The Axis Mundi

It has been an amazing six days here. This week has been my “settling in week”. I have been non-stop corresponding via email, studying Japanese, reviewing my class for the first week, and doing all the things logistically one needs to do in a new place. In that time, the one stable grounding point has been my meditation practice. This exquisite gift that my teacher Paul has given me has become the axis mundi upon which my entire life revolves. It has been the source of the clarity of my awareness in all of my major decisions over the last year, and has put me in touch with the power of the divine in a way that I could not have predicted.

It really hit home this evening as I was corresponding with a fellow teacher, Dave Willocks. I wrote him, “I am flying high on the waves of grace, and it is the Divine Shakti blazing the path for me. I am forever indebted to her love and wisdom.” As I wrote “Divine Shakti,” I felt her expansive presence in my heart, and I was filled with a great love for this universe and all it holds. Sometimes the blessing that this life is stuns me into astonishment, and this was one of those times.

In my meditation this evening I experienced what Paul calls the “frictionless flow”. I felt my awareness being funneled into the great expanse of Life around me. My energetic body swelled with this presence, and I was filled with a heavy vibration. I settled into this state, and it seemed to last an eternity. Eventually, I consciously made the decision to move into savasana, and became still in that space. The fullness of consciousness then continued to increase, as if a great ocean was being poured into my being. I was filling up beyond the capacity of my body, yet holding this infinite space within the confines of my awareness. It was a paradoxical reversal of the meditation experience, as if awareness itself had turned inside out, like some sort of lotus flower, blossoming in two directions at once, with both blossoms containing the other.

I slowly sat up, took my seat, then chanted a lovely mantra Paul taught me that is for eliciting harmony and deep understanding between beings. As my tongue articulated the beautiful sanskrit vibrations, I felt the sounds emerging from another voice inside of my own. I was being sung, and bliss filled my heart and mind.

As I sit to write this, it feels like a low level electrical hum is resonating throughout the entire surface of my body, and within there is a quietude that is vast and silent to its depths. I feel acutely alive.

Tasmai Shri Gurave Namah!