Earth Send On 4 August 2023
“August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.”
Joseph Wood Krutch
(1893–1970)
Welcome to the Circle of Mindfulness
santosha/Rainbow Tribe Reiki — Fridays, all day
Welcome, dear friends, newcomers and readers to this aroma-filled and swank Friday in August. Welcome to our meditation for the well-being of all life on earth. Welcome to Earth Send.
You can participate in this circle as a meditator and a well-wisher. We who are practising reiki are sending it to our circle first and then to all the names on our reiki request lists.
Be free to ask for support for any region that is in the process of peace building and stabilizing its climate and society. We can make it our focus for the day. You can keep your request to yourself, but respect your perception and include it into your good thoughts, prayers and healing work.
We do not energetically support the villains of our day who contaminate the ecology and bully or victimize people and animals and desertify the land. If you find yourself hypnotized by such personalities or are preoccupied with doom, move your mind to the people who are developing solutions, believe in a future and act like they do.
Love, calm and wholeness are intentions that you can broadcast to most settings and situations.
By linking up with our Earth Send, you are interacting with the field of good thoughts and blessings in human consciousness and you are adding to the world you want to live in.
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Feast On The Annual Peak Of Beauty
It is August! People eat lighter, relax more, bask in the sunlight and the fabulous scapes, be it on vacation, at their cottage, by the river, or in their garden. Do take in the month’s rich treats to the senses. Let go of information overload and all unhealthy overload, things that don’t spark joy, stuff that reminds you of struggle, sad chapters and poor choices in the past and deprivation.
I always loved summer for the pause it provided, that appeal to disencumber, drop into the moment, and be on island time. I spent many summers of my early life on islands and by the sea. I still connect summer to coasts, the breeze of salty air, the scents of nectarines and rosemary. I appreciate the beaches around freshwater basins, berries and juniper almost as much. Water is a theme!
It is sound and timely to take a break from life as usual and change the scenery. Or, alternatively, to unplug and visit the Island Self within. Thay told us that we can access the balmy island in ourselves by breathing and walking consciously. “The island of self” was a concept the late Buddha taught his students. It was a site that they could always find to take refuge in and to refresh themselves at. He did not want them to depend on scriptures, teachings and conditions beyond their control. The island of self is a dazzling image of self-care indeed: we can make it as lovely as we can and return to it as often as we want to.
Taking in the allure of the sunlit land and of the sunlit blues in the sky and the waters, savouring all the mood boosting sights of summer is immensely balancing to all of us who give a lot throughout the year.
Filling ourselves up with the sense of utter well-being and ampleness and enoughness is mightily balancing to our perception. Well-being, ampleness and enoughness are August’s gifts to us. These exquisite gifts will keep giving when this month turns into a memory.
The life force in the land is so opulent now that you can pick and choose what you want to store in your memory bank. As “so good and delish that it lacks nothing”, as “being in the pink”, as “fully charged batteries”, as “being pampered”, as “sunny mood for no reason at all” and while sober, as “not missing a thing”.
The descriptive word august is derived from the same word as the month and the name August, suggesting something magnificent and sublime.
The metaphor of adjusting our sails as the wind (the chi!) blows sounds summer-themed to me, too. So let’s adjust our sails as the wind –the chi– blows!
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Focus for the morphic field
Harmony, unity and sanity
We are grounding ourselves in the qualities of harmony, unity and sanity.
For obvious reasons, this month, we begin with harmony, add unity, then sanity.
We invite earth lovers, sympathizers and friends-to-be to join us in our aim to pour love over our home planet. May birds of a feather flock together. May soul families find each other. May the Earth benefit from us coming together.
As you ground yourself in harmony, unity and sanity, you may pick up diverse impressions about our water planet and its very varied surfaces. Some sites are hungry for attention and love, while other sites show us what it means to be whole and satiated with wisdom and love.
Do observe each site as it is. Let them be distinct.
… Become Teachable, Mist Everything Else! …
Learn from the luxuriant, thriving, pristine, restorative and enchanting sites.
