Hong Kong: image from inyminy.com

For a moment I want you to consider a dark sea under a midnight sky. Nothing beneath the surface can be seen as you sit upon the beach immersed in the silence. As your eyes adjust to the night you begin to see light as the waves crash upon the shore. Noctiluca, small minute plankton, are glowing in the water as the energy of the waves crashes upon the shore activating the bioluminescence. They are a vibrant, electric blue and do not glow without significant energy expended. They need a good crash to light up.

The entire earth may be engulfed in darkness, but to the human eye, the light of such a treasure would be unmistakeable. The beauty cannot be understood without the surrounding darkness or the crashing waves. It all goes hand in hand.

If we will allow ourselves to step into what feels dark to us, whether within or without (and, of course, in the end it is all within), we are taking ourselves to a shoreline. We are stepping into a journey. Taking ourselves into waters that we often do not know what lies beneath the surface, yet we instinctively know there is energy here. There is power in the waves that rise out of that darkness and then crash upon us.

Awakening has the silence of meditation, but like the noctiluca, it also has an element of dynamic movement that illuminates, too. Taking a look at aspects of ourselves that feel wounded or downright stunted feels dark and scary on the front end. We don’t know what is beneath that sea. If we can trust in the process, even a little, we will see that the crashing of our focus on who we are in this moment, with a sense of our deepest nature has the ability to bring forth a lightness of being.

Jelly Fish: image from extrememarine.org.uk

Our wounds do not hold us back from the good roads in life, but rather are the path themselves. Our higher selves are not separate from the journey into darkness, but deeply imbedded in this very same path.

This comes from Perspectives on Seth, episode 16 with Story Waters regarding our wounds: “This kind of process exists. If you wish to go and bring light to somewhere you have buried inside of yourself, you must go on a journey. And that journey can look like going into a depression, an anxiety, can feel like becoming unstable – losing your bearings. The power in recognizing this kind of process is you can better allow its unfolding. For so often, you go off on one of these journeys and then you start worrying about the scenery. You don’t understand where you are going. So you put on the brakes, not trusting the unfolding of your own life. This is what I spoke of in the “Human Dilemma”. Not to be afraid of your own path, your own script. To not be afraid to discover what you have lined up for yourself. So, if after pausing, debating, if somewhere feels like its pulling you, let yourself go. You simply cannot go through life avoiding the dark places. That is because you have things in those places. You put treasures there for yourselves.”

We set ourselves bits of light along the way to awaken, illuminate and direct us. It is not a path intended to be endless pain and suffering, all set in some terminal darkness. As we work to let go of old patterns and the pain of deeper wounds, the energy produced shows us our true brilliance. How luminescent we are.

Maldives: image from feel-planet.com

Do not be frightened by present feelings of being stuck, or circumstances that feel less than desirable about your practice. Don’t let fear of your deeper wounds concern you. Look within yourself and don’t flinch. You have a vision within you that can penetrate the darkest places on this Earth. Trust in the most sacred intention any of us have, no matter how sunken it may seem within us to awaken. It was there before the first breath and will illuminate our way long after this life slips back out to sea.

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Image from wallpaperput.com

Today, I send into your meditation a Lion Heart.

“My dear,
Is it true that your mind is sometimes like a battering Ram
Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out
About the ten thousand things
That do not matter?”

Hafez, The Subject Tonight Is Love

I am imperfect.

The pursuit of perfection is possibly the greatest waste of the greatest gift given — a human life.

I am…

Mad…
Mad as the Mad Hatter himself
Full of discord, at times, and delusions at others
Blissful and brimming with laughter, certainly
Annoyingly irritated by small things in the next breath
Boastful and in dark moments jealous and envious
Tender, gentle, full with never sated curiosity
All of it passing veils I draw across my eyes, moment to moment
I do not see
I do not see me
I do not see me clearly a good deal of the time.

I lie feverishly to myself about all of my flaws. My mind is a dance to escape itself. Inwardly, I speak gibberish with a silver tongue.

Enough!

Image from hdqwalls.com

The fastest path out is to embrace the imperfection. To accept every last note of my tainted heart, as pitch perfect. A song so sweet, in its off notes, as to draw birds from aloft to sit beside me. I must internalize the asymmetry and in so doing find balance. The grand paradox.

Acceptance stops resistance, which quiets the madness of speaking endlessly to myself about what does not matter. I am good, I am bad, I have value, I have no value, I am a gift, I am a lump of coal in someone’s Christmas stocking. Gobbledygook.

I want to speak more deeply about what matters
Speak of things that hold meaning for me, even if they hold no meaning for others
Get out of my own way, that what divinely flows through – manifests
To touch that divinity that is me, I am it, in my own way
To trust my journey, even if it defies a thousand master’s paths
To part my lips and speak, even as the words get jumbled, the imagery fails, my darker parts slip in anyway, no matter my effort
To open myself, knowing full well, the shadow that lingers within me, will come forth and be seen, too
To know, most profoundly, she is but a paper tiger, and thus…
I step with courage into my Lion Heart

Image from finartamerica.com

“Yes, Hafez, that was me running madly in the streets speaking so much of what does not matter. Teach me, great poet. Teach me to see into the imperfection and know it’s perfection. Teach me to accept I am this — a whole, perfect as it is in this eternal now. Teach me to roar as if the Great Pride of All That Is roared forth across my tongue without assail.”

