Tag: Deep Spring Meditaiton Center

  • Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu

    Today is my birthday.

    As my birthday ritual I did an audio Mudita meditation with John Orr from an online retreat day April 11, 2021. Mudita is a Sanskrit and Pali word that means “sympathetic joy” or “appreciative pleasure”. It’s a Buddhist concept that involves feeling joy for the good fortune of others.

    The first person you choose is someone you can feel a genuine sense of happiness for their good fortune and happiness. Today I chose my older grandson, Bradley. Currently I am sharing substantial time with him as he his helping me get DebraBasham.com set up. It will be the new home to Yellow Brick Road and Sacred Stories and many of the resources that have been located on SCS-Matters.com.

    The second person is often called The Benefactor — someone who has been loving and supportive for you at some time or times in your life. I chose Reverend Betty Lue Lieber, who founded Reunion with her husband, Robert Waldon. This is the the program I was ordained through in 1997.

    The third person is a neutral person. It may not even be someone you know personally, but it is someone who is feeling happiness and good fortune with a recent accomplishment, something that likely brings that person joy. I chose Donald Trump. You are instructed in the meditation to notice any old mind states like jealousy or envy. Right there with those feelings say, “May joy infuse your life. May it continue all of your days. May you truly be happy. May you truly be free. May all of this grow. May it infuse your heart.”

    The fourth person is sometimes called The Enemy but it is just a challenging person (a person you are having a challenge with). You are encouraged to notice all of the happiness in that person’s life — loving family and friends and relationships, meaningful work. “May you be truly happy and well.” You are invited to be genuinely grateful for all that you have learned from this person.

    After the guided meditation ended I played a recording of the chant “Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu” from a residential retreat day October 10, 2019. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu is a Sanskrit phrase that translates to “May all beings everywhere be happy and free”. It is a prayer for global well-being and peace, and a perfect chant to support the Mudita Meditation.

    When I finished I looked at a list of others I know share a January 22 birthday:
    1. Wayne Kaiser
    2. Emily Warner
    3. Phillip Largay
    4. Joyce Zerbe
    5. Aaron (Linda Gunter’s son)
    6. Allen Mumper
    7. Emily’s husband’s cousin
    8. PT at Borgess
    9. George Ross
    10. Izzie (granddaughter Courtney’s friend)
    11. Carrie Startcher (daughter Stacey’s friend in Clarksville)
    12. Sivia’s mother

    I like to also contemplate the day’s messages that come on this day from sources I value and follow.

    Daily Reflection from Deep Spring

    In a moment of darkness, you are wont to ask, “Why this darkness?” You have a sense that if you could but understand the darkness, you could protect yourself from it. Such thinking only further strengthens the illusion of the self. Can you sit there in that darkness and simply know, “Here I sit in darkness and I will wait. I need not fight with the darkness. I need not try to push it away. I need not grasp, even at faith.”

    Just faith: faith expressed as the willingness to sit in darkness, if darkness is what is there, without a need to grasp at the light but with the willingness to open the doors and allow in the light. ~ Aaron

    On this day of your life Debra, I believe God wants you to know that not everything has to turn out exactly the way you planned in order for you to call it a success. Sometimes all God wants you to do is to “get the ball rolling.” Then, She’ll take it from there.

    So when things turn out other than the way you wanted them to, don’t be so quick to say, “Bummer!”

    Many a Bummer is a Blessing in disguise. Consider the possibility that life is magic…and that there’s a rabbit in that hat.

    Love, your Friend, Neale Donald Walsch

    From Gratefulness.org

    You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence. ~ Zadie Smith

    From The Daily Tejaniya

    When you are truly aware you aren’t focusing, yet you are
    aware of objects. You are aware of thoughts of the mind, sensations
    of the body, and perceptions (sights,sounds, etc.) of the world.

    By practicing in this way, the mind stays fresh.

    It may not be usual to be happier for someone else’s birth than your own on your birthday, but today I truly feel greater joy that Stacey was born than that I was born. I get that she could not have been born unless I had been, but emotions don’t always make sense. In fact, they are often very distorted. That is just how it is. So at three quarters of a century I am grateful for the wonderful woman who came in as a teenage pregnancy and those that came in from her.

