Mountain Top Road

oracle

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I’ve been using the I Ching along with the Wisdom of the Oracle for many years. I ask a question (even though I recognize that within myself the answer is already there) and then surrender my linear mind’s knowing to allow the deeper Divine Knowing to reveal itself to me.

It is quite miraculous to witness that the answer revealed to me is ALWAYS exactly what I already know, but it’s symbolized and shown to me in a way that is crystal clear for my linear mind to understand.

It always feels most urgent to access spiritual wisdom when life challenges arise and our path is unclear.

At those times, despite my inner knowing that no matter what path I take, it will always be the correct path for me; nevertheless, I find myself wanting to ask the question. Something about the affirmation allows me to feel, ahhh, see, I was right!

Here in northeastern PA, it’s been a long winter. Spring has just revealed its precious light in the last two days, and I am resonating with nature’s calling to be NEW again. With that, comes change, big decisions, deep introspective reassessment of my life.

And so I turn to my beloved Oracle, and I ask the question:

Am I listening to the true voice of my heart?

I shuffle the card deck. I choose the card. The Oracle answers:

Card #21, upside down (a protection message):

CLEAN IT UP!

“Is it possible you may be focusing too much on other people right now?

Trying too hard to be helpful?

Perhaps you think its your calling to relieve people of their burdens, but what is the cost to you, and to them?

Don’t clean up someone else’s side of the street. You’re not helping by freeing him or her of responsibility. You’re also not doing yourself any favors, and you might just be adding an even greater strain.

You are loved as you are. You don’t need to be needed to be loved.”

Whack! Just what I needed to be told, to really hear, to own. I know all this. Yet, its message is one I continue to struggle with.

It says, Janet, you know exactly what you have to do.

Mercury retrograde

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A good time to reflect on where you “are”

Last night’s Sleep Dream:

The street is a sloping downward hill, and I am witnessing some passengers in a small (red?) vehicle slowly rolling BACKWARDS down the hill.

I perceive that they are attempting to slow the car by using the brakes (there’s a loud screeching sound of the brakes) so they don’t go flying down the hill backwards.

As I witness this, I am concerned, thinking, Wow, the brakes are barely working.

Then I observe the dog. A sweet mid-sized mutt, white with brown/black spots.

The dog is sitting on the street, and I realize he is leashed to the front of the vehicle, his back facing the car, and he is either being dragged down the hill with the car or he is purposely slowing down the roll by his body weight.

The dog does not appear distressed at all; however, I am infuriated and appalled at the sight of this.

Determined, angry, I decide to go put a stop to this. I must catch up with them and reprimand these people for dragging this dog down the hill backwards!

But first, I must grab my pocketbook. As I go to gather it up, there are two identical bags on the ground. Which one is mine? I rummage through the contents of each to see which is mine.

End of dream ……..

There ARE SO MANY SYMBOLIC indications in this dream. But the one that resonates for me is the Mercury retrograde in our present astrological configuration. A sense of either being “pulled” backward or willingly “reflecting” backward. In the “awake” dream, I am also experiencing a deep calling to look back, reflect on where I’ve been to discern where I’m “going”, both personally and collectively.

I’m working on a new website, called TheYogaofDreaming. I hope to soon have a community forum to share our dreams …..

the endless sky

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My head is always in the clouds

contemplating

dreaming

imagining

in awe

do the clouds take the shape of our thoughts?

I recall when Mom was in the very beginning stages of dementia (what is medically accepted to be dementia, an MRI scan showing shrinkage in the brain matter).

She awoke in terror early morning hours, called up to me from her bedroom downstairs.

“Janet, please come down here.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Something happened, please come down,” she was crying.

I ran downstairs.

Shaking, horrified, “Janet, something terrible happened.”

“Calm down, RoRo, (Mom’s nickname), it’s okay. Tell me what happened.”

“I woke up, and I was in another world. It was terrifying. I can’t explain it. It was like ….. a completely other world.”

“Okay, maybe it was a dream. It’s okay now, everything is okay.”

“No, it was not a dream. I know you don’t believe me, but it was real, and I was so scared, I don’t know how to explain it,” still shaking and still crying. “It wasn’t this world. It was a completely different place. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.”

