Firelight

Firelight

I was wrapping papers. When you don’t have wood for kindling, rolling newspapers for the fire will work. 

There’s nothing like a winter fire to warm the soul. She spreads her flames in all directions, each leaping higher than the other. Some are yellow. Some are orange. Eventually the blue flame emerges when the fire is good and hot. 

Meditation is like that. When you begin meditating, the soul begins clearing out the debris of the day. The soul releases the tensions of the day. 

A deeper level is reached with additional meditation.  Wounds happen throughout our lives, the soul is wounded too, and wounds need healing.  Betrayal, ignorance, pain, loss and deep grief, torn beliefs need releasing also.  Deeper meditation allows our souls to let go the wounds.  Sometimes the release comes suddenly.  More often, it happens gradually as a result of this deeper level of meditation.  Each time we meditate, the soul lets go a bit more of each wound.

Catastrophic anxiety, fear, even terror, however, require an even deeper level of meditation.  Here meditation comes up against the mighty amygdala, that primitive part of the brain that keeps us alive by sending out often bellowing alarm signals to the rest of the higher functioning brain to warn us of danger.  The meditation has to go quite deep to quiet the amygdala.  Souls who have been traumatized need this level of meditation to counteract  the incessant pinging of the wounded amygdala.  When the amygdala is bathed in the peace experienced by such a deep level of meditation, it begins to calm.  Think of it as re-conditioning the amygdala, calming its excesses afforded by wounds of trauma. 

When I began meditating, all I could hear was the chattering of my own thoughts.  One by one I practiced letting go, releasing the thoughts. I imagined sweeping them away, side to side.  Little by little, the thoughts receded.

  Up came deeper feelings, of loss, of betrayal, of profound grief.  I felt each one and let it go – difficult at first, but with time, this releasing got easier.  And then I began to encounter trauma wounds, the ones that scared me to death or caused excruciating pain, or left me so humiliated I could scarcely lift my head up.  Pain and humiliation were difficult to let go, but the most difficult were the traumas that profoundly frightened me – within an inch of my life.  Lots and lots of belly breathing, lots of deep meditation that brought me to a place of peace. 

Becoming Clear

Have you ever looked in a lake and all you could see was the reflection of a mountain or a tree?  If the water on the surface is disturbed, it is hard to see the reflection. 

As the disturbance stills, the reflection becomes clearer and clearer.  Our minds are like that lake.  Old memories are hard to see clearly if we are in a state of anxiety, fear, agitation. But if we can calm these, it is clear what those memories are.  For a very long time, my younger sister had told me that very early in her life, someone had tried to kill her, smother her, putting a pillow over her face.  She thought it was Mom.  And then it stopped.  She did not know why.  Mom was a pretty disturbed person, so I did not discount it.  I had a different memory – something that came up repeatedly in a terrifying childhood and early adulthood dream of a hugely heavy black box sitting on my chest, pressing down on me so that I could barely breathe.  In my dream, I thought it was God.  I thought if it went on much longer, I would die.  But I always woke up and wondered about those dreams. 

I was meditating deeply not long ago.  Up came a memory of nearly suffocating.  I was surprised to see Mom associated with that memory.  Then I realized I was asleep and under the covers as a small child.  She was sitting on me and put a pillow over my head.  She left me for dead,  but one nostril was still getting a small amount of air under the covers, so I did not die.  I was deeply asleep initially.  As this memory surfaced, I did not know that my mom was capable of doing that to me, but then I remembered my sister’s story and realized it was quite possible.  I suspect that my mom had post-partum depression following the birth of my younger sister.  In just a little over a year she had gone from having no children to having three children below the age of four.  Apparently, she wanted one less.  She did not succeed. 

As the memory came up, I felt myself struggling to breathe.  I knew it was a bodily memory and let it go.  That’s when Mom’s picture popped up.  But wait!  How did I know it was Mom if I was asleep?  As a struggle ensued, part of me left my body and witnessed the whole affair.  And one by one, the memories of what was seen and what was felt in my body returned.  And one by one, I let them go.  To have your mom try to kill you is no small trauma.  To have your mom try to kill two of her daughters is really quite extraordinary.  That post-partum depression must have entailed a psychosis.  It took years of therapy and years of meditation to get me to the point where I could remember and process this trauma.

We were visiting an aunt one time when I was growing up.  Mom was in a wrathful state that day.  My aunt wondered why we just took her wrath without just fighting back.  I knew in my body from that early childhood experience that it was not safe.  Mom had started trying to suffocate me with a pillow over my head, and when that did not work because my body started squirming in my sleep to free itself for more air, she sat on my chest so I could not squirm.  I started to awaken at the end and quickly realized that the more I fought back the more pressure she applied. 

When I finally lay still, holding my breath, she left, thinking she had accomplished her mission.  These details also returned in a very deep level of meditation.  The complexities of this memory and the emotions the heart feels of betrayal, anger, hatred, fear, terror, and horror that went with it were so great that I doubt I could have remembered and processed it without a very deep level of meditation.

Flying Flames

Meditation is like a purifying fire of sorts.  The emotions that may have choked us for a lifetime are eased, released, let go.  Meditation changes our energy, our vibration so that the lake inside our minds is stilled.  Meditation changes our emotional structure so that we need not hang onto the past.  Meditation changes who we are so that we are no longer defined by our past.  Meditation is like a calming wave that we ride at the crest, rather than getting sucked down into the curl of the wave where the ride is much wilder. 

Meditation heals the soul.

Whatever troubles the mind finds solace, and the soul, too, can release it.  Whatever profoundly afflicts the heart is soothed, and the soul, too, can let it go.  It is the soul that spurs us on to find the answers, the solace, the soothing that we need, even when the troubles are unconscious, even when the heart is frozen.  Meditation is the firelight that sees deeply into what is unconscious, warms the heart, and heals the soul.

When did you last meditate? 
What did you release? 
What woe needs releasing? 

Do you have resources to help you let go the past and its pains? 

Do you think meditation might help?

Flames