Show Up — Open Up — Serve Truth — Accept What Is
If Showing Up necessitates willingness to be present to one’s experience, whatever it is – unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant – then the second stage of practice, Open Up, requires courage and vulnerability. The courage to open up for personal transformation to unfold, knowing that discomfort, and even pain, can be part of the process. The vulnerability to surrender control and open wide one’s heart to all that is emerging. Ultimately, to let go of a need to be in charge.
Many years ago during a different time of chaos, I wrote in my journal, “Perhaps this is the crossroads, the release of my constant seeking, that allows me to cross over into greater understanding and wisdom. Wisdom is always preceded by letting go. I intend to not restrict myself from enlightenment. I intend enlightenment to enter me.” As is my case, our intuitive glimpses speak the truth.
The path of emergence still calls me to Show Up, Open Up, Serve Truth, and Accept What Is. I am committed to being guided by Life and continuing to hold to this course. As Osho wrote, “Just sitting at the Source, not moving, allows a tremendous force to arise, to transform into light and love, into greater life, into compassion, into creativity, into many forms. Be at the Source and the Source will decide where your potential is and take you there.” This is why relinquishing the ego’s goals, desires, and ambitions is so necessary. Only the Source can truly show me who I am, not my thoughts and not my behaviours.
Emotional and psychological openness means softening defenses, allowing feelings to surface, and being willing to experience discomfort. In contemplative traditions, this is the stage where vulnerability becomes a gateway to growth. When we become receptive to our inner experience, we can let go of rigid self-protection, and our curiosity dissolves judgment. Openness brings expansiveness into view, breadth and depth, a simple knowing and a quiet sense of comfort.
Below, I offer two forms of meditation that have never failed to shift me out of suffering and into peace, love, and joy.
- Mantra Meditation
Silently repeat the following mantra as your object of awareness during meditation or when stress and suffering are part of your inner experience of any event.
May I be filled with loving-kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I be happy.
May (whomever I am not relating well to) be filled with loving-kindness.
May (s/he/they) be well.
May (s/he/they) be peaceful and at ease.
May (s/he/they) be happy.
Hold the other person’s face and name in your inner vision and heart while you recite that portion of the mantra. I encourage you to stay with the mantra until you feel a release of your inner stress and suffering. Most noticeably, your body will relax, and your mind will become silent. - Heart Meditation
Once you can still your thoughts and emotions, then you shift your meditation to becoming aware of your heart. This meditation is not about visualizing or creating an experience. It is the practice of holding your heart as your object of awareness and sensing what emerges as a result of that focus. You might sense the front, back, and sides of the heart region.
Listen with your body, feel with your subtle senses, and notice what arises without needing to name or explain it.
Perhaps there is warmth.
Perhaps pressure, vibration, spaciousness, movement, contraction, or stillness.
Perhaps emotion.
Perhaps nothing at all.
Nothing needs to happen. The practice is simply to become intimate with whatever is there. The goal isn’t to manufacture a mystical experience. It is to develop the capacity to recognize what is already present, to investigate what becomes perceptible when awareness rests on the heart.
After either form of meditation, a helpful integrative practice is to journal your emerging insights. I call this practice Awareness Writing and often begin with the lead-in, I am aware … Sense your inner experience of your physical, energetic, mental, and emotional aspects. Writing is often where we willingly tell our truth.
For more yoga actions and teachings, click here. Namaste.