I have four brothers and a sister going through heartache, inhabiting the heartspace. As am I. What a gift for us to be synchronized. I’ve spent hours with them over the weekend, at lunch or walking or on the phone as I drove through red-orange leaf tunnels, tapping into where they are and where I am, and several concrete images have emerged.
First, I say thank you, thank you to my guides, and most notably the moon, this beautiful large waning moon that has so deeply met my prayer to become more in touch with my emotions and Scorpio moon sign. As I write, now, I feel a bridge, a circuit, a fast and powerful loop, from my heart into my solar plexus and back into my heart. And no, this is without caffeine, this is just on life: I give thanks for the re-sensitization. I am again, after decades, the HSP I buried.
Detail of a painting attributed to Marco Belli, Morgan Library Collection
Thank you as well to the art and culture that allowed me to dream of the day that I’d actually find my spiritual community, my kula: specifically Sense8 (The Wachowski Sisters) and Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki and Diana Wynne Jones) Thank you, artists, for how you allowed me, through all that daydreaming, to be present now that the dream is real and the real, the reality I knew then, fades away like a dream.
Rumble strips
This metaphor comes from Crystal Dawn Morris. Thank you.
Rumble strips, featured in image above, are those small holes on the side of the road that tell you you’ve left your lane. In Crystal Dawn’s words, emotions can be rumble strips to alert you to something changing inside yourself. And if you give yourself the required focus, you can learn to un-bottle your emotions; you can learn the dance from centered, to emotionally overwhelmed (rumble strip), back to centered. We in the West have been trained that emotions are dangerous and that we shouldn’t feel them most of the time. In fact I have old memories of responding to others’ emotions with complete, collected calm, a very-well practiced calm that was likely disassociative. I would rely on that practiced calm to fix things when they broke, when others were overwhelmed with emotion. But that practiced calm is only one small part of me: I de-identify with it, I let it go for now. What’s present for me now is un-bottling the emotions and moving energy. Rumble rumble rumble.
Know the source of your own water.
My friend Bing’s message yesterday: feeling your emotions? — Great. But stopping there? Ah, you’re missing out! The emotions are clues for your journey to find the source of your own water. Don’t think that just because you know how to tap into your emotions, that you’ve walked the full path. Sure, we’ve walked further than most, just by being present with our emotions and being sensitive to their medicine. Another image Bing uses: we are each a wave on the ocean — as a wave we are separate in some sense, but so connected in ways the city-dwellers have forgotten. And due to where we are in our paths, I am so attracted to people inhabiting their heart-space only, whereas he is so repelled by them. That opposition had us laughing.
That leaves me wondering: Is the source of my water, the same source as the collective? During yoga nidra meditations, I have walked the shores of the collective sea of consciousness. Is the answer simply that: no need for esoteric, but my water emerges from that collective source? I think simply yes, but how does the water emerge in me? I have the shell of the concept, I see its top and its bottom, but the next step in my path is understanding the full picture, how top and bottom connect. If am layers and layers, and the water comes deep from the collective, how does it permeate and flow up through each layer of me?
And maybe this is not literal enough: maybe there is simply value in tracking the source of the water I drink. I don’t want individual ownership of land for myself, since I think it should be collective, so it’s not about that per se, but in drinking the collective nyc water, can I be more present to it?
The mirror in the sky
On the call with E—, we tapped into being mirrors for each other. We mirrored the feeling of emanating love, but love that, for one reason or another, we couldn’t send into a functioning relationship. A love that was building up into a cul de sac, an impasse. And an image came to mind, as I was tapping into feeling the power of the radiance, which is the image of a giant mirror in the sky.
Picture it, a mirror, so large and improbably floating in the blue, or above the clouds. It has ornate Victorian frills, or maybe its a high-tech parabola. Either way its undeniably there, and you can focus your love into it, like a high-beam. The sky mirror reflects that love back into you, in through the heart, out across the veins, the nerves, the ligaments, golden, snapping, love pouring into your body.
Unrequited love can break you or it can build you. Mirror it into yourself and be the spinning dynamo.
The medicine of discord
One side-effect of going all-in, like I have, on inner world exploration, is that I am simultaneously experiencing multiple teachers and lessons. And even the most trusted teachers have dissonant messages. For example, on controlling the pelvic floor, one Qi Gong teacher recommends the following: fully engage the PC muscle, tuck the chin, roll the eyes up and send that excess energy to the crown. They say that will send excess energy to activate you spiritually. Another teacher says that that will just cause headaches, and all that’s needed is a soft tap on the brakes, at 15% engagement of the PC. Ah how frustrating to have disagreeing teachers!
They’re confusing, these discordant lessons, but it couldn’t be any other way. What the dissonance is telling me is the larger lesson: I am my own best teacher. And there’s a reason I was trained as a scientist, so that now I can do the science of self, the ecology of self.
Balancing
At Toronto Tantra Festival, we created an orb, three hundred and thirty three of us. We both fed energy into it, from overactive centers, and tapped it for energy, to power up centers that needed some juice. As we dispersed, it remained our energetic plexus. And it remains, for me, a metaphor for balance: a tool to rely on external circuits to send out excess or allow in needed energy.
The tensions I feel today that I am actively balancing:
Winter – Summer
Being – Doing
Shards – Whole
Wave – Ocean
The sacredness of tensions is the beauty of paradox: the undeniable signpost showing that duality and oneness, itself the ultimate tension, exist in equally real ways with their transcendence. That symbol: the triangle. It’s a reminder of the tension that since all maps are wrong, and since all we perceive is illusion, yet what we are consciously aware of is truth, the only resolution that’s available is the transcendence. Since how else to resolve true=false? The only way out is through.
The golden chain
Why do we do all this spiritual work? To merge with the divine right? That drive is what Ram Dass calls the golden chain, and that’s the definition of Mystic. But sometimes the mystic wants to say things in a way that’s too complicated for no reason: why be esoteric when you can just say things plainly? A true jedi like yoda speaks simply! And is there really any difference between the esoteric “merging with the divine oneness” and “loving where you are”? Loving where you are — that’s what I desire today.
Today I will channel my love into loving this moment, this point in 8-dimensional monad-spirit-qi-emotion-personality-space-time where I am in my path. That’s where I orient the mirror in the sky to, to bounce all my love, the energy of the sun and the stars as well, into one point. Let’s embrace the simplicity of it, no need for esoteric today:
I am.
I am here.
I am love.
Cat’s Paw Nebula, Optical. Source: Nasa’s Observatories. Full info:
Beyond Mountains, More Mountains 