Breathing in Bali
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Bali, Indonesia has been beckoning me for the last few years. Come play with me child. Come walk in the wonder of life as it truly is: Magnificent, beautiful and glorious. Come swing on my vines, wiggle your toes in my sand, dance on my soil, luxuriate in my waterfalls, and replenish your soul with the delights of smiles and Mama Gaia.
All you desire is within you and when immersed in this magical queendom, thriving will be known!
She kept whispering in my ear and my heart felt her presence, yet my left brain teamed up with my ego mind and did what it always does…asking questions to keep me in a “emotional time” which can prompt constraints and limitation. (If you are not familiar with what I am referring when I say “clock and emotional time” read Eckert Tolle’s book The Power of Now.)
Quickly stated:
Clock time is a linear, practical manner in which we keep appointments, schedules and accomplish objectives. It is simply a tool we utilize to facilitate the accomplishment of tasks. That is all fine and good. It is how it is meant to serve us.
Emotional or psychological time occurs when dwelling on a situation in our minds. The situation, issue or problem is usually not the problem. The so called “problem” is the perception that we hold that interprets it as a problem. When we are projecting ourselves constantly into the future (or past) we are abandoning ourselves in the moment. We are kept in a perpetual loop of drama. It becomes a habit to always want to solve, to fix or be at the end and we dismiss the PROCESS or the present moment experience. We are missing out on the journey of LIFE!
Our ego mind tends to be on the job to protect and insulate us from anything that can be perceived as risky, alter the status quo or shift our consciousness back inward to our wholeness.
Allowing our left brain, which is the seat of our judgment, rationale, logic, intellect, critical thinking, and pragmatic know how take the lead is best done after our heart sets the course; however, in this western world, we tend to lead with our heads.
It is just a habit but a relentless one at that! How? When? With whom? Of course, nobody in their right mind (living in time) would argue with me given the recent set of circumstances.
Pragmatically, I have all the excuses to abandon the trip of which I will save the countless details; however, the main shift in our lives was Kirk’s emancipation of himself. He left corporate America and has been offering Transformational Breath (R) full time! My Spiritual Superman, Shaman of the Heart and Sound Healer extraordinaire is full of courage and bravely carves a pathway of possibilities that is directly chosen by his heart’s intelligence.
But think about this for a moment: How many times do we put our own pleasure on hold in the name of practicality, logic and conformity of what the society norm dictates? Not enough time, money, resources, interest etc. We wait until our body sets off alarm bells beckoning us to sit up and pay attention to what is happening deep inside of us.
Since everything originates energetically, we might not notice the subtle nuances that are signaling us if we are living in our heads. It’s too fast, elusive, or slippery to perceive so the Universe sends us a more pronounced message. One we can see or hear or know! If we are still unable to perceive the message, the announcements become bigger, broader, louder and too clear to ignore like: health challenges, financial shifts or relationship disruptions.
It’s not that we did anything wrong. Hear me clearly on this because it is easy to start the blame game. There is nothing “wrong” at all. It’s simply a pointer towards what would enhance our natural state of well-being. The messenger is knocking on our door so that we might restore BALANCE to our system.
My heart felt intuition was intoxicatingly strong beckoning me to relax more, let go, be easy and enjoy more of life’s simplicities rather than in a state of perpetual pursuit.
Yes, I can make a pursuit of out anything even relaxing. What’s your loop? What tangles you up? Are you aware of your cyclical conundrum? What wants to be loved in you that you deem unlovable? Come clean. Everyone has something, and IT IS LOVABLE!
I just found out that my loopidity loop actually has a name which implies I am not alone! Have you ever heard of the Law of Paradoxical Intent?
In part, it’s when you want something so very much that you may very likely have put blinders on to your internal thought processes and inner reality to the point you cannot see what you are doing to yourself. You could say you get obsessed and even desperate. The very strength of the desperate desire keeps the point of interest or the desired experience an equidistance from experiencing the desire. The more you want it, the more it moves away from you. Slippery sucker!!
I have contemplated the age-old question: 
How do you LET GO of that which you
desire?
How do you love what you deem unlovable? If “letting go of control and allowing the Universe have the reigns” is the experience desired, the more you pursue it, the more it is out of reach and the tighter you feel. All the while, relaxation was the “goal”! How funny is that? Ya gotta laugh at this stuff!
It’s kind of like when someone tells you to relax when you are in a state of turmoil. It’s freakin’ annoying, completely unhelpful and if you had the presence of mind to relax, you would. So begin to notice your reactions, acknowledge that our charged emotions surface for the purpose of integration and all you have to do is be brave enough to “feel” them.
What would be the catalyst to give myself that which Source installed within me and LIFE has been beckoning me to experience: Enjoyment, Pleasure, and Peaceful Easy feelings. They are always within us. They already reside deep within my core. They want to come out and PLAY in the light Of day.
