprocal relationship is critical in our current challenging times when we are confronted by the devastation of climate change simultaneously with the ongoing global erosion of mental health.

Experiencing nurture in nature

Joan mentioned that she is “restored in the natural world” but not in the “constructed world” of cities. However, she counsels against despising or devaluing the constructed world. Nature surrounds us wherever we are. Joan mentioned seeing a hawk nesting on the edge of a building in New York and visiting Central Park. While these experiences of nature in the built environment are part of restoring our spirit, the depth of nurture achieved through immersion in the natural environment is of a different order and more pervasive and lasting.

Joan explains that in nature we can recapture the silence that the busy world of today has taken from us – we can access the power of stillness and silence to cultivate our creativity and our resilience. Joan describes her mindful practice in the mountains of “just sitting in choiceless awareness” and gaining the restorative benefits of nature through this goal-less approach. She explains how she sees mountains as “places of meditation’ and has learned to value “solitude in nature”.

Joan discussed how her work through the Nomads Clinic (a form of socially engaged Buddhism she established in 1980) brought her into contact not only with the Himalayas but also the people of remote places such as Nepal and Tibet. She describes the Himalayan mountains as “very raw, very tough, very dangerous” and the people of these remote communities as “fantastic people, very robust, with a wonderful sense of humour”. She acknowledges that the mountains and the mountain people have taught her much about “humour and resilience”.

Many mindfulness authors such as Louie Schwartzberg highlight the power of nature to stimulate wonder and awe in us. Louie, in his Wonder & Awe podcast, shares the recent research of Michelle Shiota, that demonstrates that we become “better thinkers when we are feeling awe”. In his talks and films, Louie stresses that nature induces healing and helps us to develop a sense of gratitude and appreciation that lead to happiness, health and profound joy.

Pamela Anderson, in her memoir Love, Pamela, describes nature as her friend and teacher. She states that she is “always curious and wants to know what nature is trying to teach” because to her “everything is a clue or a sign”. Nature had always been a part of her life growing up on Vancouver Island and for her birthday each year she asked her two boys to volunteer with her at the California Wildlife Center – which involved cleaning birdcages and feeding birds and squirrels. In line with this work Pamela and her family cared for a possum as well as pelicans and seals, even undertaking a marine mammal rescue course together.

At one stage in her performing career she was exhausted in “mind, body and soul” and decided to spend a month reconnecting with her adult sons in Malibu and with nature. She found that connecting with nature (including during her five-mile daily walks), along with Pilates, enabled her to reconnect with her body and detox both physically and emotionally. When she was at Café Sénéquier at Port de Saint Tropez in France (where she went to recover from an abusive relationship), she watched the sunrises and yachts in the harbour, while “luxuriating in my own blossoming life” – nature again elicits gratitude and appreciation.

There are many ways to engage the nurturing power of nature, to understand and appreciate our interconnectedness with nature and deepen our relationship with nature. Louie Schwartzberg reminds us that we are able to widen and deepen our perspective on nature beyond our unique childhood experience and understanding. One way to do this is to adopt the mindset of stewardship of nature.

Stewardship of nature

Joan Halifax stressed the “moral responsibility” to undertake stewardship of our immediate natural environment – in her words, “to steward, protect and restore”. She argues that it is important to plant diverse species because diversity is “essential for the health of any ecosystem or social system”. Her interviewer and founder of the Nature Summit, Mark Coleman, stated that we are currently experiencing “a painful time of degradation, loss of species and places that we love”.

Stewardship can involve many different environmental caring actions such as:

Composting
Planting trees
Caring for pot plans (both exterior and interior plants)
Growing herbs
Planting native trees that attract birds and bees
Providing shelter for birds and possums
Creating gardens of diverse species
Trimming dead leaves or branches
Enriching our soil
Cultivating worm farms
Conscious consumption.

Costa Georgiadis in his book, Costa’s World, suggests that we take up gardening “for the soil, the soul and the suburbs” – in his view, nurture through nature and stewardship of nature are not discrete activities, they occur together. He encourages us to be mindful of our immediate environment and get to know our microenvironment.

