Timeline Hopping {Part 2}
In late spring I found myself shifting towards exploring more about general topics, after a long stretch of more personal writing. If I’m being honest I guess I started wondering if it was interesting or if people want/benefit from hearing dispatches from my various astral travels. Or maybe as I started struggling out of this particular chrysalis it felt uncomfortable to do so in public.
I’m an advocate of approaching one’s spiritual practice and “manifestation” with a gentle hand, being open to the possibility that your best plans and biggest dreams for yourself are somewhat limited. I trust the energies and guides that I work with to see the bigger picture. But it’s not easy.
It’s been a strange year. Extreme highs and lows. There has been unusual slowing in certain areas and quickening in others. My writing practice has expanded rapidly (a fraction of the writing makes it here). My experience of mediumship has evolved in a way that has prioritized itself, and creating the work (writing it, or recording it, or saying it aloud to myself) has taken a certain primacy over having space to share it. And sometimes sharing it becomes necessary even if it’s not being experienced. (Recordings abound)
Prior to taking a much needed summer vacation back in July, I began having a series of interesting moments of spontaneously shifting into an altered state of consciousness. I was laying out to dry off a bit after swimming at Brighton Beach. It was overcast, and I had been resting with my eyes closed appreciating the more muted, gentle quality of light. I opened my eyes and extended one arm to block the sun with my hand, and looked at the sky. The colors seemed exceptionally vivid and I was surprised to see clearly the curvature of the atmosphere, a bubble of gases surrounding the earth, with all of us and the weather encapsulated within it. Elemental air swirling around, having no where to go it continues to spiral across and around the globe– playing with the water, earth, and sun as it travels. I saw my own mind as this undulating capsule of thoughts and experiences. With no where to go they continue to cycle, finding new ways to manifest and transform again and again. How does one’s mind hold the heaviness and emotion of water, without it becoming stifling ? How do you hold the immensity of your emotional and mental realms without letting them become their own reality?
Just a couple days later I was back there playing in the water. I was floating on my stomach, watching the waves. I usually face the open ocean but I faced the shore. I tuned into the feeling of my feet and the subtle movement. My toes perceiving tiny details of sensation announcing the waves, until I wasn’t surprised by their arrival. They passed through me as my body traveled over them. I watched each sheet of water surge past my neck and charge towards the shore— opening into the awareness of holding on.
I heard:
“It is your (human) nature to look for points in time. To search for distinction. The cycle is always turning but you want to see beginnings and endings. We understand that this is your nature to see things this way. And you must understand that it is our nature to understand that each moments stands alone and together. One moment, after another, after another, forever. The moment doesn’t last, it immediately yields to the next. To the unknown. You can’t hold it, or speed it up, or slow it down. Like these waves each moment comes and passes.”
A challenge of contemplating free will and timelines is that we cannot control anything and yet we can always make choices. We CAN choose certain actions, certain thoughts, to cultivate certain energies, even if all our available choices are undesirable. And yet we cannot control what happens after. We also cannot see the future. Or we can, but the future is always changing so what we see is really just a possibility (a dream?). Our minds can’t fathom the range of possibilities. It would be as if someone handed you a map of a city from 500 years in the future and you said “oh great, I’ll use this.”
Maybe I’m trying to say that the map is this moment. Or to know that dreams and fears are mainly ideas, ones we can pursue while also knowing that the future is constantly being written and rewritten. The feeling and intuition of this moment is a more accurate compass. Whereas your mind is an atlas on unlabeled maps from the past and future.
The next night I was working with dual frequency and my Flowering Mugwort flower essence.
Did I forget to mention I opened up a bottle for myself on the Full moon in Capricorn? This isn’t a shameless plug I but I have to give credit to Mugwort which has a great capacity to reveal the truth within our dreams, to distinguish the dream from the “reality.” But back to the story.
I found myself in a curious state of losing my thoughts. I don’t know how else to describe it. I was working with my Crown and my mind was empty. There was a sort of abstract awareness of myself and how I was feeling without any language. I could barely even hold the observation of not having thoughts. I felt the environment of my body in a way that surprised me. Who am I without my thoughts? What is a dream without language? I fell into a deep sleep and woke myself up early to leave for my trip.
In the incredible relief of feeling my mind slowing down I realized I was in desperate need of this time off. It was both peaceful and a bit dramatic on the level of natural encounters. Perhaps I had been too distracted, or preoccupied with my own emotions, to see that this was a continuation from the whole spring. In recent months I kept encountering dead animals in Prospect Park. Over and over. I tried to say to myself “this is nature too” but maybe it felt too grim so I pushed just out of my mind’s sight. I’ve had a painful and inescapable awareness of how much we (humans) are pushing against the resilience of the “nature” beyond ourselves. All resilience has a limit at which point injury occurs.
I try to meet the natural world and elements with with acknowledgement that it’s not all for my “benefit” or “appreciation,” and that it’s impolite in this exchange to judge such encounters as positive or negative. So I still enjoyed my Maritime Forest hike being chased by horseflies, and spiders crawling all over me the moment I left for a two hour kayak excursion (I witnessed my own cruel nature as I reached my limit of spiders on my face and tossed a couple overboard), and finally on the last day being stung by a jellyfish in the ocean. None were ultimately catastrophic or an emergency but it certainly got my attention.
It can also be like this. With competing needs, desires, lack of space— an exchange, or even sacrifice, is often unavoidable.
You probably can guess already that I don’t really believe in coincidence. Though I don’t think all synchronicities are of deep and life changing importance.
There can be a rawness, a cruelty, an excruciating quality to natural cycles. It’s easy to spin these into a web of “why me?” I have been known to do this at times. I was surprised when I was channeling a meditation on flowers that it was primarily a meditation on death (I should not have been surprised). And I continue to be surprised at how those times when we are “void of course,” experiencing ego death, grieving, or releasing it Just. Keeps. Happening.
I like to say, healing has many endings and many beginnings. More turns around the wheel with moments of levity and catharsis that deserve reverence because they are hard earned. Reiki is said to be a gentle energy but in my experience Your Mileage May Vary.
Energetic recalibration can be somewhat beyond merely “uncomfortable.” Even the adage I often say aloud that we practice reiki for “the highest and best good of all” is really an idea that can’t be realized fully. There is no “good of all,” or if there is surely we don’t all agree on what that looks like. In Karma Yoga there is often a distinction made between what is “good” and what is “good for you.” Or even what is “good” in the grand scheme vs this lifetime. One’s destiny has many paths. Destiny is not set in stone. Maybe there is no destination. There is no “right” path, though there may be others best avoided. Or at least that’s what I think.
When I consider the timelines of my own life, or maybe in general, I sometimes imagine it from a vantage point where they appear like strings of a guitar, or spokes on a wheel— branching off in new directions from a central point that is the beginning of one’s story. But just a quick change of orientation and those branching paths become a single line of varying depths. This strange quality of ending up in the same place even as you may try to avoid it makes we wonder about how much control we really have over hopping or shifting between timelines. Sometimes we have the illusion of choice when really all the available paths are going in the same direction. Sometimes we can’t see where a path leads and we end up somewhere unexpected.
Where do you see yourself in you own timelines, or life path right now?
If you could visualize the near future as a topography, what does the terrain look like?
Are there synchronicities or messages in plain sight that you have been noticing, or ignoring?
How do you navigate without a map?