Author: pmcrose

When I sat down to meditate this morning, I was in a funk.  I was not feeling any meditation energy.  I thought maybe it just wasn’t going to happen today…maybe its one of those days I wouldn’t dive deeper.

However, when I opened to this, a funny thing happened.  My heart started to feel the familiar uplifting energy in deepening meditation.

I had opened to the moment and accepted myself as I was in that moment.  I did not turn myself away because I was in a turbid place.

I accepted and welcomed myself just as I was in that moment sitting on my meditation cushion.

I realized once again I cannot set conditions on the life force as it comes to my doorstep.

Each moment is an opportunity to renew my focus and be welcoming with a compassionate and loving heart.

At times, we may feel in this body a sense of heaviness, a cloudiness and dullness to our mind and inner feeling.  We can attribute this heaviness to a bad mood, stressful events in our lives, etc….  Great spiritual traditions and many religions speak of engrained heaviness that occludes our vision of our higher potential.  In many traditions, this is attributed to a sense of unworthiness that blocks our vision of our real potential.

For some this unworthiness is attributed to not being loved enough as children, to emotional scars or trauma or difficulties in life, to our “sinful” nature, “It’s just the way I am”…–we can come come up with all sorts of reasons for our limitations!  And then we may never move beyond them.

However through meditation or yoga, you catch glimpses of this love and/or bliss that surpasses understanding and simple explanations. Your heart begins its journey of opening.

The grace of these heart opening experiences burns away, like sun to fog, this screen of unworthiness that obscures our vision of who and what we really are.  Gradually our light begins to shine forth into our lives and those around us.

When I set intentions, I meditate on them.

I usually only set intentions for big things in my life–like a search for new home or a new job, or some improvement in my character, or to set a new direction.

Intentions are not expectations of what should happen.  They are directional roadmaps without the details.

What I expect may happen, but never in the way I thought it would.  Or instead, something very different from what I expect happens.  Either way, I am amazed.

Life does not live in the cage of my expectations.

Life being life will surely craft its own creation of my intention.

When I get anxious or worried about all the details and unknowns out of my control, I often repeat my intention to myself like a mantra.  It helps steady me and lessen my angst.

Life over and over again creates some involution of my intention.  And still as often as this has happened, I am almost always amazed like I was the first time.

 

In meditation and yoga, there are times like yesterday in a restorative yoga class that I realize  something I at times may lose sight of–how much  I am being supported all the time, even when I am uncertain and in the flux of change.

If I hold on because I am afraid something bad will happen if I do let go, I hold on to what no longer serves me and don’t change.  If it’s no longer serving me, what is it I am holding onto?

But if I let go and have trust everything will be okay no matter what happens, I make room for something good to happen.  There is now this space of possibility.

I continue to learn over and over to trust that the resources will be available to support me no matter what unknown things lie around the bend.  Yoga and meditation give me a greater awareness, strength, calm, and flexibility to realign and stay more centered and more resilient in the midst of change.

Rather than be recoiled in fear, I am more often in awe of all the twists and turns and surprises, some certainly not easy or at all expected, that life has in store for me.

 

As you practice meditation more and more, the center will absorb you like a towel drawing up water.

Meditate!

I am a crazy ecstatic lover of life!

Life, open my heart and mind…my entire being to you.

Star-crossed lovers were only friends by comparison;

A smashed drunkard sober.

Devoted to you like an adoring spouse,

Protective of you like a thoughtful parent,

Sharing of you like a generous gift-giver,

Celebratory of you like a Mardi Gras partier,

Playful with you like excited children at hide-and-seek,

Affectionate with you like dreamy young lovers,

Trusting of you like a wide-eyed child,

Thankful to you like a gracious guest visiting a dear friend’s home,

Silent and reflective of you like a still pond.

Many things and/or activities can spark creativity or give you a refreshed quiet space and even return you to your center.  I cook to get to that creative centered uplifting space.  My wife paints.  We both garden…..

But yoga and meditation and several other traditional modes of transformative practice (i.e. Tai Chi and Qigong) are different.

They are systems of practice and discipline designed to ferment, support, and sustain personal transformation.  They are in and of themselves agents of change that can, with regular practice, set up a synergy of positive change or transformation that literally and progressively shifts how you are in the world.  They change how you live life and meet its challenges.

It is this uplifting process of transformation that feeds and thereby helps sustain a regular practice.  The fruits of your labor fuel future efforts.

 

Meditation comes to you.  Whether you watch your breath, repeat a mantra, visualize a spiritual teacher…whatever technique you practice, you cannot force meditation to happen.

It comes to you like intuition or creative inspiration.

As you practice your particular technique, as you do this, meditation arises.

You become quieter, the mind and your being becoming more and more absorbed in the center.

Some days this will take very long to happen or it may not seem to–you have more emotions and/or thoughts that arise.  Merely, be mindful of these–acknowledge and accept them and return to your meditation technique.

These things arise as the meditation energy, the kundalini shakti, draws you in.

You are graced by meditation.

With patience and practice, it will find you.

Coming out of numb…

How do we get this way?  I am sure there are multidudinous volumes written on this.

But to emerge more alive with a bigger heart accepting more and more of life with all its nuances and complexities is a marvelous wondrous thing.

There is a dark side to every light side and a light side to every dark….