On getting still enough to tune into what’s already guiding you
“Work Is Love Made Visible”
This is a quote by Kahlil Gibran.
I have had a little move-from-love practice for myself for a long time: not to post/write or share on social media for posting’s sake. That if I’m not feeling a strong urge overflowing to share something, I wait until I do feel the urge.
This is why sometimes I don’t post for weeks. Because if I am posting, working or sharing from a place of a sprouting “should”, the love of it can seem to get squeezed out. The potency dried up.
This is my business model. If I am deeply moved to share, I share. If the resonance of what I’m sharing stirs something so momentous inside of me that I feel a shift, a change, a deeper understanding and compassion in any direction- then I feel a duty to share with others.
Work is love made visible. And you can feel the difference in a piece of writing, in a meal someone made, in a conversation, between something that was created from love and something that was created from obligation dressed up as love.
One moves you and creates a rippled sense of connection. The other leaves you vaguely hollow and you don’t know why.
So I wait for the urge. And while I wait, I practice getting still enough to feel it.
The Bathtub Laboratory
It’s easier to understand the power of our thoughts or actions and the ripple effects they have upon everything around us if we imagine being underwater.
We can observe that with the slightest movement of our body, there is a ripple that travels outward. Once we completely still our extremities- the movement of breath keeps going, continuing to create ripples.
But we can become so conscious of the breath that we can create what I call “still breath.”
This is when not one part of the breath is done unconsciously, and the waters are left undisturbed.
I practice this in the bathtub. I pull all of my presence into each breath, keeping continuity with it as it travels internally along the deepest core channels I can connect to. And then, the stilling of the mind’s ripples follows.
I get off on this stuff hehe. Because it teaches me about the reflective nature of all ripples of life, helping me to see the conductions of “unseeable” life energies, such as thought formations or emotional weather systems more clearly.
Most of us are generating ripples constantly and completely unconsciously, like a body thrashing around underwater wondering why everything feels so murky. And then we go looking for guidance outside of ourselves.
But guidance lives in the still water. It can’t reach you in the churn.
The Pendulum and The Signal
I believe that when we tune into our internal guidance system, and when we share what’s really moving us, it creates a ripple of movement through the airwaves that builds a powerful momentum.
Emotions are what move us, and when the energies in the movement we generate have pure intent, their momentum is positively contagious.
We don’t have to be perfect and be perfectly sharing authentically every day. The practice is the teeter-tottering inconsistencies, the pendulum swinging – so we are constantly feeling the edges of our own experience.
Like everything else, we are all swinging on the pendulums of our own actions, riding them all out to learn the lessons they are gifting us.
Maybe the sweet spot is staying half in knowing who we are and what we are doing – and half in having absolutely no clue. So that we stay soft, openly allowing for the guidance of the mystical inconsistencies of the heart to take us where we somehow know we’re supposed to go, even when we can’t explain how we know.
The bathtub teaches me this. The urge teaches me this. The waiting teaches me this.
Get still enough to feel what’s moving. Then trust it enough to follow.
Love you meow,
Meghan