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Recently, I got the chance to hang out for a few days with an old friend on her Ohio farm.  She has stayed true to the salt of the earth traditions we both grew up with while I have winged off into less charted territory.  At breakfast one morning, Barb, curious to know how far I had flung, asked me how I see healing.  My description looked something like this:

Stored away within us is a blueprint of a perfectly functioning body.  More than a blueprint, it is how our physical presence strives to be.  When it is provided with the raw materials to create that highest form of itself, it will do just that.  The best raw material is energy of the highest, purest frequencies.  When it is given the choice, the body will be drawn to the highest energies available.

In healing, the one offering the healing holds the highest level of consciousness it can access in their awareness and at the same time, holds the one who is asking for healing in their awareness as well.  Then, the one asking for healing has a resource for their body to draw on, in creating the highest form of itself.  And can then shift from dis-ease into ease, perfect being.”

“Oh,” she says, “like praying.”

“Yeah,” I say, “like praying.”

I’m in a cheese store here in Gouda.  Facing a madly huge selection of rich country cheeses piled up on a table in the middle of the store, for tasting.  You want to come hungry.

I eat my way around the table, every little chunk of goodness as incredible as the one before.

This is getting to feel like more of a meet and greet than shopping in the cheese aisle has ever been.  I might be talking to the cheeses.  I hear myself saying things like, “You’re so salty and dense!”  “Sooo creamy!” “Oooh baby!”  “I want to take you home!”  In English, fortunately.  There’s less staring and moving away than there would have been if I could speak Dutch.

In the midst of this happy little vignette, I give myself a good hard mental poke–I am here to buy a cheese.

Uno.  Not half the store. I leave with my one cheese wrapped in its special cheese paper.  I don’t know if I got the best cheese.

They all seemed like the best to me.   What I do know is letting myself get a little crazy is food for my soul.

Find yourself a cheese shop, or the equivalent, and see if that isn’t so.

Days come along when seeing myself more like a gnat in the face of the universe than a strong, empowered she-woman looking for the next building to leap overtakes me.

After lots of trial and error, rolls of toilet paper and six ounce 90% cacao bars, I’ve found that a little preemptive action works better to get me through a gnat day than letting the crying jag with chocolate come on.

I can’t take credit for this.  I learned it at an Awakening the Light Body seminar with Duane Packer (check out www.orindaben.com).  There was this guided meditation where we were going to “visit” some very large beings, who would see us as about the size of a gnat, if they noticed us at all.   To get big enough so they could recognize us, we gathered up all of our consciousness.  This may be sounding mysterious and it really isn’t.  See–we are members of our solar system, its planets, the stars in our galaxy.  Astrologers can show us by referencing our birth date and time and location on our planet how we are affected by all of this.  And we are affected because–tahdah!!!–we are connected to all of it.  It is part of our identity.  Loosely translated, it is part of our consciousness.  If your eyes haven’t rolled back in your head yet, consider that another element of our consciousness that contributes to us being bigger than a gnat in the face of the universe is all the lives we have experienced.  They as well are part of our consciousness.  We are BIG.

Okay, so how do you gather up your consciousness and get big.  I’m going to try to describe this, and understand that my description is just a reflection of what happens.  Trying it out yourself is going to be simpler and clearer than the explanation:

Get quiet and settled.  Say your name.  Imagine that there are lines of energy going out from you, connecting you to the earth, the planets, the stars.  Imagine that from all of these points of connection, energy flows back to you, right into your center, there where a point of light resides.  Next, imagine that you notice your time line.  It extends out from your center in both directions.  All the way back to your beginning and forward to what is to come.  All of this power, all of this consciousness is you.  Drink it in, breathe it, notice your light, your expansiveness.  Once again, say your name.

A very long time ago, during the period when I interpreted my interest in teaching to mean I should be in classrooms, I gave the students in my literature class an assignment to write poetry.  Every poem they turned in got an A, just to encourage them to risk opening up their hidden selves.  Some of them had never seen such a grade before and there was a good chance they wouldn’t be seeing one again.  It offered me a hint at how huge a deal being awarded can quickly become.  There was light in their eyes when they saw those big A’s marked on their papers.  As if, with the award of the grade, they had just been granted greatness.

Does it make it better, are we bigger, if someone acknowledges our striving?

The challenge I offer is to be so completely engaged in the game that we live for both the lumps and the kudos.  Wearing our crowns when crowns come, leaving no moment unlived for its lack of luster or for its pain or ordinariness.

Finding our own juice.  Way in there, in our core, where our best, strongest, most beautiful selves bubble.