Show & Tell: Royal Coil

Alternate title: "You are getting sleeeeeepy."

I've written before about my fascination with mandalas.

Coloring one causes a kind of planned zoning out, and takes me to a meditative place, even if I'm in a room full of family members and we are coloring and chatting together, as we did over Thanksgiving week.

I love this image. It's purple and it swirls both in and out. It's symmetrical and orderly, yet infinite. I might make it my Twitter avatar someday. Anyone know how to animate it? Make it rotate?

You can get your own blank copies of mandala designs here to color as you'd like.

See the cool stuff my classmates are showing and telling over at Mel's Show & Tell.





.

Perfect Moment Monday: Labyrinth

Do you know the difference between a maze and a labyrinth? The best explanation I found is that "a Maze is multicursal, or a series of paths with dead ends and can be quite frustrating. A Labyrinth is unicursal, meaning it has only one path and no dead ends."

I spent the moment of autumnal equinox* (9:44 am, MDT) in a labyrinth on a walking meditation.



(The Carousel building in the old Elitch Gardens -- click to make bigger).

Since taking energy classes with Ethel, I have tried to meditate on the solstices and equinoxes and feel the rhythm of Mother Earth and her place with Father Sky. Here is a diagram I carry in my head:

The wave represents energy itself (vibration and ripple are two other physics and metaphysical terms), and it reminds me of the significance of the parts of the cycle: the two extremes and the midpoints. (You could superimpose the four weeks of a menstrual or moon cycle here as well.)

Today is the day the earth is at the in-between point. A time of change. A time to become fluid and open to the path ahead.

As I walked, I felt a few moments of connection and peace. I practiced tonglen, breathing in fear and anxiety held by myself and others, holding them a moment in my heart and transforming the fear into love energy while breathing out. I was able to focus for, well, I don't know for how long.

It was a beautiful string of Perfect Moments. Not because of what happened to me, but because of what happened in me.

Leave a comment this week with a link to your Perfect Moment, or the Moment itself. I'll move up to the body of this post as the week goes by.

Once you make a Perfect Moment post, you are qualified to place this button on your blog.

Click here for previous collections of Perfect Moments. Now. What Perfect Moment have you recently been aware of?

1. Susan found her get-up-and-go.

2. JV sees his future life pass before his eyes as he shares a baseball game with his son.

3. Martha poignantly eases a child's burden by remembering his father.

4. Luna and her husband are the bread in a borrowed-baby sandwich

5. Ms Planner feels her momishness in a deep way. Look at the photo and just try not to go, "Awwwwwww."

6. Furrow finds perfection in peforming a civic duty: "today, the voter registration drive I helped organized registered over 100 new voters. Yay! Doing it again tomorrow, too. Pretty perfect, I'd say."

7. Yours?

* Cheers to my friends in the southern hemisphere who greeted their vernal equinox today.

====================================

If you haven't had enough about mindfulness yet, here is an announcement I got for an online event called, "Lucid Living:Waking Up to Life" with Timothy Freke. It's tomorrow, September 23rd, starting at noon PDT (3 pm EDT) and lasting 2 hours. It's only $10.

Here's the description:

Are you sleepwalking through your life, afraid to wake up? Have you lost touch with the awesome vastness and possibilities of life?

Tim teaches you:

the hidden message at the heart of all the world's great spiritual traditions the three key insights that will help wake you from your dream to enjoy the ecstasy of being a simple technique that will enable you to experience your essential oneness with all things the pivotal role of big love in alleviating our personal and collective suffering how you can become a key player in our collective awakening

For more info, or to register through Hay House, click here.

Show & Tell: Fall Mandala

I like to color mandalas.

=========================

Want to see what the other kids are showing and telling? Visit Lollipop the Headmistress. Bring her a nice, juicy autumn apple.

(But not an iTouch.)

Presence

I wait in the clearing for them to join me. It is my celebration, after all.

The sun is shining, bathing the lea in a warm glow. There is an entire meadow of soft greenery for us to dig our toes into. Nothing sharp, nothing dangerous, nothing to mar our time together. There is just the slightest breeze. The sky is the most pleasant timeless blue imaginable.

The first to arrive is a girl about 8 years old. Her skin has a sage tint, the downshot of difficulties in breathing. She brings me worms, leftover from when she gathered a bunch for her sister's birthday. For some reason she thought worms would make a good gift. She is a bundle of fears, although she is well-fed and well-loved. I just want to hold her while she breathes. I want to breathe for her.

Soon, the 17-year old comes upon us, all arms and legs and attitude. She is skittish, like a colt, just waiting to be hurt. It's because Doug, her boyfriend, has just dumped her for the 4th time. Well, they've broken up 4 times, but she was the dumper at least once. I think about telling her there will be many more heartbreaks, and that she'll have ample opportunity to be on both ends of them. Each one hurts, but when it's all said and done, she'll be thankful that she and Doug (and the many that follow him) parted. I'd tell her, but she wouldn't believe me. She hands me her diary, the one she just started and intends to keep for the rest of her life.

