I'm diving back into the archives to revive another blog from the past. I wrote this one in 2015 as I reflected on my own life journey and the incredible gift that meditation was for me in shifting my relationship with myself.
I often see people in private practice who are at wits end, wanting help but feeling that they did not necessarily get tangible benefits from traditional therapeutic avenues. And so of course they ask, "Why iRest?" It's something I've pondered as well: "What is it about it that makes it so potent, and why has it made such a difference to so many people?" To answer that , we have to dig a little deeper.
One of the tenets of tantric meditation is that everything in life is a pointer to our home ground of presence. It's a basic, but all too often forgotten aspect of our being: presence is simply what we are at heart. It is both personally felt, and simultaneously impersonal. That is, we experience it in our body, but it's not something we own, or control, or deserve, or somehow not deserve. It just IS.
Feeling into this presence again after a lifetime of turning away from it is the ultimate show stopper. The mind cannot comprehend the magnitude of it. All we can do is feel into it and recognise that it is our most primal, indivisible, magnificent essence. And this is what we re-connect with in practice, again and again. The magic is in how iRest helps us recognise the inherent wholeness of what we have always been, and will always be, no matter what. Even if my life stays exactly the same, this recognition in and of itself is earth shifting.
Remembering and forgetting this is part of our human experience. The more we forget, the farther from centre we feel and this is when issues like depression, anxiety, and burn out might become part of our everyday life. It reminds me of what novelist and poet Wendell Berry wrote:
"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
We always had to fall apart so that we would make this descent into ourselves and realise we were never broken.
Now back to the original post....
Rumi asked, "And you, when will you begin that long journey into yourself?" Notice how he asked "when", so it was not a question of "if", rather a certainty that the day eventually comes when we all start to wonder "Is this it - is this what my life is about, or was meant to be?"
This, to me, is the most pivotal and beautiful moment in life because it's when authentic living begins. That knife-edge point in life when there is so much suffering, so much discontent, so much about the way we're living that is un-centred that we might finally be motivated to begin the migration home - finding centre. This is when life begins to be lived on purpose.
Birds, seemingly miraculously, know where to fly during migration. North American monarch butterflies make their way over thousands of kilometres from the US and Canada to Mexico, somehow knowing where to go even though they've never been there before.
Like all living things, we know when we're on course too. Like the flower and the tree, we know where the sunlight is. Like the bird, we know when we're on point in what often feels like a journey in life. And we know because the body tells us so. That constriction, that depression or despair, the feeling of heaviness that lingers day after day - they're body flares, an internal sos signalling when we're off course.
But despite getting lost awhile, haven't you been on the path to centre all along? Once you start this explorative journey into yourself - finding the essence of your Self - you realise that there never was anywhere to go at all. Right here is everything. Right here is home. Right here, in the essence of each moment, is the perfection of what you already are. Like the expression goes, "Everywhere you go, there you are."
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