Creating a positive relationship with our inner self is a lifelong adventure. Learning how to meditate has been the key to my own personal success and expansion. I recently wrote this piece on my personal inner process so I share it in the hope that it can inspire others to keep up the investigation into what it means to be human, why we make the decisions we make, how to become a more loving and connected person…
In the last year, I have deepened my practice, spending a couple of hours in meditation most mornings, and digging into who I am, what makes me tick, observing all the subtle way I am mis-identifying myself with thoughts, watching the contracting energy of stress and how it works on my body and thoughts. Seeing more clearly the subtle ways I check out of presence and invest my precious life-force in the vast collective unconscious.
Then there is the experience of feeling blooms of pure bliss when I access deeper levels of mind, allowing myself to linger in a place of BEING and not doing. I have found pockets of surrender that feel like melting, salty tears slipping from the corners of my eyes, temperature shifting and a sense of not wanting to even breathe so sublime is the stillness.
One of my favorite entry points is to ask the question ‘who am I? Who is experiencing right now? What is consciousness? I love when I catch myself in a mental projection and swiftly come back to pure spacious awareness and hang long enough for another pocket of bliss to spread like a warm hug over my body. At some point a voice will say ‘isn’t it time for breakfast? Perhaps you should move your body now, some asana? A walk? Sometimes it’s too cozy to move. I stay and begin another inquiry into the unfathomable nature of life, of spirit, of love.
During the day I notice how different my interactions have become, perhaps not so noticeable on the outside, but markedly so to the ‘me’ who is observing.
I spend more time witnessing. Opening to the environment. Attuning to the undercurrent, the unstated. I practice meeting people without holding my knowledge of their history between us.
I look for opportunities to meet friends and strangers in the moment with fresh eyes.
When I catch myself ‘spacing out’ or in a mental projection I come back to full embodied awareness, where there is no time for boredom because an intelligence is pulsing within me and the environment, and once again, if I inquire deeply enough into the moment the energy starts to come alive and my experience shifts to one of wonder.
As I anticipate this coming year I am calling in the extraordinary, I am practicing leaning over the cliff of the known and hanging in space, my heart willing me to release into the embrace of unknown, the place where I am not Kia, I am not anything familiar. What I am is open, receptive and willing to embark on the greatest adventure of my life. I invite the creative intelligence to pierce through the armor of my identity and use me as it will.