Meditation

I'm fairly sure that meditation saved my life, or at least my life as I know it today.  Meditation has for many years helped me discover that there is so much more to this existence than what I can see taking place in the world outside of me.  It has revealed to me the sweet truth of where I fit within creation.  I know that I will always seek, but my seeking is gentler now, without the frantic feel it had years ago, before meditation helped me find the quiet place within, where truth resides and the big questions are answered.

I learned to meditate at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and have practiced its very helpful tools of grounding and running my own life force energy, among many others, every day since.  I'm grateful that I listened to the urgings of my spirit and walked in the door that first day.  I had been seeking answers in various places, just trying things out.  BPI was very different from anything I had experienced, and the idea of just walking in was more than a little anxiety-producing.

I had been spending the day in a city about 45 minutes away from where I live, and was just about ready to head home.  I was driving down a street and saw a sign, and on a whim stopped and went in.  In looking back it feels like I wasn't making conscious choices, but acting on a very strong impulse that I didn't understand.  It just felt like I had go in.  I've since learned to trust that spirit leads me to the right doors; I just have to quiet my mind's nay-saying and cross the threshold, as scary as that can feel at times.

I have a quote on my desk at work which says, "If I don't go within, I go without."  I'm not sure who wrote it, but for me that play-on-words pretty much sums up how meditation has been for me in my life.  If I don't go within, on a fairly regular basis, I most definitely go without.  I lose touch with the deeper truth of who I am, and the issues of the world become the biggest reality in my existence.  In a sense, I become what I see outside of me.

When I go within, I am reconnected with awareness of myself as a spiritual being.  I am reunited with the light of the God of my heart shining brightly within me.  I am renewed in my appreciation of my body, and my soul is brought back into communion with it's beloved temple.  In going within, there is nothing I go without, for all that is good and true reflects in and through me.

I have heard it said that prayer is talking to God, and meditation is listening to God.  In my own practice it seems that the two blend so that I don't know where talking ends, and listening begins.  I'm often not sure if it's me talking and God listening, or the other way around.  In my truth it is all happening simultaneously.  It is all God, experiencing her Self.

May this tool be a blessing. . .