Forest Gardening meets Deep and Personal Ecology

I love breathing with connection to Spirit and All Beings. This is how I describe it so that you may try it.

Breath is our immediate connection to full life itself. The way we breathe shows how safe we feel living life. The more fully we breath the more alive and loving we become again.

Pause to monitor your breath for several minutes and note any moments, any ways in which you may not be able to be fully comfortable as you breath.

Breathe as Soul directed by the heart. When thinking imagine you are the intuitive mind directly in touch with Soul and follow this inner knowingness.

Imagine your body as a sphere (or egg). Feel, know, hear, and/or visualise spiritual life energy expanding out from your central beingness with each inbreath. Let the chest and belly follow this movement of energy that reaches out into all creation, below you, above you, besides you. Practice serenity. Let your expanded love of life draw your breath in as it expands out. Imagine you are smiling. It is your love of life, the love of Spirit, encompassing all Its creation.

Then relax and let go again feeling your breath expand out from your beingness in a great flowing wave to everywhere. Feel it connect into all creation. Your outbreath is mixing with all that is. Your lungs, chest, diaphragm, and body are totally relaxing because the outbreath is an elastic recoil that needs no assistance other than your release to travel to all the far corners of the universe.

This breathing can be practiced until it becomes unconscious and second nature.

On the in breath you may notice parts of you resisting the expansive force that fills you when you think of love. These parts may be anywhere and a seemingly long way from your breath. Lovingly accept these as part of your much loved self and practice breathing.

On the outbreath you may feel an old habit you want to push out of the bully, or to depress the chest in a controlled manner. The healthy outflow may also be interupted by parts of the body that are not comfortable with this. Relax the exhall, allow the release. Loving accept these as part of your much loved self and continue to practice.

Your practice is your invitation as Soul to your physical, emotional, and mental bodies to participate fully in life

Breath in and out at the rate the ocassion calls for.

Vary all of the above in whatever way feels right.

As a certified Rebirther have enjoyed teaching the breath for 20 years. I am happy to help anyone to learn how to breathe. Visit gemstonetherapy.info for more info. Breath-coaches and Rebirthers may be found throughout the world.

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Love,

David


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It is magic out there in the woods
Sometimes you think it is the rain
Sometimes you think its the wind
But really it is magic
Out there in the woods

An Elemental Poem
by David Baillie

To Discover the Magic at Harmony Volunteer and study conscious living, forest gardening, earth building, and permaculture.

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© Gerald G. May 2006
Harper Collins
Hardback. 194pp.
ISBN: 13: 9780060845407, 10: 0060845406
Dunedin Public Library: 615.851 MAY

This remarkable account of a personal journey and connection with nature emphasises the difference between our modern day focus and the all encompassing loose focus of being aware of all that goes on around us.

"Fear is not an enemy but a friend. Fear is something good, something alive, alert, and wild in us. Fear may be a response to danger, but fear itself is not dangerous. On the contrary, it is nothing other than life-spirit standing on its toes right here, right now with clear attention, sharp senses, ready body, flared nostrils, bristled hair, poised muscles, pumping heart, clean breathe.

"The immense gratitude I experienced when I was most afraid was for feeling so incredibly alive. In untamed fear there is a profound sense of something that is me going through the experience." p. 46

"Contemplation is a state of awareness that is, among other things, wide-open and completely present to whatever is going on in the immediate moment. I also know that most of us aren't that wide-open or immediately present most of the time. Instead, our brains have leared to pay attention to specific tasks at hand by actively excluding background noises, distracting thoughts, and anything else that we deem irrelevant. The brain has to work hard to do this, which is why we become tired after long periods of concentration... It has always seemed to me that true natural presence, true wild being, involves no tuning out of anything. If must be absolutely contemplative - openly receptive to all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that exist in each immediate moment. I believe it is civilisation, the taming of our nature, that has taught us to focus on a single task and tune out what we consider to be distractions. I acknowledge that we do hae to do this to function well in our society - but it just isn't natural. p. 61.

"neither dullness nor focused attention is very wise unless you're in an absolutely secure situation. Both would be dangerous in the wild ... stalking [of prey] requires a keen, open, unfocused awareness of landscape, scents, wind shifts, and a host of other perceptions all at once; it simply must be contemplative.

"The focused staling of domestic cats seems crude, almost lazy compared to the open contemplative attentivenss of wild cats. It is essence of the difference between domestic and wild, between tameness and freedom, between safety and danger. For me, it is the difference between going through the motions of life and really living. " p. 63.

