Mid-Summer Work Update

Time away from gatherings can be frustrating and this is par for the course. We have recourse to connect with the group presence we cultivated together over the past year, particularly through the sense of a unity gleaned in the Body Chain exercise we worked with in our final meetings.

The key thing is for effort to follow intention, our own intention, which is to say setting ourselves to work with a will. This is a very different thing from "trying". It is a decision. The Decision Exercise is a powerful way to engage this capacity, or we can simply set an intention for work during an interval or in an activity in the coming day.

As you work with the morning exercise, consider that the inner body is nourished by a finer substance in the air. This is not something to believe, but to experiment with in representing the image to ourselves as we work. We can see the air as living plasma which is our medium of life. We breathe this living substance as our second-being food and can experience that the air we breathe is alive.

The air is alive and it nourishes our inner life. See it, feel it, as you breathe. Try to feel the impact or shock of the air as it blends with the emanations of your brains, as it enlivens and fortifies presence in sensation, feeling, and thought. It increases our presence in being. This is a real event, and even can be felt as sacred.

The more we can remember to work this way, pausing periodically to "make bread", the more we find that the ups and downs of outer events and our own state become less compelling. We begin to have an impartiality with regard to what happens and how we feel. This does not mean we are dissociated or apathetic, just that we are connected to a source and aim that cuts through the ups and downs of the waves.