Use Your Connection
Salty Snippet March 2021
I awaken with a songline, as I often do, and to me this is one way my dreams of the night carry me forward. Here are the lines;
No you are not
lost and alone in this world, yes you are
Guided each day. No you are not
lost and alone in this world. Yes you are
Cherished and safe! [copyr. Diccon Lee]
We don’t always feel cherished and safe, guided each day. What reassures me is my own experience of being a mother, a parent. I’ve never experienced anything as mysteriously strong as the concern I feel for the offspring of my body. I know some parents fall short of this but I think even the worst parent wishes good for their offspring while not knowing how to do this, or finding their own needs too strong. Whatever awesome Force, creative Intelligence, Life Source has brought us into existence must surely be the source of the natural parental instinct to protect and nurture life.
I can also speak from experience on being guided each day. The early morning time is surprisingly the best source of new approaches to the challenges I face. The time of awakening is a special spiritual state, when we need to keep our connection to our Source and be open to newness.
I’ve been enjoying the poetry of David Whyte; here he speaks my mind in What to remember when awakening:
“What you plan is too small for you to live.” And later:
“To remember the other world
in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.”
The plans we make in the evening for the following day, we must be ready to scratch should the morning bring us to a different view! We do the best we can with our rational minds to direct our lives toward what we think we should be doing. But there often/always seems to be other forces affecting our plans. Are these other forces friends or foe?
It’s important to get ourselves to a place of confidence in the life process itself. Here’s one negative view held by many today: We are each captain of a little boat run by a computer motor, each all alone trying to direct our boat forward where we choose, over water, against winds and forces that may stop or hinder us from getting anywhere. Life is a battle against Fate; Nature is an enemy. Our only tool is our good rational mind and we are quite alone in the universe.
But when our bodies and rational minds are taking sleep, long hours pass, and scientists have discovered (as “simpler” people have always observed) that while we sleep, other parts of our minds are somewhere off doing very interesting activities. Modern science is still being born in its study of what we are doing during sleep, but if we pay attention, I know from experience we find new insights into our projects. We find “guidance,” if we will be guided. During our sleep, some process has taken all the ingredients of yesterday and my whole life, even considered my forward direction, and has revised the plan in a possibly better way. Maybe even with a vision and knowledge larger than I the little boat captain could see!
I call it “wisdom” to pay attention to guidance that comes in ways the rational mind cannot understand. Recently I was helping my grandson study Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, a story of Fate versus Will. Over and over advise came to Caesar not to go to the Senate on the Ides of March. People had dreams that warned against it, Nature was displaying lightening, earthquakes, strange events, psychic people/seers prophesied the danger – and yet he went, and went to his death. What does it take to warn us, if the Universe itself wanted to help us? Do we, also refuse guidance in order to stick with our rationally set, egotistically grounded goals? Of course, Caesar and all of us must die someday, but there is the necessary death and death that seemed avoidable with available precautions.
I say that Yes, we are guided and safe, if we are willing to be guided and safe. And as regards the guidance that may come to us in the quiet slow dawning of the day, how best to take advantage of this? Especially for all who must arise and be functioning somewhere with others by a particular time? Deepak Chopra says that “Waking up with an alarm clock is detrimental…The brain transitions from deep sleep in a series of waves, each one getting closer to being fully awake.” My daughter, Anne Marie, actually has awakened for years without an alarm clock! She goes to sleep expecting to awaken as needed and even in times of pressing deadlines has always been able to awaken slowly without an alarm. Perhaps setting that intention as we fall asleep is a self-hypnosis that sets our mind to do as we intend.
If any self-discipline is needed here, it is not in keeping our nose to the grindstone, ignoring guidance as it comes, but in going to bed at a regular and appropriate time, slowly, gracefully, doing soothing activities to fall into good sleep. Then arising slowly, open to the many impressions that come in their own language as we emerge back into this world. If we sleep with another, maybe we should discuss this and respect the space we each need to honor this natural process. As David Whyte said eloquently “To remember the other world in this world, is to live in your true inheritance.”