As I prepare to facilitate this Sunday I’m thinking about our relationship to Mother Earth. Cultural historian Thomas Berry said that every era has its great work. 10,000 to 20,000 years ago the great work of humankind was settling down, transitioning from being hunter gatherers to settled humans developing agriculture and villages. 5,000 years ago it was the development of great civilizations, 300 years ago it was the development of the modern industrial age and today it is transitioning from a destructive relationship to Earth to a mutually enhancing relationship between humanity and the other species that constitute the earth community and the earth community as a whole. Our teacher has spent a lot of his teaching in recent decades focused on Mother Earth, global warming, species extinction, devastation of the ecosystems upon which all life depends and the starvation of children and other forms of injustice. His strategy has been to help us to fall in love with Mother Earth, to receive fully the blessings of our life in the life-giving womb of Earth. It is our love for Earth, our gratitude, our capacity to savor and to be joyful and happy as a result of interbeing with such a beautiful and magnificent being as Earth that will transform our way of living such that Earth might once again thrive and all might benefit. Our practice is to fully discover our interbeing with all beings, with Earth, with the whole cosmos and even the source of the cosmos, so that we might thrive and we might be a source of transformation for the whole earth community. It is essential that we are happy and grateful for this alone will attract and seduce others into a healthier and more beneficial way of living. Let us practice together to evoke this happiness and connectedness and cultivate a Sangha rich with wellbeing and the desire to help all beings fulfill their potential to transform and be a source of transformation for others.
Here is the recording I made at Sangha of the 16 Breathing Practices meditation.
Smiling to you,
Keith
