Remembering that 2023 is our global Vision Quest year I remind us of the inquiries made in the previous blog post :

Consider your inner strength.

Consider the simple things that sustain you.

Consider the brilliance of your current fondest dream.

And Breathe.

 

Breathe as if your life depends on it!

This past year I really missed the mark on several occasions as I alluded to in the last post.

Missing the mark cannot happen unless we have a target. I thought my target was ready for prime time and then I missed it. And I missed it. And I missed it again. I had to regroup and reassess my direction while at the same time turning my attention toward being a grown-UP^, soothing myself and tending to my self-inflicted wounds. I was expanding and yet my resistances were being activated and as a result, I was simultaneously contracting. In Buddhism, we are reminded that confusion is the cause of suffering.

In 2023, the Vision Quest year, it is helpful, and it does no harm, to monitor our attitude as we set a clear intention. I set my intention last year, however, my attitude was muddled. I didn’t know. My muddle created a blind spot.  Here is how the blind spot made itself known. It took six months for it to manifest. Not easy.

My car after my blind spot was revealed, June 2022

In A Course In Miracles, there is a passage that removes the tendency to feel victimized by life:

I am responsible for what I see.
I choose the feelings I experience
I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
And everything that seems to happen to me,
I ask for, and receive as I have asked.

 

Nobody was injured in the collision that took place in June. Support arrived immediately. Every step of the unfolding experience went smoothly. I was forced to take a deep breath and realize that I had fallen out of balance.

I have been diligent and disciplined in bringing myself back hOMe to my place of balance. For months I faced my shadow(s) and thought I was integrating the dark with the Light. By November I needed to go even deeper. I had to own that the trauma of the first six months of 2022 had triggered patterns that dull me down.

I turn to body chemistry first. I have decades of experience in recognizing when I am in and when I am out of balance. It’s all about the body/brain chemistry which is a sure indicator of feeling good or feeling like crapola. I was eating foods and combinations of foods that I know create a heavy and bogged-down body … I was scaring myself. When I get scared my inner voice reminds me that the only difference between scared and sacred is the way that I ‘C’ (see). I love language and the signs revealed in the words that we choose.

My lifeline to self-expression was suffering. I was sabotaging myself. My brain knew better. As one of my Extended Lifecycle Collaborators stated as she entered her 7th decade: “Self-sabotage is stupid.”

I was hurting myself as a result of the shame and embarrassment that was rising up to be named and acknowledged as a result of the spring and my three instances of missing the mark.

I share this post with you in humble confidence. I stand before you as an artist, naked in the public square.

I do this because I am aware that my story is not my story alone. I visit with others in my community who have recently experienced a depth of resistance and confusion. We are daily moving into this new world that we are creating together. No one benefits from my pretending that everything is fine when in fact we are collectively wrapped in a fetal position, wondering if any of this is worth the price we seem to have to pay.

Yes. The journey and the destination are worth the investment we are making.

 

 One of the guiding principles of mind-body medicine is the interconnection of all things, including the mind, the body, and the environment in which we live. Each of us is an inseparable part of an infinite field of intelligence, and in this very moment, with every breath, we are exchanging millions of atoms with the universe.

                                                                                                   Creating Balance in Life| 7 Tips

This week take a meditative action. Turn your attention inward … even if only for 15 minutes each day.
Listen to what rises. Listen and breathe.

Talk to yourself with deep love. Tell yourself (speak aloud or journal) what simple strength you have cultivated since last spring. I learned about an important blindspot and I trust that this will help me to be balanced while moving forward.

Visualize bringing the fruits of your labor into the weeks ahead.

2023 is our Collective Vision Quest Year
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I loved rediscovering the Tibetan Buddhist story about the blind one-hundred-year-old sea turtle.

I found it while revisiting notes that I’ve taken during my 15 years of Buddha School*
Some notes tap me on the shoulder. I have a vast number of journals and a good number of these Buddhist teachings notebooks that play that shoulder-tapping role.

I’ll be sharing some of these notes and stories here on the blog during this Vision Quest year.

Tap. Tap. Tap. A written passage beckons me. Like Alice in Wonderland, I read the message and grow taller, or at times smaller so that I can move about in the microcosm. Sometimes I become more and my legs stretch out the metaphorical doors of my house.  Sometimes my head pops through my imaginary roof. I look around. I spy birds building their nests.

Here in Virginia, I have the amazement of living within yards of four Great Blue Heron nests. It’s only January yet the pairs are dancing in the sky as they work tirelessly, floating back n’ forth, carrying and placing large sticks, high in the tallest pines along the cove.

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Every day I observe the nests being reworked and renovated. The ballet of the Great Blues is a sight that expands my vision of possibility. My style is that of the Possibilitarian. I stretch my wings and scan for possibility. I see endless possibilities and potential.

As the soon-to-be parents glide over the water and settle into the leaf litter looking for the perfect stick to carry back to the nest platform, my heart grows expansive and I am filled with a tremendous love for the beauty of nature and for this precious human life.

It is precious to be here

Back to my finding the Buddhist teaching story describing the one-hundred-year-old blind sea turtle rising up from the depths of the ocean.

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The turtle must rise in order to take its next breath. In the story, the turtle, old and blind, is coming toward the surface of the ocean which is being buffeted by a violent storm.

The waves are roiling and strong winds are blowing the waves into gigantic swells.  There is a cut section of a massive tree floating in jagged ups and downs riding the waves. There is a large knot hole worn through this piece of log. The blind sea turtle is rising. Time to breathe the air. As the turtle rises to the surface the log is positioned just so and the blind turtle’s head slips through the opening, like a yoke, as it takes in a breath. Picture this moment!

Visualize this breathing in before once again sinking below the waves into the silence of the deep ocean. In Tibetan Buddhism, we are reminded that to be born human is as rare as this blind one-hundred-year-old sea turtle rising up through a hole in a log on a stormy roiling sea…to breathe.

Take a deep breath

Hippocrates wrote,

                                                       Art lasts long, life is short.

Art may last long, yet as Henry David Thoreau continues to support my focus I keep topmost in mind:

 

        To Live Deliberately we must learn to awaken
and keep ourselves awake by an infinite
expectation of the dawn,
which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep,
for we are encouraged that people can
elevate their lives by their own conscious endeavor.

It is something to be able to paint a picture,
or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful;
But it is far more glorious to carve
and paint the atmosphere and medium
through which we look, which morally we can do.

To affect the quality of the day is the highest of arts.

 

I am looking forward to sharing with you the shift that has occurred and I am inviting you to consider the shifts that 2022 brought for you as we enter this Vision Quest year of 2023. Write/draw/sing about these changes for the better in your journal and leave a comment if you can hear what is being offered for your personal growth edge. Here I enlist my non-dominant hand (the non-dom hand connects to parts of the brain that are generally out of sight out of mind yet rich in wisdom and true guidance.) Entries such as this bring forward my deepest truth:

 

Sending you much love for the journey ~ Iona

 

* Buddhist School refers to my having taken Refuge in the endangered Drikung Kagu Tibetan Buddhist Lineage. For fifteen years I took Tantric Empowerments with revered Tibetan Buddhist teachers along with attending a weekly study group with my Sangha founded by the Venerable Khenpo Konchog Gyaltshen Rinpoche. In 2012, after 15 years of learning together, our Sangha disbanded due to deaths, relocations, and other life changes. Now, you and all of my community create my beloved Sangha.
Thank you. We grow together.