What can we do to help moderate both the personal and the collective response to this extraordinary event?  Well, for one thing, it helps to breathe. Fear constricts, to the point where we actually stop breathing. Conscious breathing opens the heart. Love pours in. Love or Fear. These are the choices. It’s really quite stark.

I’ve noted in several posts since the Japan quake that, just as after 9/11, I have found myself practicing the Buddhist breathing technique called tonglen. Breathe the world’s suffering into the heart; transmute; breathe out love and compassion.

Meanwhile, as I continue to skim the various, and somewhat contradictory, channeled reports as to whether or not the earthquake was manmade or natural, I’m struck by the unanimity in them as to one factor: that Mother Earth is going through a cleansing process, and that this involves release of negative energies through giant storms, volcanic eruptions, and unusually large earthquakes.

“Release of negative energies”: I’m reminded of a conversation with my late husband Jeff Joel, about how the earth has been trampled for centuries with the blood and gore of armies, the bedraggled footsteps of starving migrants, and, in the past 300 years, the industrial and chemical and nuclear waste that we so cavalierly “throw away.” As if there is an “away” on a finite planet.

Let’s add to this understanding, that of an apparent balance being created between the enormous release of negativity and what appears to be an intensification of the frequencies of light bathing the planet. This intensification is palpable to anyone who has cleared or is in the process of clearing his or her old reactive patterns. Clearing our patterns opens the spiritual pores, so to speak, and lets in that light.

With this balancing action in mind, I have shifted my tonglen practice, to simultaneously incorporate both the light and the dark. It is a practice that comes quite naturally to anyone who works with chi kung and/or tai chi, where we are continuously absorbing, integrating and releasing currents of chi from all directions. Here is the practice:

Standing or sitting: Vertical on the inhale: absorb the intensifying light down into the crown chakra of the head and the compacted darkness buried in the earth up through the feet. Absorb these energies, the light and the dark, from above and below, simultaneously on the in-breath into the heart. Circulate to transmute. Then, horizontal on the exhale: breathe out Love throughout all of the kingdoms of nature, including humanity.

Lying down: Vertical on the inhale: simultaneously absorb the intensifying light into the front of the body from above and the compacted darkness into the back of the body from below. Concentrate in the heart, circulate and transmute. Horizontal on the exhale: breath out Love . . .

I find this practice even more satisfying than the original. In absorbing the darkness, I absorb the currents of past and present nuclear suffering of people in Japan as it descends into the earth, crosses the ocean floor, up through the land mass of western U.S. into my body in Bloomington, Indiana.

If I didn’t realize our interconnectedness, or, in the beautiful metaphor of chaos theory, the global effects of a butterfly’s fluttering wing, I’d think this practice foolish.

But I do realize our interconnectedness, and I’m so very grateful.

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And yet, it is well to remember the last line of this next quote from the author of The Game of Thrones . . .

In 2022, I find myself doing tonglen breathing with every step I take during my three to four mile morning walks with puppy Shadow. And when I actually meet another human being, when they can take their eyes off their screens long enough to check out Shadow, then their eyes rise to meet mine, and we meet in the heart, right there — on the sidewalk, or in the store aisle, or on the forest path. We meet and greet soul to soul, in Love, smiling, or with a big hello . . .

With each mutual greeting, my heart lifts. Swells. In gratitude.

Here’s a simple exercise that I find myself doing at odd moments, during those “spaces” between events, while “waiting” — for something to happen — for sleep to take me, to move to the head of the line, for an event to start, etc.

Rather than pay attention to people, or things, I focus on the spaces between and among them. Moving from room to room in my home, I observe the seemingly frozen lake of space in which material objects are held in suspension.

Sometimes I try this exercise at different scales, macro to micro.

Macro: rather than pay attention to earth as a planet, I notice the space in which she is held, seemingly suspended, in relation to other planets, each unique and apart and yet all together in the womb of space.

Zooming further out, to our solar system as a tiny cluster around a single star in the starry night sky; if I am quiet enough, if I can deeply listen, I seem to be attuning to the harmonics of (infinite? It seems so) space in which light beings sing like angels.

Sometimes, glimpses into the vastness make me dizzy, or give me a strong shock. My child self can’t help but ask: Why don’t they fall? What holds them there, or rather, here? If they fell, where would they go? Is there a bottom to the sky?

(Aaaaah! Too much! Too much! Please, I need to frame up my experience, carve boundaries, set limits, decide what I believe, attain certainty . . .)

Whoosh back down, and in . . . to Earth. Here, landed, feet on the ground inside this, “my body.” Feel my own, unique body upon Her. Feel the minerals and chemicals and other nutrients that make up my body as those that make up Her body. Feel this body as “my” tiny portion of Earth’s body, a living, breathing antenna for Her watery feelings . . .

Micro: Penetrate further and further in . . . to a single cell, notice the space within that cell holding atoms and molecules and electrons, like planets, or galaxies, suspended . . .

See that cell’s membrane as a circle. Take any circle, see the points within that frame. Rather than focus on the points — describing them, counting them, grouping them, analyzing them, or snapping them into a gestalt — notice, become aware of, attune to, the essentially mysterious space that holds them all in fine array.

Circles within circles. Larger and larger, smaller and smaller. Circles intersecting with circles, arcing bounded spaces within the void.

Focus in on the line forming the circumference of any particular circle. View this line with a microscope. Notice how it, too, is composed of points in space.

Aaaah! The boundary of any circle is porous, permeable. At every level, space holds points in space, and with greater magnification, it still does. No matter how “close” the points appear to one another in “real life,” they are evanescent, incandescent . . .

For the point itself — has no dimension, does not “take up” space! At the bottom of the within, there is nothing, no thing, just space, the plenum, an etheric ocean, the flux from which “things” arise and fall, form and unform, in endless, fathomless, spiraling mystery. Zero equals infinity. Both exist on either side of “any series of numbers.” Both indicate the plenum that holds any number of dots.

I do this exercise to let go of desire.

I do this exercise to jostle loose the seemingly dense, stuck, material structures that our collective minds have created and hold in place.

I do this exercise, of seeing spaces between and among points at any level, to disconnect the dots and open, wide, to the multiverse and her infinity of dimensions beyond and within the three-dimensional one in which we appear to be living.