I was reflecting yesterday to a friend that I am made up of two minds. One lives in my human body, aware of my past and present and listens to my ego, remembers painful lessons and abides by rules. I function in the world within my boundaries and am easily manipulated by the media which is why I avoid it. I literally feel bound by human rules.
My other mind lives in my heart where all my memories of the miracles and silver linings reside. This is where my travel port is accessed and I can lift off into the expansiveness of beyond, explore other dimensions, visit with past loved ones, visit with all beings that represent love and light and access wisdom. My heart is where my compassion and gratitude live. In fact, compassion and gratitude are the fuel that keeps this part of me alive, lush with expectancy knowing anything is possible.
We are practicing compassion and gratitude by showing up every morning. We are living metaphors experiencing our consciousness together. We share our personal experiences as others relate. Heart-centered consciousness is manifesting in our lives as we tell our stories and reflect our experiences.
I occasionally am able to see a glimpse of why we are doing what we are doing and I hope I can articulate the deep meaning.
Practicing silence has afforded us the ability to witness our two minds. With this awareness, we are able to choose where we put our focus. Human life is painfully challenging, and another doorway has emerged to help us survive our challenges. We are exploring our doorways. It’s easy to get caught up in the drama of our challenges because they are very real dramas. Silence is the oil that eases open other doorways to offer us respite, hope, possibility and expectancy. The more we practice the better we get.
I welcome my doorways. It’s wonderful to watch you discover your doorways. Together we grow in awareness of what is beyond to offer us comfort, understanding and clarity to keep on going separately together.
Poem
by Bill English
We are alone,
Yet we are together
Our countries are closing borders
Yet we are one in humanity
We are afraid
Yet we will
Prevail
We feel helpless
Yet if we listen closely
To the silence
We can hear the heartbeat of the world
Our empathy gym must close for now
Yet we will return
And let our time together practicing compassion
Inspire us to remember
That when we give love and understanding
We will thrive.
Participants’ Reflections:
These morning meditations your talks have been a journey. Sometimes I resonate with only pieces. Something resonated the other day I wanted to share. You talked about the inner child, and for years I thought the inner child was this carefree, gay, laughing person, just so light and lovely and bubbly. I always felt why can’t I feel that; what’s wrong with me. When I was meditating after that talk, I saw very clearly a young child whom I think was me and this older version just sitting there. The older version of me, a woman, was comforting the child. It occurred to me that’s me comforting me as a child. It’s not this Hollywood version of an inner child. I wanted to share.
Now you have an opportunity, with that image, to go there again and give her more comfort.
I, too, am getting to know my inner child first time ever with joining this group. Today was huge for me. I’ve had a wrestling match for a number of years with my participation in church. I grew up in an ecumenical church when we used silence every day. Eventually, we moved away and this other church felt like a middle ground that recognized there are gray areas and it was okay living with questions. I was happy there for a long, long time, but more recent times there were portions of my experience, including my personality of overdoing things. So, I found myself wrestling. I had a session with a psychic a little over a year ago and brought my wrestling dilemma up to her. She said since the age of three when I looked at the night sky, I have known there is more. I don’t fit into a particular frame. That resonated so clearly and I have found my way. Now I’m still part of that family of human beings. I’m so mindful learning how to be a better human and learning the many languages of spirit. Thank you.
The phrase that stuck with me going into meditation was alone together. In the past that has felt like isolation. Today was different. Today it felt like I’m the gatekeeper and it’s a good thing to be alone, and it’s a good thing to find the edges of my boundaries and be together. In meditation, I was having these conversations and I thought I’m supposed to go back to breathing. No, this is contemplative too. I allowed myself to practice having those conversations with those close to me on what I needed because this journey in the last year has taken me from having a walnut shell around me to feeling very wide open. If I don’t go alone together and set the boundaries and let people know I feel everything, I have a choice each day—do I stay open or do I close up? How do I communicate that to the other people around me to ask what I need? To say what I want is an intimate dance with you. Even though someone doesn’t say the things that bother them, I feel the energy. We have a choice. It was very powerful for me.
