I (Nancy) moved from the Berkshires to New York City in fall of 1983. For the two years that I lived in the 1800’s house on 11 acres in Sheffield, Massachusetts, I was called to a pine woods each day for meditation. The woods stood on the other side of the marshy swamp that was between the house and the woods. There was one small path I was able to take across the swamp each day and, on that first day, I discovered that the pine woods didn’t like humans. I don’t know what happened there, but there was a definite quality of hostility and a sense of “don’t come near us.” It took time to befriend the woods and we ended up having a rich two years together.
The day before I moved permanently to New York City, the woods asked one last favor of me. I was asked to encircle the woods with lines of white light, to help protect it from whatever humans or human activity might be around. I did so in a meditation, imagining that the woods became enfolded in many white lines of light. I had no idea if this was effective, but it was what I could do.
Over the years, I’ve driven by the house many times and noticed, each time, that more and more vegetation had grown up in the swampy area between the house and the woods. The last time I was there, some 30 years after leaving, I could see that the woods was almost completely hidden by the vegetative growth all around it and I could see that there was no longer a clear path to get from the land around the house to the pine woods across the swamp. It felt like “mission accomplished.”
This got me to thinking about the rainforests in Brazil and the Amazon and I began to wonder if there were a way to imagine lines of protective white light encircling the entire region to protect it from further human intervention and destruction. For this practice, I invite you to spend a bit of time each day, once a week, or once a month visualizing, imagining, or in any way that works for you, encircling the Brazilian rainforest, all the rainforest region in the Amazon, with lines of white, protective light.
Here’s an image of the Brazilian rainforest to give you a sense of what you are enfolding in lines of light:
The lines of light I used in the Berkshires were thin but strong. Whatever your lines of light may look like, the key is to envision them as brilliant and radiantly protective light that repels human activities and intentions that would bring harm to the rainforest. It seemed to me, when I visited the Berkshires recently, that the lines of light somehow created a boundary that in some way may have influenced the thinking, intentions, and planning of the humans who may have encountered it, thus protecting it.
The key here is to hold a clear intention that the lines of light you envision are there to protect the rainforest from further harm from human activity. You might also close your time of imagining these lines of light with a flow of blessings and gratitude to the rainforest for the crucial, central, and profoundly important role it plays in the overall well-being of our beautiful planet, of the eco-system within which we all live, move, and have our being.
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Here’s an audio version of the written information above, if you prefer to listen to it.
As you listen, please press pause when you need additional time to do take in the practice.
And, please remember never to listen to recordings when driving or using machinery.
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