One of the most powerful practices we can do on a daily basis is to express gratitude for the things all around us that we may take for granted – to bring into conscious awareness a recognition that we are supported by so many sources for everything we have and everything we do. Following up on my August post under Ponderings, I wanted to expand on a gratitude practice, and offer possible ways to invite it to deepen.
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Radiating Love
A practice that can become a way of life is to take just a moment to radiate love to any element of nature you may encounter along the way. For example, if you have plants in your home, notice your experience when you take the time to radiate love to them each time you see them, or at least once in any given day. Also notice your experience when you thank any crystals you may have in your home, and radiate love to them, as well. When you bring flowers into your home, offer them your love and gratitude, as well, for the beauty they bring into your environment. The same goes for any animals, fish, reptiles, birds or other creatures with whom you share your home or who you might encounter along the way on any given day.
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Nature
We hold the assumption that everything around us –Nature itself and everything that exists in it — is conscious and available for creative collaboration in every moment. This assumption and awareness encompass the following elements:
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Interconnectedness
Vietnamese monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh coined a word that expresses the inevitable and inescapable interconnection we have with every aspect of our world: interbeing. He talks about the fact that we interare, and, with this concept and others like it, Devadana Sanctuary hopes to support your experience of interconnection and interdependence in daily life.
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Multidimensionality
A major focus of Devadana Sanctuary is to support and promote an everyday awareness of the multidimensional nature of reality. This includes holding the possibility – and, hopefully, the lived experience – that there are many dimensions of reality beyond the three-dimensional, material world that we inhabit most consciously.
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Devas
In recent decades, individuals from Western cultures-–not just shamanic cultures-–have explored the existence of nature spirits, as well as beings who embody physical qualities and forms. The Findhorn community in northern Scotland has numerous references about their experiences collaborating with what are called Devas. In Sanskrit, this word means shining ones: non-physical beings that interact consciously and actively with the physical world.
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Living as a Magician
The practice of becoming a magician who engages a collaboration between visible and invisible worlds involves a clear awareness of intentionality. When we focus our intentions on specific outcomes we wish to manifest, we magnetically “call” these outcomes to us. Once the call goes out, synchronicity, operating within multidimensional realities, brings our intention and its outcome together in time and space.
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Working with Intention
The practices found here invite you to explore a variety of activities and possibilities for living with a more active conscious awareness of the multidimensional nature of reality. For our first, I draw on something that Gandhi said most eloquently. He invited his followers to focus on the outcomes they wanted to achieve, rather than putting their energy into fighting against things they didn’t want.
Books
Nancy Napier, founder of Devadana Sanctuary, has written books that we think you may enjoy. Please click either of the below images, to learn more, buy from Amazon, by clicking the link below.
Sacred Practices for Conscious Living
2nd edition paperback
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When the first edition of Sacred Practices for Conscious Living was published in 1997, the world was a different place—and author Nancy Napier was a different woman.
Now, nearly two decades later, Napier is ready to share more of her own life story while returning to the subject she was first introduced to by her grandmother. As she comes again to the topic that pervades her life story, she focuses on a number of themes. She explains that once we recognize our place within collective consciousness—and focus on compassion and mindfulness—we can begin to experience more directly the interdependence and interconnection underlying our place in the universe…
Meditations and Rituals for Conscious Living
(co-authored with Carolyn Tricomi)
Paperback
Meditations & Rituals for Conscious Living invites people to reflect on weekly meditations that allow them to deepen their understanding of themes and practices that bring spiritual experience to life. The process combines reflective meditation—returning to a theme each day for a month, with ritual—an end-of-month ceremony that gives the theme substance here and now. Each month offers a new theme with its accompanying ritual. Over the course of the year, these themes and practices provide a foundation for living each day consciously and with an open heart, creating a more alive and vital connection to the world, and to the sacred. The first week in January offers the following theme for daily reflective meditation: “Stillness is the ground of being from which all else emerges. It is within and behind every breath, every thought, every action. It is my starting point, my resting place, the home base to which I can return again and again.” The monthly themes are: January – Stillness; February – Wholeness; March – Compassion & Lovingkindness; April – Getting Grounded; May – Mindfulness; June – Gratitude & Generosity; July – Oneness; August – Intention; September – Creating Possibility & Synchronicity; October – Paradox; November – Active Surrender; December – Living Consciously.