Pamela Anderson stressed her sense of being responsible for stewardship of nature in her home environment. She luxuriates in her garden developed when she returned to Vancouver Island in her latter years. Her first garden involving “five thousand feet of roses and vegetables” (planted by seed by herself) grew impressively. She developed solar energy, a sustainable water management system and set about “re-wilding” her property – a concept involving complementing the natural environment and protecting what already exists. She immersed herself in her “Garden of Eden” and the “salty, earthy fragrance” of the sea. Pamela attests to Costa’s perspective that nurture and stewardship go hand in hand and complement and reinforce each other.

Reflection

In his book, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zin urges us to develop mindfulness through our senses. He talks of the immediacy of our external environment – the soundscape, the touchscape, the tastescape, the smellscape and the sightscape. Joan Halifax reminds us that nature provides the whole sensory experience – we can hear birds, touch plants, smell aromas from trees, taste native fruits, see the beauty and wonders of nature and feel the strength of the wind and the pressure on our bodies.

By spending time in nature and stewarding our immediate natural environment, we can grow in mindfulness and experience happiness and joy, peace and tranquility, gratitude and resilience. Nature has many gifts to offer but it needs to be visited and cared for. Micah Mortali offers ways to connect with nature in his book, Rewilding: Meditations, Practices and Skills for Awakening in Nature.

________________________________

Image by AndreasAux from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Making a Difference by Spreading Kindness

Diana Winston from MARC, UCLA, offers a guided meditation podcast on “kindness” and she maintains that we can make a real difference in the world by spreading kindness at a time when there is so much local, national and international conflict. Her loving kindness meditation cultivates mindfulness and a gratitude mindset for the practitioner and helps to diffuse anger and unkindness in the world. We know from experience that if we extend a smile or thoughtfulness to another person, it is often reciprocated, just as abruptness and rudeness stimulates a reciprocal response. Kindness is contagious and has a momentum of its own that leads to diffusion.

Diana reminds us that mindfulness involves being open and curious while accepting what is. Openness extends to being thoughtful towards people we find “difficult” or who constantly annoy us. Diana asserts, with conviction, that kindness is a natural property of the heart that we extend to others and also our pets. Kindness in her words is “the desire for another person t be happy” and has a mental, emotional and behavioural aspect. Mentally, it involves thinking kind thoughts and positive wishes for others; emotionally, it entails feeling kindly towards others and appreciating their uniqueness; and behaviourally, it means engaging in “acts of kindness”.

Diana’s guided meditation focuses on “radiating loving kindness” through our thoughts and emotions and involves creative visualisation, the use of imagery. She argues that kindness is inherent in mindfulness practice because it involves being willing to show up, to accept what is (including individual differences) and acknowledge connectedness to everybody and everything. In her experience, not everyone will warm to this form of meditation as it involves visualising a “lake of kindness” . However, for people who are not particularly visual, she offers the suggestion to focus on the positive thoughts and emotions behind the process.

Guided meditation

Diana begins the meditation in the usual way encouraging us to adopt a relaxed and comfortable posture and to take a number of deep breaths to enable us to relax and focus on the mindfulness activity. One of the aims of mindfulness mediation is to really focus on the present moment, avoiding obsessing about the past or becoming preoccupied with planning future activity (my main source of distraction!). Diana moves onto encouraging us to focus on our own breathing in an accepting, non-controlling way. She suggests that our focus can be on the up and down movement of our abdomen or chest or the in and out flow of air through our nose. She follows this activity with a focus on the sounds in the room or external environment, again just being open to what is sounding not trying to identify the source or interpret the meaning. Diana suggests that if we become distracted (everyone does, even the mindfulness experts like Diana), we can re-focus on one of the anchors mentioned, e.g. our breathing or sounds.

