Heart Nebula by G. Parker
The image begins as a dream, one where the main character feels embarrassed at her vulnerabilities being exposed. She is also claustrophobic, overwhelmed by the number of people occupying her personal space. Who are they, and how can she escape?
Is the dream mine, or does it belong to someone else? My mother-in-law is stuck in a nursing facility in India, wanting nothing more than to return to her home and live out her last days with space and ease.
Space and ease. Something about these words carry a significant resonance, like bells at the end of a religious ceremony when the priest is chanting an ancient Sanskrit prayer. The words are not only invoked in present time, but from the accumulated karma of past lives, the possibility of seeing and sensing with more sacredness in the future.
Carrying the dream and it’s multiple interpretations like a warm shawl to morning meditating, I allow space and ease to fill the body with meaningful intention. The mind is eager to apply teachings of Soulmaking and emptiness to the experience, to think its way to a profound insight as a candle of sandalwood and jasmine is lit to invoke a meditative trance.
But the bodies memories are ancient, slowing the mind down to feel the elements that have shaped it – rivers carving canyons, heat and wind molding earth, the stardust of all life being exchanged through cycles of respiration, porous skin, a beating heart influenced by the rhythms around it. Humbled, the mind yields to its wise ancestor, the body, and waits.
Space and ease. The energetic body begins to relax. The emotional body becomes a sanctuary – a temple, a church, a synagogue, a mosque, open natural space to receive the vulnerabilities of others and mirror back their beauty, strength, and resilience.
The heart becomes a doorway to boundless compassion, not only for a body sitting here, but for a mother-in-law in India, a partner there trying to honor his mother’s last wishes, patients recently encountered who felt complex because of ‘extra’ needs, a politician who appears narcissistic and aggressive, and so many other countless beings I have overlooked from contraction and dis-ease.
May this artful insight, empty of a single person, place, practice, or state of citta, filled with love from multiple beings, places, practices, and states of citta, be for the benefit of all.
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