You’d be forgiven for thinking there were more important things to do, more pressing actions to be taken, than sitting quietly on a meditation cushion. And you’d be right. Sitting meditation is practice. For being in flow with the moment, moving with grace, embodying consciousness in the best way possible, as a primate capable of self-awareness. While doing important stuff, like fighting fires. Grab the hose, aim the water, protect the assets, move back, come around the side, get out, get in and do your job. All under extreme pressure. Professional or volunteers; now that’s action.
HILLVILLE, AUSTRALIA – NOVEMBER 13: RFS Firefighters battle a spot fire on November 13, 2019 in Hillville, Australia. Catastrophic fire conditions.
Most of us who faced fires in Australia over recent weeks aren’t heroes. We’re just trying to save our lives, families and homes, and helping others when we can. But no matter whether you had to fight ember attacks or full blown fire fronts, or if you were watching the previously unimaginable horror unfold, as monster fires joined up to create a mega-catastrophe on a world changing scale, we’ve all been scarred by this experience. How we deal with it can be a matter of personal choice, but from a therapeutic perspective, if you get time, you could do worse than to sit. Contemplate.
Hone your mind. It helps. Getting to know yourself better, you can come to realise your habits and choose what works for you according to the balance of your desires and values. Or just relax, let the mind melt down the spine like a melting egg of golden butter. Breathe into the centre and up along that spine, lifting each part as if it were carried by a silver rope hanging down from the heavens. Let that breath go through the top of your head, lifting it also and tilting it slightly forwards, so that your chin is tucked a little. Look 45 degrees to the floor. Let thoughts float away like clouds in the sky. Don’t judge them, it’s a waste of time and undermines the self you want to be. Breathe in, up the spine, and let go as you exhale. Repeat.
Sit in nature if you can. It’s precious. As we’ve seen.
Sitting in meditation affords you time to check in with yourself and give you time to recognise if you are carrying some self-defeating patterns. Also to melt them away a little each time, or to support better ones. We practise in every sit, as well as throughout the day. This is a clarifying of the mind that is also self-care, because sitting in meditation can help you ensure that you’re not getting too wound up in cycles of action and reaction, by putting your daily experiences into a more expansive framework. Just like the monk who learns that the same amount of salt in the wound feels very different when you identify with the expanse of the lake and not just the limited confines of the personal mind, we can become more than an action/reaction machine.
Sitting with how expansive our minds can be can transform them from their former limits.
Sore? Let that pain dissolve into the entire energetic matrix within which we incarnate: the earth. Rest in that exact place where you are for a while. This will remind you of how much you can be as well as help you do stuff better. This includes fire fighters and frustrated parents, baristas and climate scientists. It could also help activists entering upon the shores of burnout, or just plain exhausted by the fight against a corporate and political class that is supposed to be serving us but is serving its own interests instead. The forces of climate denial are varied and very well funded. This makes the current mainstream story unpalatable, at best, and criminal, in terms of the environmental damage being wreaked upon the planet right now. We must feel this, if we are to identify with our larger being, the one that dissolved into the lake, and be true citizens of the earth, along with all our kin, without whom we cannot survive, let alone flourish. Air comes from forests and seas (remember this sometimes with your breath). To be fully alive, we must be fully alive with the earth. That’s expanded consciousness. That means something.
How do we keep plugging away when the odds are against us? Whether we are environmental activists calling for climate justice or dealing with our own inner issues and challenges in life, we need to take care of ourselves if we want to keep going.This simple practice can do that in just a couple of minutes – or it can also lead to profound, long-term transformations and explorations of who we are.
We need to do two things on a daily basis:
stay grounded in the body and our own personal experience of life; and
expand our minds so that we also stay connected in the unlimited expanse and potential of the universe.
Both of these practices can be done at once, both are completely aligned with a scientific outlook (requiring no faith), and both can help us to feel both more liberated from worldly concerns and more inspired to defend our earth and what we hold dear from the ravages of capitalist exploitation.
To begin, get into a comfortable sitting position. Try to make sure you have as much chance of silence as possible. This is particularly helpful if you do not have a strong meditation practice behind you. Then simply focus on this with each breath:
Breathe in and feel the body; the way you sit, the shape of who you are, the fact that you are here. Allow your body to inform you of these facts: you are here, you were lucky enough to be born human, an intelligent, self-aware primate, consciousness manifest in mammalian form on a planet that sustains life. Out of the illimitable things that can happen in the universe, you being born was one of them. Against all the odds, you live, breathe and enjoy consciousness of this fact, every day that you wake up.
By breathing into the body and letting it remind you of who you are – a cosmic coincidence, a member of the community of souls on earth, a person limited and liberated by the very same fact of your humanity – you become more grounded in the everyday and more open-minded to the potential each of us is born with. To be at one with the universe, with our flaws and our passions, to be at home right where we are and to remain inspired to protect our home and all of life on this planet.
This perspective is both cosmic and existential at the same time and draws on two of my core foci over the past couple of decades: Zen meditation practice and the mythic dimension of life and consciousness. Both guide us to be in the body and free of its limits at exactly the same time.