Diana begins the visualisation process after about five minutes of silent meditation. She encourages us to visualise walking with a companion (someone we admire or a close friend) beside a scintillating blue lake, whose radiance touches everything around it. She calls this the “lake of kindness”. After a short while, we enter the inviting waters with our companion, experiencing sensations of gentleness, warmth and immersiveness of the “kindness waters” – sensations that elicit feelings associated with kindness. Now, we imagine our friends, who are on the bank of the lake, joining us in the water so that they too are immersed in kindness as the lake expands through displacement.

The challenging part of the guided meditation is envisaging other people, who we are not positive about, joining us in the “lake of kindness” – dissolving to some extent our reticence to be with them and encouraging us to extend kindness to them. We are then all enveloped in the “kindness waters”. We can then envisage the kindness waters moving into the ocean; up the rivers of villages, towns and cities; and extending to all the waterways of the world thus “suffusing the world with kindness”.

Reflection

Kindness is natural but we become absorbed in our thoughts, negative emotions, stereotypes and sense of superiority – thus precluding us from radiating warmth and kindness to others. It behoves us to reflect on times when we have omitted to show kindness and to consciously undertake acts of kindness, such as sharing a meal with someone who usually eats alone. We can genuinely make a difference in the lives of individuals and everyone we come in contact with, if we approach them with kindness in our heart, even through the simple act of smiling or sharing a book.

As we grow in mindfulness and kindness through loving kindness meditation, we can make a real difference in our own lives and spread kindness in the world. For example, you often see people who have been given the opportunity to enter a line of traffic, extend this kindness to someone else further along the road.

Mindfulness meditations help us to reflect on our words and actions and their impact and reminds us that we are all connected as we share the fragility and vulnerability of the human condition. It is a useful practice to reflect at the end of each day and think about our “acts of kindness” as well as when we overlooked an opportunity to be kind to someone.

_________________________________

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Natural Awareness through Nature

Natural awareness is often contrasted with meditation focused on numbers, the breath, sounds or particular sensations or feelings. Natural awareness is not goal-focused – it is more about being aware of awareness itself, noticing that you are noticing. So much of what we do in life is goal-focused – natural awareness provides a desirable shift that can lead to less stress, more openness and a greater sense of calm. Rachelle Calvert encourages us to take our mindfulness practice outside so that we can feel more connected to the world around us and not be totally absorbed in having to “try” or “do”. She draws on research results that demonstrate that “practicing mindfulness in nature”, leads to many benefits including improved heart health, concentration, relaxation and stress reduction. Mark Coleman reminds us that a natural outcome of being mindful in nature is a sense of gratitude as well as wonder and awe inspired by nature’s beauty and resilience.

By developing natural awareness in nature through observation and listening, we can become more grounded, experience tranquility and begin to notice minute aspects of our natural environment that we have previously overlooked. Diana Winston in her book, The Little Book of Being, identifies practices we can use to develop natural awareness and offers what she calls “markers” to test whether or not we have experienced “natural awareness”. These include feelings of timelessness and ease; noticing that you are noticing; completely aware with all your senses open to your environment; and a restful mind that is open to what is passing by.

An experience of natural awareness

I was recently strolling along the Mooloolaba Beach Boardwalk noticing the people passing by – couples of all ages out for a walk, men and women pushing prams, individuals leading dogs on a leash and the perennial runners, both individuals and groups. Occasionally, a bush turkey would cross my path on its way to greener pastures. While being aware of these movements, I was totally unaware of the vegetation beside the Boardwalk. Once I realised this lack of awareness, I began to scan the vegetation either side of the path. I became aware of tiny wildflowers partially hidden amongst the trees and grasses, trees twisted sideways turning towards the sun and all different kinds of leaves (broad and large, thin and small). This cultivated, natural awareness enabled me to broaden the horizon of my awareness and instilled a greater sense of calm as I walked mindfully along the Boardwalk.

Diana Winston offers an exercise to experience what she calls, “the spectrum of awareness” – moving from a very narrow focus to a more panoramic, natural awareness view. She uses fish in an aquarium for this exercise, moving from focus on a single plant, to movement of an individual fish and, finally, to a panoramic view taking in the fish, the aquarium and the surrounding environment. As she observes as part of this exercise, natural awareness includes noticing our own bodily sensations and feelings in the present moment as we are experiencing the world around us with openness and curiosity.

