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Fearlessness, Interconnection, and Essence
One of my Teachers tells me,
"If we breathe together we are alive together. Exploring our equal, reciprocal connections with other creatures helps us go beyond our own skin, beyond our own ego, beyond our own self centeredness. What if lizard, owl, tree, and you are simply different beings cohabiting the beautiful earth? What if your power and size pose no threat, create no fear? When we walk in and inhabit an alive, pulsing universe, beauty is everywhere."
A few days later, I am sitting outside in the shade, feet propped on a chair, computer on my lap, staring at the trees. I am very still, just breathing in the summer air. A Bewick's Wren (the one with a white eye stripe) lands on the chair pad next to my right foot. He walks under both feet and alongside my left leg. Then he hops to a nearby table, and looks like he's about to land on me! Instead, he flies across my lap and into the bushes.
I am stunned: this is so like the Galapagos, where nesting Blue-Footed Boobies, nursing Sea Lions, and mating Waved Albatross pay no attention to humans. The Galapagos Islands (created by shield volcanoes at the junction of the South Ameerican and Nazca plates in the Pacific Ocean, the source of Darwin's origin of the species, and a part of Ecuador since 1832) are a place of no fear. Creatures are alert to predators (baby Marine Iguanas hang out in rock crevices with adults surrounding them to minimize capture by snakes, for example) and otherwise seemingly oblivious of each other. They nest, mate, and rest in amazing proximity (see photo link). Magnificent Frigatebirds, Flightless Cormorants, and Penguins stand or swim next to us humans as if we were another like them. And we are!
Fearlessness
The fearlessness is extraordinary, given the history. Beginning in the 1600's, pirates, whalers, and explorers came to the islands to collect giant tortoises for meat, decimating the population of 250,000 down to 3,000. The tortoises were carried in the ship holds, upside down and without food or water, for months. Beginning in 1959, when the National Park was established, a different evolution began: the large land and marine preserves allowed all creatures to live protected from most human destructiveness. In 2008, The Ecuadorian Constitution granted inalienable rights to nature, the first nation in the world to do so! (In a different paradigm, the US Constitution has granted corporations the same rights as individuals). Nature, says one passage, "has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution."
Visitors to Galapagos get to experience this regeneration and evolution in total calm and ease, where no creatures are afraid of us. I am still amazed and grateful for my opportunity. What if our whole evolution as a species moves in this direction? What if there were no fear?
Interconnection
In one of my meditations recently, nine billion humans are meditating with me. I feel us connected as one heart, a shining web of filaments between us. You and I and everyone are part of this web!
When I came out of this meditation, I thought, "the world population is only seven billion. Have I meditated into a future where all humans will experience such connection? Have I meditated into a parallel dimension of right now?
When the felt sense of vast connection of all nine billion of us returns in subsequent meditations, I understand this is a visionary experience that feeds my soul. It doesn't matter if it is this dimension or another: our peaceful heart connections are what nourish us and help us continue our work - as parents, lightworkers, healers, humans struggling to live honorable lives.
Essence
I believe that the practice of feeling and being our essence is essential to visions of our interconnection.
When I first began searching for my essence, I experienced it as a small light inside. If I worked at it, I could expand and expand my light essence. Yet each day I had to start over again. I don't think this is true for everyone: some people have a strong sense of essence and can tap into it all day long. For me, though, there was a long process of feeding it, believing it, and exploring how it felt to live from my essence. After ten years of practice, I understand essence as one heart, one light, one field.
Here are a few essence meditations that work well for me:
I. Align Body and Spirit
Greet the four directions, create sacred space, call in helpers and Teachers, calm the body with breath and movement: do whatever works to bring mind body and spirit totally into the present, with no peripheral thoughts, worries, or errands in mind. Feel your essence. Rest in this state of being.
II. Inner Light
Rest your eyes. Feel your inner light. Feel that light in your heart. Feel that light in all your cells. Feel your light expanding into your aura, pushing out the edges so you take up your full space in the world. Feel your light expanding to your loved ones, to your friends, to your circles. Notice the nondivisiveness of this light. Expand your light to the earth, and to the cosmos. Rest here.
III. Essence
Feel your heart light. Feel your heart connection with your loved ones: just essential love, no judgments. Feel your heart connection to your power animals, guides, and spiritual teachers. Feel the heart light connecting all of you. Rest in the sweetness of this heart light. Keep expanding your heart light, to your circles, your community, your coworkers, those in the world who are struggling, the earth. If you get stuck on someone who isn't open hearted, stop. Return to your essence, and find your full heart light again. Feed yourself with other full hearts. Breathe into this until you can allow the difficult ones.
IV. Group Heart
If you have a group of peers you work with, try this together. Feel the group as one heart. Sink into the light of that one heart. Feel the group heart as essential light, essential spirit. Be aware of the force and power of the group, one heart, one light, and the goodness of it. Let that goodness and light radiate out to wherever it will. The natural impulse of goodness is to extend; let it extend. Feel the joy in this, the healing power. Feel the extension of light from the groups' one heart to cover the earth, in joy and goodness. Let the light extend around the earth, penetrate it, and fill it.
As the Old Ones say, "Juicing up our hearts together is the most joyful, comforting thing we do." May we all meet together in our radiant hearts!
Meg Beeler
Earth Caretakers
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"Imagine dormant neurons in a brain, flashing into life and connecting billions of times over until the entire mind is illuminated, totally beaming with light - that is where we are going as a civilization." -- Szusan Wong
We are going to harmonize the Earth and solar system with our unified consciousness, because now we are awake enough to do so. We will not need catastrophe to evolve further. --Aluna Joy
Our beliefs have the power to change the flow of events in the universe-literally to interrupt and redirect time, matter, and space, and the events that occur within them. " -- Gregg Braden
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