Sometimes the lights go out in our visible world. Our rainbow color turns pitch black; we can’t see anything positive. If we are not accustomed, at times like these, to switch to a different frequency, to a different energy source, we’ll feel lost and victimized – like finding ourselves suddenly without electricity in our home, with no candles to light our way.
Energy shifts and plays itself out on different levels. If we are not aware of how sacred energy, energy of the invisible world, intersects with our human energy, we will not know how to call on this energy when our visible world grows dark. If we are unable to shift to a more transcendent view of what is happening – the long view – we will get caught up in the draining, disorienting details of the short view — the particular anxiety-provoking circumstance.
If we have, in the past, sought stillness and nurture with such things as meditation, music, art, nature, yoga, we have already experienced fleeting moments of wholeness – moments of sweet expansiveness, of timeless peace, a knowing that reaches beyond our human perspective. We can use these practices to still our mind and to place ourselves in the healing path of wholeness.
Living prepares us for dying – with losses, disappointments, unwanted endings. Likewise, sacred energy in us allows us to resonate and identify with the wholeness we already are, from eternity’s perspective. Letting go of life into the dying process is something we have to initiate long before we let go into actual death, or we fight death. Shifting our awareness from the visible world we can see to invisible energy and patterns we can’t is, likewise, something we have to practice before we are faced with crisis or darkness and need this support.
Wholeness is a universal experience, embedded in the human psyche. We see cycles in nature — moon cycles, countless examples of nature’s becoming, becoming, becoming. Symbols that infer wholeness – the mandala, other ancient symbols that portray the union of opposites and the dissolution of duality. We experience wholeness in a beautiful piece of music, in a moment of harmonious union with another person.
Wholeness is available to us, but we need a spiritual practice that invites it into our life in order to integrate it into our person. When we speak of sitting in the darkness until the light present in it begins to come through, we are speaking of calling into consciousness this sacred energy, this stream of light from another realm of being that sustains and directs the world we know. This is not easy to do in the hard times if we don’t practice it in lighter moments.
I once heard an old Protestant hymn, “It’s Because Of Whose I Am.” It’s because I am one with the wholeness at the Center that I will never be lost, destroyed, or forsaken. It’s because I am one with the wholeness at the Center that everything that happens to me is something the other end of which is in invisible hands that are pulling me towards my wholeness, my full potential.
In our youth, we are not drawn to such energy. We are too focused on raising children, building careers, fulfilling worldly tasks. This is as it should be. Age brings with it the leisure and reflection that welcomes the nearness of wholeness. We can take the longer view – see ourselves as part of the life-death-life cycle, part of the eternal movement of life pouring through us. Becoming a grandmother helped me to experience this in myself.
Wholeness, the propensity for wholeness, is available at all ages, of course. I nursed from its maternal presence on my waterfall as a small child. All young children have stolen moments of wholeness, but life has a way of dictating other priorities that push this propensity aside.
It is our task, at any age, to learn how to relax and to move with that which moves and informs our visible world, our body, our soul, to move into the other mind of us. This support from the invisible world, this sacred energy that pulses through us, is always close, but it takes a shift in consciousness and presence. It takes discovering the spiritual within our animal nature, looking for the deeper meaning of what it is to be human, even in the worst of circumstances.
This means not clinging to our favorite rainbow color or life circumstance in the trust that an inner directive knows better than we how to cooperate with the wholeness at our core. It means finding the wholeness, the totality of life, in circumstances that may terrify, derail and even strip us of our comfort and feelings of well being. It is a belief that life is coming back around to carry us forward, even as it feels like we are being pushed back.
In our moment of crisis, life comes back around for us in that still moment of quiet when what we are experiencing flips over into more comfortable energy. We emerge, more resilient, more aware of ourselves as part of something larger than we can say, than we can know, yet not larger than what we experience at our core.
Our breathing shifts from that heavy, tight breathing pattern into a more comfortable, rhythmic flow. As we become more conscious of our breathing, we become more conscious of those invisible hands reaching out for us just beyond awareness.