
I came to a point in the breath where I started to experience myself, feeling my intensity, and immediately began to resist it. Sometimes my intensity can feel like a bomb exploding and I’ve naturally built resistance to that. When I was able to catch it in that moment, it’s as if the honey jar broke, and it just started running through my veins. It consumed my being with a suppleness that is also me. That is how I know God within me, and it is available to me any time I can surrender in the moment.
Honey is such a beautiful metaphor for our own divine nature. From a healing perspective, it has antimicrobial elements. It’s sweet, as is innocence, our true essence, and it is made by bees, which work in community for success of their collective.
The honey is in the process. It’s the internal viewing that allows us to get glimpses of this gold, and know its truth or existence, so that we can bring just a piece of that in our day to day.
I heard Jennifer Freed say recently, “When you’re so concerned with taking someone else’s inventory, it’s because you’re terrified to look at your own”. That is one powerful and truthful statement. The bomb I reference feels really out of control, but when I can slow down enough to recognize the implosion, and fall into it, the possibilities feel endless. We so often look outside ourselves for happiness or misery, what could unfold for us if we started looking within?
An idea generated in the Meditation II class at the Passionist Earth and Spirit Center is from Galileo, the father of science. As a former monk, he researched What Does God know? To know what God knows, one can observe her creations. To know the gardener, study what she grows, and to know thyself, look within.
Father Joe suggests in class that a goal of meditation is to be with pleasant without attachment, and to be with unpleasant without aversion. To neither avert the implosion or fall into the honey jar.
Our addiction to stimulation, whether that be happiness or suffering, is real. To simply be is boring, but it is in that boredom that glimpses of enlightenment come. In the nothing, there is everything.
Finding stillness and quiet has been a constant quest for me over the past few weeks, and being a witness to the process allows for grace when honey seems far away. I can always fall into the words of Rumi when that occurs and bring a little sweetness to the present moment.