Today, a journey begins.
It’s been happening for years, but like many things, I’ve been too afraid to share. Now I know this cannot wait. And now, I accept that I can’t wait for it to come out perfect.
Today, I took a long look down a winding path. And when I fix my gaze, I learn by looking—that this path is leading me to where I’ve been all along, to where I spend the most time, but unfortunately probably recognize the least, the path in my past where I’ve logged millions of moments wildly running away from it.
Today, I come home to myself, and I read the book that is my life simultaneously as I write and revise it.
Today, I come humbly to some important truths, bowing before the forces that have shaped my journey thus far. I look into my past, and now, with a deep breath in and out, I let it go. I let go
of all the moments I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I let go of all the times I quit because things were too hard. I let go of the noise and seek a silence—a quiet both heavy and dark, a silence that is also full of light. I enter into a dream I can control. I enter into this thing called my choice.
So, now I make these choices. I choose that my meditation is God speaking to me. I choose that my whole life is an act of creation. I choose that my heart is open and ready to receive. I choose that my will is stronger than my thoughts. I choose that my will is the me behind my thoughts. I choose that my mind will take me far, but my soul is without bounds. I choose that my thoughts are not me and that they too will pass. And lastly, I choose that the eternal me, who I am, will never go away.
And here, in this place of quiet, I look inward, and I feel a great glow:
You don’t have a soul, I hear, you are a soul, you have a body.
And I feel that I am everything I need to be. I retreat into my Self. I stand atop the mountain within my Himalayan peak. I am being. I am consciousness. I am joy. I fill what is empty. I empty what is full. I am light. I am love. I am life. I am alive in the present moment.
And this present is a present, so I unwrap the gift of awareness of the infinite now.
I am free.
***
I’m finding myself speaking these words a lot to my Self a lot these days. It’s like I keep hearing the lines from the Jesus Christ Superstar rock opera song, “I Don’t Know How To Love Him”: “Could we start again, please? I think you’ve made your point now. You’ve even gone a bit too far to get the message home.” Of course, the ‘you’ I’m talking to is me. It’s my Source, the Divine from within. And what I’m coming to learn is that the harder I strain to listen, the more difficult it is to hear. Like so many, I’ve been trained to grind, to whittle problems down to the nub, to work so hard, and to struggle.
In other words, to fake it till I make it.
And it’s worked kind of, mostly, okay, not really. At least not as well as it could. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m getting pretty worn-out toiling in the minor leagues. It’s like when you’re tuning your radio and you get close to the right station, but not quite. That’s what life has been like—I can hear the words, but there’s still too much static to feel them. I keep climbing the mountain, but when I reach the peak, I don’t feel the elation I expected. Or it’s so temporary. Or I just see another mountain.
Just when I figure everything out, I blink, and life changes. Thank God!
Maybe what’s different now is the awareness that I will only get so far from climbing. Or accepting the grace we can gain from acceptance. One of my favorite visualizations in a Yoga Nidra practice is when the guide leads you to the edge of the cliff, looks back, and then says, “Follow me.” And then the guide walks off the edge and into the abyss. And this makes me think of my favorite scene from the Indiana Jones movies. In the third installment of the series, The Last Crusade (1989), there’s the part where, to reach the Holy Grail, Indiana must cross an invisible bridge across a great chasm that doesn’t exist. So, he puts his hand on his heart and affirms to himself that this crossing requires a “leap of faith.”
Maybe that’s what’s happening now. We’re at this kind of threshold that requires us to leap forward out into the unknown. To be vulnerable. To trust the universe, our God, our Source within, one another. It’s an iffy proposition, I know. We let each other down so often. We disappoint ourselves sometimes the most. Yet, this is our work. No, what I mean to say is that this is our practice. I can hear Billy Crystal now, “Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.”
And when we jump, we may fall. We may not always land where our two eyes are looking, but if we can trust the course of the one eye gazing within, our Source, we will always see what we need to see.
So, this is our practice, my friends—to lean into the wind, to soften the resistance, and to tune and calibrate to our most mystical, divine frequency. And when we get there we’ll finally learn that it’s been here inside us all along. Brothers and sisters, we are all the holiest of instruments. I can’t wait to hear the togetherness of the collective chorus of our most spiritual jam!
By Dr. Meghan Nelson, DPT, and Dr. Ryan Allen, PhD
Lumin Therapy provides integrative health and education for the mind, body, and spirit to those who are suffering or struggling to step into and live their heartfelt mission and purpose. Through the practice of physical therapy, medical therapeutic yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and resiliency mentoring, Dr. Meghan Nelson, DPT, and Dr. Ryan Allen, PhD, bring their over forty-plus combined years of knowledge and experience serving others to learn and heal and live without boundaries.
