I want to scream stillness from the rooftops!
It’s kind of a hard thing to do.
Over the last few months I have delved deeply into my meditation practice and discovered a place so beautiful, it is hard not to take the entire world with me, despite knowing everyone must make their own journey. Connecting with the Divine is, well, divine.
Every time my friends ask me how I am I tell them, I’m great because my spiritual life is so active and wonderful right now. No fine-thanks-how-are-you pass my lips. I invite them to join me, and hope I am more endearing than annoying. My impulse to share is so strong that I reread Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert so I could feel a cosmic connection with someone else who has been there, who goes there.
A quote from the sage, Kabir, in her memoir leapt out at me upon this reading:
All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
This is meditation:
Sitting on the cushion, allowing a place of stillness, and opening up to the ocean. It is hard to welcome what can swallow you whole, until you realize that you and it are a part of the same wholeness.
When I lived in Japan I used to sit alone on the docks at night. Thinking, and then not thinking. There weren’t many street lights in my fishing village. It was just me sitting with the stars, the black ocean, and an occasional flying fish jumping out to startle the silence. I lived further than I’d ever been from my family, and closer to the ocean than ever, a mere 2 blocks away. It was right there, the vast Pacific, dangling at my feet.
Sometimes I would imagine exactly where I was on the blue planet from the perspective of space: a tiny spec on a little island, beneath the swirling clouds. Strangely, the smallness of my life was a comfort. Being an infinitesimal drop meant my problems were not even visible. They barely even existed.
It was there, in Japan, that I began my yogic journey, waking to see the red sun rise over the ocean, greeting it with sun salutations each morning. In Yoga we learn that whatever exists outside of us also exists within us. There are tremendously beautiful depictions of the interior world in the ancient Yogic scriptures. In the Upanishads there is a lovely passage about the lotus of the heart which contains the entire universe, the sun, the stars, everything. I connected so deeply to this image of a miniature universe within me that I chose it as my happy place when learning self-hypnosis to prepare for birth. I have spent many delightful hours imagining this small, but complete, internal world.
Girls love anything if its miniature. Anything! You love all the small things.
My laughter betrayed my feminist instinct to object to that generalization when my boyfriend said that in high school. It was true. There is something so wonderful about cute, little, teeny, tiny things I find absolutely irresistible. It’s no far leap to guess the evolutionary reason behind a woman’s urge to love small things.
All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
I used to think those words meant that the interior world was complete, but small. It shrank to fit inside of me. I related more to the tangible drop than the incomprehensibly powerful ocean. I am comfortable with the image of being small, of fitting inside someone larger’s embrace. Being small means someone else can take care of me and look out for me.
The more I sit in stillness, the more I realize that when the ocean squeezes into the drop, it doesn’t lose its volume. It doesn’t shrink.
It is as vast and resplendent as ever.
The world inside us is not a miniature replica of the outer world. It is just as great. Great, meaning both magnificent and enormous. The vastness of the universe resides within us. There is just as much space to explore.
Just as much infinity to ponder and wander about.
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