Hey there,
This is Jen with Laughing Lotus Wellness.
Welcome to our meditation practice.
Hello and welcome into our Finding Gratitude in Tough Situations meditation.
I think many of us are facing a period of time where gratitude is a little bit more challenging to reach in the same way.
And so I decided rather than talking about gratitude in a really trite way,
That it might be important to talk about the idea of holding gratitude together in space with other tough feelings.
So it might be grief or frustration or disappointment or sadness.
It could be any of those things.
I sort of was thinking in terms of grief and gratitude,
So I called it griefitude,
Which is the combination of both.
And so what I really wanted to do was lay out a meditation for us where we first work to recognize the challenges,
The mucky parts,
And then we go in and release that to really step into our gratitude once again.
And so that's really the premise of our practice today.
So for this year,
I think we want to consider how to hold space for both the tough feelings and the gratitude and to allow ourselves moments in any of the tough feelings and then to work once again to sit in a place of gratitude for whatever it is that you can find beauty in.
We're going to start that by reading a little bit of a story.
So I am going to be reading to you just a brief chapter from The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz,
Which I absolutely love so much.
And so if you'll grant me just a few moments,
You'll see how this ties into our practice as we proceed.
So this is an introduction and it's called The Smoky Mirror.
3,
000 years ago,
There was a human just like you and me who lived near a city surrounded by mountains.
The human was studying to become a medicine man to learn the knowledge of his ancestors,
But he didn't completely agree with everything he was learning.
In his heart,
He felt there must be something more.
One day as he slept in a cave,
He dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping.
He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon.
The sky was clear and he could see millions of stars.
Then something happened inside of him that transformed his life forever.
He looked at his hands,
He felt his body and he heard his own voice say,
I am made of light.
I am made of stars.
He looked at the stars again and he realized that it's not the stars that create light,
But rather light that creates the stars.
Everything is made of light,
He said,
And the space in between isn't empty.
And he knew that everything that exists is one living being and that the light is the messenger of life because it is alive and contains all information.
Then he realized that although he was made of stars,
He was not those stars.
I am in between the stars,
He thought.
So he called the stars the tonal and the light between the stars the nagual.
And he knew that what created the harmony and space between the two is life or intent.
Without life,
The tonal and nagual could not exist.
Life is the force of the absolute,
The supreme,
The creator who creates everything.
This is what he discovered.
Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God.
Everything is God.
And he came to the conclusion that human perception is merely light perceiving light.
He also saw that matter is a mirror.
Everything is a mirror that reflects light and creates images of that light.
In the world of illusion,
The dream is just like smoke,
Which doesn't allow us to see what we really are.
The real us is pure love,
Pure light,
He said.
This realization changed his life.
Once he knew what he really was,
He looked around at other humans and the rest of nature and he was amazed at what he saw.
He saw himself in everything,
In every human,
In every animal,
In every tree,
In the water,
In the rain,
In the clouds,
And in the earth.
And he saw that life mixed the tonal and nagual in different ways to create billions of manifestations of life.
In those few moments,
He comprehended everything.
He was very excited and his heart was filled with peace.
He could hardly wait to tell his people what he had discovered.
But there were no words to explain it.
He tried to tell the others,
But they could not understand.
They could see that he had changed,
That something beautiful was radiating from his eyes and his voice.
They noticed that he no longer had judgment about anything or anyone.
He was no longer like anyone else.
He could understand everyone very well,
But no one could understand him.
They believed that he was an incarnation of God.
And he smiled when he heard this and said,
It is true,
I am God,
But you are also God.
We're the same,
You and I.
We are images of light.
We are God.
But still the people didn't understand him.
He had discovered that he was a mirror for the rest of the people,
A mirror in which he could see himself.
Everyone is a mirror,
He said.
He saw himself in everyone,
But nobody saw him as themselves.
And he realized that everyone was dreaming,
But without awareness,
Without knowing what they really are.
They couldn't see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the mirrors.
And that wall of fog was made by the interpretation of images of light,
The dream of humans.
When he knew that he would soon forget all that he had learned,
He wanted to remember all the visions he'd had.
So he decided to call himself the Smoky Mirror so that he would always know that matter is a mirror and the smoke in between is what keeps us from knowing what we are.
He said,
I am the Smoky Mirror because I am looking at myself in all of you.
But we don't recognize each other because of the smoke in between us.
That smoke is the dream and the mirror is you,
The dreamer.
And I love this story because it's so beautifully outlined that we,
In times of distress,
Have smoke between us and that's really what's showing up.
So what we're going to do is,
For a moment,
We are going to pause and maybe close your eyes if that feels comfortable,
Otherwise you can just soften your gaze.
And we're going to have what I call a wine fest,
Not out loud,
Rather in your head.
I'm going to encourage you to just spend two minutes in silence going through the stuff of life,
The smoke,
The things that get in the way of your heart mirror.
Giving them recognition,
Time and space,
Taking this time to just call up in your mind two minutes worth of just filtering through the things that are really tough right now.
Okay,
We'll close here.
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