Rituals
Please feel free to explore our rituals by selecting any of these links:
3. Honoring Those Who Have Left Their Physical Bodies
2. Honoring Everyday Helpers
1. Honoring the Spirit of Home
Meditations
Practices
Please feel free to explore our practices by selecting any of the links:
12. Practice for Blessing Water
11. Practice at the Beginning of the Day
10. Engaging and Collaborating with Living Archetypes
9. Blessings for a Troubled World
8. Gratitude Practice
7. Radiating Love
6. Nature
5. Interconnectedness
4. Multidimensionality
3. Devas
2. Living as a Magician
1. Working with Intention
Subtle Activism Practices
As of June 2020, for now, I have decided to suspend the subtle activism live calls I have offered on the second Sunday evening of each month for several years now. Please know that there are many groups offering subtle activism activities for those who are interested in doing this kind of activity, and there are some resources listed at the bottom of this page.
In place of the live calls, here’s a recorded guided subtle activism meditation. Please feel free to pause the meditation as you go along, as I didn’t leave a lot of quiet time. Allow yourself to deepen and expand your experience in whatever ways are natural for you. (And, I apologize for the sniffling–it was one of those allergy times…)
And, please note that there’s another subtle activism practice offered after the written version of the following meditation, as well as the resources listed at the end of this post.
Here’s another recorded subtle activism guided meditation on universal love:
If you prefer to work with a written version of the first meditation, here it is:
- Begin by becoming aware of the surface supporting you right now.
- Notice your experience of that support and how your body receives the support that’s under you right now.
- Support is a reciprocal process. Notice that it is offered and it is received.
- Notice now your internal center of gravity, that place in your body that is your home base.
- Follow your next outbreath down to the bottom of the breath and notice where you land.
- There is a place of core presence in each of us. Notice if that’s where you land. If not, find that place of ever-present steadiness within your core presence, a steadiness that is never disturbed.
- Also bring your awareness to your spine, noticing how it connects from the base of your skull all the way to your tailbone, supporting your body.
- Notice, as well, your entire skeleton.
- It not only gives shape to your body, but is also your internal infrastructure of support.
- Again notice the surface under your body now and expand your awareness to take in the environment around you.
- Notice whatever quality of support you receive from the environment around you.
- Bring your awareness now to the area of your heart space—not your physical heart, but your energetic heart space, that space within which you feel heart-based experiences.
- A sense of connection
- A sense of being moved or inspired
- For this meditation, I invite you to engage your heart’s natural perception and intelligence, experiencing the meditation from this aspect of your awareness.
- I’d like to suggest now that there is a source of universal love that can pour through you and into the world.
- Love is its own healing energy and frequency.
- Imagine that one kind of subtle activism is to move through the world radiating love.
- This is more than personal love; it is its own deep force that carries a frequency of healing.
- Notice what it would be like if you were to allow love to move through you into the world.
- Because it is universal love, notice your experience when you hold the intention that this love moving through you touches everything,…nothing is left out.
- This love can touch the heart of every human on the planet.
- As you do this subtle activism, you can hold the intention for the healed heart of humanity, that we as a human family can have our hearts opened and healed in a way that allows this loving presence to flow into and through our world.
- Notice what you experience in your body, what sensations, what emotions, and what state of mind accompanies your willingness to be an open channel or transmitter of love, universal love, moving through you into your world.
- You might even notice what it would be like to imagine going through your daily activities radiating love.
- How might that change the quality of your experience and expression?
- As part of this particular guided meditation, I want to invite you to bring your awareness to a quantum perspective on reality.
- We know from quantum research that reality is comprised of an infinite array of probabilities, that we will live in a participatory quantum universe.
- Because of this array of probabilities, there is the idea—which may reflect the reality—that there are alternate realities co-existing in our world.
