Another Sunset


Jupiter and Saturn glowing together so brightly that even the light pollution cannot obscure them. Jupiter is sometimes referred to as the guru planet, the weighty one. Take a look at the sky and use that to listen to your own inner guru, the space where you are fully grounded, engaged, and free in spirit all at the same time. For me, it’s still a work in progress.

I slept last night in the room that I slept in as a child. My mother now uses the room to store some of the vestiges of her old antiquing business. The carpet, wallpaper, and curtains from the 1960’s are gone, but the bed is the same one in which I had slept. The picture on the wall is a kit for making a stuffed animal that my Grandma Rose had bought me (probably when I was about 8) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that my mother decided would be better as framed art than a sewing project for me.
The neighborhood looks different–it is far more developed as is everywhere near a big city–but the bones are the same.
It is a challenge not to feel the weight of my history and ancestry when I return. Taking the time to meditate when I woke helped me stay fully in my adult self.
When we meditate, we ideally dissolve our individual consciousness into the luminous spaciouness of universal consciousness. In that space, where we are temporarily not experiencing ourselves as an individual, we are also not experiencing our individual self in the sequence (krama) of time. The luminous spaciousness of meditative consciousness is sequenceless (akrama) and, as universal consciousness, is the place in which the sequences of being in time and space arise.
What I experienced this morning when I meditated was that I did not have to be flooded with the emotions of my, to try to graciously describe, emotionally challenging childhood. In the space of meditation I could bring to my day an acceptance of all of my life and be where I am at present, coming to a place of recognition that although I lived all of my history, it neither defines me nor binds me from expanding into a space of growing love and light.
It is my understanding that unless I wear a sari, I will not be able to go into some of the places that are on the itinerary for the trip to India I will be joining. “Just think of it as playing dress-up,” suggested my sister when I told her the idea of wearing a sari perturbs me. It is not just feeling strange in foreign dress and having to expose that vulnerable fold of flesh at the waist (I have never even owned a bikini because of my discomfort in exposing my waist). What is unsettling me is that to witness what the men can witness while wearing comfortable clothing, the women must agree to wear confining, complicated, and cumbersome clothes. And the sari has come for centuries with the expectation that the woman demurely follows behind doing what she is told by the designated man.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.