DAY SIX: BIODIVERSITY

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Reflection offerings and practices for the day - Shelley Ostroff

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1. Intentional invitation:  There are many ways to connect with Biodiversity.  Sense into the way in which you would like to deepen your relationship with Biodiversity today. How can you best create the conditions for this to manifest? 

2. Breathing Biodiversity:  Sense into your breath and how the breath activates the diverse biological intelligences in your own body. Notice the different sensations as it moves through the ecosystem of your own body with all its diverse functions working together in community.

3. Sensing Biodiversity: Sense into the biodiversity within your own body – the rich aliveness of all the different parts of your being – their different colors, sizes, shapes, textures, densities, functions and intelligences. Sense into the uniqueness and differentiation of these different parts as well as their fundamental interconnectedness. Now extend your imagination, to sense into the infinite communities of animal and plant species in your close environment. The birds, the trees, the insects, the micro-organisms, the plants, and trees, that reside in your home area, in your local environment. Sense farther and farther into the larger environment, imagine bringing all the living creatures in the waters, and soil and skies across different climate zones and bioregions into your immediate sense of community of species. What do you notice as you encounter this extraordinary richness? What do you feel? What are these diverse species revealing to you?

4. Biodiversity, the elements and the Climate: Sense into the connection of all these diverse biological beings with Earth, Water, Fire and Air. How do they express and engage with these different elements? How do impact and how are they impacted by climate?  

5. Reflecting Biodiversity: Sense into the richness of your own physical, emotional, mental and spiritual being? In what ways do you acknowledge and cultivate the diverse aspects of your own being?  Sense into the way in which your relationship with the diversity within you is reflected in the diversity within your close community. Sense into the way in which your relationship with diversity within yourself is reflected in the way in which you relate to the diverse species in the world. How does your everyday behavior impact the biodiversity within you and around you?How do those diverse humans and non-humans in your environment experience your relationship with them?

6. Nourishing Biodiversity: Sense into how biodiversity manifests? Sense into all the conditions that needed for the biodiversity to exist and flourish? How do you nourish the biodiversity within you? How do you nourish the diverse intelligences within you? How do you attend to the diverse parts of your own body, mind, emotions and spirit? What do these diverse parts of you need? How is your relationship to the biodiversity within you nourished by the food that you eat? How do you nourish the diversity of your body through the rainbow colored fruits and plants of nature's kitchen, informed by pure sunlight, water, soil and air working together with the recipes of Mother Earth's precise nourishment that has evolved with Life over millenia? How do you nourish the diversity in you in hte way which you breathe, learn, move, think, feel and express yourself? In what ways do you nourish the biodiversity of the environment that nourishes you?

7. Embodying Biodiversity: Sense into the essence of biodiversity - the spark of biodiversity that manifests in its infinite spectrum of Life.  What does it feel like to dance the dance of biodiversity, to explore and discover biodiversity in your dance? Imagine becoming different forms of Life? What does it feel like to become a sea creature, a bird, a butterfly, a tortoise, tree, a leaf, a coral reef? Allow these forms of Life to inspire you as you shapeshift into becoming them. What do they feel like and what insights emerge?

8. Bidoiversity and consciousness: Feel what it feels like to perceive the world through the eyes, and consciousness of different species? How does this shift your picture of the world?

9. Messages from Biodiversity: Imagine yourself in the presence of the essence of biodiversity and that biodiversity has a message/wisdom offering for you personally. What is biodiversity showing you? What can you learn from biodiversity by becoming more like it? What is the message the biodiversity wants you to offer to humanity?

10. Messages for Climate: Sensing deeper and deeper into your ever-present relationship with Biodiversity, what is the message that you would like to offer this  essence of Life?  What would you like to tell Biodiversity if it could speak your language?

11. Art from the Heart of Biodiversity:  Sense into the way in which this dialogue with Biodiversity wants to express itself through the Heartist in you in any art form you wish. Offer your own Heartful offering to the Heart of Biodiversity.