    RIP Wayne Kaiser and Allen Mumper.

    May all beings everywhere be happy and free. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu….

  • R-E-S-P-E-C-T

    This post might be considered “The High Road Part 2.”

    I learned to think of re-spect as the willing to look again and again.

    I am not attending an eight-day workshop Healing and the Everhealed with Barbara Brodsky (January 23-30). It was very odd to not be guided to attend, especially given that my life’s work is just this.

    In fact, it was more a matter of my having been guided not to attend.

    I watched the mind games: “I will miss out,” or “I already know this stuff,” or “I should attend to support others,” and even, “This is all just ego.”

    Fortunately, I have the privilege of sending out the audio recordings from the workshop, so I am benefiting by the teachings!

    Even the introductions of those attending the workshop was humbling. It is an amazing group of individuals with such diverse experience in the healing arts. Great love and sincere commitment to path. I bow to each….

    Perhaps this “birds-eye-view” of the workshop is allowing just the right space for integration. Meanwhile, notice the amazing synchronicities!

    Aaron’s Daily Quote the opening day of the workshop was, “Remember that at the deepest level there is nothing to heal. The ever-perfect is always there. We move through the distortion, to reveal the ever-perfect. In another articulation, the human uncovers the light body template for the ever-perfect and shines it into the body, asking the etheric and physical bodies to pick up that image, and to replicate it. All the healer is doing is holding the mirror.”

    Note* Aaron’s Daily Quotes are selected randomly by a computer program from a pre-loaded field of hundreds. No human being has the ability to select from that field.

    Yesterday morning I had a phone conversation with John’s cousin. I asked about her brother following a stressful interaction we had with him about masks (conspiracy) before we left home. She and her husband will be vacationing on Sanibel Island in a few weeks and wanted to know also about Pine Island for some friends. I had to admit to her I am not a good one to ask because it does not yet seem wise to live life as though there is no coronavirus.

    Aaron’s Daily Quote for today:

      Deep Spring Center
      Thought for Today

      If you get into a situation with somebody where there’s a lot of anger and verbal clashing, and you start to hear a little voice inside that says, ‘But he’s wrong and I’m right!’ do you think that voice is just from you? A lot of it’s from you. And then there’s your negative polarity cheering team that says, ‘Ooo, here’s a place to wreak havoc. We can make a mess here!’ So it’s egging you on, ‘Yeah, you’re right and he’s wrong! Tell him!’

      ~ Aaron

    And then I open today’s teaching from Neale Donald Walsch:

      On this day of your life Debra, I believe God wants you to know …

      … that negative passions may run high, but they do not
      have to rule you.

      Your inner peace, and the sanctity of your being, are
      not worth trashing because of some negative feeling
      you have about something. Just let it go, and return to
      the knowing and experiencing of who you really are.

      Try not to abandon the self. Try very hard. In the end,
      your soul will be so grateful.

    A subtle cue that I am releasing some long-held cherished ego position and integrating awareness is how EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS SAYING THE SAME THING.

    Also from this morning’s inbox:

    Respect toward yourself is more significant than any respect from others because you know yourself better. When you practice patience, for example, you must know why you’re doing it and how it benefits you. If you value self-respect and do virtuous things that are unknown to others, you will naturally gain self-confidence, strength, and freedom from your neuroses. You will feel more and more inspired to develop your tsewa and shed the eight worldly concerns because of the benefit and freedom you personally experience by doing so. Your heart will be at peace, and eventually others will respect you as a person who has truly been transformed.

    ~ Peaceful Heart
    The Buddhist Practice of Patience

    by Dzigar Kongtrul, Edited by Joseph Waxman, page 39

    * Vihiṃsā (Sanskrit; Tibetan phonetic: nampar tsewa) is a Buddhist term translated as “malice”, “hostility”, or “cruelty”. It is identified as one of the twenty subsidiary unwholesome mental factors within the Mahayana Abhidharma teachings.

    Over and over and over in this workshop comes the gentle reminder there is nothing to fix. Trying to fix anything thwarts availability to have every thought, word, and action guided by the open loving heart.

