Dear soul,
So much emphasis is put on what is only a fragile layer of aliveness.
Trusting what is seen is to trust a world that has been staged before your eyes,
A theatre of the imagination playing to the labels you have assigned them.
But to trust what is unseen and only felt inside the subtle body is to enter into the full spectrum of your being.
The eyes are microscopes with an unforgiving scrutiny of the past,
A mutiny from those moments that have passed upon the captain and wayfarer of this life,
Your present moment.
The eyes are telescopes with an acute lens made to rest upon the glory of the earth,
But often set too high up into the heavens and search for what is already held within your hand.
Beautiful moments are multi-dimensional experiences,
Weaving sight with sound,
Lacing body with spirit.
Finding the sacred is to experience this union,
But this can feel deeply conflicting with the separation that we feel in everyday life.
Because of the autonomy we assign to the eyes,
They are the gatekeepers of our joy,
The auditors of our worthiness.
How do we find wholeness in a world of partition and segmentation?
It is through our feelings of separation that we are made ready to receive our union again.
Like magnets being pulled apart by forces outside of itself,
We feel the separation between our desires and our realities.
We feel the cleaver that slices our bodies from our minds.
We know what it feels like to live in exile,
To inhabit liminal spaces and halfway houses for years without truly coming home to our bodies and to our lives.
This pull is known as the body's wisdom,
Ever guiding us back into sacred union.
With all of the pieces of ourselves that have gone missing in the act of simply being alive,
This pull to be reunited with our wholeness has many names.
You may have felt many of them in your daily life,
If not all of them within a lifetime.
Names such as anxiety,
Depression,
Hopelessness,
Fear and doubt.
We long for the experience that each and every raindrop feels when it falls from the sky and into the body of an ocean,
Creating that union again begins with the most ancient of conversations,
The one between the body and the heart.
To hold this conversation we must first learn to listen.
Without fear,
Without judgement,
Without labels and to truly listen we must close our eyes.
Fear and sight have been partners throughout the times,
Because what sight lacks is its own language,
So it relies on the mind to make sense of it all.
The eyes simply see what is,
While the mind applies meaning from its collection box of memorabilia.
Without the mind,
The eyes are clean,
Unblemished by the mucky thumbprints of our own ego and need for identity.
Without sight,
The mind struggles to define and categorise the snap of a raven's wing on a cold winter's night.
The mind unravels itself at the rustle of a rogue dry leaf that finds its way into your hair while you weave the silent forest.
And when the mind cannot define,
It fears.
It uses the body as defence,
Armouring it up against a perceived threat,
Which is why we face our uncertain futures contracted and small,
Ready for attack,
Ready to protect,
Never truly open to the possibility that tomorrow might just unleash a butterfly and not a beast.
And when we are open,
We are whole.
We are ready to meet the world from a strength of the most exquisite and vulnerable kind.
The times when we allow ourselves to simply be in our bodies without preference or definition are opportunities to make friends with our unknowingness,
No longer being anything,
Anyone or anywhere,
But everything,
All and everywhere.
This is a sacred reunion between body,
Mind and spirit.
This is the gap in the heavy clouds that allow us to see the truer weather.
Sight becomes secondary,
A vital part of life experience,
But not the only sense to validate it.
What is left undefined is still magical,
Still whole,
Still curious.
Like the child within us who wants to explore the unknown rather than conquer it.
The more you find yourself openly dwelling in these uncertain and undefined spaces,
Away from sight and mind,
The more you will discover the wholeness that lingers below the line of sight.
We want so much to know everything.
What does our future hold?
Will we ever get to be where we want to be,
Have what we want to have,
Be who we want to be?
But close your eyes,
Let the guards take a break from their exhaustive duty,
And you will discover that your future is right here,
Which has always been part of the wholeness that exists within this moment.
It is the idea that you are separate from your future that causes the pain and not the distance itself.
What happens when you close your eyes is that your heart opens,
Opening life around its edges with a fine sandpaper of your own vulnerability.
In order to reunite yourself with your sacredness,
You must first separate yourself from your senses and create that pull,
That magnetism that calls you back to your wholeness.
Then sit with me in the Nordic forest and let yourself be with the unknown,
Dwelling in a place of wholeness that comes from opening your body to vulnerability.
