Its so funny, how some of the most foundational pieces supportive to our needs are the ones we are most likely to put aside. Like nourishment, like rest, like sitting in stillness
Perhaps it is the part of us that wants the newer better thing, the hack. Or maybe its our relationship with what we think it is going to give us.
Anyways, I was thinking about this as I was considering my journey with meditation recently, well, because there is something below that I will tell you about.
And what I noticed….(which is the skill that meditation has offered me when I have offered it my care), is that it all started there. With meditation. This unfolding, this truth, this power and it goes back real deep….
Over 15 years ago, struggling with debilitating anxiety on the flip side of well, a lot a lot of pain, work and trauma, I was tailspinning out into this feeling body when I landed in an MBSR intensive and my fragmented journey with meditation began.
I say fragmented, as maybe the case with you, there were moments of starts and stops along the way. A renegotiation of what I could feel and how committed I was to feeling it.
I was by far the youngest in the group, probably by twenty years… remember we were just starting to hear more in mainstream about how meditation was transformative even though it had been there all along, this ancestral medicine. As is the case mentioned above, we put it aside.
Side note… the actual first time I meditated was not then. It was more accurately around the age of 16/17. Completely unaware. Completely. And perhaps thats interesting to note too. How I was just guided, and open to hearing that. No one told me to but I was already deepening a connection to spirituality. Maybe it felt like a last thread to hold onto, I don’t know.
It went something like this… I purchased a little kit of what I will call ‘spirited belongings’ from what I would call a metaphysical store. It was a little lunchbox with Ganesh on the front, and inside I tucked many things, incense matches, tokens, poems, and a Mala (which I knew nothing about or how to honour or use). This kit however, would be a bit of a tether as it travelled to every hospital stay that followed over the years.
With enough reading (as if it were that easy), I eventually would practice by sitting there in my cotton gown repeating the mantra ‘om’ and waiting for something to magically happen. I remember one young resident being playful and engaged (this was not often the case), he would come in and ask if I was ‘trying to go h’om’e’, or if I ‘could go h’om’e yet’. He was right, I was on my way there, I just didn’t realize the home I was travelling to inside and where it would take me. Now that I repeat it, it reminds me of et phoning home too.
I digress. Eventually although staying curious to the spiritual side of meditation, I focused on simple but elegant mindfulness based practices like MBSR to eventually build the solid ground from which to find my roots and decide to go deeper or raise higher. It took a while, but when you decide anything is better than nothing, you open yourself up to a whole lot of changes all around.
Eventually eventually, this became more than a personal practice but one I would study and integrate into what eventually became a part of my work and purpose in helping others.
As many of you know, there are practices within how I work as a nature-led holistic therapist today that have become so powerful that they have even taken precedence over seated meditation AND…. none of this would have been available, had I not had access to the basic and foundational practice of being with self in the way meditation invited me towards.
It is why it still remains a place to return to when we are hoping to connect with our nature again. Be it our healing, our soul work, our grief work, our intuition work, our alchemy… it all is supported by a deep and reverent attention to nothing more than right now. Presence.
Sometimes the glamour and allure of mystery takes me away from thinking I can find it in this seat here, but I know, I now know, it is the best way to start
SO… what I want to say is this…
I have built something small, something simple and something elegant, that brings forward these qualities that a seated practice can offer.
I have created them through my view and my voice.
It is called Adage, and it will be available, if you would like me to sit beside you, starting next week.
This is not ground breaking, this is not a new shiny thing.
It is simply an answer to a few obstacles I often hear in getting started and I guess it is an homage in sorts to honouring foundation, to honouring soil where all things grow out of.
I look forward to knowing what grows from your garden and will send you here first.
I guess this was a love letter to being still, I hadn’t realized. But again, it is easy to tuck aside those most basic and most sophisticated things.
To the soul in slow, I love you,
Kate
