My single greatest tool for spiritual growth frightens me. A small, stricken part of me works hard to avoid it.
There is a space I can get to – not always, but often – an interior realm where my perceptions and memories and image of self alter into a different, expanded reality. It is more than quiet, more than mindful, though silence and mindfulness are present. I become aware of the volume of space within my body, sensing the surge of motion within and between my head, hips, and torso. I am paying attention to my inside the way I normally pay attention to the outside. The feeling is intimate, textured; subtle movements of energy reveal layers, opening more the longer I stay. The entire picture is realer than real should be able to be.
I hear my breathing from the inside, nearly silent, the silence weighted at the front of my chest, moving slowly like a velvet tide, moving up, moving down. Stillness below, and overhead, stillness out to the horizon. Time fills out, comes to rest. The hidden space within my thinking lengthens, limber, fluid. Having lost their compelling logic, my thoughts slow, as if moving through water, moving through the viscosity I imagine at the bottom of a deep lake. There is no urgency to act or decide or interpret or choose; there is only listening and readiness and potential. From here, it can open into anything.
This is what remains when I surrender, when the old constructs that held my image of me no longer have their glue. A familiar newness comes when I am no longer holding on. It is the blessing of relinquishment. When I allow myself to enter fully, I know that I am held; the space has weight, the weight of safety, of love. I am sustained and enriched. I have entered The Field, the ground where everything connects. It is delicious.
When there, I am removed enough from ordinary reality to observe its frantic, pressing needs from a distance. Why not stay here? Isn’t this where I’ve wanted to arrive? Why let myself be beckoned by a sound or anxious flicker and forced back into this smaller, constricted container? I don’t fully know the answer to that question. For me, at this stage in my growth, this contemplative state is a way station, a respite, not a place I can permanently reside.
But upon each return to ordinary reality, I take note of what brought me back. It is often a fear that wants to be seen, wants to be integrated. The fear is always part of an old pattern I have built over time, an armor against the arrows of life. My old patterns don’t like to surrender, which feels like a kind of death. I feel a twinge of guilt, as if these fears are holding me back.
Not true. This is the process, this is the journey. My task is to welcome each piece of me that arises in fear and bring it to The Field. Again, and again, and again, as often as required, so that being in deep contemplative space does not only nourish, it heals.
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