The phrase that stuck out for me that I’m trying to understand is “empathy gym.” It’s mind boggling. I have been studying empathy for a few years now. This thing about the inner child, I have so deeply connected with my real inner child, not just an abstract idea of her. I’ve connected deeply through the use of a teddy bear. The teddy bear became the little me and I was able to focus on her. Sometimes, I would leave her with another teddy bear as a babysitter and I would go off to work. She became part of my life. My inner child became so real to me that one day, I experienced her getting off my lap and wandering around like a curious little kid who felt safe enough to wander. She let go of me, walked around, and then came scurrying back to make sure I was there and then she wandered off again. I felt this. I know it was from the inner child work that I had done to connect with her, to have her part of my life. When she feels loved, I feel loved. Then I could actually have normal relationships with people that involves empathy without codependency. It was an incredible sensation. Thank you for the reminder.
The meditation was a long journey for me. It was a timeless meditation even though it was 15 minutes. I was really traveling around. The doorway, the archway was the focus into time travel. There were times when the door wasn’t open, I wasn’t ready, or I couldn’t go through, or it had already been closed. It was about timing and moving through it.
It’s amazing when we have these experiences, we physically feel them. They are real. That’s the whole idea of healing ourselves is we see ourselves with our little child and give our inner child tender comfort, care and respect. We viscerally experience it at some level. I don’t understand how, but we do.
Much of what you said resonated a lot with me. The whole work with the inner child changed for me after I heard it talked about here. I’ve done work with my inner child. I’m just thinking as I say this, “I’ve done work.” It isn’t work. It’s really about a tenderness that I feel inside of me that I communicate to myself, and that’s the experience I had today, just listening and moving with my body, holding myself in a caring way. That sort of morphed into breathing in and out what’s important to me. Breathing in peace and love and breathing out pain and stress and loss. It was a much more relaxed, comfortable experience.
I use an avatar like a stuffed animal and make it personal to me, then the dialog can begin with my tender love and care.
I think also it’s having the awareness and recognition that it is me, whatever I want to call her, she is me and she lives within me and responds to me how I am in this world. It seems very simple.
I was struck by the image of silence is the oil on the door hinge. I was thinking, I wonder which way the door opens and does it make a difference? Then I thought, I wonder if I could open the door just by breathing on it after the oil has been applied. I was in that place thinking about the door, how it works. Isn’t it wonderful that our silence can open it for us?
It reminds me of yesterday’s visualization of the window in the solar plexus. We can open the window and let emotions we don’t want to hold inside, move through the open window. My window has French doors that open inward. The curtains blow inward as the winds move through to the other side.
Continuing with what was said, I too was struck by silence is the oil, and before you said that in the reading, you had talked about the two minds, the mind of the ego and the mind of the heart. I’m thinking that silence is the oil helps work a good groove together. That groove needs to be oiled with silence so they can work together. I can remember taking a meditation class when the instructor said we can meditate any time during the day right in the midst of an activity. Silence connects us.
The groove is a great metaphor. We don’t get rid of our ego. Our ego merges with our heart. We use the wisdom of our mind with the wisdom of our heart and we join them with the oiled grooves.
I had a friend who would often talk about the thin veil between the present world and the world holding those who have passed. She would share stories about finding little gifts that are left for us by our loved ones from the other side, and stories about feeling/seeing past pets around us. We are so close to the other side, and so close to ourselves all the time, even though we may not know how to access it yet.
We move from a fixated state of focus listening to our minds to un-fixating and becoming aware there is more as we sit in silence, which doesn’t make logical sense. This is beyond logic. This is the journey of the heart, and a whole world opens in our silence.
Thank you for showing up for yourselves, for sharing your discoveries. It’s amazing. We have created a porous tapestry—someone named it yesterday. We are a living, breathing vessel that holds our minds and our hearts, and we do it alone in community. We are three weeks away from a one-year mark in this meditation community. Thank you for all being part of it. Have a gentle, restful, easy day.