The Transcendent Now

Last night my family and I watched as Dana Vollmer of the US Olympic Women's Swim Team broke the world record as she swam the 100-meter butterfly.  It appeared as if she defied the standard laws of physics, moving beyond the ordinary "rules" of time and space.  The three of us sat watching in awe, managing to utter one collective "wow" when she took the gold.

So often we see ourselves as bound by what is temporal. Time and space - the two key components of our material world keep us in check, and we accept our limits in what looks like a short, transitory life.  But what if there were a choice?  What if by simply realizing the choice existed we could break out of the old molds of habit and into a larger, all encompassing field of pure energy?   From this new perspective of who and where we are, we could deliberately choose to opt out of suffering - to transcend time and space.

 

 

It's dawning on me that there aren't "lines of energy" running in five straight paths like a starfish from bodies moving in a suspended, gravity-bound time line. The lines only exist in the temporal - time and space as we choose to be bound.  The puppet strings holding us in place are mental constructs we've chosen to use as restraints on what we are doing.

Instead, if we chose to expand beyond our current boundaries our energy would be all encompassing and unlimited. It would be super charged. Instead of acting like temporal beings suspended in space, this energy would reveal that we are transcendent.  We could use it to heal...

In Praise of Feathered Pipe Ranch

There is a place that no one would dream or believe is real - a place of intense beauty and unparalleled power.  The power reveals itself in rumblings: the growl of a bear; unexpected earthquakes; storms so pounding they rip through eternity and hold time hostage.

In this place healing is common place, and divas dance with angels through the aspen trees.  It is the place where I fell in love.  Only later did I realize it was not with a person, but the place itself. 

Now we stand at a precipice - we will either fall as never before or soar beyond all possibility to redemption.   The here is the all.  Everything else is of no consequence.  I'm letting that be my mantra.  The here is the all, the all, the all...

I only visited Feathered Pipe Ranch for a couple nights this time, but here are two photographs from the place that always transforms my heart.

The Main Character is You

When we allow ourselves to to acknowledge the love that constitutes our being, we realize our own largess.  Like the Grinch whose heart grows three sizes in a day, we find ourselves overflowing with gratitude toward everyone and everything around us.  Sometimes our feelings seem ineffable - we have no idea how to express what feels like an erupting volcano of joy that hits all of sudden.

There are different triggers for this bliss; for me it's settling in to my tent in Montana, but we could be set off by anything - something as seemingly trivial as a fresh raspberry picked from the garden can turn on the joy factor.   It's fun when bliss hits.  Meditation is key.  If more people knew its power they'd be lining up at yoga studios to learn how to do it.

It's a matter of being quiet in the overlap, of learning to sink into what's happening beyond the daily business of moving about and getting chores done.  When we meditate we learn to engender that overlap without too much fuss.  We learn to sit still in the emptiness that is everything.

Then we can become the main character, the centrifugal force for our own joy.  There is a sense of being all places in an instant: curled up on my sofa at home typing; in the main yoga room, and out in the woods all at once.  We are here, there, everywhere in synergistic burst of awakening.

It all boils down to energy - the expansion and the contraction of ourselves.  Let's go for the expansion now - let's hit the largess of everything.

The Power of Two

Two is a magic number.  I used to feel that it was inconsequential - my own "little" relationships with one other person.  What does it really matter to the universe if I am in love, if my daughter and I sit and have a heartfelt conversation spread out with our cats at the end of the day, if I wave at a neighbor? 

But today I'm remembering that classic metaphor of a pebble in a pond, how one bit of movement eventually reverberates throughout the entire pond.  I haven't posted here in a while.  Health issues have gotten in the way, the business of daily life, and an erroneous sense that it may not matter much - I should spend my time working on the next publishable book - like these blogs don't count as publication.  Maybe only one other person is reading them.

It only takes two - though.  Me and one other reader, two people in an interaction to make a synergistic change in the structure of what is happening everywhere.  Two people can stir the pot.  Two hearts beating love can change infinity. 

Two is enough.  Two is all we need to turn pain into joy.  Two is expansive.

(The picture is of artist Pat Olchefski-Winston and my teacher Erich Schiffmann in the yoga room in Montana.)