- For the purposes of this meditation, I invite you to be curious about the possibility that somewhere in an alternate reality there is a humanity living more gently on the earth, a humanity whose heart is healthy and open, that recognizes our inherent kinship with all life on the planet, that we are interdependent and related to everything, that the earth is our source of life.
- For a few minutes now, I invite you to put out a call for that aspect of humanity to come into our reality, to awaken in us, to bring to us that lived experience of an open, healed heart that understands how to live gently on this planet in a recognition of our kinship with all other living beings.
- Let go of any need to have specific images or rational understanding.
- Instead, take a moment to focus on your felt-sense experience of what happens in your heart space when you send out a call to a healed, healthy humanity to join us, to come into our lived experience and awaken in each of us that healthy capacity and expression.
- Notice what you become aware of as you do this, without any demand or expectation—just experience the invitation, the call, the invitation, the intention to be willing to receive this awareness in whatever way it may arise, whenever it may appear.
- Leave the options totally open and stay out of the way.
- Continue to be a transmitter of love into our world.
- As the meditation closes, in whatever way is natural for you notice the resonating tone of your experience, the frequency that you radiate out into the world, and imagine moving through your daily life filled with this frequency of universal love and with the invitation to a healed humanity, a healed heart, an inclination to live gently on the planet, experiencing kinship with all other life forms that are part of our earth family, regardless of their species.
- I invite you to do this meditation once a week at least, as part of your commitment to use subtle activism in addition to whatever you are doing as an activity out in the world.
Another subtle activism practice:
Because we exist within fields of collective consciousness, and because any- and everything that we think, feel, and experience goes directly into these collective fields, one of the practices we can do each day is to return to an internal state of steadiness. This underlying steadiness is often found in our “internal home base”, in the place where we experience our “core presence.”
Whatever practice you currently use to bring yourself into an internal state of peace, steadiness, or settled ease, think of it now as also being a subtle activism practice. Whenever you settle into these states, you automatically resonate with the frequencies that embody them. When that happens, your resonance becomes part of our collective field of consciousness, and you also contribute those qualities and frequencies to the collective field generated by Gaia, our beautiful planet. Within this collective field, every living thing is touched by the frequencies of peace, steadiness, and/or settled ease. It’s a powerful gift, especially during these challenging and troubled times.
And, please remember, whenever you engage subtle activism processes, be sure to include the inherent quality of your heart’s intelligence and perception–love. Adding the frequency of love to whatever you do is a powerful gift and all it takes is a moment to remember that your heart resonates with love as its natural home base.
*****
Here’s some additional information and resources about the process of subtle activism and I hope you will continue to engage in this activity in whatever ways work best for you.
Some comments about Subtle Activism from people actively engaged in these practices:
From David Nicol: “Subtle activism can be understood as a set of practices that allow us to connect, in the depths of our being, with our love for the world and our longing for it to reflect the highest potentials of human nature…[It] represents the intention to cultivate this force as a transformative presence in the world…underlying and informing all [our] actions is a shift in consciousness involving a deeper awareness of our essential interconnectedness.”
From Sandra Ingerman: “…once we set our intention to create a good outcome, the spiritual forces from within and without take over to manifest what is for the best of all concerned. We just need to always open our hearts in love for all of life when we do our dreaming. Then the work becomes to surrender the ego to the outcome of our dreams, having intended to create the most positive ones imaginable.”
From Arjun Walia: “I want to make it clear that my intention of presenting this information is to demonstrate that thoughts, intentions, prayer and other units of consciousness can directly influence our physical a world. Consciousness can be a big factor in creating change on the planet. Sending thoughts of love, healing intent, prayer, good intention, and more can have a powerful influence on what you are directing those feelings towards.”
Also, Claude Poncelet, in his shamanically-based work with multidimensional realms, invites all concerned to work toward the most harmonious outcomes for everyone involved.
David Spangler talks about subtle activism as a means by which we can be “…a generative source of blessing in the world. In the midst of all the distressing and hurtful happenings in the world—not to mention the scale of some of the problems that confront us, such as climate change—it’s easy to feel disempowered.”
