Consciousness and Breathing at the Shore of Infinite Kindness

I am a very fortunate woman. My husband, Tom Barrett, is Humble Kindness. It is at the core of his interactions with all that he meets. It was in his core in his years of being a mental health professional. He embraces wisdom in deep awareness of the foibles in the human experience. Now retired, he will continue to be a first responder when it is needed. 

Tom has offered a website Interlude: An Internet Retreat for many years now. He has lots of commendations and respect for his work. Unity churches have on occasion used his meditations. 

Last year he was one of the poets featured in Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems.  Others poets include Rumi, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Stafford and Pablo Neruda. He is in great company. Be sure to check it out. 

I am including below a meditation in his website archive. Kindness is never out of fashion and yet we need to be reminded now. This is something every student of life needs to be focusing on. Sit and share this with your children. 

I share it with you in it's entirety. Make more than a few moments to join him in his experience of the quiet. 

Breathing at the Shore of Infinite Kindness

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"These two are the same in that each, from her own viewpoint, wants happiness and doesn't want misery. From my viewpoint, this one who seems so close now has been reborn as my enemy countless times. This one toward whom I feel hostile has been reborn as my mother countless times and has cared for me with love. Which one should I like? Which one should I hate? I will feel equanimity and be free from attachment and aversion to near and far."

from Asanga's Teaching of Great Compassion

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"We are all in the same cart, going to execution; how can I hate anyone or wish anyone harm?"

St. Thomas More, written just before his beheading

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Practice the following meditation to help you open your heart and to grow in compassion.

Settle down and take time to clear your mind. 

Let go of your immediate concerns and just sit and breathe naturally. 

Notice your mood. 

Let go of the emotions that come with the mood and just be free. Allow your emotions to empty out with each out breath. Each time you breathe in, bring in peace and calm. 

Think of a time when a kindness was done to you. A time when you felt valued; perhaps loved. Think of the person who granted you this kindness and made you feel whole and worthwhile. Breathe in the remembrance of kindness. Breathe out your thanks. Breathing in, feel the warmth of their compassionate regard for you. Breathing out, send them your gratitude.

Think of the grandmothers and grandfathers who cared for your parents. Think of your parents when they most loved you, whether you were aware of it or not.Think of the one who nursed you, bathed you and wiped your bottom when you were an infant. Imagine who did that for them when they were tiny.

Imagine in front of you all the kind women and men you know or have heard about. 

Think of those who serve others.

Think of those who gave their lives for the cause of goodness.

Think of those who nurse the sick and dying.

Think of those who teach out of love. Take your time and visualize these many persons as well as you can. Then multiply this collection of compassionate beings that you have in mind with the realization that you can imagine only a tiny fraction of the love, compassion, and service that flows in this world. 

Expand your imagining of compassionate souls by further extending it through time. Imagine the long line of mothers caring for children that became our ancestors. Imagine the fathers who spent their lives in hard labor to provide for their families. Imagine the women and men who gave their lives over the centuries to protect the ones they loved. 

See in your mind the healers who through the centuries and millennia worked to remove the pain of the sick. 

As if it were the scent of a beautiful flower, breathe in the love of those uncountable compassionate beings. Be assured that they, being kind, would give you this love freely.

Hold this love in your heart as if it were a wonderful sparkling jewel. Breathing in, enjoy the beauty of the shining jewel. Breathing out, let the light of the love that reflects in this jewel shine out from your heart.

Let the light from this jewel fill you with love and compassion for all beings. As the love of innumerable mothers and fathers, teachers, healers, protectors, servants and saints glows in your heart, feel in your heart what they feel when they give of themselves.

Breathe in this compassion they have lived and expressed.
Make the compassion yours, and breathe it out to the world.

Think of someone who has given you pain. Perhaps this is someone close to you. Perhaps you consider them your enemy. Think of them as tiny babies coming into this world of pain and suffering. See them growing up not getting all they needed. Imagine them in their dark moments of suffering. Shine your compassion upon them.

Wish for them that they had received more love. Allow the free flow of compassion that you hold in your heart to loosen your grip on the aversion you feel for this person. Let go of your hate, dislike, aversion.

Open to a compassionate neutrality regarding this person. You need not like the bad things they may have done or will do, but acknowledge that they must work through the sufferings of life, as we all do, and that they will have the misfortune of carrying the debt of their wrong doings.
As the sage has said:

"If it is natural for the immature
To cause harm to others
It is wrong to get angry with them,
Like resenting fire for burning."

Breathe in tolerance.
Breathe out compassion.
Release your clinging to aversion.
Draw in the freedom of unbounded kindness.