I held her hands and reassured her again and again, that she was safe now, everything was okay, and that I was there for her.

But I will never forget the terror on her face. Kind of like the terror I felt years prior when I had my own out-of-body experience. But that story for another time ……

If we could even glimpse the enormity of LIFE, from our little mind’s limited view, yes, it would be terrifying, I imagine. And then maybe, after the initial fear subsides, maybe it could even be mind-blowing orgasmic, unspeakable?

Of course, we DON’T KNOW. Which leads me to trust, intuit, sense that there must be purpose to having this “veil”, this ignorance, these limited beliefs we hold about time, reality, about LIFE.

I can attest to the scariness of seeing through the illusive qualities of this world. It is disconcerting at first. All that you believed to be true ….. puff, gone.  When you “see” something that you’ve always believed is impossible. I’ve had my share of seeing through. I’ve experienced consciousness from different perspectives.

But these were only tiny glimpses of the potentiality of it ALL.

I remain humbly in awe.

 

 

 

 

There is never more or less of life

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There’s a poignant recollection that comes to my mind after completing the last chapter of The Most Important Thing (Adyashanti).

Many years ago, I had attended my Aunt Dolly’s funeral service. One of her closest and beloved nieces, Wendy, who happened to be a devout born-again Christian, was conversing with me about Aunt Dolly. When Wendy mentioned how happy she was that Aunt Dolly was in ‘heaven’ I felt compelled to say, “No, I think she’s right here, right next to me, in the very fabric of my sweater.”

Wendy did not reply, and from her expression I sensed she had no idea what I meant.

At that time, neither did I exactly know what I meant, but something deep within me knew it was true, and I felt obliged to express it in that moment.

This week, I’ve been thinking about my mom who died 5 months ago. I’ve been feeling her. This feeling of mom brings on emotions that come from so many conditioned responses to my own memories; sadness, guilt, disappointment, and even joy and deep love.

But more important than the emotions that arise, I notice how my perception of life as always present has enhanced my ability to feel mom.

It has been such a reward to have read this book which acknowledges this feeling I’ve always sensed but have not found the words for:

“If you have ever been with someone who is dying, you know that the changing of the form, the moment of death, is discernable. Even if in that moment when it happens you have your eyes closed, you know; it is a powerful moment.

It is an honor to be present when someone passes, as it is a profoundly deep and moving experience, but death is experienced differently when we know that life does not disappear as the form disappears.

This is why people can lose a loved one and suddenly feel their loved one everywhere.
We think of that as a poetic experience – the human imagination projecting the memory of somebody we’ve loved – and as something we do with our mind and our ideas, but there is also a reality to it beyond the ideas.

That person always was life, and although the form life took has disappeared, the life itself is everywhere.

To feel that someone is everywhere is not merely a romantic comfort created by those who are grieving. It touches a fundamental reality; the forms change, and there is a definitive moment of the changing of the form, but there is no more and no less life.

This is why when we awaken, when we are realized, we know there is no birth or death in some essential sense; there is the changing of forms, but not the beginning and the end of one’s existence. So in Zen, when they say the real reason for the whole spiritual endeavor is to resolve the Great Matter of birth, life, and death, they mean it.

As long as we are caught in the realm of acceptance and rejection, believing and disbelieving, we are living in a world of abstraction. That is what spiritual teachers mean- at least it is what I mean – by saying we are living in a dream. Therefore, believing or disbelieving is not the point.

The real instinct for enlightenment or awakening or God comes from a kind of dissatisfaction – from no longer wanting to live an abstracted life, no longer wanting your life to continue to contribute to the world of sorrow, and paying attention to the desire to have a rich and deep experience of being instead of one created by what you believe. This is the real enlightenment impulse.

Trust the quiet spaces within, because they are the ultimate sutras of existence”.

The Most Important Thing, Adyashanti, (bold, italics supplied by me)
PHOTO CREDIT: “Angel Wings” taken by my dear friend, Annette Adams

 

 

 

 

Ode to Opossum

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On my front porch stoop, I sit
cold February day, but sun-lit

Petting Goldie, my feral cat
she’s behaving strangely, I can sense that

Lady, can’t you see?
she urges me

Below the stoop to the left, I glance
to view a dead opossum, by chance

Innards half eaten, and frozen stiff
a raccoon, or a coyote, I wonder if

His spirit still there?
does he sense that I care?