"Whereas human teachers tell children to pay attention to one thing at a time, I am convinced mother mountain lions, wolves, and other predators teach their young the opposite: not to become to absorbed in any one thing, to keep their senses open". p. 64

"What we are missing is fullness of life. To put it simply, in concentrating on one thing at a time, we miss everything else." p. 64.

"Through it all, we fail to appreciate our own precious being - the soft flow of breath, the beating of heart, the subtle beauty and wisdom of body, the sheer pristine wonder of being aware." p. 65.

"Like domesticated animals, we are completely unprepared for the wild - the wild outdoors, the wild in our cities, the wild in our own psyches. In any of these places , we panic when we're lost and afraid. We frantically concentrate our attention here and there, folllowing non-existant tracks, unaware of a thousand clues from sky and light and smell and inner Wisdom that could tell us where to go and what to do. Feeling so divorced from the nature withing and around us, we make wildness and adversary that we must tame, rather than join, master rather than learn from. Whenever we find it, we feel we must force Nature into the tunnel of our own concentrated vision. That's what brings us to manage natural resources, engineer social change, strategize our child-reatring and human relationships, control our emotions, and cope with our stresses." p. 65.

"My hunch is that life needs 95 per cent openess and 5 per cent concentration, and we have the proportions reversed. I wish we could encourage our children's natural contemplative awareness as well as their capacity to concentrate. And I wish that we adults who have been trained away from contemplative presence could have a teacher to show us where the present moment is." p. 66.

"' Be here now, Be here now, Be here now'. All it takes is ears to hear. The listening is everything.". p. 66.

"In pure immediacy it is finally impossible to distinguish who is touching whom, who is teaching whom, what is being taught." p. 67.

"Nature, I think, knows nothing of concepts of time, or of the present. Nature - our own and that of the world around us - lives in Presence instead of 'in the present'. Rather than moving through time, it simply exists in cycles and successsions: sound and silence, light and darkness, birth and death, activity and stillness, courting and nesting, eathing and sleeping. Everything in rhythms. Everything in seasons." p. 71.

"It's just a gift to have a moment's experience of the perfection that is there all the time." p. 125.

"For the most part, my mother taught me that I should defend myself against Nature." p. 155.

"And in truth, Wilderness is everywhere." p. 185.

"Regardless of how, where, or when you experience it, Wilderness changes you. You come out of it deeper, wilder (more natural)" p. 185.

Gerald then closes with the concept that we attack our diseases, regard them as our enemies. We do not embrace them as part of ourselves, out of order perhaps, but part of ourselves as he accepts the cancer that takes him to the end of his current cycle just after putting his pres-ence into this book.

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Love,

David

Our gemstonetherapy.info site and its Gemstone Comparator helps people decide which therapeutic Gemisphere® gemstones can most help them with their goals in life. Gemisphere's affiliate program is part of how I imagine Harmony will expand her gemstone and diamond toolkit.

Click here for the opportunity to volunteer and study forest gardening, earth building, and permaculture at Harmony.

For more special experiences and insights on living with respect for All Beings Subscribe here for Harmony's free quarterly e-zine sharing enchanting personal experiences not published elsewhere.

Please forward, distribute, and publish every article in this blog anywhere you wish, as long as the ENTIRE article, footnotes, and any banners, are left as is, and all links remain active. Exception: BlogTopList and Photos may be left out, though we prefer they stay. If you want to publish the article in edited form please contact us at Harmony Forest.

Have we forgot that Spirit the matter does not make
Soul does Spirit embrace to again the matter make

All is Soul of God embued
Consciousness to Soul does grant
The wisdom to embrace

That every substance has its Master
Teaching It of Its learning

Every species has its Deva
By which It fulfil Its purpose

Every being its Guardian
To speak for it at Solar Council

Every element its elemental
That dreams it into form


Love to All Beings
- David Baillie


Click here to volunteer and study forest gardening, earth building, and permaculture at Harmony in conscious co-operation as Soul with All Beings.

For more special experiences and insights on living with respect for All Beings Subscribe here for Harmony's free quarterly e-zine sharing enchanting personal experiences not published elsewhere.

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Please forward, distribute, and publish every article in this blog anywhere you wish, as long as the ENTIRE article, footnotes, and any banners, are left as is, and all links remain active. Exception: BlogTopList and Photos may be left out, though we prefer they stay. If you want to publish the article in edited form please contact us at Harmony Forest.