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"Bless me to cultivate the spirit of enlightenment,
To save beings from the great ocean of existence,
Through the universal responsibility of love and compassion,
And the magic of mounting give and take upon the breath!"

Tibetan Buddhist verse supporting Tonglen practice

Have a great week! 

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment

www.janetandbeyond.com 
janetb@janetandbeyond.com 

Consciousness and Recognizing the Hero

Last week I was writing about how we have been in a state of creating a Doomsday/Armageddon consciousness in our entertainment and social media fields for the last several years. What do we do about it? 

All of this is about not being safe in the world and in the cosmos. We question survival of the species, of the planet, of our ideals and our cultures. We question survival of our identities. 

This is a great example of how powerful our emotions and thinking are in creating projected collective reality. We are generating and living in a fantasy war mentality of reality and unfortunately war usually includes winning and losing in it's dynamics. Ordinary men are not powerful enough to solve the problems. We need superheroes, leaders who do all the work and carry on the burden of existence and we follow behind safely behind in the distance. 

We have a need for superheroes when we may have a sense that we are not powerful or heroic enough to make change and conquer whatever we deem enemies out there. Emotional states run high and generate muck everywhere. 

This is not true. Man repeatedly demonstrates the innate ability to change his world and himself.  If we created something we can destroy it. We can also destroy what we have not created and take for granted or appropriated out of greed. 

The truth is that we are each powerful enough to be a hero in our daily lives and when called upon to help to change the world, one person at a time or groups of people at a time. 

It is not that hard to recognize those among us who we can admire for their courage, outstanding achievements or noble qualities. Everywhere are people of all ages and sizes, backgrounds, and ethnicity demonstrating what we would consider the best in being human if we only take the time to appreciate each other. Everyone else can be someone not being recognized who demonstrates heroic behavior all the time.  

I see it everyday in my weekly consciousness exploring groups. Those who gather here and on-line with me are all heroes. Life has challenged us in our various conditions and guises. What is obvious to those outside of the drama, who are serving as witness and audience are co-creators of the heroic. Our hero may be oblivious. That is the power of the group, to give feedback of appreciation when the hero may not be aware in his play. 

It is also not necessary for others to recognize us but it is nice. So often only after one is dead is a life or actions recognized as worthy of notice. Bias, agendas, alternate facts, alternate truths are always someone's opinion. They can get in our way to what would be obvious to another with even the same or different perspective. 

It is also important to be able to notice that where one might be called hero in one context can be fallible in other contexts. And, then redeems themselves for admitting it.    

When we choose to access ourselves as Consciousness we realize how we are engaging those around us. Our issues become ways of knowing and defining ourselves. 

Help can be around us. Standing alone and standing with another offers strength in position in our physical world of contrast and balance.

You stand equal in company with those others who also go beyond their fears and feel up to the challenge. And sometimes it requires you to appear as a maverick, someone who is unorthodox or independent in thinking. Which is really a hero's position when you think about it. They go beyond the fear present and the perhaps reasonable limits to anyone else.  We witness and help and watch as they sometimes die in the completion of actions or live to do it all over again in another time and place.   

My definition would also include someone willing to take on the status quo. It takes a strong vision and sense of rightness from within. We can be different from another but all are held in respect. We understand that we are not better than another, we are just different, as part of the spectrum of humans working together willingly or unwillingly in this dance of life.  

A maverick or hero can be someone that others can and will follow in leading for change in a government or in a playground safety concern or being non violent when others are not, for example. It does not matter. All responses have value, all reflect one's values of self and community. and the connection between how we walk in our truth which combines our connection to self and others with our sense of inner directions.  

For many of us who embrace ourselves as Consciousness in action, we appreciate where we are collectively and what we know to be true. That we are each part of the collective as life is evolving as mankind evolves. Doomsday thinking is only a mechanism to explore our fears of being alive. 

It is time to explore what being alive is about, not our fears. 

What if our explorations were about love of life? Does that change the orientation one might have?

 Look at John McCain who just passed. He had plenty of reason to be bitter or angry as a result of his years as a POW. Or Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years. Both men, and others like them took their experiences of pain and suffering and challenged themselves and us to do the right thing anyway. To go beyond the pain, to value life, appreciate the differences and similarities and extend a hand to a former enemy.  And to be willing to stand alone if needed. 

Conflict makes for great fireside stories of tales of daring and feeling vitally alive with our often tormented heroes and heroines. It is nice to have cautionary tales to tell the young. And that happens only when we have learned our lessons well enough to have someone to pass them on to. 

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com
www.janetandbeyond.com

  

Consciousness and The Pool of Permission

What would it be like to have permission to BE? We probably don't know what that truly means though we may be aware that we feel less than optimum.

To BE? To be what?

