Anchoring Essence: Touchstones of Truth
April 22, 2021 § 7 Comments
“I contain multitudes.” ~ Walt Whitman
“In your soul are infinitely precious things that can not be taken from you.”~ Oscar Wild
“We have to get back into the inner jeweled realm and make ourselves at home there.” ~ Terence McKenna
“The soul is your temple.” ~ Chanakya
During times when fear and uncertainty run high, as now, it is essential to be grounded and connected to our own energy, or we will go as crazy as the world.
Nobody teaches us in school how to connect with the wisdom of our soul. The idea of a soul at all is often viewed as an antiquated or purely religious concept. This erasure leaves us viewing ourselves as a blank slate mind to be filled with memorized facts. We may be informed about the world, but we are set up to miss out on our greatest resource of all: inner wisdom, essence vision.
Words are placeholders for realities far more complex than the limited signifiers used to represent them. Whether or not you subscribe to the idea of a soul or spirit that exists beyond the body, we are unarguably a point of specific consciousness containing a unique collection of experiences, feelings, talents, perspectives and affinities.
Our point of view is a feeling signature unlike any other person’s—an imprint of presence that is our deepest self beyond the personality, beyond fears and projections. A core truth of self.
This core essence knows more than our conscious minds. It is tapped into the wealth of subconscious creative connections, as well as innumerable possibilities within the imaginal planes of collective consciousness and universal inspiration. We construct our personality as a form of self-protection to interface with the world. (See, “Authenticity & The False Self.”) But deep-diving beyond this construct yields a wealth of inner richness.
Essence is innate. The constructed egoic personality often throttles the pure expressions and impulses of this essential nature, trying to play by the rules, gain approval and “get it right” by applying logic. But there is a deeper guidance system of resonance available to us, one which is infinitely expansive. Transcendent, even.
We are not told about this inner wealth, or taught to access it.
Yet anchoring our essence—and accessing its wisdom—has never been more important, both individually and collectively. Traumatic experiences and distressing, stressful circumstances—like a global pandemic, a rapidly changing environment and massive civil unrest, for instance—create dissociation. We might be partially present, going through the motions, but we are half dislodged and not fully embodied.
This deeply uncomfortable, sometimes excruciating, experience—seen as soul loss by indigenous and neo pagan traditions—manifests as anxiety, depression, brain fog, feelings of dread, listlessness and disconnection.
I’d like to share with you a time-tested personal practice I use to connect to my own essence. Using this exercise as a morning practice has been my lifeline through the past year of lockdown. I’ve shared this exercise with several friends who tried it and gave glowing reports of better days and increased well-being.
Try it as a three day challenge and let us know how it goes!
I’ve found it to be a game-changing tone setter for the day, giving a significant elevation of mood every time. Obviously some days more than others, but I’m always glad I did it.
As one friend put it: “Instead of waiting to see the day through someone else’s filter, you get to YOU deeply.”
Essence Meditation
&
Soul Dictation
Needed: a notebook & pen within reach. A way to listen to music & a timer.
1.Set the timer for 5-10 minutes. Close your eyes while sitting or lying down somewhere comfortable.
2. Listen to calming, uplifting music—I find ambient or instrumental is best to free the mind & support elevation. (Youtube & Spotify have a vast array of healing/meditation music & soundscape options.)
3. Direct your focus inward, resting your awareness in the space surrounding your heart. Placing your palm over the heart center can help stimulate sensation of presence within this area. Feel your chest rise and fall with your breathing. Relax into your inner being. Soften and sink inward.
4. Feel into your own essence. By which I mean: internally, on a feeling level, using your attention like a spotlight scanning inwardly, do your best to locate the purest center of your “you-ness” at its most innocent and pure. Then feel into it, lean into it, feed it with your attention. Deep-dive your interior like a vast ocean. And while you are swimming there ask yourself:
What does my essence feel like? If I was a color pallet, what colors feel most like me? Most like home? Does being underwater feel soothing? Feel into that.
Follow what feels “warmer, warmer, warmer…” like that game we used to play as kids. Move towards what feels good. Allow yourself to dissolve slowly and pleasurably into the core of your own inner space, like trust falling into your own arms. This, in here, is your safe place. Your regeneration chamber. Your temple. A home base just for you. A source of infinite nourishment to drink from.
Be playful. Be gentle. Have fun.
As one friend said of the exercise, “I found it very playful. An invitation to really savor the joy that I often shove down.”