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Taken from: poemsandprose.blog.co.uk

I awoke in the middle of the night to hear a bird singing somewhere in the marsh near my house. I stood at the window, feeling the moist air of a fog that had rolled in, as if the night found a way to reach into my bedroom. I stood listening for a time. What prompted him to sing, alone with no answering calls? What had awoken him from his midnight slumber? What tale did he have to sing of in all this darkness?

The song was sweet, singular and piercingly clear in the silence. A note that seemed to carry great distances and linger well past its owner’s tongue. It was not plaintive in the least, but rather joyful sounding to my ear.

Something about his singing affected me deeply. I remained at the sill, the mystery of many things floating about me on each call. I could not sing back to him in song, but I felt my spirit reach out, as if I were a fellow bird awake and delighted to hear the voice of my brother amongst the cattails.

Taken from: awallpapersgallery.blogspot.com

We sleep and for us the world disappears, as if it too, has fallen off to sleep. Yet, we are immersed in a mystery of life that continues to swirl all around us even as our minds drift in a dreamy state. There are two worlds, one night and one day. Each a vessel for some part of us. One conscious and possibly more concrete, the other subconscious with edges that are more than a little vague.

His call comes, feeling slightly closer now and I wonder again what had awaken him? Was it his birdsong that had awaken me, or had some other mystery drawn me out of my slumber and to the windowsill? Or are he and I tethered together in a midnight mystery we are sharing in, rather than I merely witnessing in these dark hours?

imgarcade.com

Many poets speak to this mystical hour. Rumi compelled us to rise and embrace what such calls before the dawn have to give us. There is mystery afoot in this gentle breeze that moves the fog past my window. Love and light, it seems, in each call of my night bird. Maybe this is what touches us so deeply about McCarthy’s lyrics to Blackbird:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

I awoke in the middle of the night to hear a bird singing somewhere in the marsh near my house. Joyfully, I arose and have not slept again since.

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Image taken from: http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/files/2014/06/The_Eye_of_the_Storm_by_sparklehorse.png

Today, I send into your meditation the Eye of the Hurricane. Sitting quietly, breathing slowly, muscles relaxed, we are the Eye of the Hurricane. Quiet, peaceful, while all around us realities we live in every day spin wildly, madly, and with great velocity. In this space we observe, witness and become a presence to our mind’s creations. We may see the storm raging around us, a flurry of thoughts and emotion, while we rest in the center of the mind’s movement.

The Eye of the Hurricane has no resistance. No pushing or pulling. No stories, no demands. Silence. The perfect description of nothingness and yet is it? It is not as ephemeral as we think. It’s got a kind of solidity to it. We feel it, not just with our hearts, but in our bellies, spine, muscles, breath. We know it as we know the metronome’s point when it stops ticking to and fro and comes to rest at center.

We may see this space as inactive, passive, the pause after raging winds or the calm before the next onslaught, as though the mind is where action lives and the Eye the absence of action. Yet feel the physicality of this space within your body, does it truly feel inert to you or a place of absence?

Might you feel a pulsation? An energy burning steadily as midnight oil to a flame. This is no escape from a storm, but rather the powerful hub from which all our lives extend outwards. A center that remains grounded to this Earth and our life, always present and unaffected by the storms raging around it, yet always there in the middle of things. It is neither passive nor active. It is something that transcends these human patterns. The Eye simply IS. It’s IS’ness is substantive, even as it has no substance at all.

Here in the Eye, we can see our machinations without prejudice or judgment. Our manipulations, self-deceits, control games, our fears, our hiding techniques, our resistances and refusals, our longings and hungers, our circus performing to gain love. In the Eye of the Hurricane we sit in an atmospheric silence that is as full as it is empty and bear witness to our habits in relating. Here we are free to really look into ourselves. To know ourselves without being consumed by shame or guilt for what we see. To detach enough to allow choices to rise and change to manifest within us.

This silent energy is for our growth. Into this space we step and see how to detach from the mayhem that we might see more of what we are doing, how we are feeling, the ways we are reacting to life. The Eye can show us how deaf, dumb and blind we are that we might learn to hear, speak and see greater truth. We want this awareness. It’s how we grow in love, by coming to see where we are forgetting that we are love.

Come to feel how it is a space where fear can be seen, but not heard. Pain can be witnessed but not born. Shame can be understood and laid down. In the Eye of the Hurricane we return to the essence of us, unscathed by lightning and flash flooding. We are rejuvenated and revitalized.

We are in many ways rechargeable batteries. Going out into the world, using up our power cells, to return to meditation and sleep to be recharged and renewed to go out into the world again. We aren’t meant to live all of our life in the Eye of the Hurricane, of course, but the Eye of the Hurricane is meant to live all our lives within us.

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