Accept your information and your emotions about places that are neglected, contaminated, covered in plastic, ailing, fragile and at risk of conflicts.
Gently spray these territories with the mist of harmony, unity and sanity.
Gently spray the buildings and the resident restorers, the animals and people who remain and can restore their region, with the mist of harmony, unity and sanity.
Gently spray your feelings and thoughts about these sites with harmony, unity and sanity, too.
Anytime you feel upset thoughts or feelings rise in the coming week, gently spray the situation, the place, and your inner (reactive) processes with the mist of harmony, unity and sanity.
Notice how this mist hydrates you and the information you are absorbing and the sites that ask for more love and wisdom.
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Check-In With Your Vital Energy
How have you been feeling?
Have you run the Inner Smile through your body again, after last Friday?
Have you drunk any sun water from a glass in this sun-rich season?
Have you been charging your water with thanks and love, or with other high thoughts, as Masaru Emoto taught?
Have you been kind to yourself?
How can you be kinder to yourself?
You can be off-and-on committed to your well-being, and you can decide that “I am learning new habits now. I am improving. I am rewiring myself. I am doing my best. It is about practice, not perfection. I am progressing. I notice it!”
…
Here, I’d like to offer a useful insight about my first years of growing community gardens. The co-gardeners and I came up with a watering schedule that we all agreed to. I was excited to water the garden. Only when it came to doing it, I suddenly felt inconvenienced, faced with deadlines or weather whammies, wanting conversations that suddenly seemed oh so “important”, wanting to milk creative flows… I had to make myself water the plants.
Mind you, the community garden was my “baby”. Noone made me do it. I cared about the young plants, I wanted to water them! And once I was at it, I had a fantastic time watering and observing the greenery. Those other “programs” — urgencies, whimsies, sudden desires — competed with a no-brainer, pleasure and devotion.
Winter came. The garden was covered in snow, and I missed my watering routines. I found myself baffled by my senseless resistance. “What was that about? What was I thinking?”
I could have easily analyzed my resistance (against doing what I had signed up for and wholeheartedly wanted to do). But instead of piling up clever excuses, I developed a strategy for the following year:
I freed up the space for it: I scheduled watering into my week’s agenda.
It was a solution that has worked since. Of course, I have moods when I want to skip it, but because I care for my plants, I listen to my decision instead. As a parent, I know too well that parenting is not always suave, easy-going and fun. Most worthwhile things in life are not a “pure” thrill. We do them, because we want to maintain the conditions of health.
Plus, I am prone to rebellion. Everything that I could improve on in my life is brought on by my tendency to rebel (in inexplicable moments at times). Okay, the trait gets me admiration from others more than is sane; but I sabotage myself with it. I do not want to be mastered by it. I have to work on it.
This is what I hope to communicate about self-care and every commitment that is new to you: A new project is quite like watering a very new garden. Maybe you are into it, into some facets for chunks of time; then, other agendas assert themselves and appear urgent, and your follow-through weakens. Remind yourself that you can do what you may not want to do at that moment, but do want to do in the big picture. That is what grows your consistency, integrity and self-discipline — qualities a lot more desirable than all moods and excuses.
Even I could not rely on my enthusiasm for the new garden. I had to come up with a practical solution, so that I would do it.
Inner growth is a journey: you are re-parenting yourself.
Help yourself when you are trying to wiggle out of it.
Get real with yourself. Maybe noone else will notice. But you will notice!
My favourite two Western philosophers — Epictetus and Henri-Frederic Amiel (from different eras and different societies) — hammered the message home that we work on ourselves because we are the person we live with from our first to our last breath, that the witness of our life is no fool, and that robust self-worth is built by our own actions.
Does that strike a chord, I wonder? Do you encounter resistance? How have you helped yourself?
I am glad for you if you are super steadfast and just do what you need to, even when you are not “feeling it”. It means that you have mastery over that aspect of life.
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What Are You Grateful For Today?
