HELPING HEAL THE EARTH

We offer teaching and healing gifts

Helping Heal the Earth is a non-profit website offering teachings, recordings, and reflections on the natural world as a sacred space, and as an opportunity for mystery, reverence, and communion with the divine.

The site includes material on nervous system regulation, calm, and inner stillness through the Healing Gifts section, blog writings, and archival recordings.

Across these materials, the work explores spiritual teaching, meditation, consciousness, and the relationship between inner experience and the natural world, offering a quiet invitation toward greater presence and understanding.

Listening: An Unfocused Attention

November 28, 2018  /  Paul Goodberg

In mid August we moved to the foot of Mt. Burdell here in Northwest Novato and I have been hiking the Dwarf Oak Trail. This trail runs along the side of my back yard. We are separated from it by a deer fence. Weekdays, I have the trail to myself.

Yesterday, i went looking for hummingbirds hoping some of them have survived the intense smoke of the last two weeks. The trail was quiet and open to me, welcoming in a hesitant way. We are just beginning to know each other.

As I walked along, I was enveloped in a strong and deep silence. Within this silence, listening to “what wants to be known” is simply to maintain an unfocused attention. That is the key to listening: an unfocused attention, a very patient yielding to the unknown.

Silence can continue throughout the day as the background of the day.

Attentiveness to the great silence is an offering of respect to the voice of the sacred.

11/28/18

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