Springing Light

Those who know me know that I’m a bit passionate about cycling. It provides me with movement and freedom and a space to allow my thoughts to move freely. It’s no surprise, then, that I find metaphors for life within the context of my experiences while cycling.

Music is a big part of my cycling experience and provides a backdrop for my thoughts as I go speeding down the country lanes near my home. Sometimes I become immersed in the experience of the music, and often it is with the music that I experience my physical sensations of speed and muscles working, the scenery I pass, and my thoughts as they move from twisted tangle to smooth to tangential.

Yesterday I found I was noticing at one point some repetitive phrasing within a particular song, that I kept hearing the words “Maybe I…” over and over. I sensed that the rest of the lyrics weren’t nearly so important as those:

“Maybe I…”

At that moment, when I found myself thinking about what “Maybe I…” could mean in the sense of adding possibility to one’s life, I noticed how big the space was around me. I felt myself filling it, expanding. It was an empowering and peaceful feeling.

“Maybe I…” Doesn’t that evoke possibility? Its exciting, isn’t it, imagining all the things that could come simply from having imagined them? You can find ways to fill in the blank: “Maybe I….” “Maybe I…will fulfill my life’s dream of being an artist.” “Maybe I…can let go of this emotional issue I’ve been struggling with.”

Children are especially good at imagining possibilities. Their whole lives are nothing but possibilities! Everything is open when you’re a child, and there are no restrictions. The thing is, when we grow up we forget this and we begin to place restrictions where there are none. In reality, there still are no restrictions. Everything is still a possibility; we only have to be able to see it as such.

Let’s talk about bigness for a moment. By “bigness” I mean being all of Who You Are, being you while showing the truest aspects of yourself. This is a natural state that we are all capable of, a state that leads to total empowerment. Manifesting your Self, all the aspects of your Self, is what enlightenment is, because when you know who you are you know the vastness of your entirety and your connection to everything else in the world. Once you know that, not just in your mind but in your heart and through your body as well, then you are truly whole.

By showing more of who you are, by allowing your perception of you to move into that vast state that contains everything including you, you move into bigness. When you are in state of bigness, others can’t help but react to the entirety of you that they perceive, and as they do they too are inspired to reach for their own bigness. By showing your entirety to the world, you change the world.

Obviously, situations or thoughts can move us out of that state of bigness again as we feel we must react to something with our usual sense of smallness, but once you have experienced the vastness of bigness and the empowering sensation of feeling complete and whole you will likely want to find a way back there again.

Here, then, is an exercise in creating bigness in your life:

Imagine you are standing in the middle of a vast empty meadow. This meadow stretches in every direction as far as your eye can see and appears to have no end. You are not afraid of this vastness; on the contrary you find it exciting and appealing. You feel safe here, even though you are perfectly alone. There is complete silence and you hear only the sound of your own heart beating.

“Maybe I…”

You begin to concentrate on the sound of your heartbeat, and you notice that as you do so, with each beat of your heart, your perception of yourself seems to grow. Soon you are growing quickly, moving over this wonderful magical meadow, expanding to fill its entirety. Except there IS no end to this meadow. You are aware that you could continue growing indefinitely if you wished to, or you could immediately shrink back to your normal size.

All possibilities are open to you. Everything is open. You are aware of your infinite power, your connectedness to your true self and to everything else there is.

“Maybe I…”

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One of my favorite books growing up was Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. I read it over and over, marveling at times at how alike we were, this girl and I, and how she somehow spoke some of my own thoughts out loud. It was almost uncanny, and it was through reading her often painful but always revealing honesty that I felt inspired to determine that one day I would be a writer.

Encouraged recently to take a closer look at the aspects of myself I find less than endearing, yet with an air of acceptance and openness rather than judgment and self-recrimination, I was reminded of such a list Anne made about herself detailing all her “faults”, as she described them. Do you remember this?

What struck me in remembering this was her utter lack of emotion as attached to the list she made. She saw her dark places, her shortcomings as she saw them, and described them with a dispassionate voice, but yet a voice of expectation for her eventual ability to move beyond those “faults”.

So I am thinking it would be useful to use such a voice in the process of shining light upon those dark places inside myself, to give them air and voice, and to eventually allow them to dissipate, since they are what thrives in darkness.

Part of me resists this process; after all, these things have been a part of me for such a long time! Must I really reveal them? Can’t I simply keep them hidden?

The answer comes: yes, I can, but they will continue to torment me, to prevent me from seeing truly, to prevent me from being true.

Which do I want? Hidden darkness, or truth?

That’s easy to answer. So here’s my list (you can make your own):

1. Impatient with self
2. Everything relates to me (selfish)
3. Procrastinates
4. Impatient with others (”Here! Let me do it!”)
5. Fear of being inadequate

Many other things all relate back to elements on the list. It’s easy to get lost in them, but as I learned recently, if you really immerse yourself in something you fear and allow yourself to (without emotion) imagine the worst possible aspect of that fear, you realize how little power the fear has over you and how very big and powerful you really are.

And once you begin looking at the shadow side of who you are, you begin to see yourself in wholeness.

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I’ve been feeling a bit stuck lately. I think most people feel that way from time to time. There’s the sensation that things aren’t moving, that life is just happening around you, that you’re enmired in old patterns and beliefs.

Do you recognize this?

It’s true that in order to grow, in order to become more of Who You Truly Are, you must first look at all the parts of yourself that are there, peer into those dark corners and shine light on them so they can be either kept or released, depending on how you choose. But ofttimes looking in these dark places simply reinforces them, reminds you of their limitations, their hold upon you.

And this is when you can feel stuck.

You sense that there is a way through the darkness, a way through those old patterns of belief and behavior. You sense that they are something you’d like to release, something you no longer wish to own. But the problem is, when you become enmired in these patterns, sometimes you can see nothing else. They seem to have a life of their own. After all, they’ve been a part of you for a long time. It’s difficult to release something that has become familiar, even though we know it is not part of our best and truest choices.

This can make you feel rather hopeless, as if nothing will ever change. That actually couldn’t be further from the truth! Not only are we always in a state of transformation, but I find that it is that very feeling, the feeling of knowing there is a different way but feeling as if I can’t quite get there, that signifies that things are indeed about to change.

A good thing to do when you feel like that is to clean house.

Clean house? Absolutely! Here’s why:

1. Cleaning moves energy around, which aids in change.You’ll feel like you are accomplishing something rather than feeling a lack of accomplishment.
2. Even the phrase “cleaning house” has a symbolic significance and you will be aware of that on a subconscious level, which will in turn aid in the release of what which you no longer wish to own.
3. Moving physically can also often aid you in moving to a different space of perception.
4. Cleaning is a somewhat mindless activity that frees your thoughts to soar to new places, encouraging creativity.

Ready to get unstuck from whatever old perception you’ve been caught in?

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If you’ve arrived here, likely you already know me from LightSpring Transformations or Lion and Magic Boy. I’ve been encouraged to write more about my spiritual perceptions, wisdom I’ve gleaned from walking my own path. I’ve included quite a bit of that over at Lion and Magic Boy, but it’s clear that a decision about emphasis was needed. Lion and Magic Boy seems to be all about my entire life (after all, everything is connected, is it not?), which includes me and my spiritual path, my relationships, my children, my work, Down syndrome, random humor…

See? No focus there. So I’m bringing the spiritual part here to Springing Light and adding to that focus in order to bring insights to you and to myself.

It’s all part of the path, you see.

So my wish here is to present things as I learn them for myself, in the hope that they can be useful to you as well.

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