Some further thoughts on subtle activism from Devadana Sanctuary:
Subtle Activism is a name given to working in collaboration with the subtle realms to support outcomes in the material world. It can involve orienting to human collective consciousness. It can involve invisible dimensions as well as our three-dimensional reality. It can involve life forms other than human—some from the invisible realms and some from our everyday world. Within a context of oneness, the fundamental reality is that we are all connected within the same ground of being. What any one of us does affects everything else and what everything else does affects every one of us.
We recognize that not all of us are able to engage in external activism, even though that is a valid path for many. We also recognize that “what we fight, we feed” and, in a similar way, what we support, we can nurture into being.
One of the important aspects of working with subtle activism is to attend to frequencies. There are countless qualities of consciousness and being from which we may choose the focus of our intention and activities. In this work, we pay a great deal of attention to the frequencies with which we resonate, as these frequencies define and co-create what emerges as a result of our subtle activism.
There are different forms of subtle activism. Group prayer, focused on healing outcomes, is one way to engage this process. Collective meditations that take place around the world, with groups and individuals in many and varied locales focused on the same intentions and outcomes, are another powerful way to engage in subtle activism. A Buddhist practice called tonglen is yet another dynamic way to do this. There are two versions of tonglen practice found on my website, www.nancynapier.com. There are also youtube videos made by various Buddhist teachers that describe the process.
Here are some links to websites and groups that have subtle activism activities, some on a global scale. There are more, as well, so please explore what the Internet has to offer along these lines…
“What is subtle activism?”, Gaifield Project: https://gaiafield.net/what-is-subtle-activism/
“Subtle Activism Movement”, Gaifield Project: https://gaiafield.net/subtle-activism-movement/
Kosmos Journal: Subtle Activism: A Way Forward Through Chaotic Times, David Nicol: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/subtle-activism-a-way-forward-through-chaotic-times/
Global Conherence Initiative, HeartMath Institute: https://www.heartmath.org/gci/
There are many more resources you can find if you google “subtle activism groups”.
Also, Amazon has a number of books that might be of interest: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=subtle+activism&i=digital-text&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
Video
A Video Series on Multidimensional Living
Video 17: Asking for Help
In this video, I talk about asking for help from nature, from subtle helpers, from a wide array of what I experience as supportive presences that are always available, if we will only remember to ask. A key to this process is to ask and then let the question go, without trying to figure out anything or “work” at receiving a response. This process underscores the need to be willing not to know and also to be willing to receive. Then, when you receive, to be willing to act on it if what you received feels right to you. Also, not to do it if it feels wrong. We never relinquish the need or ability to use discernment to sense whether the input is truly helpful or if it comes from your own wishes or fears.
Video 16: Cultivating Intuitive Perception
In this video, I talk about things I learned from my grandmother about how to track intuitive awareness—learning to discern what is actually valid and useful and what is wishful thinking. An important skill that supports honoring intuition is to be receptive, along with cultivating discernment. Did the intuitive awareness I sensed turn out to be meaningful, supporting, useful, or important in some other way. It’s also important to keep from “chasing after” intuitive awareness or to try to figure it out. Allowing time to allow awareness of something that has dropped in to develop and reveal itself. And, there’s no right way to do this. Intuitive input may come as images, words, physical sensations, a movie or music, being physically nudged in a particular direction. Also, don’t ask it to make sense right away. The key is to be open and responsive and willing to see what develops.
Video 15: Quantum Experiences
In this video, I share some of my “quantum-like” experiences as a way to support and validate our expanding awareness that the linear reality that most of us have learned is only one version of how the world actually is. I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a multigenerational home with a grandmother who was a healer and who regularly worked with nature spirits. She taught me many things as my first spiritual teacher and, even though I couldn’t see these beings as she could, I was given a worldview that allows me to be open to experiences that are outside the materialistic scientific worldview. The fact that quantum physics keeps demonstrating experiments in which many spiritual realities are affirmed is expanding science to begin to include more of these realities as “normal”.
