A quiet Sunday morning. The bell rings. I intend inner quiet. Rooting my sit bones into the cushion, dropping my shoulders, allowing my spine to rise naturally to the base of my skull, allowing my head to balance like a ping-pong ball on a column of air, I remember: I intended inner quiet.
I notice my breath. Rising and falling, air travels up and out of my body then back down again. Miraculously, this Sunday morning, I am (at least for some bit of time) actually just noticing my breath. There is a vague awareness of having attached my mind to my breath as if it were a great mouth with teeth sunk into the movement of breathing. There is stillness. Then there is an image.
Being not of traditional Buddhist stock (being sort of a non-traditionalist in general) I gazed upon the image. It was that of a tennis ball being hit by a racket. Then, there was a golf ball being hit by a golf club. Finally, I saw a baseball bat strike a ball of the same sport.
As the images melted back into the flowing movement of my breath, I understood. What I was being shown was what to do with my consciousness, my thoughts, and in turn my life-force energy. I was being told to “keep my eye on the ball”. In the magical world of inner knowing, three simple images downloaded pages of guidance that I could apply right then and there and in every subsequent moment I would live. The “eye” is the mind. The “ball” is the center of the experience of being. The message: anchor your awareness deeply into your essential self and what you are aiming for will be reached.
Upon reflection, also in the mysterious manner of the mystical realms, this image would speak particularly strongly to me. I have a memory, clear and visceral, of a kind of shocked surprise, when for the first time, in an act of sheer will, I forced my eye to watch the bat contact the ball and as a result the ball travelled straight in the direction I wanted it to go. In all prior attempts, I had done the logical, but ineffective, act of looking out toward the place I wanted the ball to go. As most can guess, this only produced strikes, fouls or other non-starters.
So these images, simple yet profound, told me that all of my worries and wonderings over the trajectory of my life, what choices to make, where to put my energies and essentially how it will “all work out” will all be taken care of if I can stay rooted in the center of my being.
Later that morning, I had the good fortune to be discussing this realization with Sacred!Centre’s founder Deirdre Cole, and there came an enhancement. Contacting the center of one’s being seems to be fundamentally an alignment with the heart. And as we relate with the world through the actions we take, if we can stay anchored in the heart those actions will be infused with a quality of caring, compassion, and kindness and none of that ever seems to be bad.
And then I saw a final image, one of human arms leading directly out of human hearts, animating human hands that are the “doers” in the world. If we can stay centered in the center of our beings, in the energy of the heart, then when we strike a ball or lift our hands in action we find that we do attain our goals, the highest ones being inner peace and joy in living.
Lisa Jane Lipkin is a piano based singer-songwriter who recently released her third CD called “Flying on Instruments”. www.lisajanelipkin.com
“Beloved“ – Written & performed by Lisa Jane Lipkin. From her album ” A Prayer for Peace”