Enjoy your wild life and this unrepeatable moment!
How do you feel in your body? Do you enjoy it? How does the way you move relate to the way your mind works? There’s no separation. Just as the universe is consciousness made manifest in physical reality – at least one kind of physical reality, which in itself is already insanely complex and diverse, let alone all the other possible dimensions lurking about within this one, or through intergalactic wormholes, or on the other side of a black hole, or laughing at everything from within black matter … so our bodies are consciousness, as countless messages sent from our pores, our internal organs, our senses and subtle perceptions. Our bodies make up consciousness, our minds feed off the physical sensations as well as the hopes and dreams within and all the infinite possibilities everywhere; but our minds can also roam endlessly, beyond physical limit and mortal frame.
Might as well enjoy it, hey? Walking should be a supreme pleasure. Being a self-aware primate, with the infinite potential of human consciousness – what an opportunity! Yet we too often allow the forces of socialisation to limit us. I’m an Aussie male, which means i have been entrained to keep myself pretty rigid; don’t dance with the hips (that’s ok for Latinos but not us) and definitely don’t walk with a rolling gait, as if you really enjoy it. Too gay! But I’m here to challenge the status quo, question the dominant paradigm, give it to the man (ooh that might be too close to the bone – ouch I’ve done it again!) … I’m here to Give It Some Mince! “Let the way that you move celebrate your life on Earth,” say I.
Now you all know what I’m talking about: walking. Walking like you mean it. Mince in Aussie slang is a kind of homophobic insult; it means waltzing about like a fancy pansy, probably with a limp wrist … but what if it feels good? When you get into your primate body and move about as if you mean it, you might find yourself using some muscles and moves that feel right, yet look … different. But if you are going to be true to what you are – “consciously evolving stardust, rising up out of the earth” – then you need to “front up in your body”, beyond socialised fears and tensions, so that we can “get a sense of our embodiment, as a part of the self-aware universe.” Coz “we’re living in an unrepeatable moment right now. Right Now!”
Hope you enjoy it. Please Like, Comment, and SHARE with everyone!
Put some bounce into the way that you cross that floor
Yeah give it some mince
Feel your way into your body and let’s explore
Give it some mince
Pump that walk, yeah
Let the way that you move celebrate your life on earth …
And give it some mince
Front up in your body, yeah
Give it some mince
Walk that talk
Get some pep into the way that you cross that floor
Yeah give it some mince
Sense the way that your body opens out through your pores
And give it some mince
Pump that walk, yeah
Let the way that you move celebrate your life on earth …
And give it some mince
Front up in your body, yeah
Consciously evolving stardust
Rising up out of the earth
Get a sense of your embodiment
As a part of the self-aware universe
And give it some mince!
Front up in your body, yeah
We’re living in an unrepeatable moment, right now
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If we have finally hit the point where we have to admit that our esteemed leaders are not listening – to us, to climate science, to the voice of hope for a peaceful, healthy earth – then it is probably also a good time to let ourselves synch in to a new way of evolving. I’m going to try to outline this in under 300 words, by using dot points, to illustrate that we are still capable of profound possibilities in a digital age hurtling towards some very uncivilised outcomes.
We are here.
This means our ancestors survived and evolved successfully, across a myriad of different environments, and we can do the same. But to do this, we need to …
Adapt to reality.
Our planetary climate is heating up, drying out in many places and flooding more in others, making every micro-climate more challenging. But …
It’s business as usual at the top.
Business and politics are following the military/industrial complex model of colonisation, appealing to the lowest common denominator of our worst tendencies like greed and fear, and consolidating their power over divided peoples at the same time. So …
We have to do two things at once:
We have to get organised, hold the powers that be to account, demand action that combats climate change by taking care of our environment and treating all people (as well as animals, plants and places) with dignity and respect – all of which sounds very boring but necessary; and
We can get back in touch with our ‘deep time’ selves, as well as our fleeting sense of being alive in this very moment, right where we are, in this mind and body. This could be the fun thing that balances out the serious stuff with a blend of timelessness and existential awareness: that realisation that we are consciousness embodied, a deep time experiment in primate bodies, with the capacity for self-awareness, able to perceive complex problems and solve them with win/win solutions, social animals with personal identities and mystic abilities and the ABILITY TO SEE THE ENORMITY OF THE UNIVERSE THROUGH INSANELY POWERFUL TELESCOPES AND IMAGINE OUR PLACE IN ETERNITY ALL AT ONCE!
OK, i got a bit excited there, but watch this video and be reminded of how incredibly, unimaginably vast the universe is. And that’s just the physical one we can sense with our limited beings. Life is beyond words. Let’s party like there’s nowhere else to go*
*The universe may be very large but we can’t get anywhere else in it. The scales are too big. This is home.
NB: sorry i went over 300 words. But hey, get off the internet and read some Virgil or Shakespeare. That’ll test your attention span 🙂
PS i tried to talk about this video once during a public presentation in Hong Kong and CHOKED ON MY TEARS! Egad. I’ve performed better, but at least i found out how i really felt about the universe – cosmic!