Video 14: Handling Objects with Care and Collaboration
In this video, I explore some thoughts about our everyday relationship with all the gadgets we interact with everyday. We have dynamic and reciprocal relationships with these gadgets. As strange as it may sound, we are in active. collaborative relationship with all the “objects” we have around us. We have an ongoing opportunity to acknowledge, respect, and thank all the “objects”/gadgets we interact with on a daily basis. When we call objects “it”, we imply that they are just stuff rather than consciousness in a form very different from what it means to be a human being. I suggest that it’s an interesting journey to befriend and get to know your gadgets and to notice what happens if you ask them for help. Also, remember to acknowledge all the people and earth resources that go into bringing these gadgets to us. Remembering this can become a practice that can remind you of our constant and inevitable interdependence with so many aspects of your earth life.
Video 13: Drawing on Collective Consciousness
In this video, I offer some information on the fact that we are always part of—contributing to and drawing from—collective information fields. An example is the global information field that contains the healing wisdom of humanity across all time, wisdom that those of us in healing professions draw from automatically and constantly. We touch into information, healing practices, interventions, and more that deal with our human kin and also with our more-than-human earth-kin. Whatever frequencies we resonate with, wherever we focus our attention, we are likely to be participating in collective information fields that resonate with us, whether these are collectives focused on creativity, scientific discoveries, prayer, sending love and blessings, offering supportive presence to groups that focus on healing the planet, etc. It’s also important to remember that the frequencies with which we resonate orient us to the information fields with which we resonate, as well.
Video 12: Awareness Gives Us Choice
This video focuses on the importance and gift of awareness. With awareness, we have choice, even when we can’t change what may be happening in our lives. Also, awareness draws on the noticing brain, which is distinct from an inner critic or self-talk. The noticing brain helps to calm the amygdala, the area of our brain where we experience activation. I mentioned in the video on frequencies that one of the gifts of awareness is that we can track the frequencies we’re resonating with and then choose whether to continue where we are or do some practice that enables us to shift to another frequency. Also, when we orient ourselves to our noticing brain, we create moment-to-moment opportunities to choose how to respond to what arises in our daily lives.
Video 11: We Are Energy Beings Resonating with Love
In this brief video, I invite you to engage a brief guided process. Because we are energy beings, living within frequencies of the different dimensions of our body-mind being—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—the quality of energies we engage matters. In this particular video, I offer a brief experience of sending love, Universal love—a fundamental healing force—to each aspect of your body-mind being. And, when we can love ourselves, that love spontaneously flows out into the world around us.
Video 10: Asking for Help and Guidance
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about asking for help and guidance from sources that are unseen and perhaps even unknown. Drawing on ideas like collective consciousness or my grandmother’s sense of the “raincloud of knowable things” that rains down on everyone all the time, I suggest that we can receive input from sources we don’t consciously perceive. I also underscore the importance of being open to receive rather than trying to figure out what will show up as a response. I share how my grandmother taught me that receiving intuitive responses is like having something arrive all at once. One moment you don’t know it and the next it’s as though you have always known something.
Video 9: Gratitude and Inspiration
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about the importance of gratitude and the impact it has on the quality of our inner and outer life. Taking the time to notice and express gratitude for the smallest things in our lives can become nourishment for our body-mind, allowing us to resonate with the frequency of gratitude. I also talk a bit about inspiration and of the importance of seeking out sources of inspiration as we also acknowledge the suffering in our world. At the end, I share a small practice of focusing on gratitude for ourselves—body, emotions, mind, and spiritual connections.
Video 8: Drawing on Optimal Futures and Alternate Selves
In this video, I share some information and experiences about accessing the optimal future self and alternate selves. Drawing on the relationship between intention and possibility, orienting to these other aspects of being offers opportunities to connect with capacities, healing, and other outcomes that we may want to bring into our present-day life and expression. Because we live in an information universe, a key to this kind of process is that the experience is embodied so that the body and psyche receive the information carried in the future self and in alternate selves. An information update offers the body-mind new options that find their way into our everyday lives as organically as morning finds its way into afternoon.