What images, colors, places, activities or symbols conjure a deep, abiding sense of home and truth for you?
Does the sound of the wind in the trees give you an extra lift of excitement, reminding you of running free as a child, when you could still hear the secrets whispered between leaves? Feel into that energy.
Perhaps you have a favorite memory that conjures a feeling of home for you. Color combinations that give you a little spark of joy.
Does the way sunlight looks on water make you feel a special charge? Expand that sparkly visual in your mind’s eye—dive deep into the feeling of that liquid light.
Maybe you can access the feeling without needing to conjure images or words. Sink into that cozy sensation that feels like home.
With loving awareness, nurture the feeling the touchstone inspires inside you. Allow yourself to drift pleasurably inside the feeling.
What brings you alive? The answers will be the same things that bring you home to yourself.
What we love is part of who we are.
What are your touchstones of personal essence? This meditation will help you discover them, at which point they become a vital resource—instant access to anchored essence which increases well-being, flow state, confidence, clear thinking and creative connections.
Images and symbols, like words, are portals to the energies they represent. Make notes in your notebook when you find a touchstone that elevates your feeling state.
Once you have discovered your inner touchstones of essence, you can use them as a shortcut to access the feeling-state they inspire.
Remember, this isn’t shadow work. We aren’t going down the dark interior rabbit holes here. This is an exercise for nourishment, uplift and re-connection with the truest parts of being.
You are consciously creating a bubble of heavenly frequencies within and around yourself. Watering your inner garden, showing your truest, deepest, purest, most innocent and powerful self interest and love. Focus on joyful, uplifting sensations.
(This is not to advocate for spiritual bypassing. Facing fears, uncomfortable truths and healing inner wounds is an important part of coming home to yourself. For more on shadow work, “Navigating The Dark Night of the Soul,” and to work with wounded inner aspects, see “Soul-Retrieval.” That being said, in these dark times I truly think we need the fortification of going straight to the spirit for nourishment, vision, uplift, empowerment and regeneration.)
Essence Meditation is about elevating your inner atmosphere to connect with your most exalted aspects. Your multidimensional self.
5. Anchor essence. Once you’ve located the “warmer, warmer” feeling enough to evoke it, even slightly, at will—once you have fed your experience of your essence with your attention, grow it. Expand the sensation outward from your inner being to fill your body. Then keep expanding it to surround and encompass you like a loving atmosphere.
If you saw colors, visualize them around you. If you saw stars, surround yourself with starlight. Expand your inner world to form a protective energetic cocoon of your own essence around you. This is also a good strategy for creating energetic boundaries.
6. Soul Dictation.
When your timer goes off, open your notebook, raise your pen and ask your soul, your essence—this inner magical mystery you’ve just spent the last five or ten minutes communing with—“What do you have to tell me?”
Write down whatever comes. Even if it seems simple or obvious. Silly, cheesy, gibberish. Disjointed. Doesn’t matter. Withhold judgement. Allow yourself to be vulnerable with yourself. This is a process of getting comfortable with allowing a vaster, more intuitive, multidimensional aspect of self to speak—and be heard.
Just free-associate and write down whatever you hear internally as you listen for that true voice, whatever comes up. If you want, ask a question. Words, impressions, downloads will start to come. And the messages might surprise you.
Sometimes they feel very ordinary or generic while you’re scribing, but then you’ll read them later and they’ll suddenly light up. Profound truths are often simple. In the moment, it may seem like nothing. But later, it might be exactly what you need to hear. Just play, trust, explore. Sometimes I purposely let myself write messily so I can trick myself into thinking less and listening more. The idea is to get out of the way so you can hear the still, small voice.
As one friend who tried this exercise to great success related: “It’s a doorway to your own sacred heart.”
Going within for answers is a radical act in a society that conditions us to look for the truth from authority figures outside ourselves.
Ask your essence questions you don’t know the answer to…and watch an answer come.
*Please share your experiences in the comments if you try this exercise. I’d love to hear any thoughts you care to share, regardless. I love it when the comments becomes a shared pooling of notes.
Patterns & Portals: Exploring The Fabric of Reality
August 5, 2016 § 8 Comments
“Plato said God geometrizes continually.” ~ Plutarch
Sacred geometry patterns have been associated with mystical schools of thought for time immemorial, from the medicine wheels of North American tribal cultures to the sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism. But why?
