 And welcome to Spark of Humanity, a production of Spark of Humanity Network. What is Spark of Humanity? Well, in everyone, in each one of us, there's a spark of humanity. Sometimes we're afraid that something might damage our spark. We're afraid it might be put out. It can't be. Even though at times we are not feeling it. Sometimes our sparks are defended. Sometimes they are distorted. Sometimes they're baffled. And sometimes I think they're all three. I would say you're correct. Sometimes so much we're not aware that we even have one. Regardless, in everyone we meet and everyone we think of, there is a spark of humanity in us too. Regardless how baffled or distorted or defended. All sparks are made of the same stuff. Sparks have a natural affinity for each other. When you, through your spark, affirm and connect with the spark in another, regardless how defended or distorted or baffled they are, their spark is strengthened. That changes things. It seems that the strength and spark acts to erode the defenses, release the distortions, clarify the bafflement. From the inside. It's very good. Well thanks everybody. Oh, how might you claim your spark? How might you claim your spark? How might you claim your spark? So that's from the little booklet of spark of humanity which is available. And if you go to the sparkofhumanity.net, you can see how you can make your own little spark of humanity booklet to share and to use. So today we're talking about the spark of humanity and how to nourish, how to keep the spark strong. How to keep your spark in good shape. But it's not really a matter of keeping your spark in good faith. I had an experience with a good friend of mine and she was complaining of not being able to breathe when I was driving her and I am a nurse and I know about people having difficulty breathing and I was just amazed that my ability to have compassion and empathy for her just when she mentioned she wanted to go to the hospital, my instant reaction was oh my God, no. I don't want to spend hours in the ER. I just automatically thought that she was making it up or needing attention and then afterwards I had to apologize because I realized what a jerk I'd been but in the whole process of it I realized what happened to my spark. Normally I would have understood and been carrying and whisked her to the hospital because she was wheezing so I'm like okay what is going on? How come my spark is diminished and baffled and how can I get my spark nourished again so that this hopefully doesn't happen to me because it was just it was really an awful experience not just for me but for my friend because afterwards when I apologized and I said you know I bet you don't want me to drive you anywhere else ever again and she's like well not really because you know I really was having a rough time breathing and it was a good wake-up call for me and a good experience to take a look at my spark and I'm glad that I'm here and able to share that and hopefully glean some insight more insight into how to nourish my spark so that it's a healthy, caring, loving, giving piece of me. That's a wonderful example and thank you very much for sharing it. That's good. I think that to give it largely, we just heard we're talking about how sparks can be baffled or distorted or defended so it's something like that because I'm not innocent of similar responses to people. I like to look at okay, so what's going on with me? Where was I baffled? What were the distortions that were going on with me? How was I defended? How did that defend it? A quick scan is it worth through those possibilities and then look at my root system. This we haven't talked about. There are some very wise intelligent caring people who say sparks don't have roots and of course in conventional Newtonian world they don't have roots but the way I think about it and the way we're talking about it in a network and on the Spark of Humanity website is that our sparks are fed through their roots and that's how they get to be strong and connect with and affirm the sparks in others is because our sparks are drawing in the wisdom, clarity, wisdom, clarity, strength and community that they need. There are meditations on the Spark of Humanity Network that can talk about this process and we might do one in a couple of minutes but the idea is that our sparks need to be strong in order to be agents of transformation which is high saluting language but the idea is that through our Spark of Humanity which we each have we can transform the people around us and the people we think about and the people we're worried about and the people we're scared of and the situation in which we live through using our Spark of Humanity by connecting in and affirming the other sparks but in order to do that our sparks need to be fed because it's tiring business what more are you looking confused about? No, I'm just a ponderous I think. I'm pondering because I'm thinking of in Buddhism that all life is suffering and then it's being aware of suffering and then transformation of suffering and it sounds almost similar to that and then I was also thinking of a Spark, you think of Spark as just being boom, like that of Spark and then I thought of what our concept of time is and is for whatever it was that conveyed to you in each and every one of us there's a spark of humanity their concept of your humanity and your life is different than our understanding of it and we with our thoughts create when you were talking about we can make a change in other people and the way that we make a change in other people is that we make a change in ourselves and