Video 7: Foreground Background and Wholeness
In this brief video, I talk about wholeness and the foreground/background dynamics that we all experience within our wholeness as we move through the world. It’s inevitable that at times we’ll become triggered by something or another and an aspect of our wholeness pops into the foreground of awareness. Perhaps we are angry, sad, or scared. With the gift of awareness, we have an opportunity to notice what state we’re in, to respond to it in whatever way we need to, drawing on the presence of choice that our awareness makes possible. We can’t get rid of our wholeness, but having access to our noticing brain gives us an opportunity to choose how we want to move through whatever has popped into the foreground. Within a context of acknowledging and accepting our wholeness, we can meet ourselves with compassion and love.
Video 6: Orienting to Possibility
In this video, I share information about the optimal future self and the possibility of blending with that body-mind in order to bring back into this dimension what has become actualized in that “future” dimension. This way of looking at the world involves quantum ideas about intention, possibility, and probability. One practice: each day to affirm or hold the intention that your optimal life is arriving and arising each day. Then, being willing not to know what that means but to be open and notice what comes into your awareness and your life. I also talk about holding a sense of an optimal life for the planet and to explore what it’s like to hold this intention along with all the people around the planet who are currently doing so. And, again, being willing not to know what this all means. Instead, trusting that the intention to call on one’s optimal life will generate something and, to remember that change, even positive change, can be temporarily uncomfortable.
Video 5: Frequencies – Resonating with Qualities and Tones of Energy and Being
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about the importance of the quality of frequencies (the energies) with which we resonate. Because we are part of a human collective, whatever frequencies we resonate with in any given moment are augmented by the presence of those same frequencies in our global human collective. And, our individual, unique presence, our unique energy signature, radiates its frequency throughout our own body-mind being—affecting the quality and tone of our physical self, our emotions, and our thoughts, then on out into the world around us, and also into our human and Gaian collective information fields.
Video 4: Synchronicity – Dancing with Possibility
In this brief video, I share some thoughts about synchronicity and how it constantly dances in our lives, bringing into our experience moments of “meaningful coincidence”, as Carl Jung defined it. I also invite us to be willing “not to know” and to embrace non-rational experiences as sources of guidance and inspiration. Then, to be willing to be open, to acknowledge, and to respond to those moments when we feel internal nudges in directions we may not yet consciously understand.
Video 3: Acknowledging and Honoring Spirits of Place
In this video, I talk about the fact that everything around us expresses a living presence, just as we do, that we are part of collective fields of information, intelligence, and connection—that we are never alone, and that separation is an illusion. There is a living presence in buildings, homes, places in nature, sacred spaces, and I think of these living presences as the Spirits of place or space. Honoring and acknowledging Spirits of place is a powerful and nurturing practice. Also, my grandmother taught me about what she called “the raincloud of knowable things”, raining down on everyone all the time, a source of information and inspiration. (The name I couldn’t remember on the recording is John Bradshaw and his writings on working with the inner child.)
Video 2: Entanglement Separateness is An Illusion
In this short video, I talk about the quantum concept of entanglement, which has been demonstrated in experiments in quantum physics, revealing that everything is connected to everything, that we impact our world in every moment. We are part of countless fields of collective information to which we constantly, and usually unconsciously, contribute and from which we constantly draw. I also share some ideas about living from the heart, moving through the world oriented to the frequencies of love, kindness, and care for ourselves, our earth-kin, and our world.
Video 1: Being Lived and Quantum Realities, Intention, Possibility
In this short video, I share my experience of not wanting to say to life, “I’m sorry I was too afraid.” Here, I talk about holding the intention that you are receiving and living your optimal life—drawing the best possibility to you; being willing not to know what is arising and arriving ahead of time and instead being open to allow inspiration and impressions to drop in without needing to figure everything out ahead of time.
Frequencies, Entanglement, and Interbeing, Unity Center, Norwalk CT, January 21, 2024
Indwelling Spirit and Radiating Presence: Expressions of Subtle Activism and More
Subtle Activism
Saying “Yes” to All You Can Be
Nature’s Intelligence
Spirit Driven Life
Sunday Talk
Bringing Our Presence to Body, Mind and Spirit
Audio