I fetch the shovel to carry away
the petrified corpse, now free from affray

Far behind the house I choose the plot
frozen leaves and branches, I clear a slot

I make a blanket with sticks and dried leaves
to cover his corpse that no longer grieves

Now you are free from the body cage-jail
I honor my dead friend with the prehensile tail

It has been such an interesting week. I have had so many synchronistic occurrences, and I’m noticing more and more how every single thought manifests itself through form (a body). I recognize more deeply how Father Time veils our wisdom, hiding the reality that it’s actually all occurring simultaneously. I think I’m learning something new, but it’s actually what I know already. Thankfully, my dream time opens up my mind again, at least while I’m in deep sleep. But damn, that illusive “time” covers it over with ignorance when my morning alarm goes off.

It has become obvious to me the meaninglessness of the labels we get stuck to. But they’re sooooo energetically sticky, like Superglue.

Vegan/ Carnivore
White/ Black
Nationalist/Globalist
Christian/Jew
Left/Right
Straight/Gay
Theist/Atheist
Human/Alien
Elite/Blue collar

We get stuck to the label, and then BELIEVE IN the label, and the mind closes up!
None of it is true. We don’t even know what consciousness IS.

“You can’t be open-minded when you label yourself with anything!” Freedom Fighters Florida

meditation

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so busy
doing this, doing that
mind flutter
going here, going there
distractions
ooooh yes, ooooh no
The month has been kind of hectic, and I’ve lapsed in my precious quiet sitting time.
So today, I took the time to sit in awareness …… of awareness.

“It is more useful and certainly easier  to think of meditation as the art of acknowledging what is already present. This can happen when you’re sitting in meditation, which is great, but you can also do it at any time. It takes only a few seconds to notice that awareness and quiet are always and already the background of every experience. Start with little moments of meditation – ten seconds, fifteen seconds – and repeat them during the day. Gradually do nothing but this acknowledgement practice for two, ten, twenty seconds, whatever- but do not turn it into a battle, and do not turn it into something that is frustrating or makes you feel defeated. These small moments of meditation can change what you are noticing. In a certain sense, you will be changing your consciousness, opening and beginning to observe and feel and sense into – become sensitive to – the sacred and the timeless. It may or may not start out that way the first time you do it, but the sacred and the timeless are always and already present. All we need to do is take a moment to notice, and that is what meditation is.”

excerpt from the most important thing, Adyashanti (italics and bold are mine)

 

 

 

unknown

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It’s often the simplest seeming gesture or word/idea that serves as a deep awakening.

As I’m reading The Most Important Thing, (Adyashanti), I’m reminded ….

How we IDENTIFY with a thought about absolutely anything can create either suffering or happiness.

This has been so helpful for me to re-cognize, again, simple as it is.

Further grace dropped into my consciousness while I was revisiting my old dream journals, as I’m preparing to work on my new project, The Yoga of Dreaming.

I was reminded of a teaching at a silent retreat that served a deep awakening for me, at that time:

“You will NEVER find TRUTH looking through the MIND”

Why is this SO important to re-cognize?

Because the Mind’s nonstop evaluation of its perceptions are occurring in TIME (in this dimension of reality)

We already know Time is an illusion, right? But in Time the only thing we can actually KNOW through EXPERIENCE is the present moment

Everything else is the UNKNOWN

The unknown = FEAR (most of the time), especially the unknowing about death

Which leaves 99.99999% of us living in FEAR (aka anxiety) pretty much all of the TIME

To eliminate this constant state of fear, our only hope would be to let go of identifying with the MIND’s obsessive compulsion to make up stories about everything – and then believe it’s TRUE!!!!

Sounds simple enough.

But it’s not simple. Why?

Because the UNKNOWN will always be the only thing that is TRUE.

Our MIND cannot accept that.

What can we do?

Sit still. Be quiet. Observe. Listen. Feel. Laugh. Watch nature. Trust. Open your heart to gratitude. Take Action without attaching to outcome. Be YOU, authentically.

KNOW that you will never KNOW.

Remind yourself every day.

Even this writing is not true.
It’s just an attempt to express the ineffable……..

suggestions welcome