At the forefront of this question is the idea that, because we see mathematical formulas & recurring geometric patterns in nature, math must be the highest form of expression—as mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss said, echoing Plutarch & Plato before him: “God arithmetizes.”
But many of today’s meditation practitioners & psychonauts are discovering a far more intimate connection to these patterns: through developing third eye perception, or spiritual/energetic sight, we are, many of us, beginning to visually perceive these sacred geometry patterns emerging from reality itself. (See the comments section of Parallax’s “The Art of Seeing: Third Eye Perception & The Mystical Gaze,” for a plethora of reported anecdotal experiences.)
Psychedelics, such as ayahuasca, magic mushrooms & LSD, are also popular portals into viewing these sacred designs—though they are only brief glimpses into states which meditation can achieve in a more sustainable manner.
The implications of so many people perceiving these patterns—not just reading about them, but experiencing them directly—are profound. In a recent visionary journey with a friend we both came to the conclusion that existence is a constantly recycling infinity, much like the shape known as a torus.
This insight was accompanied by a tremendous sense of safety and security, because there was no falling through the cracks in this model of reality: everything remained part of the moving whole, and energy was never destroyed—the endless cycle spoken about in ancient texts, particularly of Eastern origin.
Viewed from above, a torus becomes a mandala, which is particularly interesting when we contemplate how long mandalas have been around, and how the modeling of the three dimensional torus is a relatively new construct.
To those of us seeing through the spiritual eye, it appears not only that we each have a personal vortex of this nature within our own skulls—the third eye—but also that the greater fabric of reality is composed of these patterns. The more we cultivate our third eye perception, the more we will see these patterns emerging. Staring at the sky on a clear night or during a day with no clouds can be a great place to begin seeing these patterns emerge.
Our culture doesn’t encourage skywatching, because it has forgotten the importance of cultivating Being—conspiracy theorists might say this is no coincidence. But that is where we seekers must pave our own paths and rekindle the ancient truth that stillness & contemplation are essential for understanding, and hence progress.
Meditation, of course, is a major gateway into starting to perceive this phenomena—particularly third eye based meditations. (Although not specifically third eye based, Headspace offers a fantastic free guided meditation app that will get you comfortable with the basics.)
So how does it all come together? What does it mean? For one, it means we are living in an energetic matrix, that we ourselves are composed of these fine patterns, which suggests a larger coherence & beauty underpinning existence than might meet the physical eye.
It would appear that the sacred mandalas repeated throughout history are intended as portals to initiate awakening to this awareness.
As the veil begins to lift, we see that we are more beautiful than we had imagined, that life is more full of the potential for joy than we may have conceived. And that this beauty and joy is already ours in its potential. It is not something that we can buy. It is something that we are. All that we need to do is access this untapped state within.
As we become more aligned with these patterns of existence, we begin to receive more personal revelations and connect more dots—find more pieces to the puzzle. Our instinct becomes sharper…and our anxiety begins to recede. Because the more we understand about the nature of existence, the more we see that, from an ontological standpoint, there is nothing to fear.
We see that, while there are many atrocities perpetuated by man, the universe itself is always waiting, within stillness, to lead us home back to ourselves, to a place of peace and eternal unfolding.
When I experienced this state of satori recently on my vision quest, I was particularly aware of one thread running throughout all of my visions: a sense of deep sacredness & reverence for life, which permeated all of existence. A feeling of sublime love was central to the feeling, and I understood why so many great spiritual thinkers return to the idea that Love is at the center of everything.
The more aware we become of our own being, the more tenderness & compassion we develop towards ourselves. The more tenderness & compassion we develop for ourselves, the more kindness we are able cultivate towards others—the more rippling outward effects we create, which is ultimately the road to world peace.
“Sacred Contract” by Robby Donaghey
At the conclusion of our vision quest, my friend voiced that she would never feel purposeless again, because she had tasted this state of intoxicating unity & bliss within her own Being. “It’s simple,” she said. “The purpose is to attain this frequency as much as possible, and to cultivate it wherever & however possible.”
This was music to my ears, because I have come to exactly the same conclusion, and it has served me well.
This is the higher consciousness we have been striving to bring forth.
“Awakening,” by Robby Donaghey
“There is nothing to seek and find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the ‘I am’. Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge, or, rather, it will take you in.”
See “Connectivity Through Form: Sacred Geometry & The Golden Mean,”
“Beyond Division: Studies in Bliss”
& “Inward Bound: Exploring The Fractal Matrix.”
PARALLAX: 