It was the middle of an afternoon and I’d sat down on my yoga mat to close my eyes for five minutes of stillness. No sooner had I closed my eyes than an image formed in my mind’s eye. A weary looking little girl wandering by a stream, a heavy-looking backpack on her back.
The girl in my vision sat down by the stream, took off her pack and laid it down on the banks of the water. As she did so, tears of remembrance and relief welled up in my eyes, a burden I hadn’t known I’d been carrying lifted.
The little girl was remembering that she didn’t have to do this alone. Remembering that it wasn’t all on her to figure everything out. Remembering that life flows effortlessly when we get out of the way. Remembering that there is a deeper intelligence behind it all that’s got us covered.
And then the other day, in the cemetery, three phrases formed in my mind one after the other:
It’s about remembering to connect to the Mother Ship.
No, it’s about remembering you’re already connected to the Mother Ship.
No, no, no, it’s about knowing you are the Mother Ship.
It brought to mind a paragraph from A Course in Miracles which I’ve gone back to repeatedly since I first read it some weeks ago:
“The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that within it is your kingdom, where God can enter not.”
As seemingly difficult moments arise in life, we can so easily feel ourselves to be alone in a terrifying world. A world in which it’s all on us to figure everything out. The mind can become very tightly wound, scrabbling to find solutions to the problems it perceives.
But if we would but rest for a moment, set down our packs and settle into that place of stillness within, we might catch sight of that deeper truth – that not only do we not have to figure it all out alone but that doing so isn’t an advisable course of action.
The small minded ‘me’ has access only to what it already knows and it turns these limited ideas around and around, increasingly frustrated that none of them fit the bill. But the deeper truth of who we are has access to something far better, an infinite space of infinite creativity and possibility.
When the mind is given space to rest and permission to stop trying to figure it all out, we open up a space for something new to come in. Flashes of inspiration, ideas from out of the blue – these are the phrases we have to describe this infinite space of infinite creativity and possibility that’s available to us every moment of every day.
So whatever burden you might be carrying this week, whether it feels large or small and whatever form it takes, why not sit with me by the stream a while, lay down your pack and remember:
You don’t have to figure it all out alone.
Love and courage,
Leah