Sacred Spaces

Today I lean into what is happening around me with a new openness to what it is. Now is the time to make everything around me a sacred space.

I notice I get short tempered, grouchy and just plain bitchy when I miss out on sleep, a proper diet and time to myself to meditate or exercise or just walk through the botanical garden in the park by my house and appreciate what is happening there. Realizing the sacred spaces around me is useful in making me a kinder, more tolerant human being.

A balanced physical body makes me less prone to the habitual fear response I fall into when I don't know in advance what is going to happen. We can never know what will happen in advance, and that is why there is a temptation to contract, become a control freak, and approach the world in a suspicious, worried, fearful way.

Fear is a shrinking response to stimuli perceived as outside and separate from the self. It is the direct result of an inaccurate perception of what is occurring and at heart it is the inaccurate sense that it is possible to be abandoned.

I wonder what or who we think will forsake us: our parents, friends, God. There is an inaccurate sense that we can be abandoned by the truth of being, and that fear is by definition mistaken. Our being is ordained by all that already is and all that will be as evidenced by its very existence.

We turn into fear out of habit and ignorance. I'm not a scientist, but I bet there's a habitual misfiring of neurons in our brain that causes the fear response. The more it happens, the more we respond inappropriately and defensively to our surroundings. And that is when we misrepresent who we are, the reality of our own being. Delusion begets delusion out of habit. The awareness - the acknowledgement of divinity of being, all being, will alleviate prior imbalances and misperceptions.

So, it's important for me to eat nutritious foods, rest as required, and visit places of natural beauty like the garden by my house. When I am clear and rested I will be prepared, open to acknowledge the Truth.

http://www.manhattanbeachbotanicalgarden.org/ http://www.manhattanbeachbotanicalgarden.org/