Stone meditation:
- The big soft-edged grey stone that called to me from the edge of the curb near the canal. It is a little bigger than my hand and so solid & grounding. Scraped from where the different tires had pushed it along the road & curb-sides.
- It called out to me, the perfect rock, perfect in its imperfections, holding it’s essence though under what seemed like less than optimal circumstances. It called out to me to take it home.
- It’s heaviness is grounding. So solid, brigs me back in the flurry of uncertainty -- that airy, drifting disconnect.
- It tells me secrets of the alchemists — it is not what goes into the crucible, that is the essence of the being. All the magic that happens in the crucible is possible because of the boundaries of the crucible. The boundaries keep the elements of magic within appropriate proximity to act and react and merge and separate. The crucible retains the boundaries and allows magic to happen within but it remains consistent at the end, whatever else has been going on.
It’s an alchemically philosophical rock!? Then again, it was the one that called to me to bring it home...
- The crucible is the vessel that carries, can be rinsed clean, and is what always remains.
- Through transformation, we can add things to our crucible, to our stone soup pot, to our vessels ourselves, but the transformations that stand up to time are the transformations that rinse us clean, back to our essential natures. “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” (St. Exupery).
- Transformation through the elimination and removal of our limiting beliefs. The false stories we tell ourselves about who we are, that sometimes we don’t even know are false. When we become wrapped up with having and doing rather than authentic being.
- The final message of the rock:
Shed your limiting beliefs and transform by going back to that which is essential to your being.
Thank you, rock, for grounding me today and last fall. Thank you for reminding me that the essence of being is that which is immutable and that which remains when all else is washed away.
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Writing for me is a practice of processing. Human beings are ‘sense makers’ (or at least some of us lean that way). We want to know why things happen. What just happened. What’s going to happen. Does it make sense? All of the religions in the world, all of the divination systems in the world, all of the beliefs in the world (limiting and freeing) are stories we tell ourselves to try to help us make sense of the world.
Sometimes the world is non-sensical. Things don’t always happen “for a reason” or the things that happen are incomprehensible. Sometimes we try to apply a framework to those stories that don’t fit, trying to make sense of them according to something that has helped us make sense before but is not appropriate now, and may not have been appropriate then. Sometimes that leads to more nonsense or guilt or harmful/not right action. Sometimes our frameworks require review and adaptation and correction.
I write to make sense. To take the strands and ends, the odds & sods that appear in my brain, and lay them out in front of me. To take the jumbled pieces and see what patterns appear in front of me. Sometimes my stories are correct and true, and sometimes they are colored by my perceptions and application of frameworks and my limited perspective. Sometimes I need to process as best I can to keep trying to move forward.
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Alas, I missed the next writing exercise — life is what happens while you’re making other plans.
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Yeshe Tsogyal writing meditation:
- Perfect memory — that memory that surfaces what needs to be surfaced, correctly in the correct moment.
- Bees bringing wisdom to and from the flowers.
- Watching the incense rise and curl in a sun beam, being and knowing in the moment.
- I’m sort of mesmerized and distracted by the curls of incense. The shades of blues and greys, twisting in the rays of the sun.
…
- She says,
Being and knowing in the moment. It’s ok sometimes to just be. And know. Let it be.
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