Are You Awake?

Hello my friends. Today is Day 9 of my Restorative Retreat. I am so happy and grateful that I can stay here for a while and not feel like I have to get up and go anywhere else for the time being. When it feels right and I feel ready and well rested I will take a ride up to RI and get some more of my stuff out of storage but I am not making a plan other than to pay attention and follow my guidance on that.

I have been absorbed in sound and music in various forms. I’ve spent quite a bit of time practicing the piano and playing the guitar, trying to break out and explore new possibilities rather than just sticking with what I know- which Is easy to do on the piano because I don’t know much at all other than the notes and basic scales. I do understand the basics of creating chords also so I have a little bit of very basic foundational material to work with.

… And… some time has elapsed since I wrote the above- I am now on day 13 of my stay-at-home retreat! I have completed a painting (see below!), created several very simple short riffs on the piano, painted a couple of stools for the breakfast bar in my kitchen, made homemade pizza (and had Mahesh & Mukta over to help me eat them), explored double drop D tuning on the guitar, taken a two-hour online yoga class on the day of the most recent full moon and been working on whitening the bones of a turtle skeleton and shell found down by the pond on the property where I live. I’ve also made a few short meditation videos intended basically to help my friends end their evening on a good note. I spent hours one day going through pictures from the Sound Body Wholistic Health Center- my old sound healing center in St. Pete- just to pick out a new cover photo for the Facebook page for the center. And I’ve watched a whole bunch of episodes of “Doctor, Doctor” on Amazon Prime- AKA “The Heart Guy”!

I have several plants that Mahesh and Mukta gave me waiting to be planted. Cannas and kalanchoe… and a rosemary plant that I bought at the market. My yard is very drab. Needs some new life for sure. It’s small but there’s plenty of room for some herbs and flowers to brighten things up. The truth is I’ve been nervous about digging around too much in the yard because the one day I did in the spring I was introduced to chiggers- not fun!

Last night before bed I had a teaspoon of honey with cannabis extract in it. It is supposed to help with sleep. It didn’t- in fact it had the opposite effect. I was up til somewhere around 5 a.m. At a certain point it occurred to me that perhaps I should focus on “waking up” rather than going to sleep. I am fascinated by my dream state… isn’t my “waking state” equally as important, if not more so? And what does it mean to be awake? So I picked up Francis Lucille’s book, The Perfume of Silence.

I have only just started it but I can pretty comfortably say that it is on the nature of consciousness and non-dual reality. In response to a question in the beginning of the book he uses the sound of birds and ambient outdoor sounds as a reference point. He says, “Ask yourself, ‘Where do they appear?’ If the answer is that the bird is singing 50 feet from here, see that this is not actually your experience, that it is a concept. The actual experience of the sound is happening at a zero distance from you, not 50 feet away. It is not happening there but rather here, always. Everything is always happening here and now.”

Immediately I tuned into the sound of the crickets “outside” and suddenly felt that i was floating in a sea of consciousness. Everything that “seems” to be happening to me and around me is happening within the consciousness of I AM. I picked up my journal long enough to write “There is no separation between ‘I’ and my experience of the world around me- around the body I seem to inhabit. I am in fact inhabiting everything I seem to come into contact with.” And then drifted back out into the sea of consciousness…

Gratitude

I woke up extremely conscious of the passage of time yesterday and am feeling directed to make better use of it. There is no shortage of it- as well as the opportunity to spend a lot of said time in solitude. My intention this winter was to focus on immersing myself in the experience and study of sound and its effects in various forms. Of course that has been my path for a very long time but there is an opportunity right now since there is no gathering in groups and I am in a new place and not particularly inclined to promote private sessions right now until the spread of Covid begins to subside.

To that end I have joined a 7-day mantra practice with Jai Uttal as well as a 40-day kundalini yoga practice which begins on January 4. Those are the formal practices I am engaging in. Then there are my personal practices. I am definitely exploring the effects of Richway’s BioAcoustic Mat since I do not have my Soundweaver here. I haven’t been using it as often as I could but that is going to change too! I am using it with the BioMat on top which is a great combination. Yesterday I gave myself a 50-minute session while doing long distant healing for a friend at the same time. The music I used was Nawang Khechog and Carlos Nakai’s recording “Winds of Devotion” which is so beautiful and one that I have always found to be very powerful and effective on the Soundweaver.

