Journey to the Mountain of Being 3

This third excerpt from my new book A Journey to the Mountain of Being happens after she has sprained her ankle and has had to camp beside a mountain brook to give her ankle a rest.  (See last two blogs for the previous excerpts)

“When she wakes up the next morning, her ankle is throbbing and has turned all sorts of fantastic shades of blues and purples. She knows that she needs to rest it for a few days but her mind mumbles and grumbles, attached to its idea of how this day should unfold. She Is somewhat amazed at how upset her mind is, even with all the exploration she has been doing. So, she closes her eyes and tries to be curious about what’s going on inside of her. But there is just resistance. She tries all the skills she has used before to get below the agitation of struggle, but resistance is having nothing to do with this. Everything feels gray inside, tinged with the exasperation of trying to have a different experience.

Then in a flash, she remembers the art of welcoming. “My slippery mind is trying again to be in a particular place rather than me just being with what is,” her awareness says! So, she allows a few long slow out-breaths and welcomes the resistance. “You are allowed to be here too!” As soon as the gray resistance feels seen and heard, it steps aside and she is immediately in awareness again, seeing rather than being lost in the upsets of her mind.  Not getting caught in the twisted alleys of her reactive mind, she again is fully with what life is offering, a sprained ankle, bowing to it as her teacher.

She realizes the main reason her mind was so resistant is that it really dislikes the discomfort of her ankle.  Watching her mind, she sees it perceives this as a problem, something that shouldn’t be here and must be fixed.  But she has watched her mind enough to know that to frame it in that way only gets her more deeply enmeshed in the world of her mind.  Rather than struggling with her ankle, she perceives it as a request for attention and care, a request for her heart.  So, she sends caring compassion to her ankle, and almost immediately, it feels better.

When she opens her eyes again, a gathering of flowers on the other side of the brook captures her attention and she is absolutely stunned by the variety of their expressions. She did recognize the flowers that filled the meadow, but she hadn’t slowed down enough to really see them. She realizes this is one of the gifts this sore ankle is giving her, to slow down so she can receive the magnificence all around her.

As she opens to the truth that she is alive, right here, right now, she uses the flowers to invite her attention to be fully here. She is delighted with all the shapes, sizes, and colors, and their beauty is so astounding she can hardly let it all in. She is so deeply moved by this exuberant expression of life, that she leans back to get a magnifying glass out of her pack and bends over to look more deeply at the face of a purple coneflower. She is not only captured by its beauty but by the truth that a whole universe exists in this flower as William Blake so beautifully said.

Instantly she realizes this kind of beauty is all over the planet. Flowers show up in deserts, polar regions, rainforests, bodies of water, home gardens, grasslands, farmlands, and even in the sea.  She finally understands that throughout her entire existence, life has been trying to show her the beauty at the heart of life through the exquisite expression of flowers and she bows in gratitude to the meadow all around her.

She then gathers some of the wildflowers and weaves them into her hair, reminding herself that the beauty she sees in them is also in her. This is a radical shift in how she used to see herself for she was conditioned to look at what was not okay rather than her natural okayness. She knows she isn’t a perfect human being, for there is no such thing but she is perfectly imperfect. These flowers are reminding her to celebrate her own unique blending of dark and light, so she can open into the innate goodness that she is, living from the wisdom of her awake heart.

With great surprise she sees a hummingbird darting from one flower to another on the other side of the brook, sipping their nectar.  Hummingbirds have shown up at pivotal points in her life and for her, they remind her of joy, for her whole body is dancing in delight to be in the presence of this precious little being.  They are also the only bird that can fly in any direction, and she appreciates this is what she is learning to do, to be spontaneously movable no matter what shows up in her life.

Then much to her amazement the hummingbird, with light bouncing off its iridescent feathers, comes right to her and drinks from a flower on her head. Tears of joy trickle out of her eyes as she feels the hummingbird’s wings send tiny puffs of wind across her face.

Any armoring left around her heart falls away, setting free the truth that at her essence she is Love. Rather than being flawed, she is lovable exactly as she is. Rather than being broken, she is an unbreakable human being, with oceans of inner strength she is beginning to tap into. She is not sinful nor unredeemable. Instead, she is a unique expression of life, completely lovable as she is. She is a process made out of dark and light constantly being reborn, getting closer and closer to realizing she matters and is beloved by life.”