Visualisation | contemplativeinquiry

“Three months after becoming a monk, I took off to the Himalayan foothills behind Dharamsala. I was 21 years old. My backpack contained a sleeping bag, groundsheet, towel, kettle, bowl, mug, two books, some apples, dried food and a 5-liter container of water. Monsoon had just ended: the sky was crystalline, the air cleansed, the foliage luxuriant. After 3 or 4 hours, I left the well-trodden footpath and followed animal trails up the steep, sparsely forested slope until I reached the grassy ledge hidden by boulders and sheltered by branches that I had identified earlier on an earlier foray.

“Inspired by stories of Indian and Tibetan hermits, I wanted to know what it would be like to be cut off from all human contact, alone and unprotected. I would stay here as long as my meager supply of food and water permitted. No one knew where I was. If I fell and broke my leg, was bitten by a cobra or mauled by a bear, I was unlikely to be found. High in this aerie, I could still hear the distant horn blasts and grinding gears of buses and trucks below, which I regarded as an affront.

“I would wake with my sleeping covered in dew. After peeing and meditating, I would light a fire, boil water, make tea, then mix it with roasted barley flour and milk powder to form a lump of dough. This was breakfast and lunch – following the monastic rule, I did not eat in the evening.

“My meditations included the sadhanas into which I had been initiated, where I visualised myself either as the furious bull-headed, priapic Yamantaka or the naked, menstruating red goddess Vajrayogini. I alternated these tantric practices with an hour of mindfully ‘sweeping’ my body from head to foot, noticing with precision the transient sensations and feelings that suffused it. When not eating or meditating, I intoned a translation of Santideva’s Compendium of Training, an 8th century Sanskrit anthology of Mahyana Buddhist discourses, which I had vowed to recite in its entirety while up there.

……….

“What remains of that solitude now is my memory of the sweeping panorama of the plains of the Punjab, the immense arc of the heavens, and the embrace of the mountains that harbored this fragile dot of self-awareness. Once, a fabulous multi-colored bird that launched itself from the cliff beneath, floated for an instant in the air, then disappeared from view. A herdsman and his goats came close to discovering me one afternoon. I peeked at them through a lattice of leaves as the animals grazed and the wiry, sun-blackened man in a coarse wool tunic lay on a rock.

“Supplies exhausted and text recited, I trekked back to my room in McLeod-ganj below. During my five days on the mountain I had acquired a taste for solitude that has been with me ever since.”

Stephen Batchelor The Art of Solitude: A Meditation on Being Alone with Others in This World New Haven, CT & London, England: Yale University Press, 2020

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June 23, 2021

GARDEN VARIETY MINDFULNESS

I’m coming out of an extended period of laboured breathing, loss of voice, and bouts of coughing that didn’t want to stop. I cannot tell whether this represents a recovery or a respite. Medical tests so far have been reassuring, but there are others to come. I do know that the experience, whilst at one level a drain on my energy and attention, has been a teacher of what I am calling garden variety mindfulness.

I have been nudged into taking mindfulness off the meditation stool and into acts of daily living. I am thinking of breathing for the purpose of staying alive: staying present and awake whilst struggling; eating (what, when, how much and how fast or slow); the re-arranging, with negotiation, of living space and how it works; slowing down and paying better attention in all departments. This mindfulness has been the agent of significant practical change.

It does help to keep a formal meditation practice going as well, and for this I am tending to use models from Eckhart Tolle Now (https://eckharttolle.com/), since I am working with them. I am also entering meditational states in emergencies. On occasions when my breathing seemed very compromised, I would experience a raw fear that felt like a healthy body-mind response, but which I also wanted to put space around. Staying with the fear, and keeping it company, the loving awareness of of the Deep-I would wrap itself around the fear and hold it. As loving awareness I would allow the fear its run whilst also showing that I am not defined by any passing event or response to it.

I have also compassionately intervened with distress-laden narratives of helplessness and anticipated doom – constructing ‘my future’ in later life as having an inevitable downhill trajectory. This is an understandable story in the circumstances – and also a limiting and distorted one. I realise that I am more concerned about incapacity than I am about death itself. Death is something I need to face into and make room for.

