I go into meditation the same way I have done hundreds of times before. Legs crossed with my bottom propped up on pillows. Earbuds dangling from my ears with my phone laying beside me cued to one of my favorite tracks.
My heart always feels a little fluttery with anticipation before meditation. I try to breathe through it, reminding myself that expecting nothing is the best way to go into the stillness, but my body knows the truth. It remembers the multitude of times we've been thrown into ecstasy while floating in the abyss. It remembers the delicious calm that overtakes it. And it remembers how good it feels to sit here doing nothing.
And so it tingles with excitement.
The past seven days have been a gift of sweet, stolen moments like these. I am home from a long vacation at the beach, and my soul is renewed from sunshine and the salty waters of the sea. My meditation practice in the week since returning to the mountains has been rich and simple. I have felt called each day to its embrace, and I have met it with openness and ease.
This morning I decide to sit for an hour. It is the weekend, and the illusion of time feels especially fluid. My daughter is content playing in her room, and the soft sounds of my husband's sleepy breath dance from the bed above me. I have no expectation of Spirit, no grand questions I want answered; only the desire to drink in the peace that comes from unfolding into nothing.
I lower my mask over my eyes and allow my body to settle as the music rises. I remind myself to relax, and I effortlessly move through my mind's usual last-ditch attempts to distract and deter me. When I was first learning to meditate, I remember feeling so confused by the concept of watching thoughts float by, of not attaching to them or judging them, but rather observing them like clouds in the sky. Now, all these years later, it feels as natural as breathing. I see my brain tossing out distractions in quickening bursts, and then all at once it explodes into silence.
I'm not sure how much time passes before the images start coming. I know that my right leg is falling asleep and that my left knee is aching where it was operated on just a few months ago. I hear my body protesting, but like a parent I soothe it with firmness and love. I promise it we will move again, and I press deeper into the blackness unfolding around me.
Just as I am floating into deep space, a great rush of energy moves up my spine and into my head. I often feel a powerful burning sensation at my crown when meditating or doing readings, and my conscious mind translates the cue with excitement. I feel expanded, like the edges of my body have dissipated, and I know something is coming.
It's hard to describe in integrity what it feels like to receive messages from the Divine. For me it comes in rushes of images and knowings that are within me and yet not of me. It's like someone has placed a small computer chip within my brain, and in a matter of milliseconds, I am receiving and processing all the information in long strings of energy. Concepts and knowings that didn't previously exist feel as clear and common as my own name.
Today I sink into the download with relative ease. Spirit is showing me flashes of things I am already familiar with - quantum physics, the electron cloud, the field of all potential - and yet there are new layers. There is a new understanding about the energy around my body, around all our bodies, and how it is that we can access it, manipulate it, use it, heal it.
I see how we are each surrounded by a giant energetic cloud containing all our experiences past, present and future. I am familiar with this field because I swim in it each time I do a reading for someone, and yet it is being shown to me in a new context. Here lies both the seen and the unseen, the remembered and the forgotten, the conscious and the unconscious.
The field is fluid and wholly accessible, and I am shown that we have total choice in the energies that we access within it. Each memory, each desire, each experience, each emotion is like a little glob of energy floating around us. Some are positive, some are negative, and some are neutral.
When we live from limited and victim states, it is because we have pulled a negatively charged memory/experience/fear into our line of sight, and we are using it as a filter for how we see, feel and think. The color and nature of that particular energy is casting its resonance on everything we perceive, and thus similarly coloring our present life experiences.
The color and nature of these negatively-charged experiences can be transmuted permanently to take on a different shape and hue. This is what happens when we heal a past hurt or diffuse a present fear. But they can also simply be pushed aside. We don't have to heal every single glob of negative energy in order to choose a different point of focus, but they are all always there.
Focus is the magnet that draws each of these energetic lenses into our view. The ones that are most accustomed to being called on stand ready, like first-string football players on the sidelines with their helmets in hand. They know they're about to be called back into the game, and so they linger just at the periphery where they can be easily mobilized. All the while, there are thousands, millions of better players sitting on the bench or even back in the locker room that we haven't acknowledged because we're so used to running the same old plays.
The entirety of our field is what makes up our energetic resonance and is what other people experience when they are around us. Have you ever been around someone that seems nice enough, but you can just tell there is some deep grief or trauma haunting them? Or maybe someone is being sugary sweet on the exterior, but you can feel something draining and negative about them? Or maybe someone's high and loving energy always lifts you?
This is because when we are with someone else, our fields overlap. For the time that you are with them you get a sense of what it feels like to be them. You instinctively and unconsciously experience their energy cloud, and you are influenced accordingly whether you realize it or not. This can happen non-locally as well - on the phone, via email, or just in your persistent thoughts about someone. It may trigger an energy dormant in your own cloud. It may inspire you to pull new energies to the forefront. Or it may exhaust you as you feel the drain of their negative players tossing the ball around in there.
Spirit is adamant in showing me as well that future experiences are also an important part of each person's cloud. Since time is nonlinear, everything already exists within the field around us, and our own desires and longings are more often than not the residue of energetic cords we already have to those experiences. We desire it because it is already a part of us.
Mostly this is not entirely new information to me, but it is the picture that Spirit is painting that makes it so clear. It is this humanesque spin being put on it that has edges and textures and colors that makes it so digestible for my earth-bound brain. I feel my heart longing to know more. What do we do with this information? How can we use it to feel better?
Spirit tells me we have to first understand and acknowledge that the cloud is there. We have to begin to pay attention to how we feel, what we are thinking and even who we are around. Learning to tap into our energy cloud hinges first on accepting that it is there and beginning to play with our focus.
Next we must practice calling up positively-charged filters. The light of love is the only way to heal the darkness of trauma, and we must actively choose to see using the light dotting our own field. Spirit reminds me that it's always a choice and that the beauty of this human existence is that we each have freewill to make that choice.
We then must consciously push aside pesky, distracting negatively-charged filters while we work to transmute the biggest offenders. We have to look at the plays we've been running again and again and begin to bench the players that aren't actually advancing us to the goal. The thing with each of the energies in our cloud is that they're all in motion. So at first glance, it may look like a lot is happening when in fact we haven't actually been making any progress.
Transmuting and healing each of these experiences is "the work." This is where we do the heavy lifting of looking at our lives as objectively as we can and being willing to see things different and being open to change. This is what my sister and I teach in Belief Class, and it's the day in, day out commitment to riding the wave of our own emotions and mastering the shit out of them.
Even as Spirit is still speaking to me in meditation, I begin to see my own life differently. It becomes easier to detach from experiences and hurts and see them as outside of myself. I am the nucleus. I am the light of love keeping all these other energies in orbit. I am not the experiences; I am the keeper. I am here to tend them and love them into light. They do not define me; they only surround me. And I choose to be surrounded by possibility. I no longer see even the negatively-charged energies as weights. I see them as opportunities.
Before I know it the music that marks my hour of meditation is fading out. I become present to my body again. The legs that once shouted at me no longer have my attention. As I blink open my eyes, I notice that the light in the room has taken on a new quality. It is ethereal, gauzy. Lines and edges are blurred, and I feel myself looking at the spaces between things instead of the things themselves. I press my attention into my cloud and practice sifting through the layers. It feels buoyant and effervescent. Like the sea.
I remove my earbuds and become present again to the waves of sound filling my home. There is a new quality to its hum. I feel colors and densities dancing through the rooms, and I give thanks for the energy fields of these two beings with which I share this home. I find my own edges and experiment with feeling into theirs. I feel the pillows beneath me, the air around me, the energy within me. And instinctively I know that a new play has just been called.