Sit comfortably,
Take a deep breath and on the exhale close your eyes slowly.
Immediately feel this shift in energy,
Your body responding to the vulnerability of being unprotected.
Where does your body resist exposure?
Is it in the tightness of shoulders,
Contracted belly,
Clenched jaw?
Just notice your body's defenses in a room where there are no immediate threats.
Shake the body out a little now,
Just dusting off the residue of fear and protection.
Stretch out the spine,
Pull back the shoulders,
Soften the heart and take a deep breath.
You are now sitting in a small clearing of light in a dense and beautiful forest.
This place is brimming with life,
From the tiny iridescent Christmas beetle crawling across the dry leaves,
To the violet feathered raven perched high upon the eve of a silver birch tree,
Its tiny marble eyes darting across the forest bed.
Bright rays of light pierce through the open canopy and bathe upon the leafy ground upon where you sit.
Smells like pine and damp earth.
Peaty and rich aromas of the woodland permeate your body,
Calming,
Grounding and holding you in this space.
At first,
Just notice your breath,
Notice its depth without having to change it.
Notice its rhythm without forcing it.
Just notice how it flows in and out of the body.
Every time you meditate you meet yourself where you are in your life.
Do not need to be in perfect condition to sit with yourself,
Because that is why you are here,
To notice,
Feel and connect with who you are today.
Who are you today?
How does this breath meet this body?
How does this body receive the breath?
Is there harmony,
Partnership?
Now take a few deep breaths.
Inhale from the belly into the chest,
The head and then out again.
Deep inhale again,
Expanding the belly,
The chest,
The head and naturally out again.
Listen to the rich forest sounds now.
Observe them with your body.
Feel how they are received by the body.
Feel how your body meets the forest and its plethora of unusual sounds.
When you don't immediately identify a sound,
Try and be with that unknowingness.
Try and leave the label out and just say,
Sound.
Instead of allowing the mind to focus on the sounds,
Splitting them up into names,
Categories,
Preferences,
Allow all the sounds to be unified by the one who is hearing them,
This body and this forest.
One beautiful entity of collaboration,
An orchestra from the heart.
If there is fear,
Remember that you are safe and soften.
If there is discomfort,
Breathe into it and soften.
Allow yourself to practice this for a few minutes now.
Notice how vulnerability shows up in this place of observation.
An unprotected state of being left open to the external world.
Because of your willingness to be open,
Undefined and simply aware,
You are more receptive,
More united,
Whole,
Your body in partnership with this environment,
Trusting this invisible connection in order to see through the heart.
This body,
These sounds,
This outer and inner world,
United by closing the eyes and giving vision to the heart.
The heart is the wiser companion in this life.
It sees unity,
Hope,
Unconditional love,
And it sees beyond the superficial,
Beyond time and into the truth of it all.
The forest fades away and you now sit in stillness and silence.
This is perhaps the most vulnerable places of all.
The body,
Defending itself against itself.
Just be with the silence.
It has no inherent meaning.
It is safe.
Without labels,
Without past experiences,
You are whole,
As you've always been in the silence that exists beneath all of sound.
Take a few deep breaths and place a hand over your heart.
Bow your head gently towards it and take a moment to honor your body and your companion in this life.
When you are ready,
You may open your eyes.
This practice offers us a way to connect deeper to our lives.
It takes us away from the sight and the mind and into the wisdom of the heart.
It requires vulnerability to stand down and de-armor the body of its restless protection.
When fear becomes irrational or objectless,
We tend to float in a constant state of anxiety and separation.
But that is often because we are subconsciously associating so many feelings and past experiences with what is seen.
If we can ground ourselves in other senses,
Then we realize that sight is just a small part of this experience.
Smallness and separation is not the truth of our existence,
Because we have another set of eyes which sees a much greater version of reality.
When our eyes are open,
We feel this body is a habitat.
It's external from us and life is happening to us.
When the eyes are closed,
We feel like we are inhabiting this body as a whole,
And life is happening from us,
The central point to which all of life unfolds from.
Become an apprentice of the heart by closing your eyes.
Let your other senses teach you that all is united through the vulnerable act of learning to be comfortable with the unknown.
And seek not your wholeness,
But all that is keeping you from remembering what you already are.