I expect that from now on, you will bring your gratitude container to this meditation.
Make it a part of our gatherings on Fridays. You will make quantum leaps that you can not even fathom now.
Have you written in your gratitude journal? Have you dropped new items into your gratitude box? Have you surprised yourself with topics of gratitude that were new to you?
Good. Keep going!
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Check-in With Your Recent Manifestations
Appreciate how far you have come.
Recall where you were months ago and that you are moving forward.
Because you are investing in your well-being now, expect new arrivals and new departures. Fresh fascinations are surfacing, less compatible energies are pulling away.
What has life presented to you lately that points to your goal map, vision board, or what you care about deeply?
Several Feng shui masters I listened to a while ago offered the idea of “Buy that dress. You are going to a party that you don’t know about.”
In the spirit of: You may not know what it is for; you will find out soon what it is for.
It reminded me of the adage “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”… But I hadn’t heard it quite like that before, spoken with concrete, proactive and expect-good-to-happen words.
For something good to arrive, we need to make space for it, clean up what needs cleaning, and let go of what obstructs its arrival.
If, by any chance, you get the idea to “buy that dress”, or get other clues about an action that you can take — right after this session –, assume that it is your intuition messaging you. Give it a shot.
Our Reiki Sends are times when our energies get combed, cleared and aligned, and we open to downloads and to receiving directives. Maybe you have ignored a hint before? This month, give yourself credit, and do what you are being shown.
I too keep getting signs about an issue. I will get to it before next Friday! Having shared it now is a way to hold myself accountable.
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Gratitude to the Season and the Land
What have you learned about your soil? What do you know about your watershed?
I say hello to the lands where you all live and grow food on.
I say hello to the land of the Anishinabe Algonquin on whose ancestral land I live and grow food on and do my best to be respectful, auspicious, and me. I can not complain: native people have been warm to me, curious and open, since I came to this continent. (I heard that this is not the case for many people who look like me… But we have a heart connection, similar values and concerns, and we click.)
I just shared my story about watering my first gardens… My gardens now consume less water. I moved, and the next gardens were quasi clean slates to green up, so I planned. I chose plants that have the best chance to spread out, requiring less and less maintenance, native or hardiness zone appropriate perennials, edible plants that either have ornamental value or are super resilient in my clime’s mood swings. I also use household compost on top of the mulch that I get for a small delivery cost and sometimes for free (arborist, or the city’s, “waste”). Mulch has been the biggest success in my garden: not only did it extend the growing season for a handful of weeks, the plants stay in better shape, suffer less from winds, downpour and heat waves, and grow taller. I applied the principles of permaculture and water retention landscapes to my microclimates in smallish urban spaces. It is possible to adapt the guidelines to pretty much every type of growing station available to you, even while being a micro grower, plant appreciator and plant eater.
It is so satisfying to learn from the visionaries of permaculture, river rejuvenation and water retention systems and to realize that so much of it can be put into practice right away and that all your plants are stronger and healthier than ever before. That is because you are borrowing from the knowledge and the science of harmony, unity and sanity.
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Gather Evidence
Your Gallery Of Mudita — People To Celebrate And Learn From
Who is a success story to you that you can be happy about today?
Who are the people who achieved what you imagine for yourself?
Can you contact them, interview them, get them to recommend what you could do? Are they making themselves available to learners? Do they speak at events that you can go to, at bookstores, at the library or in podcasts? Have they published instructions or a memoir?
When approached in kind, people who made things happen can be quite generous with their know-how. Mentorship is a reliable path to grow adroitly toward your dreams.
…
Your journey, your courage, your success belong into your gratitude container. It is good to acknowledge your good traits and feats, but the evidence that you want to gather are people who are further ahead than you and who materialized something important to you.
…
We have been told that noone belongs onto a pedestal. If we talk about a cultish “X can’t do no wrong” attitude, okay, that is not healthy and should be avoided, period. But nothing is wrong about looking up to people who have achieved something that we want to attain and something that we are in awe of.