Last week we were exploring fault, no fault, blame, no blame. Identity started dancing. This week the pool showed up. It was the Pool of Permission.

One of those wonderful spontaneous moments that group is filled with  always, happened. It was some thing for all of us to share in individually. It appeared as a small circle about 2 feet wide in the concrete patio floor in front of one of us. I invited them to step in, with the understanding that they were who they thought they were standing in front of it. And if they stepped in they were in permission of being.  And to register the difference.

All of us took our turn stepping into this new pool of reality. Some of us stepped forward into it, one felt the pool come to them. Some went underwater in it like a hole in the ice, some stood in it as a puddle of liquid energy and felt it wick it up their legs. Many were knocked back into their chairs. It was felt by all in some way personal to them. It came out my fingertips and sent information into the cosmos. Not so much fireworks but something else.

The differences were noted. We were all surprised by what showed up in this spontaneous state. There were eight of us present to enjoy this. One gave herself permission to be loved. One, I think, came himself time with his family. One only knew that things would change. I gave myself permission to go beyond my definitions of my stories of self, to give myself permission to not care about right or wrong. In this moment i am not remembering the others.

Later that night I shared this with those on the free monthly conference call that is part of our radio show Conscious Conversations with Joan and Janet and we felt it again.

I invite you to join us. Make some time to access Heart Centered Awareness, the Field of Unified Consciousness. Feel your physical heart and appreciate and enjoy the beat. Then, notice the emotional terrain and all the emotional charges that are active. and just let them be as you go neutral. Then breathe in the core essence of All, where we are all One. This the Infinite Sea of Potential where All is and isn't.

Notice the Pool of Permission. It is there somewhere and bring it forward, right in front of you. Feel it waiting, extending itself to you. Decide to swim or bath or just take it inward in some way. Notice yourself now.

Now step in.

What would be different if you gave yourself permission?

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com
www.janetandbeyond.com 

Being Conscious of the Sacred

Sacred: holy, devoted to a religious ceremony, or simply worthy of awe and respect

How do you relate to the Sacred when you are in Heart Centered Awareness? We access this state when we are gathered in group and you experience it as real. We feel it. We all notice it in some manner. What has come to my attention is how people are relating to Sacred. Many of us may not be used to or have a sense of the intangible as tangible. We are transforming our awareness of the concept of the Sacred into the state that is Consciousness.

Depending upon your religious trainings you may have conflict with the whole idea. Sacred can often be presented as something out there, not inside of us. God, Universe, whatever your term might be can be held separate from us. and it is not. It is Consciousness. Whether you are of the scientific bent and the label Zero Point Field, or God in religious disciplines or Universe in Metaphysical practices it is all the same. Consciousness, the field of Unified Consciousness, Heart Centered Awareness. Use the term you like. Just realize that you are accessing all that word is associated with and those reality mindsets, which you may or may not agree with. Which may cause chaffing.

I prefer Heart Centered Awareness as it is free of bias and morphic field dynamics that the other words encompass now. Consciousness Technologies give us a more neutral reference for that which can not be named. We do like to name things don't we? Unfortunately the names may define and then they limit and keep stuck what is possible. We buy into the patterns of the morphic field references and then what is possible is narrowed down. To name something some thing, be it God or Universe or squirrel is to keep old paradigms in place.

Many can be in reaction to certain words so new words show up in reaction. Atheist is a reaction word for instance.

I and others like Consciousness or The All. It clears the state of old references. And it allows the Sacred to be present without a middleman of clergy or empowered objects.

Which goes back to those holding themselves separate. This is what is important in reframing our past stories. We are all One, individuals sharing in the collective as Consciousness. We sit and feel and resonate in the quiet of the Sacred drowning out the chaotic clammering sounds of vibrational forces that are in each of us. Not out there, in us. If you can sense the Sacred in some way then it is in you as there is no separateness.

A lot of dogmas employ others to reveal, rightly and wrongly what we are to follow to be good people. That is what a follower is, someone who comes behind another. In Heart Centered Awareness the only thing to follow is where your attention is going.

It might be time to check in and see how you are with being sacred and if you are scared, or scarred by the Sacred. Access HCA right now and see what you notice about relating to Sacred. Is there comfort present? Or is there an interface, a veil or person between or upsetting your sense of Sacred? Allow for the information to be present and what shows up in response. Allow. Relate. Transform. Release. Breathe.

In the Infinite Sea of Potential that is Heart Centered Awareness, there is a buoyancy, a lightness to be found. A state of quiet, calm, peace, expansiveness, nothingness, and a sense that all is well.

It is a deep, deep, well. This is Sacred.

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment
janetb@janetandbeyond.com 
www.janetandbeyond.com