This post started as one genre and ended as another. Maybe I can too.
Last week I wrote about a meditation I’ve been doing lately. This week I discovered a much shorter version that’s become possible now that the images from the first one are in my muscle memory (soul memory? psyche memory?). It’s just a deep breath. As I breathe in, my breath itself is what I visualize collecting all those parts of me that get spread so far away. As I breathe out, I visualize my breath creating an invisible skin that keeps me all here, all present in this moment.
As I write this, and even as I physically do the meditation, I’m aware that this kind of centering isn’t original to me at all. I’m aware that people of many religions and/or lacks thereof do these sorts of things, and that there are books written and lectures given and CDs recorded and workshops offered and meditation centers founded all around them. They aren’t new.
Somewhere along the way, though, I became tired of trying to find God and find peace and find community and ways of waking all the parts of me up by studying what everyone else does toward such ends. My studies became a way of saying to myself over and over again, you’re not enough, you can’t begin until you have some coherent thing figured out from all the pieces, you need something more. Something someone else has. I’m all for apprenticeship, and think there’s Life to be found in many forms of imitation, but at this point I need a healthy dose of trying things out “on my own.” I put that in quotes because what I really mean is playing with what’s already gone into me (and I’ve poured in quite a lot) and coming up with practices that feel honest, and make some sort of sense to me, even if only to my gut. Things that say to me and whoever else is listening: this is who I am, and these are things that make me feel thankful or peaceful or connected to something bigger. And all of it’s enough.
The day that I get certain voices out of my head, voices of people I love, but who have strong opinions about what the “right” way to be spiritual is, the right way to do religion, is the day I will rise up from this earth of nettles and legs made lame from thick constraints and feel my wings go soaring. Feel wind beneath them, and like Spirit is the one blowing it, and hear her singing while she blows, “Fly, dear soul! Become the woman you were meant to be!”