Stealth Blessings
Dear All,
There is a lot to overcome in any meditation or spiritual practice, and we tasted some of that yesterday.
We have to overcome our distractions, above all. That’s a big category, since anything that isn’t the desired focus is a distraction, including noises, bodily states, wandering thoughts, critical thoughts, smells, memories, and so on. Each time, even if it is thousands of times a minute, when we notice that the mind has wandered we return to the task at hand.
Please don’t be harsh with yourself about your wandering mind. There are ways to be light with it. Be grateful, for instance, that your mind has wandered because it means you have extra, untapped energy for your meditation. The energy that goes into that wandering is a diamond in the rough.
Yesterday we engaged in a kind of stealth-bomb of blessing for our country’s political situation.
We first established what Spangler calls Self Light. We allowed a column of pure light from “above” to cascade around us and through us. Then we allowed a column of green light from the center of the Earth to embrace us from “below.” These two light-columns met at our hearts, radiating a gold-green light all around each of us. That is Self-Light, unique to each person.
It is a visualization, of course, a way of inviting into view something that isn’t gold or green or light or in columns in the normal sense. The directions of the two energies also are not physical or geographical in the normal sense. What does it mean when blind Bartimaeus tells Christ he wants to “look up”?
Having established the capacity to generate Self-Light, renewed from the cosmos and from the Earth itself, we then imaginally placed ourselves in Washington, DC. People chose their own spot there: the Washington Monument, the White House, the Mall, the Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorials, the Vietnam Memorial. We generated Self-Light there, with the good will to bless the place. And at the ring of the bell, we each allowed our Self-Light to remain as a blessing in Washington, while we mentally returned to our seats in my office in Massachusetts, trusting that the offered light will be used wherever it can do good, as a gift of harmony, peace, or whatever quality is most needed.
Before and after, as so often, we oriented toward our “dead,” not trying to give to them or get from them, but simply performing an inward turning-toward, a directed but open glance.
To ground ourselves afterward, we made sure to embrace our bodies, minds, energies and spirits as refreshed by this generation of Self-Light, this gift freely given. We are not exhausted by an act of blessing, but rejuvenated and empowered.
Sandy mentioned that he kept thinking of the Aurora Borealis during our meditation. It is quite relevant: an interaction between solar winds and elements of the earth's atmosphere, the Aurora is a dawning Self-Light of the Earth itself.
During yesterday’s practice, several people noted their sense that the group as a whole was in Washington together, co-blessing the environs. Next week, we’ll consider more broadly who accompanies us in a generous act.
All blessings to all,
Michael
