Fully committed to nonviolence, the process is to hold an open mind, the “don’t know mind”. Then “bear witness” to that which is out of alignment, and finally to “move appropriately”, more and more fully committed to nonviolence. 

So here we go again, bearing witness to the erosion of checks and balances, to the participation of the people by the people, and for the lack of regard for collateral damage caused from pushing ideological, religious and political views in favor to those of more and more extreme wealth. 

This is the work. We are here to bear witness to the devastation that comes from those desiring more and more wealth, more and more power, to leaders with little regard to the impact of the collateral damage caused from such actions. We bear witness to those committed to fighting, deepening our commitment to not fight. We stand tall in the face of their arguments and persuasive sales pitches as we find our grounding from our own wisdom and experience. We stand upright and make a plea for more healing and less hurting, for more belonging and less othering, for more “we” and less “us vs them”. More wisdom, less propaganda. More power from opportunity, less forced control of the people from fundamentalist religious/political ideological beliefs.

I recently made a Facebook post showing my golden retriever toning in harmony to my trumpet. There were a couple comments about possible pain this may cause to him. One response drew the conclusion that it was causing pain. In truth, this is a deep ritual practice that emanates from the heart. It’s a call to wake up to the illusion of being separate, to the poisons of fear and greed, and our need for healing rather than continued fighting.

Mojo and I have done this every day for more than four years, sometimes twice a day. Toning for healing has been a spiritual practice for me since 2003. There are times during trouble and deep wounding when it’s too early to introduce words. This became all the more clear to me when toning the horn at Virginia Tech after the mass shooting in 2007. Mojo was a gift of grace to me at the beginning of the pandemic. The grief in October 2020 was tremendous and Mojo spontaneously joined in the healing tone when only 10 months old. We both meet this ritual with tremendous vital energy each and every day. My experience and research shows no evidence that this is a painful experience for him. I’m sure there are those whose experience and research could draw another conclusion. This seems to be the problem we have today. There’s a lack of awareness to the field of epistemology, how we know what we “think“ we know. We debate, argue, fight under the illusion that somehow “we know and others don’t“. I can’t conclude that Mojo‘s howling is not painful at some point. I can only take my experience and research. Others have their experience and their research and they can only come to a temporary conclusion. In effect, this is the essence of wisdom from R D. Laing. He claims that I have my experience and you have your experience. I have my experience of your experience. You have your experience of my experience. And on and on this can go. We will never have each other‘s experience so all we can do is deeply listen to one another for better understanding. Can you imagine the world today as John Lennon did when writing the song “Imagine“? Can you imagine putting even a small percentage of our military budget toward the very sophisticated skills needed in listening to each other for understanding rather than dominance and ideology?

Over the years of doing this Mojo and I have come to listen to each other in deeper ways. His tone is entraining more and more to the tone of the trumpet just as I’m entraining to his howling tone. These tones go deep into my ancestry and the ancestry he has with the wolves. Our experience has shown a tremendous healing impact with these calls back to wholeness, healing and unity consciousness. It’s our simple way for making a wake up call to the gift of grace and the opportunity to move through another day with deepening resolve to not cause harm.

After more than 50 years of a daily zazen meditation practice it seems it can be summarized with one word: attention. With full wholehearted attention to the moment, the mind can settle down from its busyness. Awareness to the body and present moment surroundings is what gets attention. Yet, it’s only natural to be distracted, to lose attention, to drift and daydream, and even fall asleep sometimes. This is why my teachers in the early 70s used at kaisuka slapstick. When they saw that we were drifting and drowsy, they would use this instrument to bring us back to full awareness. 

The other day, while meditating outside, a beaver‘s tail had the same effect on me. The loud slapping of his tail brought me to full attention. It’s so difficult today when culture has become very sophisticated in drawing our attention away from the moment. We seem to have little awareness to the present moment as we live on a constant diet of dissatisfaction, complaint, and mindless consumption. There have been a number of events where culture has been slapped into attention. These were moments where we have humbled ourselves with a deep sense of compassion and stewardship for each other and the planet. However, we seem to keep coming under the cultural influence of small tribal thinking in times where we need magnanimous thinking. We are times where we need more healing and less hurting.

