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Portal to Multidimensional Living

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)

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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.

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

Gallery

About Nancy

Nancy J.  Napier is a psychotherapist and interfaith minister.  She specializes in treating trauma and is a long-term hypnotherapist.  She also offers clients and colleagues a context within which they may explore their spirituality more deeply.  Her first spiritual teacher was her grandmother, who was a clairvoyant and a healer.  Nancy grew up in a world filled with the healing, collaborative presence of invisible beings described to her by her grandmother.

One of her passions is to bring the magic of the invisible realms and the presence of the sacred into everyday life.  Her focus here is for those who live in urban settings, but isn’t intended to exclude people who have the benefit of living closer to nature.  Her focus here on urban living is because it is often more challenging to resonate with nature and the sacred when separated from the enfolding presence of the natural world.

From Nancy:  “When we spend time in beautiful natural settings, it is easier to sense and imagine nature spirits and other ensouling invisible beings.  In urban settings, bringing the sacred to life often requires a more deliberate focus, even as it invites us to engage a journey that adds powerfully to our sense of well-being.  It is my pleasure to offer practices, guided meditations, and other approaches to support the awakening and deepening of a sense of the sacred in everyday life.  I am also committed to helping people connect with an underlying sense of oneness as a living reality and to bring this to life in an everyday context.”

 

Resources

Here, you’ll find various resources, including links to websites that have information on collaborating with the invisible realms, developing relationships and partnerships with Spirits of the urban sacred and nature spirits, books, videos, and more.

One of the great gifts of the Internet is that there are countless resources available to nurture your relationship with the invisible realms and with all the support available there.  As those of us who collaborate with our gadgets know already, your computer, phone, iPad, and other technological friends will help guide you to the resources you need at this particular moment.  The opportunity is to relax, ask for guidance as you log on, and see where you find yourself.

For information and practices related to living multidimensionally, please visit our sister website: Devadana Sanctuary.

A favorite resource for helpful information about interacting with invisible realms is David Spangler, in his work with Inspirational Spirituality and the Lorian Association:

His books include:
“Apprenticed to Spirit: The Education of a Soul”
“Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes”

He also has a subscription journal:  “Views From the Borderland”, in which he shares his experiences with the subtle realms, his guides, and teachers.

Here are some links to interviews and talks with David:

Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview:

 

Brief talk at a Findhorn gathering on The New Story and collaborating with the subtle realms:

https://youtu.be/hjT3NN0vL0A

And, even though the sound is a bit challenging, here’s another talk by David at a church meeting:

* * * * *

Another favorite resource for exploring spirits of the urban sacred is Claude Poncelet.  Here are some resources about him:

On Youtube, Claude’s two-part interview with Tami Simon on her podcast, Insights at the Edge:

Part I:

Part 2:

Claude’s talk on The Reconsecration of Our Modern Technological World, given at a class given by Brian Swimme:

Claude’s book, The Shaman Within

* * * * *

The Findhorn Community, in Scotland, has many resources.  One of the best for learning about devas, nature spirits, and our collaboration with them, is Dorothy Maclean, one of the founders of Findhorn:

“To Hear the Angels Sing”
“To Honor the Earth”

These books, and others by Dorothy and other authors, maybe found at

An early book about Findhorn is “The Findhorn Garden”, available on Amazon.com.  Also available is “The Magic of Findhorn”, by Paul Hawken.

* * * * *

Practices

On this website, you’ll find various kinds of practices to explore and experiment with using that are intended to enrich your experience of the Spirits of the Urban Sacred.

Through guided meditations, rituals, and other ways to develop an ongoing, living sense that, in every moment, in every interaction with everything you encounter, you deepen your awareness that you constantly are in relationship with the Sacred in form.   Remember, the Sacred is One and what we think of as our world of form represents that One dressed up in an infinite array of costumes.

Everything and anything you can imagine in your physical world is an expression of the Sacred in form.  Any thought, feeling, spiritual state or awareness of any kind is also the Sacred in form, within the vast array–probably infinite–of frequencies and possibilities that exist.

