Love on a mountaintop

I just want to write a short post here to tell the story of climbing Table Rock in the Oregon cascade mountains, and what happened at the top.  

Some of the boulders below table rock (disclaimer, this is not my photo, I captured it from the net)

This is a pretty big hike, for regular folks who are not hiking up mountains on a regular basis.  We took it seriously and packed a lunch and enough water to keep us hydrated, though we saw other people who felt it was just a stroll and went up without anything but a pair of shoes and a pair of lungs.  We were pretty hot and tired when we reached the top.  After we rested and recovered for a bit (Dave said, "I love these bodies, they recover so well!"), I strolled over to the edge, sat down on some rocks, and looked out at the vast green expanse of mountains laying quiet and radiant in the hazy moistness of that afternoon.  

So much space and quiet and life.  I wanted to sing to it.  I spent some time toning with the intention to re-create the sequence from the crystal palace within meditation that I have done a couple times recently.  In this lovely meditation, you first activate your heart chakra with a heartfelt resonance with the earth.  This is pretty easy to do on top of a mountain!  Then you spend time paying attention to your pineal gland, in the middle of your head.  This is to activate your receptivity to subtle energies.  The third phase is you pay attention to a spot about 18 inches above your head, with an attitude of appreciation and gratitude.  This is to open a portal to your higher mind and free you from the negative idea that you are separate from God.  So I sat there and enjoyed the sounds that my voice could make while focusing on these different places and ideas.  

There is a way of singing I like to do, in which it feels as though the sound is creating a thick space around me, and in that space, there is a whole choir of singers.  There may be some scientific explanation for this, it might be overtones or something.  Whatever it is, it feels very cool and I like it. So I directed this resonant sound to my heart, my head, and the space above my head.  And then I looked out again at this beautiful planet, and sang to it.  

I sang a very simple song.  The words are, "I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you I love you I love you."  Etc.  You get the idea.  I feel a little shy saying it here, but then again, I want to say it.  I think none of us should be ashamed of loving the earth.  Maybe we should say it all day long.  I think the earth would like to hear that, just as any other living thing would like to hear that it is loved.  Especially if it has been abused and treated with disrespect.  What a relief it is to hear "I love you" after you have been hurt.  

It sure felt sweet inside me to sing that love song out there on top of the mountain.  I felt that my song could be heard more clearly because I was singing into all that open space without thousands of people's words and thoughts competing and filling up the field.  It was sincere.  I felt renewed and healed and transformed by the whole experience.  

Maybe some of you will read this and you will let the earth know how much you love her the next time you get a chance.  Thanks.   

Mindfulness and expansion

I've been working with a counselor to assist with my evolution process.  I've found it very helpful to have another person there as a ground and witness as I venture into my own energetic experience of being.  Recently, I really experienced an amazing shift.  Part of what's so cool about it is that I had no idea what was going to happen when I started.  I just sat down and closed my eyes and started feeling what was in my body and communicating it to the lovely woman who has made it her vocation to assist with this.  

I followed the thread of my own experience and sensations and thoughts in the moment.  I used my understanding to offer forgiveness and thanks.  Out of this, eventually a beautiful lightness was revealed to me.  It wasn't really something I saw, as I'm not all that visual, but it was more of a feeling of spaciousness and love and energy.  At that point, I sensed that we were accompanied by other beings who reside in that vibration all the time.  It was a wow moment. 

Later I thought, hey, I have really learned a lot in life to be able to do this process so easily.  And that's true.  But then I watched a video on youtube about the shift in consciousness happening in this time period, and one of the commentators said that a sort of window is opened and we have abilities and access that we did not have before.  That felt true to me also - that it has become easier than ever to tune in and follow the flow of awareness to find resolution of old problems, hurts, and misunderstandings.  And I want to do that, because it lifts all of us.  We are in this together.

The universe offers confirmations.  I got an email from Jason Siff, a Buddhist teacher, who said, "What occurs to me about meditation practice is that we have difficulty being with our experience. We’ll use all sorts of means in order not to stay with what it is we’re going through."  So he suggested, "In practicing in a more receptive and allowing way, our tendency to steer our attention away from something that’s uncomfortable becomes interesting. It’s an ability we’ve developed in a variety of ways. We can then start to look at some of these habits that we’ve developed that have worked quite well."  I think this is insightful. Finding a way to be receptive to our own resistance.  Finding an experience interesting, being curious, is a way of dis-identifying from it, which is important to do - otherwise, you become the thing, and you can't see around it. 

This can happen very fast.  For example, one kind of resistance I have had is that I get a spacey feeling in my head.  I felt that, I said, "I have a spacey feeling" and felt it, and it soon shifted.  I also felt tired at one point.  I noticed where the tired feeling was in my body (sort of a dark weight in front of me, not in my body per se), and shortly, it morphed into a sense of defiantly not wanting to do anything because of a thought that anything I can do in this life is not going to help me feel better.  In other words, I felt just like an adolescent!  What shifted it was I didn't become that feeling.  I felt it, observed it, noticed where it was coming from in my body, stated it, appreciated what it was, and it changed again.  I love this process! 

This spiral of learning, uncovering, mining, allowing, expressing, appreciating, keeps unfolding.  Yesterday after a meditation I followed the thread of sensation in my throat to a loud sound, which turned into a "no!" and then a sort of memory of what it was like being a child in the midst of the darkness that can be human nature. What's interesting to me about this is that the present-time experiencing of the memory is not at all what it was like at the time.  At the time, I didn't think, "Oh, all these people around me are asleep and acting out of some lower impulses."  I was just cruising along in the moment and sometimes, some painful stuff happened, and I may have reacted some, but mostly I just swallowed hard and moved into the next moment. 

But from the expanded place that is my now, I can feel how on a deeper level, behind the scenes, I was a light being who fell asleep and woke up in this life and felt shock after shock at how harsh and hostile being a human is.  As I recover the integrity of who I really am, my view of the experience is big enough to encompass all that - the dullness and impulsiveness that fueled so many insults, the woundedness of every person's heart, and the ultimate integrity of each being despite their apparent brutishness.  And it takes its proper place - really just a small part of the span of our time here.  Mostly we are immersed in an environment of stunning beauty and incredible abundance.  And we are motivated by a desire to do the right thing (even if misguided).  We humans more or less offer tenderness to those we love.  And love we do.  That is the strongest, most impervious, persistent, and undying impulse and force behind everything. 

When you wash your windows, in pours the light. It's so strong that it can feel uncomfortable to bathe in it unshielded.  I think we are mostly not accustomed to it.  But it's the truth, and we crave it.  Beneath all the other cravings, is that one.  Craving love, craving that pure beauty, the energy of life.  

When John Perkins said at lecture I attended a year or so back that we have to create a new dream to create a new world, I kept wondering what that might look like.  Gradually I have seen that, for me, it has to do with the transformation of my own consciousness, the gradual unwinding of the fear that emerging into darkness had generated.  This begins to transform my relationships, and thus ripples out into the collective.  There may also be a rippling out and a lifting up that takes place on a less visible plane.  I hope so.  

For all of us, I wish for emergence from the collective dream of powerlessness, in which we live in the shadow of cataclysm and dearth.  Into the true dream of cooperation, caring, compassion, concern, and communion with the whole body of humanity as we stand equal to and a part of all that is.  I think this is the new dream, and I hope that more and more of us can wake up to the possibility.