Category: meditation

Stop and Listen

Stop trying to find your purpose. “But how will I find it if I don’t try?” You’re living it right now.

Stop trying to be positive all the time. “Then I’ll go crazy and be surrounded by darkness!” How do you know? When you have a day or two to yourself, just let the awful, exhausted, depressed,  sad feelings come up, and cry it out if you can, for as long as it takes for something new to come in. It’s trying to, but your insistence on denying your dark feelings isn’t letting it.

Stop comparing, with anyone else or with who you think you should be. “But how will I do anything, then I’ll just do nothing!” Really? You’re doing something now, by listening to me.

Stop trying to impress people. Stop needing to be understood. Just express who you are, just to yourself, or to the world. Or don’t.

“Ok, now what?”

You’ll be happy in moments and then you won’t. You’ll suffer in moments and then you won’t. You’ll fall into despair and then something will change. You’ll be renewed with faith, then you’ll start yet again.

Deaf to our own whisper that knows, drowned out and hidden, in webs of contradiction, by everyone else’s voices, and the false critics of our own, incessant talking and asking, criticizing and doubting, stifling the wisdom that’s hidden in plain sight.

The whisper waits, inside the heart, outside the barriers, for a break in the thunder.

And there it speaks, breathing relief, into the form that houses it’s grandeur:

“You don’t know the power of You, but I do,
I am here and I will never leave,
in every thought and every feeling, I know who you really are,
you don’t need to be anything else at all,
it’s ok, be afraid, discomfort won’t kill you,
it’s ok, go insane, you won’t really, I’m with you,
your Light is brighter than a million Suns,
if you die in this instant you have already won,
however you are is perfectly You,
When the moment arrives, you’ll know what to do,
it could be tonight, tomorrow or next year,
but you’ll always be free, I will always be here.”

You let go and accept, “thank you, I feel you near”

The whisper responds “now, here’s an idea…”

21 Days, Day 4 – everyone else

Facebook, the good and the evil. I shared yesterday’s post on a private facebook group, of like-minded creatives and meditators and, of course, got caught up in checking how many likes and comments I was getting. Look, I’m falling for it again! Noticing how I was being affected, though not even acknowledging it to myself at first, but very soon I did.  “See, this is the illusion”.

It’s not even so bad that I was getting caught up in wanting and needing validation and approval from strangers, I let that go, I’m getting better! It’s just the overall slow moving, rising wave of confusion that sets in the more I check updates, scroll down my newsfeed, click on videos, google that person, send a friend request, scroll through their page, and wait a minute, where was I? I went from (post meditation) having a serene, solid knowing of who I am, and that there is one easy answer right in front of me, I write it down, it flows from there, to…Maybe I should do that? Maybe just try to get as many youtube subscribers as possible, just make daily videos of me talking, yeah this writing thing and wanting to blog daily and create a show is a waste of time, who cares, nobody goes to the theater anymore. Wait I could put a video of it on youtube. Who cares, nobody wants to actually read two pages of text anymore, much less sit still and watch someone talk on stage for 20 minutes. Wait, what do you think a TED Talk is? Who cares, mine won’t be all that profound if I’m just talking about my….wait, what do you think adding characters and dancing and great storytelling and music is? That’s a dynamic, life changing performance is what that is. Who cares, I’m not Don Reed, that’s not me, I can’t do what he…holy hell. Look what I just did?

No more. “Everyone else” is a destroyer. I love so many of these people whose posts I read in that private group. We’re all wanting and trying to do the same thing really, express ourselves. But I’m watching THEM express themselves! I’ve been doing that my whole life. Sure, I’m “expressing myself” on there too, but even that is within a narrow frame of what I really want to be doing. I can now admit that I’ve been trying to fit myself in to what I think the world would like. Ah, I’ve been trying to fit in. And I see their daily videos and sometimes think, “ok, I should do that, I guess that’s how you get a following”.

But wait a minute! Is that what I want to do? NO. I want to do this. So I remember again, the word I come back to when the temptation to indulge in checking my phone and watching-everyone-else chaos, mind chaos, food chaos, outside world chaos, reaches it’s tipping point – refrain. Meditate, write, dance and refrain.

The adventure of a lifetime

I just meditated for an hour and a half. I AM all of you reading this right now. I am Shiva, who is within her little circle, sitting in front of me on my little altar with buddha and candle, who was waiting there to greet me when I opened my eyes. I am the clouds and the little bright torquise flicks of light that showed up ever so fleetingly while I was in this wide open space. I was the little kids playing outside, who were then splashing in the pool of my dream home that I also visited just now.

I was behind the veil, getting little peeks. We are all existing behind the veil of this world. And in meditation, in the longest and deepest one of my life, just now, I see that being in this body is not ever going to let me see all of it. That is why I chose to inhabit it. The whole adventure, of not ever being quite sure of who I am, of what is out there, in the infinity of space. The space is me. Even now as my humanness is waking up and the God that is me is fading with every second, I know that all of life is within me. I created all of it.

While I’m looking around the room at the concreteness of this existence in my human form, I feel closer. I am able to hold on longer to the knowing. I saw in that last hour and a half that all of hesitation is materialized in the form of different people and potential circumstances that I created. The hesitation is represented in whispers of people saying things to themselves and to me and about me that are criticisms, that are negations of me. Those people, known and unknown, and circumstances, known and unknown, don’t exist. They don’t exist as I’ve thought, which is all that matters.