Can you face the moment in the affirmative? Can you greet this rising moment with a resounding “yes“? Can you say yes to deeper understanding? Can you allow the unfolding moment with a sense of love and wholeness? Can you allow and greet healing with the affirmative? A helpful meditation for this is “Breath in Yes, Breath out Thank you”.

Or do you meet the moment with complaint? Is your day filled with resistance and the negative? Are you continuously carried away by those things you fear or by your craving for what you want things to be? Can you allow your curiosity to feed deeper understanding? Can you stretch into greater and greater Being? When your thoughts are surrendered, you can more deeply touch the experience of love, wholeness and a deeper healing that knows you are supported, you’ve always been supported, and you always will be supported. This is the true experience of Grace, of God, living in and of all things and the awareness to that inner light that is in all living things. It’s not limited to membership or certain requirements. When we awaken to presence, to love, we see how no one can “not belong”. We see how everyone has been loved, is loved and will always be loved. This is the experience of breaking the illusion of Separateness.

Mojo is a golden retriever who tries to uphold the Golden Rule. He is now five years old and started howling with my horn toning when only ten months old. Since then we have a daily routine of harmonizing together with the intention to “More healing, Less hurting”. It’s a call to start the day with deeping intention to nonviolence, not fighting and meeting each moment fresh in gratitude for the opportunity to “just be”. It helps navigate through the gravity of the day so we don’t end up like the fishing boat in the background.

The ritual starts with “Ready” on mid-G, “Set” on F# and “Go” on F. We then go down the chromatic scale to low C and follow with mid C down to mid-G where we sing the opening melody of “Imagine” before ending on a flury that juices our mojo for the day.

Once you break through the illusion of being separate, once you experience “unity consciousness“, this understanding of “no me, just we“ layers open the paradox to how we must care for each other since we are each other, knowing that no one cares for us since there is no “me“. This is the essence of Toltec wisdom, “Don’t take things personally” since there is no me.

The more we can say, “I’m here. I just want to be here, now fully embracing this moment” the less we suffer. The practice is to breathe in “yes“ to what is before us in this moment, and breathe out “thank you“ for the gift of this moment, recognizing that we may not see that gift for some time as we are caught in our suffering and attachments.

Breathing in, say “yes” to just being. Breathing out, say “thank you” for the gift of being. With this practice our doing lines up and we wake up from the illusion of our separateness, from the fear and greed that would lead us to cause harm to others.

We can learn to move with the sense of the sacred, with the reverence for the gift of this moment. The Bible asks us to be still and experience God. The Buddha recognizes the suffering that comes from our attachments, and the relief that comes when we let them go. When we let go of the thoughts of the mind and fully enter the body we alleviate the stress that is the cause of so much disease. Brother David Steindl-Rast eloquently speaks about the benefits of gratitude. He says that we feed our gratitude with the recognition for the gift of opportunity to participate. We can always find something to be grateful for, even if it comes down to participating in the gift of the next precious breath. When we pull the mind back, allow thoughts and beliefs to dissipate, we experience joy in the experience of the divine here and now, the experience of heaven, here and now. The suffering that comes from grasping or pushing away can be alleviated by fully entering the experience of the body and touching the sacred in all.

We’re continually asking ourselves, “What are we here for?“ Many believe it’s to receive the approval and good opinion of others. However, this creates a prison for us and limits capacity to live in the creative zone. It seems we’re here to “feel good“. So how do we do this? A deeper awareness to the impact of our experiences and what we ingest will help us better understand how we can increase our energy levels, our vitality and life force. 

For me, getting enough sleep is essential. Also, doing the work of being in the present moment instead of stressed about wanting things to be different provides an uncommon equanimity that feeds the energy. A deeper awareness of breathing and extending exhalation energizes me. Having a well functioning digestive system that comes from mindful eating has the focus on how we feel after eating rather than during eating. It lets me see what foods sustain energy, and which foods drain it. The sounds I listen to have an energizing effect or a numbing effect. Listening to the sounds of nature…the birds, the moving water, the rustling of the leaves in the trees… these build energy. The landscape makes a huge difference on the degree of energy we carry and how we feel. For me, blue is an energizing color that still provides a sense of calm and equanimity. Red seems to feed more anxiety and those gray sky days make it more difficult to be in the present moment, more difficult to focus, and all too easy to daydream and wonder. No doubt, the energy of sunshine facilitates and fuels energy. 