So, getting back to the Bali trip……..
Of course, it would have to be Jordyn who is my 20 year old vivacious niece who has a zest for adventure and life affirming experiences.
She texts me asking me to spend a week with her in Bali as her last hooray while studying abroad in Australia! Well, when a 20-year-old wants to hang out with her aunt, you know that is the definition of “TOTALLY COOL” and you jump on it.
No need for the ego mind to jump in and squash it. Follow the thread of intuition or just pure inspiration.
Interspersed between a plethora of activities, there was communion with the absolute abundance of nature.
Here is the unfolding that was quite the juxtaposition from my left brain mentality!!!!
I saw a sign………………………………………….of pure Intuit De-Light
Which means to
De-Liberately De-Sign your own De-Light
Sitting still, relaxing my vision and watching the earth and plants in all of their liveliness breath. YES WATCHING THE EARTH BREATHE!!!
There have been many mornings when I had witnessed this in-breath and out-breath by the trees behind my house as I sat on my back deck drinking my morning tea but this was exaggerated a million fold by the plush plant life. My gaze relaxed so much that what appeared were dimensions of space.
Picture glass discs layered one behind the other perpendicular to the Earth’s ground. They are transparency in motion at different depths and speeds. If you” try” to see them, you will only see the dense physical objects before you. “Trying” is antithetical to the experience. Its that Law of Paradoxical Intent. You cannot “try”. It will not happen that way. Such an exploration!!!
It’s like when you look at a painting that has two images embedded in it and depending how you are focusing will determine whether you see one, two or multiple images.
There was a feeling of thrilling connectivity to ALL THERE IS yet it left me almost as quickly as the experience washed over me. The moment I attached to it, it was gone.
Bali is very much in her own vibrational, magical presence. We breathe together in perfect harmony. Nature has been the catalyst by which my soul has romanced me. She is teaching me the singularity of trusting the moment through the art of dance. The bliss of complete presence. The experience of presence vs my relentless pursuit of the timebound concept.
She whispered, “Joining me in presence will simply allow you to move through the fair of life with more peace”
I can hear my left brain jockeying for position “You mean it won’t solve my problems? What use is that?”
Choosing the moment silences the problems. There are none there.
I carried that morning experience with me throughout the day. I activated it by really looking into the eyes of the people that I passed on the streets and smiling to their soul. The wonderful thing about Balinese people is that they look back deep into your soul and say with their eyes “I love you! I see you! I hear you! I feel you!”
The breath of Bali has had her way with me. It felt as though she SLOWED TIME down for me…that things were orchestrated in slow motion so that I might be enveloped into the fragrance of life. Oh how luxurious life is. Time to feel the subtleties of my internal world. To be fully IN my felt perceptions and not DO anything to mask, change, contort or synthesize. JUST BE!!! It’s a real experience people! The real estestestest!!!!!
We are allowed to JUST BE and have that be completely OK, acceptable, copasetic and feel yourself deserving of Just Being.
The Stillness. My brain clutches to hoard it as if there isn’t enough in the world. The plants laugh as they exist in the realm of boundless abundance.
This is what they are teaching me with direct experience. Something my mind has no comprehension of. My mind clammers for a mental intrepretation. I laugh. Oh it’s so grand to laugh at the antics of the mind. It will do anything for attention. Triple twisted backflips…anything for bus-i-ness.
The Breath of Bali shows me how easy it is to simply be and the extravaganza that exists in, through and around me. She demonstrates the process of SOFTENING that is so effortless. How could I ever believe otherwise. She inhales on my out breath and I inhale on her exhalation. We dance in perfect harmony as we are all ONE. We are NATURE!
What did Bali do for me? Bali taught me the profound significance of embodied relaxation. Embodied, meaning “Living from a place of encapsulated beauty, wonder and peace of mind”
She taught me about Flow. Her feminine principles of allowing, receptivity, grace, power and respect that is available to all of us.
She quelled and soothed my forward motioning habitual push to bring about a balanced beingness.
What did I do for Bali (Mama Gaia)? I renewed my vows to honor her, to keep the sanctity of her principles close to my heart and trust an enlivened life from which all might thrive. The specifics of how that might unfold remain a mystery and my left brain will just have to acclimate.
Mindfulness Practice:
- Go outside.
- Set an intention for your time with nature. ( An intention is the general direction you wish to explore)
- Frame the intention in present tense, positive, pertinent to you and powerful.
- Establish yourself in a relaxed, comfortable posture such as
-lying down looking up at the sky
-seated upright with support with plant life, mountains, bodies of water around you
- Allow your vision to be soft. If you wear contact lens or glasses, remove them.
- Have the expectation that whatever happens or does not happen is a pure perfection “happening” in its entirety.
- Imagine what the plants are communicating with you. If you cynical mind comes in, thank it for its practicality and let it know that you will get back to it later. This is bliss time. It can take the day off!
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