My seed shape needs to grow
Please tickle water up my roots
And teach me how to breathe
So I may stand as stem and trunk
And reach my friend the sky

Give me stems to spread like wings
And unfold my leaves upon the air
From tender bud do give me
the flowers that are your home

Then I will call upon the bees
And create me some seed
My children then will call you
Because they too need to know
How their shape will grow


Written for the fairies
Love, David Baillie


To volunteer and play with fairies while learning forest gardening, earth building, and permaculture you can volunteer at Harmony.

For more special experiences and insights on living with respect for fairies, devas, and all Beings Subscribe here for Harmony's free quarterly e-zine sharing enchanting personal experiences not published elsewhere.

Thanks for telling you like this article by clicking:

Love,

David


Forward, distribute, and publish every article in this blog anywhere you wish, as long as the ENTIRE article, footnotes, and any banners, are left as is, and all links remain active. Exception: BlogTopList and Photos may be left out, though we prefer they stay. If you want to publish with changes please ask us at Harmony Forest.

I need have
Heart of Earth
Fire of Spirit
Wind of Change
Wave of Emotion
Air of Inspiration
Oh mighty elements
Thankyou
For your devotion
To our mother earth

- David Baillie

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To study forest gardening, earth building, and permaculture at Harmony with the elementals volunteer at Harmony.

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Please forward, distribute, and publish every article in this blog anywhere you wish, as long as the ENTIRE article, footnotes, and any banners, are left as is, and all links remain active. Exception: BlogTopList and Photos may be left out, though we prefer they stay.

I have whittled away a day holding onto my fears, thinking about it, deciding I will stay scared of the consequences of this big change in life, digging a hole that is deeper and deeper for me to climb out of.

The change is up there in the real world not in my personal, deep, dark, hole.

I wish someone else would make the big decisions for me so that I would have their instant approval and be accepted.

I have been here before, wondering what to do. Waiting for the decision to come from outside of myself.

Yet only I can love myself so fully that I give myself the freedom to do whatever I want. God is not going to tell me what to do. My parents have long moved onto other joys in life rather than running mine. It is up to me.

My partner has not always approved of my rash actions, my great intentions. Focus on many activities does take time away from relationship but it also creates the self, which we bring to that relationship. The activities of soul create the spirit, the love, the joy, the excitement, and the challenges, which a relationship has to have to share.

Letting go I must see if my life friends stay or go.

So what am I going to do with my life?

Ok please Mahanta give me signs. My mobile phone works inside my country cabin for the first time so communication is possible from here. The wood fire has embers and a rises from its ashes with new flame. The computer has rarely started first time but now it invites the staccato of my typing without hesitation for the journey. My Word program has been reloaded but still does not give me a menu of options and in so doing steers my writing to my database were I can search and display whatever I write.

Yes I am to write. I crave to write. It activates my senses. It expresses my loves to the world. Now that I am writing it does not scare me totally I have taken the keen edge from the knife of fear and blunted it on my passion. In time I will write so much that knife will rarely see the light of day from its dark sheath and I will sharpen instead the knife of love, the cuts through the obstacles in its path, to share and thus find itself with others.

I must honour my individuality, my passions for arts long forgotten. It is these that will be of interest, unique, adventurous, and heart full.

I am going to have to reinvent this every year or two. Life changes so fast now.

The wood fire indeed burns fiercely now.


For more special experiences and insights on living with respect for All Beings Subscribe here for Harmony's free quarterly e-zine sharing enchanting personal experiences not published elsewhere.

Thanks for telling you like this article by clicking:

Love,

David

Please forward, distribute, and publish every article in this blog anywhere you wish, as long as the ENTIRE article, footnotes, and any banners, are left as is, and all links remain active. Exception: BlogTopList and Photos may be left out, though we prefer they stay.

The developer clears the woods for a house.
The conservationist has a house in the woods.

The ecologist's home is being in the woods
The deep ecologist is at home in the woods

The transformational ecologist's home is the world

She walks the razor's edge with all beings
It is in the company of these friends that she makes it home


Thanks for telling you like this article by clicking:

Love,

David

For your transformational experiences gift yourself a session and come volunteer at Harmony to forest garden, build with earth, and practice permaculture.

For more special experiences and insights on living with respect for All Beings Subscribe here for Harmony's free quarterly e-zine sharing enchanting personal experiences not published elsewhere.

Forward, distribute, and publish every article in this blog anywhere you wish, as long as the ENTIRE article, footnotes, and any banners, are left as is, and all links remain active. Exceptions: BlogTopList and Photos may be left out, though we prefer they stay. If you want to publish the article in edited form please contact us at Harmony Forest.