Resting the Mind in the Heart

Resting the mind in the heart is the beginning and end of your pathless journey. We meet here, where all our pronouns dissolve into 'Thou.' At first you thought the heart was just a blood-beating pump. But as you rest here, golden wholeness enfolds your body-mind. You realize that your heart is the densely lit center of a boundless energy field. The nerves of the cardiac plexus pulsate with your gentlest breath, soft and effortless, hardly trembling yet ineffably powerful, infusing your heartbeat with the primordial sound that created the universe - Shabda, the Word of God, the Mantra - like an unstruck gong. Flowering at the center of your flesh, yet transcending matter, this bridal bower you call the heart is not an abstraction. It’s atoms vibrate with the substance of grace. Their radiance creates an ever-expanding lotus-like pavilion of forgiveness, where minds estranged can melt in friendship, sickness heals, stress dissolves, and those who are ready to depart meet their dearest mothers. Under a momentary shadow of loneliness, you may feel that your heart is small; yet in that humble hermit's cell are many mansions. No longer contained by the body, your heart outshines you, and your body is enfolded by the glory of the heart. Hridaya, self-luminous as the sun, beaming joy through time and space, comforting your ancestors for seven generations past and to come, threading each neuron to a star, entangling galaxies in the wonder-woven garment of God's infinite light, which is your physiology. Why not bathe in your own heart, let your heart irradiate the home, the city, the meadows and hills, the planet and the sky? I'm pretty sure this is why you are here.



Photo by Kristy Thompson

Hips

Don't just unwind your solar plexus. Don't just relax your belly. Release your hips, those closed doors with rusty hinges built to swing open and dance, celestially designed to rotate like galaxies of golden pollen. Honor your lowdown seed pod milkweed silk and toss it in the breeze. Cherish the ley lines of your darkest valley, harrowed and plowed, fallow wilderness of blessed yearning. You will never expand your mind if you don't unbuckle your hips. Only then can you transcend, and celebrate the cosmic dissolution of your silhouette, evaporate the veil between spirit and flesh. The whole universe is your climax, gently exploding, just as it is. You don't need to attain anything. No anxiety, no performance. If you want to wear a thousand-petaled crown, then sink your stem in the loam and channel up rose's sap. Be your own furrow. Breathe through your bone marrow. Green your body. A nurse log lying in a lost ruined temple, overgrown with blackberries, trumpet vine, boiling with ant hills, tiered with turkey tail mushrooms : visualize your soul as That! A life of interior prayer is to contemplate the juice of gurgling microbes. And what is lectio divina? To linger over hieroglyphs of fungi in your lymph nodes. If you listen more deeply to the silence in your physiology, and tend the priestly flame in your pineal gland, what you call "the mind" will glitter with jewels of darkness. Now enter the year of the serpent, the season of hopeless beauty, when the Goddess Kundalini undulates through all forms, beginning with compost. Thank everything you smell.

Engraving by William Blake

Listen

 

Really listen

to mother coyote

at midnight

and you will stay awake

forever.

Stand still, not far

from the bird feeder

eavesdropping on gossip

of nuthatch and titmouse,

finch and pine siskin,

all the morning news 

you need. 

In the evening

when you hear Jesus

weeping in the garden,

stay awhile.

Don't ask, "What's wrong?"

Never ask anybody

that.

He'll just answer, "Oh,

it's nothing."

True poverty is resting

without words.

You think he is grieving

about tomorrow?

Really listen.

There is never

another day.

His tears are for the beauty

of silence,

the softness of the dark, 

and in the midst

of all our sorrows, the gift

of this breath.

Photo by Pamela Karaz