Stepping Out of Civilization back into Creation (replay from 12-15-2024) Inner Peace Meditation

This is a replay of an inner peace, guided meditation from Sunday, December 15, 2024.

Sometimes I do take my own advice and get good results!  In this case, I spent at least an hour in a beautiful meadow, looking at all the tiny wildflower blossoms springing up due to a recent rain.  I have an excellent nature app called Seek on my iphone.  I took photos of at least 12 tiny blossoms or leaves.  This app tells me if the plant is native to the region or invasive.  Fortunately, more than half of these tiny plants were Native.  I had a wonderful time and felt refreshed by the time I left!  Some days it pays to take our own advice! 

All text below the line is from the previous post.

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December 15, 2024

I am sitting in the Keystone Ancient Forest which is about 25 minutes outside Tulsa, Oklahoma.  The Keystone is approximately 1300 acres of undisturbed old-growth forest.  It has not been developed or had any settlements or roads running through it.

I have stepped out of civilization and back into Creation.  It is so peaceful.  I hiked up here on the Fire Trail and I am about as close to the top of the ridge as I could get.  I sat down with this lovely evergreen, got comfortable, and immediately went to sleep.  I was sitting in Sunshine.  It was about 57 degrees and a little breezy, but I was wearing several layers so I was comfortable.  I woke up after about 30 minutes and looked around.  There were no lions or tigers or bears, so I closed my eyes and slept for about another 30 minutes.

The Sunshine was wonderful.  The colors of the leaves were amazing.  And, it was so peaceful.  Sitting here with this lovely tree, it was not hard at all to align with my Inner Peace.  What a Blessing !!!

Today I wanted to talk about something I've been meditating on for 10 days more or less.  About two weeks ago, I saw this statement somewhere online that said “Healing the Future”, and it got my attention!  We understand that Human Beings are Creators.  Whether we mean to or not, we do create our future.  Sometimes we do a better job than others, and sometimes we get all goofy and go into a major destruction mode!  We get really frustrated and decide the thing to do is just tear it all down and start over again!  Which, generally speaking, is usually not very helpful. 

When I was growing up, I would occasionally hear someone on the farm say, in a moment of extreme frustration, “Give me a big enough hammer and I can fix anything!”.  Well, we know that some things can be fixed beyond repair!  I've never found that giving someone a big enough hammer is the best of all possible solutions.  Usually, this means we are not being very creative or cooperative or even listening to each other.  We all know when we work together, and listen to each other, and get creative, we accomplish amazing things!  We all know that.  Somehow we manage to figure out all kinds of amazing solutions.

Right now we have a lot of challenges in our country and the world.  But 90% of the time, these situations are not the result of people being mean or stupid. They are usually the result of very rapid cultural change!  Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, our social, industrial, and technological systems have been changing so rapidly that we have not had any time to adjust.  Now we are dealing with systems that have not kept up with these changes!  Many of the systems have not been updated or restructured and they are just not working well for many people.

I have a picture of my aunt, who lived to be 103.  She was born right around the turn of the century.  I treasure this early photograph, because it was taken where she went to school.  She went to school in a one room schoolhouse.  The younger children are seated closest to the camera.  This would have been a big box camera.  It's easy to see my aunt since she was one of the younger children.  As you go toward the back of the room all the other children are older.  There is only one teacher for a large roomful of children, maybe 20 to 30. 

There were not enough qualified teachers to go around on the western frontier.  But they did figure out a brilliant way to solve the problem.  The older students who could read and write and do math would help the younger ones.  They would sit down with them and go over the lesson.  Or help them do a little bit of math while the teacher was working with other children.  It was a great system!  It worked!  It was like mentoring.  So this neat little system evolved.  It was a very compassionate system, where the people that needed help got the extra attention that they needed. And it worked!  Many cultural and social challenges have solutions if we can be patient and compassionate.  Problem solved ... !!!  

A week or so ago, I saw this little phrase, which was “Healing the Future”.  So I started meditating on that.  After a few days, I had an intuitive sense that if we can heal our hearts, we can heal the future.  That means, if we can heal our hearts and heal some of this frustration and angst and despair and cynicism, then we can create a better future!  We have done it before. We are perfectly capable of healing our Hearts, but we have to believe in ourselves.

So today, I would like for us to work with a simple way to heal the hurts of our hearts, to start the process, just a little bit.  This is why I'm sitting in the wilderness, or as close to pure wilderness as I can get.  I am sitting with a lovely tree, surrounded by many other lovely trees with beautiful fall colors and evergreens.  It is just gorgeous.  I'm sitting on a soft bed of leaves.  The whole floor of the forest is covered with leaves.  As these leaves break down, all the nutrients will go back into the soil to feed the trees.  It is a perfect system, as long as we, that would be human beings, don't mess with it.

