Editor’s note: scroll down to the bottom of the blog post for an audio version of the meditation.
Thanksgiving time here in the USA comes in late November and is one of the last harvest festivals each fall season to celebrate and give thanks for the bounty and blessings of the year. Along with the traditional turkey, harvest pies, and mashed potatoes, it is a moment to celebrate family and friends and the warmth of community coming together. But sitting down to write a blog this year has been hard. This year it doesn’t feel enough to just “give thanks.” I want to root my thankfulness in a way that goes deeply into the world to connect, include, and nourish others who are struggling in lives upended by drought or fire, pain, or warring dissension. I would like to feel I can help to make a difference.
Reflecting on how that might unfold from an incarnational perspective, it seems that it would be most accurate to say I want to know myself to be a source of blessing, contributing as an engaged and regenerative resource. And the energies of Thanksgiving seem to be a perfect partner. So, I am taking the challenge of writing a blog for Lorian as an opportunity to draw on our community field and explore a way to deepen my thank-full-ness as an active resource and blessing that makes a difference in life.
My friend and colleague, David Spangler recently spoke of three areas that help us take action from an incarnational perspective. Starting there seems a useful beginning. His first and most evident area of action was physical. Working with this area we take specific actions organic to us that allow us to connect our love and care with our own local environment. For me, that includes making regular contributions to a local food bank and gifting to areas of environmental crisis around the world. In a wider but still specific way, it includes my composting, growing native plants, and moderating my environmental impacts through simplified life choices.
A second area David spoke about in which we have the power to influence and take action is a subtle or energetic one. We can sound a note of love, peace, joy, and collaboration in our own life relationships. For me, that means attending to my own family interactions in ways that enhance our joyful and loving connection. It means attending to my irritation with traffic jams or long lines at the grocery store with some equanimity and patience. It means catching my resentful or negative thoughts, being honest about what I must do to change them, and then acting on that understanding. My energetic state adds its unique note to the harmony of the world, and I can make sure it is as clear and true as possible.
It is the third area David mentioned that opens a less defined and explored territory for me. It is the action of Presencing. Though I can feel and point to the power of Presence, it is not really the result of direct individual actions. It is a relational unfoldment and as such, I experience it emerging from within a different field of exchange. Like a tuning fork, I notice that Presence communicates through resonance. It is not the back-and-forth exchange that fuels many physical initiatives or the centering alignment that draws our energetic intention into a sympathetic field of activity. Presence does draw from these, but it seems to me that it reveals and renews itself by finding a wholeness that honors difference. It shapes a regenerative relationship with the world that blooms and thrives in love and diversity.
Presencing draws me from doing into being and back again in new ways. It is an active engagement, focused yet open in its listening. It is not at all a passive state. I feel it starts in my feet more than anywhere else and it unfolds a fullness of self that opens a new space for my soul to connect to the world. There is an unexplored doorway here for me, a space where impact and energy, commitment and freedom weave a new matrix that shapes “a wholeness greater than the sum of its parts,” both for ourselves and for the world.
And this is as far as I can talk about Presencing with just words. Why? Because it is still new and something about understanding it cannot be just talked about, it must be lived into. My fingers on the keyboard notice an invitation emerging, an urge to bring the spirit of Thanksgiving, this season of harvest and community to mind, heart, feet, and hands, and let Presence emerge.
So, I invite you to take a moment with me to settle into your own place of center and ease. Take a few breaths. Let your feet rest easy on the floor, enjoying the connection and support of the earth beneath you. Let your breath bring your torso upright, spacious, proudly acknowledging yourself as a partner in Life. Let your imagination include the possibility that others in your wide network of connectedness are joining in, linked through love and learning. Let your eyes and body be soft yet alert, present in time and place.
As in the Presence exercise itself, face any direction to begin. In this direction, we breathe in the gift of the personal in this Thanksgiving season. Think of the things you celebrate in your life, the people, the beauty and joys of your family and friends. Feel into the aspects of your life that you are proud of, accomplishments and challenges that you have met, some with success, some maybe not. Both can help us to stand true in ourselves. Draw the quality of standing into your core center be present with honor for who you are to the world. Let your breath become a hum in your body expressing thanks for this personal aspect of Thanksgiving.
Now turn in a new direction. In this direction, we meet the planetary in this Thanksgiving time. As a seasonal event celebrated around the globe, harvest honors energies of both expansive abundance and focused gathering. Nature’s rhythms begin to quiet in this season, drawing in to rest and renew. There is a moment of pause and reflection inherent in giving thanks that allows the fullness and activity of growth to transform into essence, seed, and new possibility. Draw this quality of transformation into your individual sphere and awareness with honor for the gift of renewal in the world. Let your breath hum in a pulse of life as you.
Turn again 90 degrees to imagine and embrace Thanksgiving’s roots in the communal chord of humanity. In this direction, we celebrate the strength of our creativity that reaches out to touch, interweave, and shape. Think of the ways you connect and contribute through your ability to imagine, engage, and serve. Draw all these qualities into your interweaving field with honor for the gifts our humanity brings to the world. Let your breath be your unique song of loving entanglement.
And again, turn and shift your attention 90 degrees. Imagine the essential note, the soul-beat, inspiring this Thanksgiving season. Let yourself resonate within a felt sense of Thank-full-ness, recognizing and celebrating the equanimity, love, and blessing that is your essential note of beingness and that upholds you as a part of the living world. Let yourself breathe in this fullness as a resonant prayer of love.
Now, turn again to the direction you first began and let your fullness and vitality overflow as you embrace the gifts and challenges of your own life, the miracle of nature's life around you, and the creativity, strengths, and challenges of humanity that impact this moment in the world’s incarnation. Feel the loving Presence that weaves it all together in a dance of wholeness. Keep an awareness of your feet on the ground, your breath open and free, and allow your awareness, your Presence to resonate down into the earth and flow out into the world around you. Let it settle into your heart and very beingness.
Your Presence is not a rarified state, it is rooted through the daily notes of your life. You hum it into action with your love, your creativity, your laughter, your tears, and your acts of daily kindness. It is there at any time you choose to focus on it. Each of us in our Presencing makes a difference that resonates throughout the world.
Bring your attention back to this moment in your day, energized, connected, and perhaps humming.
Thank you.