I have been a wild woman for a while,

and it’s been for months. I dropped into a specific kind of mentoring relationship a while ago, and never really settled in. I was a rounded object trying to fit into a rigid, square space and mindset. I was impatient and had little discipline. Worked for others, why not me?

But the problems were large, and it wasn’t working. As my friends know, I left that relationship and started to look around. There were other ‘invites’ but I was chary, having learned at least that I was in flux, and to reconsider what I was doing at this point. I didn’t need to jump into anything else, having still to sum up what I had just come out of.

At least I had realized power and control from the outside does not answer to the power and self-control needed from the inside first. When you listen to something outside, sometimes…..you abdicate what is needed to do inside. I needed to do some serious self-work.

My loving friends told me that everything I needed right now was inside me already. Fine. How to access that when I was a ball of confusion and anxiety? Well, slow down, enter the silence and still my mind. Clarify things through the practice of mediation.

I was a Quaker for 12 years, until 2001. I was used to the practice of sitting in silence, listening, hopefully for the voice of my particular God who rarely showed up. But it was a practice that at least I was familiar with. I forgot a lot of those lessons over the past few years, and especially when I started to write two years ago. Images, words, concepts, all these things whirled around my head and distracted me. Recently I have tried to go back to a particular form of meditation, and I am making a little progress.

I find that I settle into meditation, and my mind instead of stilling it’s thoughts, either throws me back into the recent past, or hurries me up to the future. It is very hard to stay in the present.  All I do is seem to argue with myself when I try to meditate.

But I know now what is happening. My ego is fighting to keep itself in power, it’s trying to direct the workings of my present state…and it’s fighting a hard battle. I was faced with someones powerful ego, and my own rose to do battle just about all the time. It got used to putting on it’s armor and going to war, whether it was openly or covertly. I was always tense and finally got too weary to make good decisions for myself. And my ego got nasty and hurtful, lashing out with abandon. A number of people suffered, and probably didn’t deserve it. Or maybe they did. I shouldn’t say, right?

Ego doesn’t serve you. Its job, I am told, and I am finding out, is to remain in power. It blocks growth and ultimately knowledge that would free you from its tyranny and allow the heart to come in and look around, decide things that are much healthier.

Yep, it’s all inside….the issue is how to unlock it. That was the rub.

I was struggling with the not so simple “Om namah shivaya” mantra , meaning “I honor the divine within me”. I didn’t know how to breathe and internalize the words, get lost of deep within. Then I lay out on my bed, with cats to the left of me, right of me, and sitting on my pelvis. Their warmth and combined comfort seems to propel me into some natural rhythm and it all fell into place.

Om-inhale/namah-exhale/shiva-inhale/yaaaa-exhale. I found myself slowing down, breathing gently and deeply, floating upon the words.

The Sanskrit was nice, but the English is what makes the point. Then I found that my mind split into two parts, and though my voice (or my mind) was saying the Sanskrit, another part of my mind was understanding it in English: “I honor the divine within me.” At the same time.

These all sound like the mechanics of something and not the essence of it all. But it’s coming, it’s developing fruit on the limb and that takes time. I am becoming, finally, more mindful of being mindful. That’s a buzz word with many, this ‘mindfulness’, but it’s something that can be obtained. It goes beyond discipline and straight to the heart.

All these things are brand new and still rather stilted within me. But it beats beating myself up for failure and disobedience to those outside voices.

It has come time to still the mind and listen to that heart, and hopefully the divine someday inside.

Lady Nyo.

Om namah shivaya…….

I honor the divinity that resides within me.

For a while, I have been looking for something unknown in me, something elusive. I thought it was power, feeling rather powerless in the face of many things. Some were small frustrations, but mostly they were interrelationships. Dealing with people.

I turned to outside forces, and some questionable. It was not an issue of ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ but I had, in the doing, lost my way. I had given over my own self to such an extent I had lost my vision of myself. I was floundering. When you flounder in the sea, you attract sharks, those who would eat you up. Perhaps that is why you have to be ‘still’, to go inward to something more essential than what is being offered outside. To try to remember the bedrock of who and what you are. That inner strength that got you through marriage-divorce-marriage and keeps you alive and creative in life.

Yesterday I acted the crazy woman to get away from a rather foolish fellow. It worked. But I wonder in the end how much truth there was in the craziness. I touched something raw and uncomfortable, a piece that I wasn’t so ‘disconnected’ as I thought. I had become needy. And this was because I had denied or covered over my own strength, that stuff, whatever you call it, that got me from one year to another. I had given over too easily my own power, and I suffered the consequences.

I was denying part of my true nature, which is full of flaws but also of strengths. I was denying my full creativity, the stuff that colors and is a part of what makes life worth living.

That perfection was in there, I just was just hell bent on denying it. And, I was casting my pearls before a swine herd.

In looking for something outside myself, some foreign answers, I had denied what was always right there. I went a far distance, tripping and falling, looking for answers when the inner journey would have been closer, faster and more satisfactory.

Had I embraced that divinity inside, that perfection already in place that was waiting for me to notice it, I would have come home.

What I had done wrong here was to believe that my limited little ego constituted my whole nature. Somewhere within us is that balance, which is that we bear God within and don’t know it.

Om namah shivaya.

Lady Nyo

I got this message this morning from Brady Sutton, who posts here on occasion.  He is a firm friend and his words go from hysterically funny to profoundly comforting.

Sweet Jane, I’m heartened by your discoveries. We are all a part of God, thus we are all a part of one another. Each of us has perfection inside, because God resides within us. Some of us search for paths (the road less traveled?) that deliver us to a temporary tranquillity, and then the search resumes. Others are content to take a seat alongside their particular path and watch the wanderers pass by.

Some of us wander because we were made to wander. God likes variety and gives some of us a bit extra of whatever it is that makes us see things differently. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. And sometimes misleading. We can’t always see things clearly. God’s variety, as we see every day, is not always made of happiness. But happiness is there to be found, inside us.

Look inside, sweet Jane. You’ll see that, for whatever it’s worth, you have my love. You have my brotherhood. I am always available. You aren’t alone, although, as I’ve experienced, it sometimes feels that way, no matter who stands by your side.

Peace and love, sweet Jane. Be happy. You DO have the choice.

BS…Brady, I choose you every time. Jane