It’s helpful to be around children who have fresh minds, children willing to explore new experiences with a sense of wonder and awe. I lose energy when I’m around people speaking as if they have all the answers. Watching media filled with opinion and judgment drains my energy. Sedentary living, watching screens all day, drains my energy and movement feeds it. It’s helpful to be around curious minds willing to step into a sense of wonder and gratitude for each unfolding moment. It’s also helpful to know how the music we listen to builds or drains energy. Does it lift us up or take us down? Music made to facilitate waking up calibrates at a much higher vibration. Media that focuses on non-violence and healing calibrates at a higher level from the dominant violent media we’re exposed to throughout the day. Complaint calibrates to low energy and gratitude calibrates to a higher energy with the necessary consequence of increased joy whenever practiced.

It’s helpful to set a deep intention at the beginning of the day, an intention to feel good, practice gratitude, and vow to not cause harm.  Reaching the end of the day, in recognition that minimal harm was caused by thoughts, words and actions necessarily brings a sense of calm and peace. Cultivating a deep sense of safety in the universe rather than feeding fear and greed, feeds a higher vibration. Living a consumptive life of moderation rather than luxury and excess leads to feeling peace and joy and increased energy.

It’s tremendously energizing when we realize we have the strength to face uncertainty with the stability of a mountain, the freshness of the flower blooming, the clarity of a spring brook and the spaciousness of the air. This is the essence of “just being”. No doubt, if we can ease the suffering of others in anyway, it feeds our life force.  The trick is to stay humble and keep ego from thinking it has fixed something.

I find vacations are also very energizing when it’s a pilgrim’s trip to new territory. If I can take a vacation from judgment/opinion and settle into the nonjudgemental mind, things go better. When I take a break from ingesting food, I develop a greater appreciation for the gift of the nourishment food provides. I am much more careful about identifying the sacred gift of daily bread . When I hold a body weight that feels good I am less tempted to criticize and critique it. I feel more free to ‘just be’. This full acceptance of the body in gratitude for what it provides seems critical for growing life force energy and a higher vibration.  I recognize that I did not create this body, nor am I able to control all my body’s functions. I recognize an intelligence that is far greater than the human mind is at work here. I know I cannot get any closer to that intelligence than by being aware of my own inner energy field, my feeling of aliveness, the animating presence within the body. This seems to be the essence of ‘well being’, a feeling beyond description that’s found more in the center of the body than in the head. Brother David Steindl Rast calls it ‘great fullness’, that place where the craving mind of dissatisfaction has quieted, if only temporarily.

Become more embodied (body aware) and less embedded in the head.

“Just be it” is about the practice of coming fully into awareness of the body and surroundings as one. It’s about escaping the shackles of thought. When we have a practice dedicated to awakening awareness in the body we awaken to the delusion of our separateness.

The real polarity in society revolves around “open vs. closed” minds.  The closed mind has attached to thought/beliefs without possibility of movement.  There’s little to no flexibility.  We will always have difference of thought.  However, our violence is dependent on our rigor mortis of thought.  Either we’re willing to listen to each other for understanding in acknowledging

that we don’t know everything or we’re not.  We can be angry about the situation and willing to open to other ways of seeing things or we become violent, justifying harm to others who don’t see it our way.  Yet, the only thing we really need to agree upon is a deep intention to not harm one another.  When it comes to conflict situations are we water or stone?  The fundamentalist thinking we have in politics and religion is dangerous because the closed mind creates a rational to cause harm to those of difference.  It’s of human nature to want an absolute answer.  Yet, the only absolute is that of uncertainty.  Either we can creatively deal with uncertainty or we meet it with the inflexible mind unwilling to open to new possibility.  The closed mind often uses the dead end phrase, “I know that”.  The open mind uses the word “appears” and will qualify flexibility in knowing with, “Given the information I have now, it appears to be……”.  

We would radically reduce violence if we could pledge allegiance to the open mind and non-violence.  I wonder if there’s any correlation between flexibility in the body and flexibility in the mind.  Without flexibility it’s more difficult to move.  With flexibility training we can better move to meet the inevitable change that is forever before us.