The Olympic Meditation
Have your ever considered an olympic meditation, where all humans can focus on the same thing at the same time? When I opened my blog to write something about my recent Thailand Trip, I saw a blog entry that I wrote in 2016 during the days after THAT presidential election here in the USA. The blog included my favorite Mary Oliver poem about Wild Geese, and as I write this, I’m feeling a bit like a wild goose after just flying 18,000 miles roundtrip around the world to Chiang Mai, Thailand. The journey included layovers in Seoul, Korea, which just hosted the 2018 Winter Olympics.
On the way to South Korea, we flew over and along the northern most parts of Canada and Alaska with daylight the whole way. I sat glued to the window like I usually do, meditating on the majestic and multipointed chains of snow covered mountains. From the air, Alaska’s landscape rolls on endlessly with no roads, and more jagged, wild, and harsh landscapes than I’ve during any of my many flights over the lower 48. During one of my yoga-in-the-back-of-the-plane sessions, I had an opportunity to talk with a young man in amazing physical shape whom I had mistaken for an olympic athlete. He peered through tiny door window, trying to find the mountain range that he had hiked and climbed the previous summer! How amazing to be talking with a man who had been hiking in that impossible looking landscape below us. It really made me consider the gift we humans have with each Olympic Games to see the potential of human development and skill. It also reminded me of “monkey see, monkey do,” and how we each possess the ability to inspire each other.
During both layovers in Seoul, the airport buzzed with Olympic charisma. I saw people from EVERYWHERE on the planet, and on the last flight home, the evening’s pilot announced that people on the right side of the plane could see the slopes and event venues and the Olympic Flame. I was happily sitting on the left side of the plane, still very content to be in the space time of it, experiencing my own personal olympic meditation on the nexus of time that is Olympic focus and how it supports human development. I imagined the blazing flame in that night sky, a true burning light in the timeline of human existence, an illumination of human spirit and how since we captured fire, humans continue to change our organism, and our planet.
When I first visited Atlanta in June 1996, my home city now of 22 years buzzed like I had felt Seoul vibrate during my two layovers. It wasn’t just the marketing materials and signs, athletes, media, and families. The air resonated with a multitude of all of our human monkey making sounds, patterns and behaviors. My eyes savored our many beautiful skin tones and facial shapes, our body sizes and patterns of movement, and the diversity of the how human lives the path from youth through adulthood to elder status. The air breathed rich, a clustering moment where so many humans crossed paths, and hopefully cross-pollinated kindness, tolerance and inspiration. Each person vibrated their own personal personal, cultural and genetic energy frequencies, and in that airport we interwove our signatures with each others chakras to take with us into our futures, and back to our respective homes.
Imagine the energetic cross-pollination that happens for our planet, when every two years, we have the opportunity to view human function as we advance and improve together, adding to our human organism’s collective potential “To Do.” As one human learns, and then another copies the attempt and perhaps improves and innovates the next thing. A one monkey does, then another one sees, then another tries, and someone else sees, and perhaps by trying, improves. We all have potential access to that level function and proficiency, which raises the bar for what our future may contain. The Olympics are the only shared human event that all people and all countries (usually) can share in positive group focus. And every two years, we gather together, in an Olympic Mediation that might advance who and what we are, and contribute to what we all can be, if and when we all focus on the same thing.
