What to trust?
I like to meditate for twenty five minutes in the morning. I start by looking at the clock and working out what time it should be when I finish and trust myself to instinctively know when my allotted time is up. Usually, that just happens to be when I open my eyes again. I always look towards the clock afterwards. Mostly, I’m amazed at the accuracy of my inner timepiece. Although sometimes I stop a minute or two early or late. Other times I forget what time it’s meant to be. But in general this technique works much better than when I used to set an alarm because I can give my mind up so much easier to taking a break whereas if I set an alarm I am jittery and less able to clear my head. As I’m writing this, I’m wondering why I have to check the time, at all? Is it to self-congratulate if I get it right or to self-reproach if I get it wrong? Why is the amount of time even important to me? Why is this my end goal when that is not the purpose of my meditation? One thing is for sure, it is learnt behaviour and something that gets in the way of trusting myself and my connection to the universe, which is the main purpose of my meditation.
How much of what we do, what we think, who we think we are, is innate and how much is learnt enslavement to something or everything?
I was listening to a podcast this morning of an ex CIA agent talking about why you shouldn’t trust your gut. He spoke about how someone who isn’t being honest will ask you lots of questions, making you feel seen and heard but leaving no room to reveal anything about himself. My immediate thought was, ‘that’s interesting’, because that’s exactly what I do in my role as a homeopath. Taking a new case is a kind of meditation in itself; tucking myself away to absorb and understand the picture of what is going wrong for the person sitting in front of me, so that I am well informed as to what remedy will trigger a self-healing response and has nothing to do with myself not being honest. The ex spy went on to say that a fabricated story of intimacy will often encourage the other person to open up and make them want to reveal their innermost to you, and after you do that they will make you their most trusted confidant. So, when he finally revealed that we should stand apart from our instincts and rationalise everything, I understood how that would be the case for a trickster who is also a self-confessed, very successful business man, lately.
As described, in not so many words, by the past intelligence operative, trickery is end-gaining and in doing so a person has to disconnect from Self, others, and what the universe offers if we are attentive, engage with it and listen. Tricksters are everywhere. They boast about their sophistry with a goal to enslave both body and mind.
During my yoga lesson last week, my teacher focused on getting us to breathe into our back body. When we focus on our front body, it’s all about going forward, looking ahead, stepping into our roles in the mayhem without a thought for what’s behind us. And yet, our spine supports our whole frame, our spinal cord houses our central nervous system, and we treat it like a slave, expecting it to work for us without giving it a thought. What if our frontal organs become servants to our back body? What happens then? When I continually focused and breathed into my back, my mind became steady, I was less absorbed with achievement in the pose, more circumspect, I forgot about hurrying and willingly relaxed. My practice lost its edge, became more holistic and gentle. So, why are we not taught to revere and oxygenate our spines as children? Just that one lesson alone, repeated often — lest we forget —has the power to change our inner thoughts and how we approach life.
I had a conversation with someone very close to me. Someone who panics and is anxious much of the time. It’s almost like she’s fighting her way through life as if it is her enemy. When I asked her what she wanted to do about something in particular, she said she didn’t know. I told her to trust her instincts and make a decision. She told me she doesn’t have any instincts and that made me sad. I’m sad too, about what has happened to so many members of our species, so fully invested in worldliness and totally unaware there’s a whole treasure chest of ancestral memories to call upon inside each and every one of us. But first we have to undo our miseducation, our slavery, and obedience to the bad actors who are pulling our strings…