Meditation For A Changing World

This week the New York Times published a piece entitled Fatigued by the News? Experts Suggest How to Adjust Your Media Diet. In a similar vein, a resonant New Yorker cartoon has been making the social media rounds. Its text reads: 'My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.'

Certainly there's been a sense of burnout or as one author pundit on MSNBC referred to the daily pall cast over informed citizens: 'a sense of low-level dread.'

I've experienced this myself to the point of distraction. Ordinarily a creatively driven person, I've found my mojo lacking as of late. The more I engage on social media and read and watch the news, the more my spirit dies a little each day.

Some friends and acquaintances who I had thought were socio-politically on my 'team' seem to have taken the opportunity to now look for negligible differences in our ideologies — hurling these contrasts like hand grenades into social media's trenches... A latent anti-American sentiment previously beneath the surface has now been given license to run amuck...

There is so much anger coming from all sides — left, right, and centrist — that it's difficult perhaps to remember that we're all in the same boat here, on planet earth, and it's sink or swim. We're ultimately all from the same tribe (homo sapiens).

I too am guilty of letting anger get the best of me when I'm the most vulnerable, so I'm 'not without sin' and not 'casting stones.' Instead I offer what I hope can be a nectar or tonic for a toxic age — my tiny contribution to the greater good: an 11-minute guided audio meditation for a radically changing and unsettled world.

The words seemed to pour out of me and I hadn't even to think twice about whether I should be creating this meditation, which I intuit means it's emanating from a pulse or energy greater than little old me. It blends my love of audio/video production and voiceover with my journalistic/writerly inclination to tell stories or paint pictures.

My aim was to create something non-partisan that could resonate with as wide a swath of people as possible and which could ignite positive energy that nourishes — helping us find our inner guiding light and helping us find and grow that spark in others (even those who don't agree with us).

If even one person who's feeling exhausted, hopeless, anxious and overwhelmed by it all is helped, comforted and inspired by this recording, my 'job' will have been done :)