If we want to develop, we can not make ourselves the ceiling of what is possible for us. We are also not making ourselves into our own higher power. Steer away from such ideas, please, and from the people who tell you that spiritual growth is about putting yourself on a pedestal. That is a high red alert about a narcissistic, delusional mind, and, clearly, self-limiting to you.
I had the dubious privilege to observe people who proposed views like that and to learn, a long time ago, that their act was a smoke screen. Everyone who came after was a clone of the ones before. When they get outed, and caught by the law, I do not feel too much pity for them; I already anticipated that they would be in trouble. Of course, we can be compassionate to them, too, because they are flawed like everyone else, but I have more compassion for their victims.
If you feel no attraction to them, congratulations. I am glad that I am sensitive to these dynamics and to the power abuse that harms followers who switch off their thinking, flush down all common sense, discard all warnings… Later, they will be blaming. Understandable. But they were part of the dance, too; they did not value the signals they were getting and the knowledge they accumulated before that bad teacher showed up. If a teacher expects such sacrifices or is suggesting that we be the be-all and end-all, find the next one, someone more decent and benign.
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Manifestation
Our Goal Maps, Action Maps, Shopping Lists, Dream Boards, Vision Boards
Reiki will circulate through both your gratitude container and your manifestation memos today.
I do not ask what is on your gratitude list and on your action map. But I appreciate your feedback, once you start getting results.
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Align With The Five Reiki Precepts
Just for today, we do not worry, we do not anger, we are grateful for all the good in our daily life, we are honest in our work, we honour those who have raised us with love and the educators who have turned us into lifelong learners. We are grateful for everything we were given, we have acquired, earned, inherited, participated in and that we use today. May we use it for the highest good.
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Help Yourself Practise
(On Fridays … And When You Said You Would)
Set up a time when you will join this Earth Send. And keep it up next week.
You may travel and be far away from your cozy, meditative space, but show up at that time anyway.
Keep a water bottle nearby, your newest gratitude list, a portable action map, and a few objects that comfort you.
If you are a high comfort person, perhaps even a bit lazy, add reminders of purification and wakefulness to the space where you do inner work and practice meditation.
If you have not given yourself enough comfort, add comforting elements to your space that make it more grounding, relaxing and appealing to your nose, touch, skin, ears and eyes.
What I bring to Earth Sends differs from week to week. I am not a minimalist, but I am simplicity minded. I do not mistake neat stuff for the practice. I shop judiciously, irregularly, and I maintain those objects for years. I love mantras and let them play in the background for an ambiental touch. I also enjoy bird songs and no other music. Or white noise and meditative compositions. Sound is not a must for me. But for inspiration, it can be wonderful! I use essential oils often, or have herbs in hot water to clear the air. (To me, they substitute incense sticks, candles, amber resin and cacao — all of which I use only in the cold months.) I like fresh flowers, too. Less and lighter is my style.
Jade is a stone that I find similar, in effect, to reiki going through me. I kept a jade in my palm when I wrote many Earth Send invitations. I recently read that jade gives off far infrared heat.
I am not going to talk you out of your own preferences — if they work for you, great; but if I can suggest a gemstone, it is jade.
Jadeite is for women, nephrite for men. They are similar enough in energy; one is a tad more yin, the other a tad more yang.
Know that all props are great — if they make you show up to your session. But the inner work and the practice in your healing modality comes from you. Do not lean on objects. Harmless rituals and tools can be nifty reinforcers, but the foundation of the practice is that you reserve a space and protect your time dedicated to the practice.
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What To Look Forward To
Allow yourself to be a sponge this month! August is awesome. Let the sunshine in!
The night sky will feature the Perseids until the third week of August. Happy stargazing.
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May This Day Be Of Benefit To You
Stay hydrated.
Take freshness, pizazz and positive expectations into your weekend. Write your gratitude lists, create a gallery of role models, teachers, guides and possible mentors. Play with your vision board.
I humbly receive. I bow to love.
4 August 2023