One of the most basic practices in living with Spirits of the Urban Sacred is to support an awareness that everything you encounter in the course of a regular day is an embodiment of the same Sacred source as you.  Non-indigenous humans have had a tendency to experience reality as a pyramid, with human beings at the top of the pile, in terms of thinking of ourselves as more evolved and, perhaps, more important than other species.  This is quite different from the indigenous view, where all life is seen as part of one, indivisible circle, one family of beings, with no life form more important than any other.

The practices you will find on this website seek to support a perspective that there is nothing that is outside the Sacred expression of Spirit in form and that no life, whether in the visible or invisible realms, is more important than any other.  For those of us raised with a Western point of view, this can be a challenging shift, and it is my hope that the practices offered here will help create and support a perspective of oneness, a lived experience of our place within the whole that is Spirit in form.

About Spirits of the Urban Sacred

SOME ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT SPIRITS OF THE URBAN SACRED

Introduction by Nancy Napier

Many of us raised in Western cultures have lost an important part of our collective “nature wisdom”.  Because of the scientific revolution and an emphasis on materialism, we’ve been taught that it is fantastic at best, and laughable at worst, to imagine that nature is conscious and intelligent.  Even more unfathomable to the rational mind is the belief that there are invisible realms within which dwell beings who can be our partners in creating a quality of life that serves all life forms.  Indigenous cultures have tended to continue to cultivate an awareness of a larger, more active multidimensional world within which humans are members of a large community of beings. They have also kept alive a sense of the sacred as part of everyday life, a sense that the natural world is as sacred and precious as any other living being.

Spirits of the Urban Sacred seeks to support a return to a more multidimensional and expansive collaboration between humans, other life forms on the planet, and the invisible realms that are inhabited by countless beings who want to collaborate and cooperate with those of us living in this three-dimensional world of matter.

There are many sources of information about these invisible realms and the ways in which they interact with us in every moment of our daily lives.  At Findhorn, in Scotland, there were early experiments and experiences involving conscious collaboration with nature spirits and what are called, in Sanskrit, devas.  When I was young, my grandmother taught me about these beings, saying that nature spirits are what she called “elementals”—the “workers” in nature, whereas devas, she said, are the “architects” of nature—the beings who create the blueprints for material form.  David Spangler, a spiritual teacher who has been actively engaged in collaborations with the invisible realms since he was a young man, has a number of publications on the subject of differentiating various kinds of invisible beings and how to interact with them.  His website is www.lorian.org.

When I say that devas are the architects of “material form”, I mean physical, emotional, and mental “forms”, as in material objects, including our bodies, expressions of emotion, and thought forms.  For example, I often think of beings such as the Spirit of Gratitude, the Spirit of Compassion, the Spirit of Kindness, the Spirit of Healing, and the Spirit of Focus.  Any essence or quality you can imagine has a living Spirit that represents it and it encompasses a particular frequency.  For me, these are beings who embody the qualities and essences of all the various states of being we experience, positive and negative.  When I bring them to mind, I have an opportunity to resonate with their qualities, which allows me to enhance or strengthen ways of being I want to express in my life.  For example, I often call on the Spirit of Kindness to fill and guide me as I go through my daily life.  Whether I actually receive this help, I do not know at conscious levels of awareness.  What I do know is that, when I orient to the Spirit of Kindness, I’m more likely to draw on that quality in my interactions as I move through a day.

There are many other embodying Spirits all around us. These are Spirits that encompass all the lives unfolding within the scope of their presence and essence.  For example, there are devic beings who embody whole landscapes, as with the Spirit of Central Park; buildings, as with the Spirit that embodies an apartment building, homes, an office where you may find yourself on a regular basis, and sacred sites all around the planet, just to name a few.  Next time you are in a building, or even in your home, take a moment to notice that each space you enter has its own “signature” quality, its particular tone.  Allow yourself to be curious about how it would feel to acknowledge and thank these Spirits for their presence and support, and maybe to ask them for inspiration.