Reflection

We can develop natural awareness through our everyday activities if we adopt a mindset that involves consciously noticing what we are doing and seeing, as well as what we are experiencing internally. Diana Winston suggests that we can develop natural awareness even when doing the dishes; when we expertly handle a distraction while meditating; when consciously avoid foods that lead to inflammation or when we monitor how we spend our time.

Focused meditation helps to develop natural awareness as we become increasing able to concentrate and pay attention with openness and curiosity. As we grow in mindfulness through developing our capacity for natural awareness and engaging in formal meditation, we can experience a greater sense of tranquility, freedom from anxiety and a more complete alignment of our words and actions with our values and life purpose.

____________________________

Image by Waldemar Zielinski from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Developing Natural Awareness through Observation and Listening

On New Year’s day, I was sitting on my deck at home and immediately thought about Diana Winston’s discussion of natural awareness. All I wanted to do was sit there, observe and listen. It was as if I was being transported into a different world where nature was supreme and everything else faded in the distance.

As I looked out from the deck I could see the waters of Moreton Bay in the distance through a gap in the trees that afforded a glimpse of the bay and the island not far from the shore. It was one of those days when the sun was warm, the sky was blue and there was an eerie stillness in the air. The trees glistened with drops of water after many days of rain. There was a clarity about the view and a coolness in the air despite the summer weather beginning to warm up.

I could hear the birds in the foreground and background – Doves cooing persistently, Butcherbirds stretching their necks to break into song and raucous Rainbow Lorikeets breaking the silence with their fast flapping wings as they sped by screeching. The air was suddenly filled with loud sounds as a Kookaburra landed nearby to let out its laughing call.

I began to observe more closely my pot plants on the table, cupboard and floor of the deck. I was able to notice new growth with emerging leaves and buds, the thickening of stems and the increasing individuality of the plants as they matured in their pots and took in the air and sunlight. Some succulents had very shiny leaves, others were tall and imposing, while a small group hung over their pots and extended their reach to the floor. Another variegated plant that was previously close to death now displayed its bright colours and scalloped edges in a new location on the deck that afforded lots of air, light and access to light rain.

The sky was a bright blue with light, passing clouds moving slowly and forming unusual shapes. The many birds that surrounded me seemed to rejoice in the clear skies, the gentle breeze and the brightening sunlight.

Reflection

I am reminded of Costa Georgiadis exhortation in his book, Costa’s World: Gardening for the SOIL, the SOUL and the SUBURBS, that we should become more mindful of our immediate environment as we move through it and around it, often totally unaware of its beauty, variety and earthiness and its ability to make us grounded. Deepak Chopra reminds us of the healing power of “earthing” – consciously grounding ourselves by walking barefoot on the earth or grass.

Diana, in her book The Little Book of Being, also offers ways to develop natural awareness and encourages us to monitor our sensations throughout the day, engage in deep listening and avoid unnecessary aggravation either of our emotions or our microbiome (through the ingestion of inflammatory foods).

As we develop natural awareness and grow in mindfulness through meditation and conscious observation and listening, we can achieve a sense of tranquility, gratitude and peace amid what is increasingly a turbulent world. Our own backyard can be where we earth and become grounded.

_________________________________

Image by Perez Vöcking from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Meditation on the Power of the Present Moment

Allyson Pimentel, UCLA meditation trainer, provided a guided meditation podcast focused on the power of the present moment. Her meditation, titled Mindfulness and Lineage explores the present moment as the encapsulation of all that has happened in our past along with the potentiality to shape our future. The present moment provides us with the opportunity to reflect on our words and actions, to engage in reflection-in action and to envisage our future. It enables us to begin to appreciate our ancestors and all that has gone before us while looking forward to what we ourselves can contribute to future generations.