    Abraham Hicks joins the integration today:

      Making Peace with My Today Will Improve My Future…

      It may sound odd, but the fastest way to get to a new-and-improved situation is to make peace with your current situation. By making lists of the most positive aspects you can find about your current situation, you then release your resistance to the improvements that are waiting for you. But if you rail against the injustices of your current situation, you hold yourself in Vibrational alignment with what you do not want, and you cannot then move in the direction of improvement. It defies Law. In every particle of the Universe, there is that which is wanted – and the lack of it.

      Excerpted from The Vortex on 8/31/09

      Our Love
      Esther (Abraham and Jerry)

    And just one more synchronicity from my inbox: They may not deserve forgiveness, but I do. ~ Anne P.

    Now, this is R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

  • 2021 – A True Spiritual Path

    Deep Spring Center
    Thought for Today
    December 31, 2020

    So often beings have a
    limited view of spiritual life
    that creates a duality in themselves,
    so that they only see themselves
    as ‘being spiritual’
    when they’re being kind and loving.

    When painful emotions arise,
    then they think,
    ‘I am no longer being spiritual.
    I should fix or get rid of these emotions
    and come back to kindness and
    then I will be spiritual.’

    But this dualistic thinking only
    enhances the fragmentation of the self and
    enhances negativity and suffering.

    To open the heart to the self,
    just as it is in this moment,
    is the true spiritual path.

    ~ Aaron

    As we turn the page on our calendar to 2021 at midnight tonight where ever you are, hindsight will be 2020. New Years has held a nostalgic space in my heart and mind for as long as I can remember, but just as 2021 offers unlimited possibilities, tomorrow is also just another day.

    What will you remember most from the past year? High on my list is the consistent kindness and generosity of our friends, Linda and Larry, consistently doing our grocery shopping for us. First, using InstaCart, and then going to the grocery store, just so we could limit our exposure to the coronavirus.

    I will remember the blessing of Zoom bringing the meditation hall into my home.

    I will also feel the sting of not going to Tennessee to visit Stacey’s family on our way home in April. Or having to tell Melody I could not do an in-person ceremony for her mom, my friend and colleague, who contracted COVID-19 while in the hospital with acute pancreatitis. Bonnie passed without Melody or Dan, Bonnie’s husband, having opportunity to be with her.

    No service of celebration of life for Fred Gibby yet either. They say it will be an ultimate hug-fest when the time is right. and Fred loves that idea!

    It is otherworldly to not have gotten to Kalamazoo to see Joel and the kitties; and very hollow that I did not unpack the office when contents were moved to the beautiful new space at Lakeshore Acupuncture.

    Immense gratitude for Barbara Brodsky and John Orr and Aaron and Jeshua (and all who help me remember who I really am) seeps deeply into every day.

    The take-out dinners and dominoes by Zoom.

    And now, Jackson Taylor Yarber, born December 28, 2020, has joined our family, and I am loving my first great-grandchild fully from Southwest Florida as he is in Tennessee. Fingers crossed it will be safe to hold him and smell him on our way back home in the spring.


    In the spring — the spring of 2021!

    It feels otherworldly to say that…

    2020 is ending.

    2021 is beginning.

    Suddenly, I am hearing a song from the musical Godspell in my head: Where are you going? Where are you going? Can you take me with you?

    Last December I was fixated on accessing a Magic Eye Wall Calendar! When I found one, I decided to gift a bunch of folks! Janis and I have ritualized the turning of the page on the first day of each month, letting the image come into view, noticing how some are very easy and others quite challenging.

    Interestingly, there will not be a Magic Eye Wall Calendar for 2021, as announced on the website: Our calendar publisher has asked us to wait until next year to publish a Magic Eye 2022 wall calendar, as printing, shipping and distribution channels have all been disrupted by Covid-19. We will not be releasing a Magic Eye 2021 wall calendar. Wishing everyone a happy & safe year!

    Janis and I have agreed to go back through each month of the 2020 Magic Eye Wall Calendar, enjoying again in 2021 what we learned in 2020.

    The missing and longing, and seeing and being. It has all been here all along.

    Here’s to 2021, a true spiritual path. It, too, has been there all along….

    “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” ~ Joseph Campbell