Screwing Down the Hatches...

...of the bathyscaphe into inner space.

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Resonant World #108

The days before a silent retreat are like the countdown to a space rocket blasting into orbit.

Or launching a submersible into the Marianas Trench.

Of course, meditation is travelling without moving.

The path lies on the inside, if it makes sense to speak of “inside,” when deep silence makes the seamlessness of the continuum between “inner” and “outer” easier to perceive.

The destination is an inner sanctum,

Where I can synchronize with my Soul.

Resonate with Self Leadership.

Receive ideas,

Or inspiration for creative projects.

To allow more to flow through me, into the world.

But there’s a sense in which the grasping for the “next big thing” is a symptom of the misperception the meditation aims to solve.

I go to the cushion to grow my capacity to be Here.

Really, Here.

This Presence is the ultimate medicine.

The prima materia.

As Gerd Ziegler writes of the Three of Wands in Tarot, Mirror of the Soul:

“Reflection on this point of internal stillness allows a new sense of self-confidence to come into being, and guards against an overload of unnecessary problems…The brooding, analytical considerations of the intellectual mind don’t stand a chance when you are filled with life energy and a sense of vitality.”

I have traversed enough inner terrain to know there are peaks, and ridgelines, where the view of the landscape is clearer, where the clarity of the Three of Wands reigns.

And yet so much of the time, I notice myself waist-deep in the swamps, my mind whirling in obsolete, Self-obscuring thought loops.

My intention, in a sense, isn’t to change this tendency — wonderful as it would be if some of these old loops would magically dissolve.

No, my intent is to “grow my cup” — to expand my capacity to host these patterns, without becoming them. I want to deepen the foundations of my stable core, a place I can — on a good day — speak and act from in an increasingly reliable way.

I invite grace.

I’m intimate with the action of grace in my life, most obviously manifested in the web of relationships with family, friends and colleagues that cannot have constellated by chance.

A relational tapestry, woven by a hidden hand.