Clear Mind, Steady Heart

Clear Mind, Steady Heart: Week 1 (3/9/25) Home Practices

Each of our meetings will be in line with the Ecosattva sessions. We will cover material from session two in our second class. From session three in our third class, etc.

Formal

Continue with the body touching the earth meditation. Particularly noticing the earth element of the body and the earth element below.

Informal

Visit a place in nature consistently. Every day if you can. Spend a couple of minutes there noticing what is arising at the sense doors. Be as intimate with that place as you can.

When waking, know you are walking on the earth. Feel it. Additionally, see what it would be like to offer kindness to the earth through the soles of your feet as you mindfully walk on the earth.

Think of something connected to the Ecosattva course that you would like to cultivate. Make an intention and visit that intention each morning the moment you are aware that you are awake.

Clear Mind, Steady Heart: Week 2 (3/16/25) Home Practices

Continue to visit your place. Start to be intentionally relational with any living beings in that place.

Pay attention to any habitual ways you collapse around a sense of self. Notice how when this happens, your connection to the larger whole is disrupted.

For formal practice, continue to become intimate with the experience of body resting on the earth. Notice any sense of the body being separate from the earth starting to dissolve.

Either formally or informally, be mindful that you are walking on this earth. Be present for the somatic experience of it. You can also offer kindness to the earth through your feet.

Clear Mind, Steady Heart: Week 3 (3/23/25) Home Practices

Continue to visit your place. Continue to be relational with living beings that inhabit that place. Notice how your body feels when you are there.

Find a note that best describes your ecological distress. Use it whenever you are mindful of feeling this stress.

Notice and/or actively experiment with what helps to calm your ecological stress/nervous system. Make a list so you can refer to it when needed.

Continue with the body focused meditation so as to turn it into a resource for ecological stress. Without striving, actively use the felt sense of the small and big body to support a deepening calm. If you are noticing the body breathing, pay careful attention not to breathe any faster or deeper than is needed.

Session Three

The necessity of naming our ecological stress, anxiety, fear, anger, numbness, etc.

Part of being able to be the agent of change in this time that we want to be has to do with us facing mortality. Our own and all other species. It’s just what is so.

Touching the end of things in order to be fully alive in the present moment.

The Climate Crisis is the first trauma that effects everyone. She compared the skills needed in order to live in a world defined by climate crisis with the skills one would need to live as a black person in a racist world or a woman in a patriarchal world.

Trauma response of avoiding the reality of what is happening. What are the practices that can calm the anxiety, so that we can open to what is happening. STEADY

Community as that which supports “steady”. Also inspire wholesome responses. Also body.

We’re not alone and don’t have to figure it out alone. 

We’re stuck in unhealthy structures, and that’s not our fault. 

Clear Mind, Steady Heart: Week 4 (3/30/25) Home Practices

Michael Yellow Bird talks about his experience being in the grove of trees by the river with his horse and dogs. Intentionally recall a time or times when you’ve had a similar experience. Recall this each day and be aware of your body as you do it.

Continue with Body based formal practice inclining toward Metta in an embodied way.

In formal practice, and during the day, notice if your orientation is toward just yourself, or with something larger. (Decolonizing the mind)

Continue to visit your place. After a few minutes of being there, see if you can let go of a sense of you visiting this place, and simply be part of the place.

Clear Mind, Steady Heart: Week 5 (4/6/25) Home Practices

Notice how we live with uncertainty. From not knowing if the next in breath will arrive, to not knowing what one’s health will be tomorrow, to not knowing how one’s child’s life will unfold. We are constantly living in Bardo.

Practice staying. Staying with the eco anxiety. Using the felt sense of the body as a steadying force. Using whole body sitting and breathing to help stay in touch with the feeling without getting overwhelmed.

Find the place of refuge that is outside of the concept of time in the present moment. Tending to the gap between the end of the out breath and the beginning of the in breath can be helpful.

Come to terms with your own death. Reflect on the inevitability of your death.  Do this as a way to support staying with the truth of the climate crisis.

Clear Mind, Steady Heart: Week 6 (4/13/25) Home Practices

Continue to lean into uncertainty. Notice how it is everywhere. Everything from if you are going to get to the restaurant on time for your reservation, to how that talk you are going to have with a friend about something difficult, to your own or a loved one’s uncertain health. Use mindfulness to keep looking at/experiencing life through this lens.

Notice if/when you fall into either of the two extremes of hope that all will be well, and complete despair and certainty that we are doomed as a civilization. When you realize you are in either place, remember, you don’t know. See if you can connect with that and rest there.

In formal practice, continue to let go into the space between breaths. Particularly between the end of the out breath and the beginning of the in breath. Let go utterly and completely, and die into that dark still space.

Work with Adam’s instructions for finding a subjective, transpersonal ecosattva identity. Particularly with:

Having a relationship with play, creativity and spontaneity. Be willing to make mistakes.

Letting go of guilt and being kind and gentle to ourselves

Taking care of yourself physically, and in a trauma informed way

Clear Mind, Steady Heart: Week 7 (4/27/25) Home Practices

Formal Practice – As practiced earlier in the session. 

Informal Practice – What’s one small way you can make a change in your life so as to lessen your carbon footprint?

Informal Practice – Try doing the journaling that Tim described. What is your intersection of what you are good at, what you love and what the earth needs?

Formal Practice – Metta and Compassion practice for all of humanity. How we all suffer when our actions are led by greed, hatred and delusion.