Guiding Thought

I now invite, welcome, and receive the effects of Divine Love, and I am Truly grateful. I experience Divine Mind as I experience these effects, and Divine Presence confirms itself in my life, activities and affairs.

Sharing

Sometimes you only realize how tough something was once you get through it. Then, with a feeling of accomplishment or freedom or relief, you can then admit how hard you worked, how you stuck with it, how you overcame, survived, or “made it”.

The three examples that come to mind are:

• Going through an application or interview process and being selected
• Finishing high school, college, or earning a Ph.D.
• Leaving an abusive relationship. leaving any unhealthy relationship

This only comes to mind because now that we are in Round 4, I realize how hard Round 3 was. The “we” of Round 3 was virtually inaccessible to me. I was too steeped in “me” to think about “you” or “we”—and I apologize. I did the best I could with what I had, with “where I was”, but it was not nearly what I am capable of… I’m better now.

In some ways, the ease-or-difficulty of focusing on “we” is a barometer for me and where my mind-emotions are.

When I am high with Life, filled with Love and Joy, overflowing, and knowing my Oneness with ALL, focusing on “we” is SO easy. Of course you are included! I LOVE YOU! Why would I not want you to feel and know the beauty of Life and Love? ALL I WANT is for US to KNOW this JOY TOGETHER.

On the other hand, when I am steeped in my own self, when my emotions overwhelm me, when my body becomes painful and uncomfortable, when the minutia of daily life become stressful, I retract and constrict. I need to take care of myself. I feel like crap, how do I make it through this day? I can’t breathe, I’m being suffocated—survival dictates that I breathe before I can do anything else!

When I started writing this I was feeling a bit judgmental toward myself…just a bit (you can “hear” it when I said “I’m better now”—as though there was something wrong with what I had experienced, because I knew I was performing “less than” what I am capable of).

But now, through this reflection, I feel only that I am learning. This process is pointing something out, something I am now aware of, and something I can now pay attention to in a new way.

Much of the time I use words like, “expanding”, “growing”, “sharing”, “extending”, words that are BIG, and outward, and inclusive. But today, to describe how I felt during round three, I used words like, “retract” and “constrict”, words that decrease space, reduce involvement, exclude.

Do you see how I’m only going through a different part of the cycle? It’s all part of the process.

What’s more, I see the duality (“expansion” vs. “retraction”) in a new light, thanks to the book I mentioned yesterday:

To turn back from the multiplicity of relativity and return to our original unity we must center our awareness in that primal impulse to duality which is manifesting most objectively as the process of our physical inhaling and exhaling. These seemingly two movements are in reality one, inseparable from one another, and together are capable of leading us back to their – and our- source. Through our full attention focused on the entire process of inhalation and exhalation, we become immersed in the subtler levels of that alternating cycle, moving into deeper and deeper levels until we at last come to the originating point. Then transcending that dual movement, we regain our lost unity. By continual practice of that transcendence we will become established in that unity and freed forever from all forms of bondage. (Breath of Life, p. 8) http://ocoy.org/original-yoga/how-to-meditate/the-breath-of-life-the-practice-of-breath-meditation/

The quote frames “duality” as the inhale and exhale of the breath. But, as you well know, duality can be found pretty much anywhere in material reality. For my purposes, I am substituting my current experience of “expansion” vs. “restriction” as the duality to be aware of, to pay attention to. “We must center our awareness…in duality…which is manifesting…objectively”. Duality manifesting objectively shows us a path to return to our original unity. Wow. Thus, I can think of these two aspects of my process as “in reality one, inseparable from one another, and together capable of leading” me back to my source.

Everything I experience has the potential to lead me to Source, to “the originating point”. Everything is here to teach me transcendence, to lead me to awareness of Unity. Once we “arrive” at the point of Unity, our natural state, we will look back on this life of duality and wonder why we made it so hard.