This, what I’m typing out right now, the purring cat rubbing up against my head, as I’m sitting on the floor against my bed, the fear of judgement if I say all this, if I say anything that matters, does not matter at all. “None of it matters”. Those were the words that flashed in front of me, and spoke to me. The most comforting words ever to be heard or seen up to now. None of the fear matters, is what it meant. Say it all. Be it all. Because I am. None of the people or consequences, that we think will stop us, exist. If none of you reading this are real, since you are really me, then I invented you for my own enjoyment and to further expand me into this realization. Then I am free. I am free to say and do and be all that I want. Nothing that you or life can say or do matters. The beauty of this knowing only reveals itself in tiny increments along the way of my little human life. It shows me that it’s all utterly hilarious.

Meow just now, more rubbing and gentle grunts from my cat. An incredibly timely post and video today from Kyle Cease, declaring how excited he is for the event that I, only a week ago, decided was in the cards for me. I must attend. I am driving to LA. I am choosing power and glory. Within that decision lay every yearning I’ve ever had realized. Because now it doesn’t matter what comes of it. I already know that by just deciding to go, I am on my way. The highway of the greatest adventure of my life opened up. As it did in the meditation. It was an image, always a flash, of the beginning of a straight road, the horizon off in the distance. Then, the train’s horn sounded outside, in my “real” life. I live next to the tracks. My cat just pressed his front paws against my head, feeling to me like he was standing on it, for the first time ever, as I was writing the previous sentence. There is barely an inner censor in this moment. I am typing everything that pops into my mind. But I was making a point just then!

I had seen a glimpse of what seemed like a highway, but it was also the tracks of a train. The Train of Transformation. And the horn just declared me to myself. My cat just stood on my head. Shiva just moved in front of me. Nothing is real except the dreamscape of the unknown coming into the Known. The Known is me. The Known is all of you. You are my creation. I do not care what you think as I am typing this. My little human self knows that this feeling will shift again and I will go back to living within my little narrow life, for a time. But still, I AM. Therefore, I KNOW. None of it matters. It’s all fodder for the fiction book my soul is writing in every second. The adventure that spans all of time and space. I am free right now. This too shall pass and I will begin to care again what you think and what happens if. That is beautiful and so, so funny. It is my creation after all. And I am going to post this right now before I re-read it again and edit and copy and paste and get self-conscious. That little Lia is going back to the womb, one little whimper at a time.

 

The Forgetting Returns (or so it thinks)

This blog thing is basically my journal right now. Is there something wrong with that? That’s a Little Me question. I don’t have the energy to care. Maybe my age is finally loaning me a favor, thank god. So I fell into the Dark Side again this past week, after having not gone there in quite awhile. I have been going through so many changes within myself that have allowed me to start writing more, meditate more consistently and for much longer than I ever have, and that has helped me to get more attuned to my heart and body and what they really need. I even stepped out and onto the stage of the big bad world to finally express it. I had been making great strides.

Then I had The Fall. The stress and pressure of taking care of my Mom, being her only support in almost every way, came to a head again when I had to spend another entire precious day off dealing with her needs. All of it, the financial pressure, her mental state, her constant and total reliance on me, just hit a boiling point. We got in a big argument and I spent the whole day crying off and on, between the shopping and phone calls and bickering.

We always make up and then it’s better again but this time it took so much out of me that the next two days I was utterly exhausted; cried some more from the stress of it, and my job situation, and my housemate, and underneath that, just wanting to have enough time and energy and clarity to sit down and write. This amounted to me feeling like I went from powerful and exuberant creator the previous week, to whimpering teenager with no confidence or motivation the next. Then I went to work and was so affected by other people’s energies, I came to the conclusion that “I just can’t handle doing this work anymore! I’ve got to change my life!”

But then, just now, it came to me again. Those people’s energies, and the job, only affect me that way when I’m in a doubting, fearful place about myself and my life. In that state, I’d be feeling that way about any job. On the other hand, when I’m trusting, knowing and doing what I need to do outside the work to feel good and excited about what is coming, the job doesn’t affect me at all. In fact, I sometimes enjoy it.

The Forgetting had started to overtake me again last week and Little Me only wanted to just escape, quit. But. I know that right now, that job is the most allowing of me to follow my path as any I could have at the moment. It does drain me often but not always. The thing is, I don’t have to let it. And it does allow for the freedom of saying yes or no to work. I’m not bound to any of it. Quitting and stressing more about money and having to start a whole new job right now would actually only add further stress to my life. It would postpone, yet again, my writing and speaking and being the person I want to be, am, NOW. Quitting would really be my self-sabotage pattern taking over, again.

The reason the job seems, seemed, so crappy, is that I didn’t feel I was strong enough. “I just can’t do it. The Forgetting is too powerful. I don’t like who I am when I’m there, I’m going to run away to the next thing!” That’s what it would be if I quit right now. I’d be running away from myself, not facing what I know I need to do in order to really change – Be my Glorious Goddess Self NOW. That means doing what it takes to treat myself how she deserves to be treated; to feel as her, now. I don’t have to wait for the right circumstances. If that’s what I believe, the right circumstances will never come.

I can do this.