'To thine own self be true.' Such a simple adage. Not always easy to follow.
So often in life we find ourselves staying with what is familiar, long after it has grown cold. Our habit mind dutifully helps us to hold fast while our awake self yearns to let go. This can even happen with good things.
I can remember a ceramics class that I was helping to teach. It was a delight, but it kept on going long after the time when it was supposed to stop. I felt conflicted and over burdened. Though I enjoyed it, I was not truly staying in my joy. I was beholden more to social duty than to my own true self. These lessons can come hard. And it's good to say "no," when it's time to let go.
In this particular scenario, Divine Arrangement intervened in the form of an automobile accident that put me where I needed to be, at home, tending within. As rough as it began, it was there that I found my true joy again. Nowadays, I like to think that I make these types of choices more frequently and on my own, when it is time to listen within, take stock and re-access. It just seems so much more wise for me to do this before Divine Intervention sweeps in.
I am reminded of my mother's laundry soap, made from her fireplace wood ash and kitchen bacon grease, bubbling slowly on the stove. With the flame of transformation beneath it, the two substances would begin to unite. Over time, large bubbles would slowly rise up, thick and sticky. Then with a sigh of release, they would pop and sink back down into the congealing, coalescing mass.
Our creativity must rise, express itself and then return back down to the source in order to gather and rise again. And just like the fat and ash, we become forever changed into something even more useful and new.
It's okay for us to let go. When a part of our lives gets too high and tight and thin, be it an addiction, a commitment or an unresolved dream, it may be time for us to go back down. Sometimes we just need to re-group in order to let ourselves take a little break, mix it up a bit and draw from what we know or have been before, in order to rise up and generate our own transformation once more.
Enjoy the lovely sunset photo by my friend Anno.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
Peace Pilgrim said that if we smile at the world, it smiles back at us. When we connect with the grace and innocence of our pure love, for both the animate and the inanimate world around us, then our connection with Nature's voice is awakened.
In modern times it has become progressively easy for us to connect with other humans, but what we have forgotten is how to connect with the Natural world around us. However, we don't have to re-invent the wheel here, we humans have been listening to the subtle communications coming to us from Nature since time began. We've gone on vision quests and written in pictographs. We've seen the forest as our brother and the river as our sister. Reclaiming this part of ourselves is as easy as stepping outside.
Of course our dutiful beloved subconscious minds are always going to protect us from something we have been taught to fear. And make no mistake about it, all of our fears have been taught to us. We learn them from our families, our religious groups, our friends and even our government. Unless our subconscious programming along these lines is intentionally changed, it can sabotage our attempts to open our hearts to hear Nature's voice. Beliefs like "People will think I'm crazy," or "I may loose my grip on reality," or "This is against my family belief system," are all scary enough to stop you in your tracks.
This is where self love steps in. We need to love ourselves enough to give ourselves what we need and really want in the world. Many of us yearn for this connection with Nature and when we get whispers and glimpses of it, it brings us so much joy.
I feel that joy is the basis of our spirituality an that it is our job as humans to nourish the Universe with our joy. So, if we'd really love to have that beautiful connection with our mother, Nature, we need to free ourselves from the tyranny of our own minds.
Identifying our fears, so we can move through and past them, is how we do so. Once we have become aware of them, we can use our intention plus our attention to change those old thought habit patterns and manifest new thoughts instead.
Our spiritual practices can also help us to listen to the voice of Nature. Self love, meditation, dream interpretation and prayer all help us to calm our minds, activate our inner vision centers and connect with the Divinity in everything, including Ourselves. When we do this, we open our hearts and let the love flow. We free ourselves to smile at the Natural word. And then it smiles back at us. We step into our joy with open hearts and Hear From Our Source How We Can All Serve The One.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
One of my favorite types of meditation is the Guided Imagery Mediation. This type of meditation engages our image center or our imagination. It stimulates our clairvoyant function by activating our third eye. Meditations of this nature guide us through an idea or an image. When we do a guided imagery meditation, we can either listen to a prerecorded meditation or we can guide ourselves through the process using our own thoughts.
My first exposure to guided imagery meditation was with a prerecorded forgiveness meditation. This was on an audio tape that was made by Louise Hay, who wrote You Can Heal Your Life. I listened to this almost every night on my little tape player while I was healing from a painful and long term injury. Louise's gentle, loving voice, playing through my ear-buds, helped me to more easily manage the pain and often lulled me into sleep. In this meditation, she asked her listeners to imagine our parents as little children, to see them as innocent, to forgive them, to pick them up, hold them lovingly, and then place them right into my heart.
Another great teacher of this type of meditation is Shakti Gawain. She headed me down the path of guided imagery meditations with her remarkable book, Creative Visualization. I welcome you to discover for yourself this little book and the life changing wisdom within it for yourself. One of her readers said that it was like being led by the hand into a beautiful garden and being given a single flower, one after another, to marvel at and enjoy.
I'd like to share with you today a few of my favorite guided imagery meditations. The first one is the pink bubble technique. Take a minute to imagine a pink bubble, with your eyes either opened or closed. Place into the bubble any worrying thoughts you may have. Close the door on that bubble if there was one, and see the bubble lift off and start to float away. Let it float over the distant horizon, perhaps even over a mountain, and know that it has gone to its next, most highest placement in the universe for its transformation.
A dear friend of mine who has since moved to the east coast taught me about the healing modality of Regenesis. This is a technique where the practitioner imagines a beautiful blue light entering into each and every cell of the client's body. This is the light of regeneration. I have taken this idea and altered it slightly to create a wonderful guided imagery meditation for myself that I do every day. In it, I imagine the blue light of Divinity entering in through the crown of my head and igniting all of my cells, one by one. In just a few moment's time it fills my whole body with the loving light of my higher self. This guided imagery meditation is part of what I do when I clear myself before I do my clairvoyant healing work for a client.
Another beautiful guided imagery mediation is to imagine a golden disk or a golden halo over the top of your head. Let this halo be a filter. Your thoughts can come and go, but all the thoughts of others are naturally sifted away. This lets us really focus on being who we are in accordance with our original blueprint, our natural being, our true self.
I'll leave you with these few meditations to enjoy this week. May they serve you as well as they have served me.
© Josephine Laing, 2014
