The Meadow of Your Being

Imagine a beautiful meadow where there is a rainbow of wildflowers, along with the heart-opening music of birds. The smells of the heather and the pristine beauty of the surrounding mountains all bring forth a deep sense of peace. In this meadow, everything is energy, everything flows and is at peace. The same is true for you. You may have no memories of this kind of well-being but there was a time when you were very young where there were no thoughts in your head. Past and future had no meaning for you, so this moment was all there was. Because you weren’t searching for a better state, you were open to it – all of it – and life was okay exactly as it was. Even when there was pain and discomfort, you fully experienced it rather than turning it into a problem in your mind. But, as you grew up, you were conditioned to be afraid of life and you lost sight of the beautiful meadow of your being.   

There are five core qualities (flow, spaciousness, light, love, and stillness/peace) that are the essence of the meadow of your being and as you learn how to open into life, you will live from these qualities. They have always been with you, but you haven’t noticed them because you have been too busy living inside your mind.   

1. Flow 

In the great circle of life, flow shows up in the dance of day and night and the changes from one season into the next. Death is also a part of this flow. Life arises out of mystery, expressing itself in an amazing variety of forms, and each and every one will dissolve back into mystery. Even the invisible world flows. Light shows up as waves of energy, each color being a different frequency. Sound is simply waves of vibration touching your eardrum.  

The only thing in all of creation that doesn’t flow is the human ego. It has declared that there is a me in here and then there is life out there. It believes itself to be separate from the flow of life and believes that its job is to control it. It lives from fixed positions – good/bad; right/wrong; liking/disliking. As long as you see yourself as separate, you will view life as a potential threat and will withdraw from its flow. 

2. Spaciousness  

If you look carefully, you will see that life loves space. Right now, you are sitting on a planet that is dancing through vast oceans of space and it is 24,000,000,000,000 miles to the closest star. Then there are stars that are billions of times farther away than that! Can you even begin to imagine how much space that is? And this is all happening in a universe that seems to have no end. 

When lost in your thoughts, you live in the tight and narrow space of your mind. When you are open to this moment, spaciousness permeates your body, mind and heart. This is your natural state that can be accessed no matter what is happening in your life. To live from spaciousness doesn’t mean that you will want to disengage from your life. It means that you won’t be fighting with it anymore.  

3. Light 

As you reconnect with space and flow, you can know the third aspect of your being which is light. In the Creation story at the very beginning of the Bible, it says, “And God said, let there be light!” And according to the Book of Genesis, this statement comes before the creation of the sun and stars. We think of light as coming from the sun, but the leading edge of science is now saying that everything is made out of light. David Bohm, the grandfather of quantum physics, once said that matter is just frozen light!  

You have so much energy within you that wants to be let out of the prison of your struggling mind so it can expand and dance, and when energy is free to flow, it shines. This is what you are hungry for – your own radiance.  There is no accident that when a great burden has been lifted or you feel very happy, you oftentimes say, “I feel so light!” It is also no coincidence that the word delight means ‘of light’!  

4. Love 

When you rediscover the spaciousness of being open again to the great flow of life, feeling energy moving through you rather than trying to control it, you begin to recognize that the word that best describes this movement of light is love. There is great truth in the song title – Love Makes the World Go ‘Round.  It not only makes it go around, but it permeates absolutely everything.  

Physicist Brian Swimme calls this essence at the heart of life ‘allurement.’ This force of attraction can be seen from the very beginning of our universe. The ‘stuff’ that arose out of the Big Bang followed the call of attraction and came together into communities we call atoms. The next step happened when these atoms were drawn together into communities called molecules. Then molecules were so attracted to one another they came together into communities called cells, and then cells followed the call of allurement and became multi-cell beings.  

This urge to connect at the heart of life is all about love. The great mystics of the world have all agreed that when you come out of your struggling mind, what you recognize and fully become is love.  And it is this love, this allurement, this urge to connect, that brings all things together, whether it is subatomic particles or human beings or solar systems. What would happen if you recognized that the love you long for is right here, right now? What would happen if you realized that love is not something you need to find – it is who you already are? 

5. Stillness 

Look out at the world and see this dance of form that has been going on for eons – things arising and passing away – mosquitoes, dinosaurs, your great grandparents, mountains and even stars. Everything in this dance of life appears and then eventually disappears. This constant movement of life extends all the way out to the dance of galaxies and all the way within to electrons dancing around the nucleus of every single atom of your body.  

But that is only half of it. All this movement arises out of a vast stillness, a stillness that births all the varied forms of life. This stillness is also within you. Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now says, “Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness.” Yet most people know nothing of this stillness within. They have been conditioned not to listen. Instead, they are so busy running here and there that it is almost impossible for them to simply become quiet, allowing their thoughts to settle, so that they can recognize this stillness and be nourished by its presence. It is possible, even in the midst of a busy life, to rest in stillness, which will nourish you to your core.   

As you drink in these five qualities that are at the core of who you truly are, it is important to recognize that they are here with you right now! You may not notice them, but they are always with you no matter what is happening in your life. As you see through your struggling mind, you not only begin to recognize these qualities, but also live from them, and you are then able to partner with the wisdom of life.