that's really what we're controlling and we apply that and we apply that and in that, in our thoughts, so we are, so we create our world and our perception of our world so ways of nourishing that thought, how do you do that? How do you nourish that? How do you maintain the roots? Well, let's talk about the Spark because I need to keep this simple because it gets a little... Absolutely. So I try to keep it within the language. Thank you. The way we talk about it in the roots work is that the spark has needs. The spark knows what it needs. This never passes through necessarily our conscious minds. Probably better if it doesn't, particularly if it's my conscious mind because my conscious mind is distorting. That's one of the places where the distortion of my spark manifests is in my thinking and I think of the needs of the spark as being roots reaching out to get what they need and they will get out, they will get what they need, my roots. If I give them the freedom and open up the opportunity, it may be new friendships, it may be different books, it may be a workshop, it may be more prayer, it may be meditation. Whatever my spark needs, there's something in me that knows what that is and has a tropism towards what will have the spark be strong and healthy. That's just the way it is. And so I'm developing the sensitivity, the trust to let my roots access what they need and not be judging. And on the other hand, not letting every whim that comes into my mind or every craving to get back to Buddhism, every craving run my show. It's to develop the sensitivity so I'm aware of what's coming from my spark and what's coming from my self-will and my desire for self-indulgence and the fact that I really like chocolate or whatever because I don't want my roots distracted into places of toxicity and I don't want them getting cut off or burnt or something. So I want them going healthy places, which is their instinct because they are there to feed the spark so the spark can do the work of reaching out to other sparks. So to me, it seems like the roots would be another doors of perception. The roots to me seem to be like a conduit or a vehicle that delivers this knowledge or strength or love or kindness or connectedness. Delivers that into me so that can come from any number of ways. So there is no definitive. There are an infinite number of... Like Martha said, through books or workshops or friendships, that really made sense to me. Music or air or being with nature, which both we all three like to do. We get fed in the ways we get fed. So the symbolism of roots, for the people that are saying, well, sparks don't have roots, it's symbolic. It's symbolic of roots go down or sometimes they go up and it's like they wind around here and then they wind around here. I am not totally off balance because I have some tethering and I'm not all alone because I have some tethering from all that is around me. And then also I get this whatever guidance it is from whatever else is there. Right. And you're stabilizing the top so everything around you, the circumstances around you, the society, the community in which you live has greater stability because your roots are digging in and holding onto other people's roots and you're stabilizing your sound. When there's the fire season, you'll have the trees burning down and then invariably what follows the fire season is the rain season and the mud season, the mud slides, California I'm thinking of. And in any place where the top and not so much the roots aren't going away but sometimes the roots do go away because things die off and then they're weaker and they sort of shrivel up and then they can be tossed aside. Right, but with our spark of humanity you see the roots never die. Right. So it's a useful language analogy to play around with but I find it helpful to keep coming back to what I'm talking about rather than getting too far off in the metaphors and the analogies. That might be a good time to do the... Want to do a little meditation? Yes, the nourishment. Okay, we're going to do a meditation. I've been doing these for a while, but okay, so let's get relaxed. Eyes open or closed, however we want. Ah, breathing. Feet maybe flat on the floor. All our feet are flat on the floor. And first of all, recognizing that we each have a spark of humanity and connecting with that spark, resonating with it, allowing ourselves simply wherever it may be in our system, maybe in our body, maybe outside of our body, but somewhere is our spark of humanity and we connect with that and rest with that and get comfortable with it, sort of curl up with it and become what our awareness meld into it or it meld into our awareness. And then as we become more aligned and at one with our spark of humanity, we become aware that it has hungers, it has needs. It can always use more strength. It always seeks greater wisdom and clarity and it can always want benefit from deeper and truer community. So we might feel something like roots growing out from our spark or from our feet or our elbows or our ears, something like roots reaching out to what our sparks are needing at the moment. This does not need to pass through our conscious mind. It's probably better just not to be judging, not to putting words on it, just trusting that these things that we're thinking of or visualizing or feeling as roots will go where our spark needs them to go in order to draw in and connect with what our spark is needing. We may feel some of our roots here in this room reaching out and connecting with each other's roots and we may feel our roots whoever is watching, whoever is