When we think of the people who have gone before us, our ancestors, and realise that we are today the inheritors of their efforts, sacrifices, challenges and perspectives, we can begin to feel gratitude for all the positive things that we have inherited. The SBS TV documentary, Who Do You Think You Are?, explores the ancestry of well-known Australians from sport, politics, music, film, stage and television. Invariably, the exploration highlights incredible courage and resilience of forbears and their vision to create a better future for those who were to come after them. They often endured unbelievably harsh living conditions, undertook dangerous and arduous journeys and lived with uncertainty as the reality of daily life.

When we reflect on the past and the people who have preceded us we have a lot to be grateful for – our freedom, innovations, insights, discoveries, technologies (including medical processes and medications). We acquired knowledge through our predecessors trial and error endeavours and risk-taking. We have come to better understand our bodies, minds and spirit through their explorations, including neuroscience research. The inheritance from our forbears is endless, enduring and engaging. If we reflect on our lineage and explore our family history, we come to appreciate even more our connectedness to people, places and history. We can be grateful for the mindfulness tradition which had its origins in Buddhism but has broadened from a religious base and, in Western countries, morphed into a secular tradition informed by neuroscience.

Guided meditation

Allyson focuses initially on our bodies, encouraging us to be really grounded our body in the way it takes up space, its textures, height and width, weight, lightness and heaviness and interactions with its external world through the senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. She reminds us that mindfulness involves being fully in the present moment and apprehending the present with its potency and potentiality through curiosity, openness and willingness to be with what is – accepting our here-and-now experience, including our limitations (physical and mental), our lived experience shaping our perceptions and habituated behaviour, and our emergent self-awareness.

Allyson encourages us firstly to explore the back of our body – our spine running down the length of our back as well as the back of our head, neck, buttocks, legs, arms, and heels. She suggests that this process can activate our conscious link with the past, with what has come before us but is now behind us. As we breath in and out gently, we can express appreciation for our lineage – what we have inherited in our world that contributes to our health, happiness and overall wellbeing. We can value our inherited natural environment and the connectedness to nature that we enjoy.

The next stage of the guided meditation involves focusing on the front of our body – our eyes, face, jaw, chest, stomach, thighs, calves, feet and toes. This process helps us to focus on the future – on the fact that our present moment is shaping our future. This is not only as a result of the immediate benefits of meditation but also the way we begin to develop our world view, heighten our perception, enhance our self-awareness and clarify our life purpose.

Reflection

We take so much for granted in our lives. This guided meditation on our lineage opens our minds to the people who have gone before us and what they have made possible for us. It builds our sense of appreciation and gratitude and enables us to deepen our self-awareness through understanding our origins and its influence on our daily lives. The meditation also develops an openness to the potentiality of our future. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection we gain increasing insight into our inner landscape and our outer environment and the forces that have shaped us and continue to influence our life and our individual paths.

______________________________

Image Source

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Meditating on Nature and Gratitude

Mark Coleman provides a guided meditation podcast on nature and gratitude that reinforces the theme of his work which is to “bring awareness to every aspect of our experience”. He maintains that this form of meditation is designed to cultivate “a grateful heart and appreciative mind”. He argues that appreciation of nature is not just an intellectual exercise but involves a heartfelt engagement with nature and its beauty, variety and expansiveness. In the meditation, he steps us through various ways of focusing on elements of nature so that we can express our gratitude and appreciation for all that exists around us.

Paying attention to the elements of nature

As he progresses through the guided meditation, Mark draws our attention to different elements of nature that are readily accessible to us but often overlooked or cursorily observed. Below are some of the elements that he encourages us to pay closer attention to, with a grateful heart and appreciative mind:

Sunrise – we can look at a sunrise and marvel at its magnitude, the endless changing patterns and shapes of clouds and colour of the sky. In my location, near the bay and a large marina, I have the additional opportunity to observe the outlines of boats and sails reflected in the water as the sun rises of a morning – something that is a continuous source of amazement. The presence of photographers lining the foreshore with their tripods attests to the beauty of the morning sunrise over the water and its power to attract attention. The sunrise heralds a day of potential and promise.
Sounds– we often experience the sounds of birds as background noise rather than something that we notice and consciously pay attention to. We can distinguish the cooing of doves nestling and nesting in trees, the squawking of rainbow lorikeets, the enthusiastic sound of kookaburras welcoming the morning’s light and the penetrating call of the curlew piercing the stillness and silence of the night. The eerie curlew’s call and its hypnotic effect are exquisitely captured by Karen Manton in her novel, The Curlew’s Eye.
Flight patterns of birds – we can learn to pay attention to the flight patterns of different birds. We can come to appreciate the speedy swooping and swerving of swallows as they skim across the water or fly rapidly around building structures, the quiet flight and landing of pairs of rosellas or the raucous, flighty behaviour of large flocks of lorikeets, especially at dusk near the seaside (or bayside, in my location). We can also notice the tentative steps and flight of baby birds and their incessant cries for food.
Rain – we can pay attention to the sounds of rain and appreciate its role in invigorating plants, filling depleted dams and providing life-giving resources to communities of people and animals devastated by fire or drought. In another podcast, Mark reminds us of the capacity of rain to increase our awareness of the interconnectedness of nature. Rainbows that accompany rain are a continuous source of wonder.
Our own body – Mark reminds us to notice and admire the miracle of our own body – its complexity, utility, inner connectedness and interconnectedness with nature. He suggests that we pay attention (with appreciation) to the oxygen that we absorb from trees and plants, while acknowledging how valuable and mysterious is this interplay between humans and nature. The recent research on the role of our microbiome and its connection to illness, inflammation and eyesight, reminds us that, despite the wealth of knowledge, scientific methods and technology, our experts are still trying to fathom the depths of the mystery of our bodies and minds and their interconnectedness. We are just beginning to learn about the intelligence of the heart and of the gut. The HeartMath Institute helps us to understand heart-brain science and to access “the heart’s intuitive guidance” through achieving “coherent alignment” of our physical, emotional and mental systems. We can learn to appreciate and value our brain and our own special capabilities such as analytical skills, capacity to see patterns, attention to detail, creativity and/or strategic thinking. Through appreciating these capacities, we will savour our subconscious mind and readily “mind our brain”.
Our breath – the breath reinforces the miracle of life. We know that people who experienced the COVID19 virus often had severe difficulties breathing. Our breath is normally so automatic (luckily!) that we take it for granted. Mindful breathing can enable us to be grateful for each breath, to develop our self-awareness and access calmness and equanimity. Richard Wolf, author of In Tune: Music as the Bridge to Mindfulness, encourages us to listen to the “sonic qualities” of our breath and offers ways to tune our breath to music beats – what he calls “breathing in time”

Reflection

Meditating on nature and gratitude encourages us to open up our senses and consciously pay attention to the world around us. It makes us appreciate that we can hear, smell, see, touch and taste (if these senses are intact). Many things we take for granted such as smell and taste were lost to people suffering from the COVID19 virus. It’s often through the temporary loss of things that we learn to appreciate them. Ideally our sense of gratitude is always present and often expressed even through micro-gestures.

As we grow in mindfulness, through meditation, observation and reflection, we can more readily develop a grateful heart and appreciative mind, enhance our sense of wonder and awe, and savour what we have in our everyday lives. Mantra meditations can be very helpful in enabling us to appreciate nature, our mind-body connection and the interconnection of everything. Lulu & Mischka’s mantra meditation, Stillness in Motion, performed while sailing and singing with whales, reminds us of our connection with the earth, the stars, the waves and the light in other people’s eyes.

Environmental educator, Costa Georgiadis, maintains that our connection to nature and appreciation of all that it offers begins with gardening in our own “backyard”. He offers multiple ways to get closer to nature and appreciate what it has to offer in his new book, Costa’s World: Gardening for the SOIL, the SOUL and the SUBURBS.

____________________________________

Image by Anh Lê khắc from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.