Ballerina Unfurled

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The Many Robes

I tried on robes of all kinds in every shape, size and color.

Long and short, thick and thin, gentle and tough, mean and kind. Soft and hard, dark and light, fighter and peacemaker, young and old. The variations went on and on.

None of these costumes fit. They tugged here, bunched and scrunched there, wrinkled and pinched here, hung too loosely there.

Lifetimes Peel Away

After years of this, lifetimes really – suddenly, no, not suddenly – slowly, yes, slowly, one by one, the robes are starting to fall off of me. Now I stand en pointe, center stage, on the proverbial stage of life.

I am the ballerina fitted in pink leotards. performing an intricate pirouette. The robes lift around me and twirl on the air in a slow motion spiral.

Exit The Dance

The robes drop, scatter, litter the ground around me. I am spinning, slowly, circling across the stage, my arms flutter around me. I prance over all the robes now littering the stage with their multi-colored, varied fabrics.

On the tips of my toes, with tiny pointe shoe steps, I cross the stage to the waiting wings. Smooth movements of my arms up and down belie the exquiste, minute steps of the pointe toes.

"Exit stage left."

Ballerina Unfurled

Perpetual movement propels me forward. Now, even the pointe shoes unlace and fall to the wayside.

With bare feet, I twirl into the ocean waves.

I look up to see that an earthly robe is draped over me. It’s familiar and unknown all at the same time. Flesh bound to the worldly plane, subject to the rhythms and cycles of earthly demands and limitations. Yet, the spirit is etherial, boundless, free.

I’m simply a beam of light, a sparkle on a crested wave. Was that a flash of light we saw or our imagination?

Water Is All There Is

Water is all there is in this ocean whether it is crashes as waves on the surface or barely moves as thick, dense depths of dark glass.

Sounds of eternity travel through the water, but these tones are unheard by our limited human ears. Blue whales are singing primordial tones to each other across hundreds of miles.

An ocean throbs. Constant movement. Lifing up. Pulling down.

Water is all there is and we are the water.

No boundaries.

Only being.

Ballerina from Pacific Northwest Ballet

Words

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Word Sparkles

Peering forth at the light of existence, you could almost hold it cupped in your hand. You try to describe to someone else, even to yourself. The very moment you speak a sound to capture that wide, great light crystalizes. With the first utterance of sound, the whole shatters into thousands of reflected lights, like when a crystal is caught in a sunbeam. Sparkles fling off into multiple colors, dancing in the dust beams.

Whole To Part

You hold a vast wholeness within you. Words, by their own nature, are composed of tiny bits and pieces. You say the sky is blue, but at the same time, you also know the sky can be black, grey, and even red or orange. The problem with language is that you can’t say all of that at the exact same time. So, only a partial truth is expressed at any given moment.

As words spill out of our mouths, we enter the realm of partiality. It can’t be helped. It’s the nature of language. Chopped-up little pieces attempt to capture the wide world around us. That’s hard enough as it is. Now imagine trying to use words to capture inner dimensions that are not bound by outer forms. That becomes a “horse of a different color,” as they say.

The Perils Of Our Guides

On the path of greater consciousness, this is one of the challenges for teachers as they guide their students. Students are only capable of hearing from their own perspectives.

Yesterday, the teacher said the sky is blue… and that was accurate for that precise moment in time. But, today, we are in a different time, another moment of existence, and it may no longer apply. We are different, the teacher is different, the sky is different.

Now, the student sees an orange sky. The student insists, “No, the sky is blue, the teacher said so, and I refuse to see this sky of orange.” Or, faced with an orange sky they can no longer deny, the student then feels as if the teacher lied to them and rejects the teaching of the teacher entirely.

Clinging to the words that were previously uttered is how we enter into dogma. It becomes a “truth” frozen in time, locked in the dead past.

As students, we need to remind ourselves that the words of any teacher are only signposts, pointing in a direction, to a dimension on an inner path. Words can never define the teacher and, by the same token, words cannot define us either.

A Lot Of Words

Some of us have a lot of words. We’re looking at you, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Both men were filled with words of passion and sentences of history that consumed vast pages of books stretching into infinity. Well, infinity is a slight exaggeration, but it looks like that when you’re still on page one of their books.

Words are good. They delight, entertain, provoke and encourage. Words tickle our fancy. Some of us word-smiths are enamored with words. We gather cherished words and phrases around us like little children. Two favorites of mine are “as is my wont” (thank you, Shakespeare) and “gird your loins.” In addition, some of us bulk up our repertoire with beloved words from different languages.

Ernest Hemingway shaped his writing style with “clean words.” No flowery prose for him. He wanted his writing to be as clean as the cold, crisp white wine he quaffed in copious amounts in his novels. Nothing sticky or cloying about his drinks or his writing. He wrote like an Anglo-Saxon language warrior, short and to the point.

His clean lines have a haunting quality to them. From his book, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway crafted one of his most lovely string of words:

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Joyful Words

Words guide, inspire and inform us. Well-turned words can lift us up to higher realms. Words that are connected with awareness to a higher consciousness can stir us awake like drops of milk added to our coffee, forever changing its hue, forever changing us.

Still, in the end, each of us has to take our own steps into awakening. Along the way we realize that the words themselves are not our truth, just tiny sparks of it, ever-changing in the very moment we find ourselves.

Let’s rejoice in our words as we smile privately to ourselves, all the while knowing that vast universes stand behind all the sparkles of light.

Easter Transcendence

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The Point In the Middle

Where the horizontal and the vertical meet, there is your transcendence.

A Symbolic Path

Within the symbolism of the cross, there lies a path of transformation. We can acknowledge the outer world which is represented by the horizontal line and bring to our realization that this outer existence intersects with the transcendental world which is represented by the vertical line. That holy meeting place of the two worlds lives in our consciousness.

Easter celebrates the resurrection, the transcendence of life over death.

Death and birth lie on the horizontal line and are parts of our outer world.

On the vertical line, the energy of life is always moving and rising up.

Life is wide and deep and while it steps out of the outer world, it also intersects with it in a greater whole. 

For Your Meditations

Students of The Radiance Technique® (TRT®) can celebrate the Easter holiday and its transcendental energy whether they perceive themselves as Christians or not.

Step into the symbolism and let it guide your awareness. Suggested for your meditations is a focus on TRT® hands-on positions #1 on the Front and #3 on the Head, or a combination of #1  and #3 on the Front for a period of 10 to 15 minutes.

Happy Easter.

Artwork by J. Vincent

 

(The Radiance Technique® is not associated with any religion
or belief system.  Please see About for more details.)