A student shares a powerful experience of expansive movement, vision, and spacious awareness, and the teacher invites any questions that may arise from it.
A student shares a powerful experience of expansive movement, vision, and spacious awareness, and the teacher invites any questions that may arise from it.
I have something I'd like to share. I feel a lot of reaction right now, nervousness and excitement.
Last night I had a really beautiful experience. I don't usually smoke cannabis, but last night I had a small amount. I was hanging out in my living room listening to really awesome dance music, and I felt the impulse to get up and move and start to dance.
I closed my eyes and began channeling movement through my body. I started slow and just got deeply into the movement. I felt like the goddess was dancing through me, like the pure playfulness you mentioned, and the pure joy of experience was my state of being as I moved. The more I moved, the more I generated this joy and this love. It was so grand and so expansive. I was in my full creative expression, experiencing all the levels of what it means to show yourself and shine in this world, whether from a pure place or from an egoic place. I was moving through all the layers of what it felt like to actually show yourself, claim your power, state yourself into the world, calling in my divinity and feeling it move into me. I felt so empowered, enlivened, protected, and whole.
Into the underworld
Then I felt inclined to lean over into a fold, stretching the back of my legs, hands on the ground, leaning forward. As I changed into that position, I began to get visions of the darkness that exists in the world: all of the pain, the suffering, the deep darkness. Somehow I was experiencing that as well, as part of God.
When I think of the homeless people and the drug addicts in my city, the destitution and squalor they live in, I realized in that moment that there is a place for that in this world. It exists because it is a part of God that wants to experience that deep pain. The gutters, the rats, the bacteria, the horrible things that happen in this world that we judge: there is a place for that too. The underworld. I recognized that part of the underworld also exists in me, that part of me that wants to get down and dirty and be disgusting in a way. It was so intense, and I allowed myself to embrace that through the movement.
The tapestry
Then I came back into the space and recognized the beauty I was in, going through those levels of experiencing deep, joyful expression, the sun, the shining, the divinity within me. I started getting all these visions of the grandness of this creation, all the layers, all the variety, all the textures and flavors. There were so many dimensions and ways of expressing, cultures and people, and it all fit together in this amazing tapestry of life. I was at the center of that.
Invisible space
Then I noticed my state of being began to shift. I experienced myself existing as an invisible space within my visual field. I was the air, the purity. There was this clearness that I was experiencing myself as, and it was all-encompassing. I was the ether, the space between the heartbeats, the space between the words and the atoms.
Then my mind would come back in and I would forget about it, start thinking about something else. Then I would remember what I had just gone through and move back into that pure space. It was so profound and so beautiful. I loved the storyline that life brought me through in this experience: you go from the highs to the lows, then the whole picture, and at the center of that is yourself. The trees outside, the plants, everything around me felt like it was worshiping me. Not my ego, but my being, the core of this whole dance. It was all looking back at me, saying, "You're the star. You're the center of this. This is all here for you."
This morning I woke up and I still feel elated and happy and playful, as you mentioned in the meditation today. There is a real sense of even more joy and groundedness and trust. It was just a really wonderful opening.
Thank you for sharing. If you have any specific questions, anything at all, let me know.
I don't feel like I have any.