Sit quietly and listen to the flow of your heart, to how it slows down and beats calmly when you tell it to go into the flow of life, into the flow of the calm air around you, and how it begins to hold itself in a steady state of persistent peacefulness. Let it be as it is. Without tension or intention, just be with the sound of your heart.
How can you love yourself when you are so imperfect? How can you possibly grow when you fail so often? How can you expect miracles when you are so caught in mundane worldly habits?
Begin by letting go of those questions, those judgments, those ideas of self. You are whole and perfect as you are. You are where you are right now, and that is perfect.
Let your mind be still, your inner critic quiet for just a moment as you reach for something new. Let your mind relax into not doing. Let your heart open and your innocence ask for guidance. In your innocence you are perfect.
In this state of perfect innocence allow your breath to be easy and natural. Let it just do its magic. See how magical you are? Your breath shows you this. Where does it come from and how does it keep on flowing? That is the magic of you.
Allow your eyes to soften their gaze, your muscles to relax, your thoughts to cease. Just be with each calm and slow breath, with each beat of your heart, with each soft puff of air as it enters and leaves your nostrils. Let yourself sit quietly with the calm and perfect self that you are in this moment. Nothing else matters.
As you sit with your perfect self, begin to allow a new idea to enter your mind: I am perfect. I am perfect. I am perfect.
Each day you are the perfect person to live the life you are in, the perfect self for the day. There is no need to be anyone else. Just be yourself. As you wake up each morning state your intention: I am perfect today as I am.
Allow your body, your mind, your spirit to be in the flow of the day as it comes, whatever comes. Without struggle address what comes up, because that is what is perfect for the day. There is no need to resist, to fight or to be angry. Just be with what is. This is the day I am granted and it is perfect.
Let your perfect day be fulfilled in the most perfect way. Accept it with open arms and heart: it is the perfect day for what needs to be done and for what I need to learn. Today is perfect.
Notice how calm you become as you ponder taking this attitude to each day. Come what may, I am okay! Come what may, I am okay!
May you be calm. May you be safe. May you be peaceful. May you be happy.
How does the body speak to you? The body also has its own unique ways of communication. You may feel distress or pain in a certain region of the body, signaling something to be aware of. You may hear gurgling sounds that you will have to decipher. You may feel your blood pressure is too high or your pulse is racing. These are all signs from your body to pay attention, that something needs attention, that perhaps some habit needs to change. You may feel tension, anxiety or chronic stress. These are all signs from your body that changes may be called for in your life. Likewise, feelings of calmness, relaxation, peacefulness signal to you that your body is happy, that it likes what you are doing. Feelings of sadness, tiredness, despair signal that there is emotional disruption happening within the body and that it’s time to get back to those other good feelings of calmness, relaxation, and peacefulness. Over time you will learn that your body is probably talking to you all the time, just as your heart is.
Up from the depths come pearls of wisdom… -Hudson River Brick wrapping by Maggie R.
In a dream, I am swimming across the Hudson River, beneath the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. As I swim along, I reach up and gather thousands of fishing lines, thin filaments that originate from the top of the bridge and hang down to the water. No one is now fishing from above, these are the remnants of past efforts.
When I gather, in one hand, enough entwined lines to form a thick rope, I use it to propel me forward. Then I let go of it and begin gathering new lines. I awaken before reaching the Kingston shore.
Crossing the river is a powerful archetypal symbol of significant Completion, be it with a stage of life, a relationship, a passionate obsession or a dominant attitude. To truly complete, we must be ready to let go of the solid ground we have habitually walked upon, as we venture forward into the unknown of murky waters, replete with powerful tides and undercurrents of emotional uncertainty, before arriving at a new solid ground of knowing. Such is the perennial opus of human life.
Incidentally, the currents of the Hudson River are so powerful that they have claimed the lives of many a seasoned and professional swimmer. I associate those potentially fatal undercurrents with the state of the global energy of our time. We are dealing with volatile, unpredictable currents of energy that can exhaust one’s intent to stay afloat, or simply move forward.