So I've stepped out of civilization, and I'm sitting in Creation.  I'm relaxing. I am gently aware of every breath, relaxing, feeling my body settling down.  What I have understood is that we are not able to think our way into a peaceful state.  We can't think our way out of despair, or anger, or frustration.  This is one of the things that is so difficult for people who are doing their best to learn how to meditate.  We can't think our way into a quiet state or even into a peaceful state.  It just does not work! 

But we can go to our heart.  We can rest with our Heart.  We don't have to make our Heart do anything.  We can just rest with our Heart and breathe through our Heart.  We can let our Heart relax and be with our breath.  Let our mind ramble on wherever it wants to ramble and not worry about it.  Just, very gently, bring our attention back to our breath and our Heart.

One of the great miracles about being a human being is that our bodies, like our whole system, is always trying to heal itself.  This is built in.  When we relax and breathe gently, we begin to shift gears.  When we look at the incredible beauty around us and breathe then we are aligning with Creation and becoming more coherent.

If we can shift out of looking for what's wrong and or what we think is not working, and focus on what is working, this begins to shift our perception of the world and of the people all around us. We start to see people as whole.  If not as our brothers and sisters, at least as our cousins 3X removed, right?

We are all on the planet right now, and it's difficult.  It is extremely challenging, and scary.  At this point, we need to remember that Human Beings are programmed to have a bias for negativity.  When we were evolving and our brain was developing, we were doing our best to survive while living on the Savannah.  So, wherever we were on the world, we were looking for things that might be a threat.  If we got really good at finding those threats and escaping them or getting rid of them, we stood a much better chance of living longer and producing offspring.  So, we have a negativity bias. We're looking for what's wrong in order to survive. 

But we're no longer living in the wilderness. We are no longer living in the savannah.  We're living where there's some civilization.  It might seem like a chaotic civilization, but it is still civilization.  There aren't lions and tigers and bears and snakes. We don't have the same kind of threats, but we still have this negativity bias!  So we need to be very conscious about what we pay attention to and where we put our awareness.  This doesn't mean that we become naive!  It means that we are aware of where we are and what is happening right now, in the present.  

We need to be aware of and looking for what's working and who is helping, not harming.  That is precisely what we need to know for survival.  We need to know what systems are working. We need to know what people are capable of working with other people to build a better civilization.

This is exactly where we need to put our energy!

And we need to be very patient and compassionate with ourselves.  Because if we are patient and compassionate with ourselves, we'll be so much better at being patient and compassionate with others.  Maybe we will even get better at listening to each other.  Wouldn’t that be Wonderful !!!

In our meditation, I would like for us to do a very simple practice.  I've been doing this particular little exercise for more than a week.  I've discovered that as I allow my heart to relax, my heart seems to take a deep breath and calm down.  When I do this, it is much easier for me to find that place of Inner Peace.  Amazing … so simple and it works !!!

You can listen to the podcast.  Or, try it yourself …

This is so simple.

Just sit down or lie down and breathe, gently …

Follow your breath,

as we breathe in,

following your breath, 

all the way down into your solar plexus,

feel yourself becoming more centered.

As you breathe out,

following your breath

from your solar plexus,

from the bottom of your lungs,

past your heart

and out into the space all around you,

allow yourself to relax,

Keep following your breath.

When you're feeling centered and relaxed,

at ease with yourself,

and comfortable with your breath, 

then bring your awareness to your heart.

Allow your whole body to sink into the chair 

or the floor or the sofa or the bed, 

just wherever you are.

Let your body rest.

As you breathe in, be aware of your heart.

And as you breathe out, allow your heart to relax,

to open up.

We're in a safe space.

Or, we're with good people.

Allow your heart to open,

to relax just a little bit,

feel the power in your heart,

the rhythm of your heart.

Let yourself come to Rest 

very gently with your Heart.

Feel the unconditional love,

the compassion, the blessing   

That compassion is always there,

Moving through our hearts,

always there,

Let yourself feel with every breath

the love and compassion,

the unconditional love that moves through All Creation.

Let your heart begin to heal from anything

that has ever caused any hurt.

Very gently, stay with your breath.

Stay with your heart

for as long as it's comfortable and

and when you find that inner peace and calm,

then remember it.

Walk that feeling into your week,

remembering the goodness that lives within you,

and the goodness that lives within other people.   

Mary Christopher