listening, your roots may be connecting with our roots and then people beyond, people that we may be worried about, people who may have passed through that illusory veil that we call death, maybe our roots need to go there, maybe they don't, maybe they need not to go there, other dimensions, other galaxies, letting our roots go where they need to go for the benefit of our sparks. This is gathering always, this is not any random exploration. This is to be gathering in the strength and the nutrition, the wisdom, the clarity and the community that our sparks need in order to do their work. By feeling ourselves connected in with a layer of roots and circling this planet and touching people who need that sense of connection for their sparks to know that we are all connected and that somehow as we are drawing nourishment through our roots somehow in a mysterious way we are nourishing the roots of those we are touching. We are both giving and receiving because we are connected. We are in community. We are giving and receiving really have no meaning because it's all both, it's all connection, it's all community. So we bring our awareness back to our sparks, our individual personal spark. We see how it's feeling, does it feel any different than it did before we started growing our roots and we rest with that difference or the sameness and then when we are ready we let our eyes open and our fingers wiggle and our toes jiggle and whatever we need to do to come back to where we are in our physical reality and let ourselves begin to access words. That was good Martha. Yeah, I really, I love that. I found first my, you know, the tentacles or kind of... Root hairs. Root hairs, yes. Kind of reached in and embraced my heart a little bit and I could actually kind of visualize my heart and I loved the, when we reached out to past lives you know, to people that have passed and I thought that was beautiful to include everything. I don't think I've ever had a session like that or a meditation where it was so encompassing of all different kinds of things. That was really, I love that. We never know what our sparks need so we have to trust our roots and get it. Yeah, it was very good and I could feel, I felt the roots going into the ground but the coolest thing was going around into my heart. I love that. Thank you. That was beautiful. I think for me, I mean that was just so lovely, my spark wants to open the iris and take more in and listen, just listen and observe and have that, there's no silence, there is no silence. It's interesting, it's quite interesting which sounds, I don't want to use the word, it's hard to define the indefinable, it's hard to describe the infinite. So I'm enamored of words and there are no words for this. It just reminded me of when I saw this beautiful baby and she was just tiny and perfect little hands and feet and it was just the feeling that I had was just pure love, no definition, just love. And it was, my heart melted when I was with that child and I think the more that I can be with that child and myself of that pure love and others, the more open I am to being somehow light, somehow light and spark. Did the roots feed that? I think so. I think in that the roots are a vehicle. A channel? A channel? A blood vessel? Yes. Yeah, yeah. A capillary? A capillary. Yeah, yeah. I think really just being open to that engagement and not defending myself or defining myself but just being myself. And that is something I often think of vegetables in a garden and think of am I a good broccoli? I'm just broccoli. I don't have to defend my broccoliness or I'm just a broccoli. Some people don't like broccoli. Broccoli has no thoughts on the fact that some people don't like broccoli. It's still going to be broccoli. And that's okay. I mean, I'm me. And I think being aware makes you more cognizant of when you're not being true to yourself, true to that light. And when you're not being true to that light, you notice it in the form of distortion, in the form of bafflement, in the form of that defensive things. Like you're trying to get the signal to come on the radio or something or getting the focus in there and getting it. So it's whole. And the more that I can head towards whole instead of holes within me. And what I lack. But focus on what I have and what I can do and not what I don't have and what I can't do. Because what you have is the spark of humanity. And when that's healthy, that can connect with the spark of anybody. Yeah. And do them good. And that's a beautiful thing? Feeding them and doing them good. So the feeding the spark. So it can be strong, so it's willing to reach through. So you can get, I mean I find I need to get out from under my bafflement and distortion and defenses me, myself, to my spark to the willing because my spark's nature is to connect. Because sparks have a natural affinity for each other. It can be a very simple thing. Like you're walking along and you see somebody recognize them as hello. Right. Hello. Like you see a flower and you say, oh, a flower. There's Martha. There's Anne. Hi. And somehow being recognized makes you just feel like I am. Connecting and affirming. I am. And to do that, right, we need to, we can't just, we can't just let the joy of that carry us away. We need to do the maintenance. Yeah. We need to keep our roots fed and letting them be fed and paying attention so that they're not wandering into places where they can get damaged or blighted or poisoned. Because there are places like that. Because there are, thanks for being here. Right. So we want to keep our spark healthy. Yeah. Right. Thank you.