Today I went for a beautiful walk in the woods. I found myself filled with deep gratitude… gratitude for time, for beauty, for the experience of being in a body where- because of the apparent separation- we have the gift of appreciation, for my teachers- past and present, known and unknown, for my ancestors, for my family, my parents, my siblings, my children and grandchildren, for all the masters who have walked the earth, for all that is past and all that is to come. It was an endless, expansive and totally joyful experience. From gratitude I moved into prayer. i walked and I prayed and I prayed and i walked. The prayer became the simple mantra from Dr. Emoto, “I love you, I thank you, I respect you.” As I looked at the trees, the water, the ferns, the rocks, the sky, felt the air on my skin, heard the sounds of the running water, thought about the molecules, atoms and particles that all matter is composed of… “I love you, I thank you, I respect you.” And myself, a hand on my heart “I love you”, joined by my other hand on my heart “I thank you”, and one hand then raised to my third eye “I respect you”. Over and over, tears streaming down my face.

I love you.
I thank you.
I respect you.

Higher Ground

So, election 2016 is over. Donald Trump has been elected to be the next president of the United States. This has been painful... brutal in fact. Sad, disheartening and depressing for so many of us. I stayed up late last night watching the results praying for a miracle and that the tide would finally turn in Hillary's favor. It did not. Finally I went to bed and got to sleep after 3 a.m.

When I woke up this morning I was so depressed that I pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep. This is where I tell you that I do not get depressed. I may get sad, bummed out, disheartened, disillusioned, or angry- but depressed? No. Except today. And I could feel in my consciousness the real possibility to spiral down and hang out there. It didn't feel like a good option.

I have given the looming possibility of Donald Trump as our next president a lot of thought over the last few weeks. I can say that my heart has been having palpitations quite a bit lately. I have consumed unusual amounts of Rescue Remedy. I have said on numerous occasions that if he is elected I would have to cash in my savings and leave the country.

Looking back over the last few weeks and months, I was more than a little concerned. I was downright afraid of the possibility of this country being "run" by a loose cannon- a man who is a bigot, a racist and a misogynist with no political experience and a serious and dangerous personality disorder. (I still don't even understand how he got in the running but here we are.)

Over the last few days, as Election Day approached, I began to think more and more about what it would mean and what it would signify if Hillary made it to the White House as the first female president. The way I saw it energetically, is that she represented another paradigm shift. Having an African-American president for the last 8 years was huge, and this was the next step in a real shift in consciousness for the American people and ultimately for humanity. Donald Trump represented the ego digging in and shouting, No! We will not allow you to wake up! You belong to me! Whenever we are going through a major spiritual awakening the ego tends to get very loud and ugly and in our face. Donald Trump wasn't just representing the old paradigm- his consciousness is neanderthal! Club the woman and drag her into the cave by her hair- the Fred Flintstone Method, as one friend said.

It was a no-brainer in the end. Of course there were enough of us who were conscious and not buying into the whole fear-based thought system that he was presenting. Ultimately Hillary was a shoo-in.

Not.

So, the first thing I had to get past was the idea of leaving. That was pretty clear. Fuck you Donald Trump. You may be a bully but you are not going to push me away. I'm not going anywhere. But I'm sad, I'm heartbroken, I'm depressed, I don't even want to get out of bed.

Okay, meditate. Change your mind. As A Course in Miracles says, "I am not a victim of the world I see." And I saw that Donald Trump is now the catalyst for us to be the change we want to see. All those tools that we, who have chosen awakening as our path and truth as our goal, have accumulated over the years, now we have to put our tools to work. I saw that I have become complacent. And to some degree Donald trump reflects that complacency rather than the ideals of the best and highest good (unless of course you like him). So I have to own up to my complacency- and unless I want to be swallowed up by my own sadness I now have to put all these tools that I have gathered throughout my lifetime to work.

As I was processing all this the phrase "higher ground" kept coming into my mind- that I had to lift myself up- which brought to mind the great Stevie Wonder song. I am adopting this as my anthem for as long as I need it- until whatever the next one is- or until I reach the higher ground!