The dream offers a technology to successfully traverse such chaotic times. The suggestion is to grasp and appreciatively weave together the thousands of attempts to spiritually advance. This processing and act of love can now provide the strength for a major advance.
One powerful association, for me personally, with fishing, is the act of remembering and interacting with dreams, messengers from the depths of the unconscious, or infinity, who nourish and share their pearls of wisdom, as they deliver needed guidance to the conscious mind.
As all who fish are well aware, patience and effort are required to successfully reel in the fish that is quite energetically capable of slipping back into the river. In practical terms, this means setting the intent to lucidly remember the dream and then record it immediately upon awakening, before the familiar thought of, “Oh, how could I forget this?” lulls us back into oblivion and lost dreams.
There is no actual waking-life fishing permitted on this bridge of my dream. The fishing lines presented are symbolic of countless attempts to align the efforts of waking life with the spiritual guidance from the depths. These are the many cycles of groundhog days we have endured to inch our way beyond our default habitual patterns.
In Buddhist tradition, this completion is emergence from a path of Avidya, which means ignorance, unwisdom or delusion. By suspending judgment we can see Avidya as a necessary stage of learning, whose cycles accrue to a broader awakening to the true nature of reality. We see the deeper picture and no longer need the support of older scaffolds of attachment. We can let go with love and compassion. The many strands of this journey, when fully entwined and grasped, thrust us forward into new life.
Completion requires us to not turn back. To move forward may require some sacrifice, but energetically we have fully explored and exhausted our attachment to our prior way of being. To look back at this point is to lose our fluidity and turn to stone. We no longer need to go there; it is done.
The many fishing lines also represent the efforts of our ancestors, whose knowledge is there to be grasped and consciously integrated. This is a major feature in the technology of advance in the water. By grasping and intertwining so many threads the strength is gained to propel forward. There is also the suggestion to stay collectively united with resonant beings who strengthen our resolve.
Inwardly, our greatest resource lies in the Divine Intelligence accessed in our subconscious minds. The subconscious is the storehouse of all memory and experience, the many fish brought up from the sea of human history.
As I write this blog, my subconscious immediately responds to my conscious mind’s deliberations with associations to vaster knowledge, both personal and collective. This interactive relationship between conscious thought and subconscious associative memory, personal or collective, is a constant creative interaction within and between our minds and bodies.
My subconscious brings to the surface several memories of frightful encounters with the undercurrents of the mighty Hudson River. I’m reminded of the I Ching, hexagram #63, After Completion, depicting the river being successfully crossed. Psychological references to the island in the ocean as ego, in its relation to the greater collective unconscious of humankind, flood my mind.
Aside from the powerful ability of the subconscious mind to miraculously manifest desired change, is this automatic ability to constantly interact with the conscious mind by presenting a treasure trove of timeless knowledge, accrued through evolutionary history.
Of course, it remains for the conscious mind to weave or process these associations in such a way that they provide the solution to the dilemmas and questions we face.
We can quite directly ask the subconscious a question before sleep that will spin its strands of knowledge into the dream we are invited to participate in.
And finally, we can retrieve those dreams, as I have done here, and deepen our ability to successfully navigate our lives, and the troubled waters of our time.
So how does the heart speak? It will vary from person to person. You might hear your heart speak in words, in pictures, or in abstract symbols. You might hear it reverberate through nature, in the natural world outside of you. You might receive messages from animals, from angels, from those you love and whom love you. You might even hear a direct message, loud and clear, a voice in your head. These are some of the ways that the heart may speak to you. But everyone is unique, and just how your heart speaks to you is also going to be unique. Stay open and available, and gently ask to be guided.
A guiding principle is to always pay attention to what is going on inside yourself, inside your heart, and inside your body. Though you may think that your heart and body are silent, this is not the case. They speak to you all the time in different and various ways that you can learn. Once you get used to how they speak to you it will be smooth sailing ahead, unless you forget this most important principle of guidance—that it is all within you.
