Cultivating care

To collaborate in forming and sustaining ecodemocracies of care is the only way to move in the world for people who have vowed to care. Vow is everything – your own personal commitment, exactly as you intend it, formed freely in your heart.

Here is one way to cultivate care through meditative practice, and after practicing.

Imagine the most perfect embodiment of goodness: unconditionally loving; knowing all phenomena in all their knowable aspects, just as they arise, while never losing realization of their essential lack of essence, their boundless nature of sheer possibility – a vast and subtle expanse that can embody in any way; able to act however may most skillfully meet this moment's needs, out of this pure power of love and wisdom that never falls from total intimacy with the world.

Let this embodiment take form, imagining the most beautiful and blissful appearance that comes to mind – whether light, nectar, person, or boundless sacred source appearing like space, like self-illumined cloudless sky.

Let your breath enter the soft burrow of your belly, nestling there. Exhaling through the luminous channel running up the central axis of your body (however you sense it in this moment), let the unadulterated free flow of breath spread ease and calm throughout your whole body.

Continue to cultivate a sense of the pure form's presence while allowing yourself to gently breathe it in and out. Breath flowing in and out through your whole body, you receive the luminous, nectar-like presence of this pure embodiment as though it rides along with the breath – a silent, magical companion entwined with a flowing, furry body.

Touching into that ungraspable and total experience, a natural care, attuned and skillful, arises. You become a more awake, active, and tender person, a blessing for your family, community, country, and world. You reveal yourself, without promoting yourself, as an awakening being.

Long experience led teachers to explain deities, and how they enter your central channel to merge with your embodiment at its inexhaustibly pure source. If this is familiar to you, practice what you have been taught and have learned well. Ultimately, yours is an entirely unique display – the pure, precious, transient, and complete expression of your body, breath, and mind in this magical moment. Practice as your imagination leads you. Dedicate your experience to future accomplishment of your vow.

Now you are more ready to help form a healthy ecodemocracy. Looking within your society, you exercise all your capacity for care, nourishing its freedoms and opportunities for the good of all who share its bounds. With this capacity, you soften the scar-tissue of conflict that builds hard walls and breeds heartlessness. You face the trauma of past wrongs – the injustices and harms that have befallen your body, heart, and mind in this lifetime. You fearlessly feel into how they intertwine with, depend upon and contribute to the trauma of others. Lovingly, you relieve the places you touch of oppression – the falsehoods and unspoken disregard perpetuating the trauma, disinfecting their wounds with the light of your awakening awareness.

Such healed places are like holy ground, upon which sacred activities take form. Aware of all beings inter-being, awakening ones participate in this work as best they can.