The next young woman arrives in a black gown and mortarboard and with a gold cord dangling from collar to waist. You can feel the promise that fills her. She looks both ready to tackle and tame the world and also petrified of taking her next step. She will face rejection after rejection before she comes on a job with a meager paycheck that will fulfill her emotional, if not monetary, needs. She is planning a wedding, but is having thoughts of calling the whole thing off. The burden of this thought weighs down her shoulders. I whisper to her, "listen to your gut." She looks at me hopefully and shows me the keys to her first apartment. Where she will live alone.

A very sad woman enters our circle. She's in her 30s and she's been crying, crying, crying. The losses she has endured have sucked the very life out of her. She has beautiful, glorious child-bearing hips, which are going to waste. Her dreams have evaporated. She feels alone (although, still well-loved) and without hope. We instinctively move toward her, trying to sense if she will allow us to comfort her. I barely recognize this woman -- the toll has been so drastic. Can't she see that this chapter, like all the others before, will end? Her hands hold only tissues full of tears.

The next woman to grace the clearing has graying hair, still long like I knew she would. She is weary -- after all, she is raising teenagers. The one knows how to trip all her wires and the other is just growing up and away too quickly. She has a peace about her...the peace that comes from repeatedly being shown that this, too, shall pass. Her eyes pierce through me, chiding me for my petty complaints about the drains of childrearing. She has brought me a watch -- one that ticks twice as fast as normal.

We turn to receive our final guest. She walks toward the west and is a few inches shorter than the rest of us grown women --still a head taller than the child. She is white-gray in hair, fissured of skin, and her eyes and lips have lost several shades of their original vibrancy. For all her physical feebleness, the corners of her mouth are upturned. Her eyes are kind, and she exudes patience. Like the sky above us, there is something timeless about her. She extends only her trembling hand, representative of the enduring body that houses her immortal spirit.

These are my Selves. They have come to honor the fact that I have been on the planet for another turn around the sun. They bring me their tokens and dreams and insights. I envelope them and am enveloped by them. One by one, I welcome each into my heart, accepting the gifts they have brought. I acknowledge the gift she is, she is, she is, she is, she is, she is.

I am.

Mandalas: I'm not too old to color

I brought an array of colored pens and a several pages of mandalas to our family reunion.

My parents, sisters, brothers-in-law and nephews joined me in coloring one afternoon. I find it both fun and meditative.

While I do have some talents, I've never considered art among them. But still, I enjoy seeing a mandala pattern emerge right before my eyes.

Here are some of my mandalas. You can get your own blank copies here.













###

"Dear Baby" is today's entry on Drama 2B Mama.

Expansion...see how you big you are?

OK, OK. As promised, here it is, a meditation based on expansion (rather than contraction) for hopeful adoptive couples.

It is said you must teach what you most need to learn. Here's one of my lessons.

Sit quietly and collect yourself from wherever your energy is. Work issue? Bring back your energy. A fight with someone? Bring back your energy. A warm fuzzy you keep replaying in your head? Bring back your energy.

Make your mind subservient to your heart by focusing on your breathing. Act as though your breath is the most fascinating thing to watch as it goes into and out of your nostrils, into and out of your lungs, nourishing all the cells of your body and moving out what you don't need, bringing consciousness ("spirit," as in "re-spire" and "in-spire") and renewal to your physical body.

Go into your heart and meditate by watching your breath. After you've been there awhile, and once you begin to see the colors/patterns on your eyelids (at least, this is how it is for me), become aware of your connection with the center of the earth -- the feminine -- and with the top of the sky -- the masculine. Tether your being to both, and feel supported by the universe. Know that you embody the connection of both matter (earth) and spirit (heaven). Of both love and of wisdom.

This is a place of abundance. There is no lack. (It's like that old joke about the Buddhist monk ordering a hot dog who says, "make me one with everything.")

You are NOT small and limited. You are part of the Divine. Part of the All. Interconnected with all that is. There is nothing that is not you.

Imagine your heart center. As you continue breathing in and out the energies of the earth and sky, and watching how they co-mingle at your heart, picture your heart center growing until it fills the room. Keep breathing and allow your heart to fill your home, your neighborhood, your city and state. Keep filling your heart with more light until your entire region (the Pacific NW, Great Lakes, Rocky Mountains, New England, etc) is surrounded by the light and love in your heart. Go even bigger if you want. This is also a way to manifest peace in the world.

Your huge heart swirling with energy from the earth and the sky now encompasses an expectant mother and father who are or will be considering adoption as their best choice. It encircles the child that will join you. Become aware of the connection you have with them that is, for now, unmanifested. State your intention that this connection be made manifest in the time frame that is best for all concerned. Shower the expectant parents with love from your gigantic heart. Envelope that child with all that unbounded love energy you're blessed with. Offer your gratitude and your service to them, as well as healing energy.

Hold this space for awhile. Just let them know you are ready. Sit in their presence and breathe. Stay with your breath and in your heart.

After some time, close by offering gratitude to God/the Divine, of which you and the expectant parents and your baby are a part.

Over the next few weeks, spend some time expanding and knowing how big you truly are. Rather than bringing what you want TO you (contraction), you are realizing that you already are all that you seek.


Questions? Comments? Let me know. bestlightlori (at) gmail (dot) com