Writing, Meditation, Prayer. What do all of these practices have in common?
Intimacy.
In my mind they personify nakedness. They present themselves to me as myself without any clothes on. True and heartfelt personifications of each of these are raw. They aren’t always beautiful, they aren’t always refined, and they are most definitely not meant to be witnessed or understood by all. But they speak deeply to anyone who is in a familiar state of mind to the one delivering the message.
Some of the most powerful renditions of these came to me when I was stripped of something that had offered me safety, comfort, care. Anything that resonated with my internal need for security and left me feeling unsettled, unseated, and at the mercy of whatever giant had lifted its head against me. Be it death, fear, captivity, the promise of defeat, embarrassment… Rejection.
I am doing my best to relay these things without making the tone all about me because these universal tools are meant to be personal to whoever is cultivating or crafting a relationship with them. So let’s start there maybe.
Time to take my clothes off. Again.
Visualization is key. I have run into invisible walls time and again because I’ve taken advice from outlets I’d learned to trust. Let me be clear, it isn’t the fault of these outlets that their advising turned to painful lessons. It is mine for listening more closely to external resources than my internal voice screaming that what I was about to do was going to lead in a direction that it did. The answers are inside of us. Each of us and everyone’s answers are unique to themselves.
What works for me, might not work for the next person who comes to me looking for answers of their own. It is my duty to step outside of myself and into the shoes of an active listener. My answers when regarding others should reflect in questions meant to help initiate further exploration rather than an expose of how wise I think I am. If I am offering anything outside of the opportunity to explore, I am going about the experience wrong because the truth is, I don’t contain anyone’s epiphanies but my own. So my point? If someone is confidently expressing to you, what you should do. Runaway, go take a moment to confide in yourself and take up the council within. Maybe what was offered is spot on but that is between you, yourself, and your insides. It’s okay to respectfully decline another opinion as just that.
So what is a prayer to me? It’s the act of taking my perceived wants and needs inside and offering them to the little voice that’s kept me company my whole life, I like to picture a funeral pyre in my mind, I place my desire in the fire, watch it go up in smoke to be reconciled. This only works if I see the desire being transformed into an inevitable future outcome. Ask and you shall… not might… SHALL receive.
I like to think of my heart as a generator and my mind as a satellite or a receiver of sorts depending on what role it is playing at any given time. I am constantly picking up relevant feedback to whatever prompts I’ve fed myself. Think Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. I see what I want to see for better or for worse. Prayer is a method of asking for something that hasn’t presented itself physically.
What is Meditation? The art of imagination. This is what meditation is to me, I tried for years and years to master the way of sitting still, breathing… there is nothing relaxing about that to me. We are taking instructions from masters who perfected doing nothing in a time when that was completely natural… There were no televisions, computers, distractions, cars. The idea of travel wasn’t as simple as getting online and booking a ticket to someplace far away. It would take days to travel twenty or thirty miles. I came to this realization one day while running along a bike path on a three-mile route that took me twenty minutes to complete. It stopped me in my tracks and had me laughing at all the toil and frustration I’d put into the act. Instead of taking my thoughts sitting down, I started doing it my way. Listening to something relaxing while folding laundry, cleaning, and picturing myself in my mind doing the same thing. Clearing noise out of the way so I could cultivate new and fresh perspectives. Meditation is whatever offers YOU the meditator the ability to reflect and absorb in the present, anything that cultivates mindfulness and internal relationship.
What is writing? Well, this one is difficult to put a finger on. It’s been a lot of things to me in the past. To put it into a simply. Writing has been a mirror to me, a reflective surface, an outlet for recharge, a judge and jury, a compassionate and nurturing voice of reason when I am feeling unsettled or unreasonable, it is a practice that has lead me into imagery so gently before tumbling me into smooth lines and mindfully soft edges. It is a refining tool in my book.
These three practices over time have saved my life, set me on a firm foundation, and put me back together at different key points in my life. At times I’ve been a fair weather friend and only turned to their use when the waters grew rough and choppy, I am learning to bring them into my best days as well recently, to turn to them to display gratitude as well as needs, and desires I see for my future. I will offer a few samples of pictures I’ve taken of my journals below. These are personal my mind stripping away the outer coverings I’ve hidden behind until I am naked with only my shadow standing beside me and extending in front of me to remind me, I am never alone.