What is unfamiliar to most people living in Western societies is that we can have conscious and interactive relationships with these beings of the invisible realms, and that these relationships can benefit everyone involved.  Even if you are someone who doesn’t perceive these beings, you can interact with them effectively simply by acknowledging their presence, offering gratitude, and engaging in an intention to collaborate with them.  It doesn’t matter if you have a conscious awareness of them.  Your intention is like a rudder and it will orient your actions and internal experience toward the collaboration you desire.

The practices and resources on this website are intended to help you develop a more living and dynamic sense of the support available in the invisible realms, and of the intelligence that moves through and in nature.  It also seeks to strengthen your sense of the sacred as part of your everyday life, as part of your relationship with people, all living beings, all the objects and gadgets of your life—to live a life expressing a sense of relatedness to, and respect for, all that you encounter.

We are all on this journey together.  May we travel in ways that protect our precious planet and support all our relations.

 

Read more about Nancy here.

 

A Framework for Thinking Multidimensionally

As you explore the thoughts and approaches shared on this site, there are some assumptions and hypotheses inherent in what you’ll find here.  It’s my hope that this beginning page will allow you insight into the world view I bring to what you’ll find throughout the site.

I was raised in a home defined by the presence of my maternal grandmother–a Victorian woman who ran our multi-family home as the unquestioned authority on just about everything.  She was a clairvoyant who perceived other dimensions of reality, as well as a healer who worked with people who came to our large Hollywood, California home to see her.  She was a Theosophist and, I later discovered, a Spiritualist.  When I was about 10 years old and decided I didn’t want to go to the local Presbyterian church anymore, she gave me a choice:  go back to church or study with her.  I chose to study with her, which I did from ages 10 to 16, when she died.  The time spent as her student shaped my perceptions of, and expectations about, reality.

Even though I have grown beyond the teachings of my childhood, some of the assumptions about reality that I learned as her student are still with me, which comprise the working model of reality reflected by Devadana Sanctuary:

We live in a world made up of many dimensions of reality.

There are visible and invisible sources of help and inspiration around us all the time.

Help is readily available if we ask for and then allow ourselves to receive it.

In 1978, during meditation, I fell into what I can only call the Void.  In the flash of a moment, it became clear to me that everything I had ever believed and experienced, no matter how moving, no matter how vivid, no matter how much love I felt in it or about it, was unreal and impermanent.  The beliefs on which I had based my life now appeared as one way to translate an infinite reality that, ultimately, emerged from the Void space and returned to it.  It was a thoroughly shattering experience and I felt as though my solid foundation of reality, the world as I had known it, had been yanked out from under me.  Even though I have recreated a fluid kind of belief about reality in the years since, there is a part of me that never forgets that what is ultimately real, in my experience, is the Nothing that is the ever-present, all encompassing Void – the paradox that this Nothing holds the infinite potential for all that is and all that will ever be.

For that reason, while Devadana Sanctuary offers a working model to engage in a creative, dynamic relationship with multidimensional reality, I want to avoid offering any kind of belief system.  In this community, I seek to inspire your own perceptions of reality rather than to suggest what belief system you should hold.

Also, if you are interested in a series of brief videos on multidimensional living, you can find one on my website, www.nancynapier.com, under A Video Series on Multidimensional Living.

~ Nancy Napier

About Rev. Nancy Napier

Nancy Napier is an ordained Interfaith minister and psychotherapist.  Her books include, among others, Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition and Meditations & Rituals for Conscious Living.

Nancy’s first spiritual teacher was her grandmother, a clairvoyant and healer, who believed in and experienced multidimensional realities as normal elements of everyday life.  At her grandmother’’s knee, Nancy learned about nature spirits, devas, spirit guides and teachers, healing practices, and other aspects of multidimensional living. She brings these early learnings into her explorations in consciousness and spiritual practice. Along with this, she has a deep commitment to creating grounded and practical approaches to acknowledging and celebrating the Sacred in everyday life.