Meditation | Bonnie Barnard - Part 5

Home » Meditation

Self Soothing Practices

When your emotional body is overstimulated or out-of-whack what actions do you take to soothe yourself? If you aren’t conscious of your behavior, now may be the time to give yourself a look-see. I have my standard practices: Ground, breathe and become present. Meditate. Sit in affirmative prayer. Chant. Take a walk. Call a friend who loves me and reminds me of who I am. And, today I added a new one. Adult coloring. I know, I am late on the coloring train; yet I want to say that there is brain technology that supports my new-found self-soothing practice. Check this out…according to an article by Dr. Nikki Martinez in the Huffington Post there are seven benefits to adult coloring: It works with the subconscious to access information and become more self-aware. By concentrated focus it helps with many mental and emotional disorders. Returns us to a simpler time in our life. It utilizes advanced brain functions like organization and problem solving. Calm down parts of our brain that...

Watching the Seahawks Play and Thinking About Meditation

The Seahawks game just started in Minnesota as the third coldest game to be played in history. With ten seconds into the game, watching the signs of cold evidenced through exhalation clouds, I am grateful. Grateful for meditation. The Seahawks meditate. There are many fabulous articles written about how Pete Carroll, the coach, has created a different culture with the team by introducing meditation, yoga, mental health services, and holistic practices. As I sit in my warm living room grateful for meditation, I think of the monks who through meditation are able to raise their body temperature. From the Harvard Gazette in 2002, “In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators’ shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering. If body temperatures...

Knocked Out of a State of Bliss

Three weeks of bliss. Uninterrupted, pure bliss gone in one judgment. One thought that I knew how someone ought to live their life better than they are doing it … Ouch. And, I was kicked out of paradise. Yep, twenty one long and glorious days of Love is All there Is. Conditions don’t define me. Spirit rocks this house. Life is a beach on a sunny day with dear friends and a kickin’ sunset. Then driving down the road, letting my mind take a detour into the thought ghetto and I was snagged. I never spoke the thought. I didn’t take action on the thought. I didn’t gossip about this opinion of mine. I merely entertained it and I went from Heaven to outside its doors knocking loudly. There I was, driving down the street, one moment Here and the next moment there. It was that quick. I returned home and entered my meditation practice. Open heart. Breathe deep. Remember who I Am. Restored. Back to...

Is This REALLY Urgent?

“We have to talk NOW.” “Can you call me this afternoon, this can’t wait?” “We need a decision right away.” “You’ll miss this window of opportunity if you don’t act now.” “I can’t go any further without your input.” I lay in bed with pneumonia as the phone rings and each caller at the end of the phone has what they consider to be an urgent situation that then is to become my urgency. As my energetic capacity is slight, my ability to assess the true emergent is keen. Not one of the panicked “must do, must have or must act now” was REALLY urgent. I watched the callers acting from this crescendoed peak energy of the now or never. Finding this curious, I have been observing and inquiring into this energy pattern for several months. This is what I’ve come to know: We are trained into this idea of a short window in most part by artificial deadlines imposed by corporate marketing strategies. The idea of urgent is...

There is Something Within Me that Knows

I am in the midst of such an exquisite awareness. Curiosity and innate wisdom have joined their hands together and are leading me to resources describing what I know to be true in new ways. I find myself reading books on emergence, field and systems theory, lost (now found) books of the Bible, collective revelations, tribes, and watching videos by teachers that move me. This is interspersed with my own silent reflection and meditation. If I could bottle up this feeling tone and pass it around we’d all be talking about the party for the remainder of our lives. One of the books I am reading is called Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by four change leadership colleagues* who got together to dialogue on what happens at the point of collective breakthrough. As a minister, soon to be community leader, these observations hold great value to me. How does or could transformation happen within and to the collective consciousness? Silence is a key. And, the shift,...

Meditation Monday: My Life NOW

I am at times called into deep contemplation and prayer for a day. Today is such a day. As I have taken my prayer seat in my prayer chair to begin the process, I have asked my inner guidance for today’s meditation to clear the energy around me and within me that has impeded my ability to know the Allness of God. The meditation that bubbled to the top for the day is repeating the following words of Truth and feeling them in my body: There is One Life and that is the Life of God and it is my life NOW. This contemplation isn’t new to me. I’ve spoken it for decades, but today, the energy of it is vibrant and light and lifts my Soul and cracks my heart wide open. What I know is the Presence is within me. Jesus and all of the great teachers say this, and I have been blessed to know it on occasion, as well. I also know that I...