I have developed a healing visualisation for my scratchy throat. First I pay attend to the felt-sense of scratchiness and become familiar with it. Then I see a cavern like space dotted around with luminous grit. This is gently washed by a liquid light energy that acts to dissolve the grit. I make sure that this liquid covers the grit on the cavern floor but doesn’t fill the cavern space as a whole. The visualisation has had a perceptible effect on the sensations in my throat, as well as contradicting any story of helplessness and being an effective way of paying attention to parts of me that are asking for it.. The whole story of this period, really, is about paying attention.

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August 15, 2020

MEDITATION: ENERGY BODY

This meditation is the last of three formal meditations for regular use in my current Druid practice. It draws on a variety of sources – Druid, Gnostic, Tantric – and accumulated personal experience. I use the term ‘energy’, where others might prefer ‘light’. This is to signal the importance of embodied, felt experience in this work.

I find Energy Body a valuable complement to my Living Presence and Wisdom’s House meditations. The image is from R. J. Stewart’s The Dreampower Tarot. (1)

I sit on a chair, feet on the ground and hands on knees. This meditation has a Kabbalistic Tree of Life frame of reference, and I begin with a short form of crossing practice, using my right hand for the movements. I say, In the name of Wisdom (hand upwards to top of forehead), Love (hand downwards towards genitals), Justice (to right shoulder), Mercy (across to left shoulder) and Oneness (both hands over heart centre) Awen (chanted as aah-wen). (2)

Closing my eyes, I attend briefly to my body and senses, relaxing into being on the chair. When ready, I send my attention down below my feet, as if dousing for the energies of the deep earth and underworld. I rely primarily on the kinaesthetic sense – warmth, sensations, the pulse and vibration beneath me. Visual images may appear, but this journey is guided by feel.

The earth energy immediately beneath me is strong and relatively quiet, though I do sense the power of familiar organic life at this level. Deeper down, I get a cooler mineral sense. Deeper still, I connect with the heat and highly pressured turmoil of the underworld, as I get closer to the planetary core.

Directing my attention with the breath, I pull up energy from these realms, starting at the fiery volcanic level, and adding elements of the softer, cooler earth energy as I move up. I pull these energies up through my body and a field extending a little beyond it. I notice an energetic mobilisation – heat, tingling, a feeling-tone of energetic arousal, noting specific sensations in different parts of the body. I use the inbreath to raise this energy and the outbreath to distribute it. Eventually, fully enveloped in this active chthonic energy, I allow myself to bathe in it.

When the time is right, I direct my attention upwards. I sense the sky and the celestial realms beyond – the moon, sun and stars – now seeing both day and night skies from my perspective and bringing my visual sense into more prominence overall. I connect with these energies too, sensing and visualising the powers of a universe in motion at the macrocosmic level.

I draw energy into my field of awareness and intention, bringing it in a focused way, laser-like, somewhat in the manner of a lightning flash, down to the crown of my head. From there it zig-zags successively to my left temple, right temple, throat, left shoulder, right shoulder, heart centre, left hip, right hip, genital area, and feet. Here, I visualise a white lightning effect and feel the ignition of these 11 points, the sephira of the Kabbalistic tree of life.

I now sense a merging of the chthonic and celestial energies, and the rejuvenating power and vitality that this brings. When ready, I direct my energy with the breath up the back and down the front of my central channel, behind and then in front of the 5 energy centres found there: feet, genital area, heart centre, throat, crown. This becomes a circuit descending down the front of my body on the exhale and rising up the back of my body on the inhale.

Once this circuit is stabilised, I develop a second one rising up the right side on the inhale and descending down the left side on the exhale, moving past 8 centres: feet, right hip, right shoulder, right temple, crown, left temple, left shoulder, left hip, and feet again. I keep the two circulations going and use them to scan my wellbeing at the energetic level. At this point I might work with individual sephira and their relationships with each other, but such work is not typical within this generic meditation. Commonly, I simply acknowledge them.

For the next stage, I begin to see, as if from outside, a translucent egg-shaped light energy containing me, with its circuits and currents moving of their own volition. Falling back into place, I feel the benefits of being held within this field of light energy, expanding into it and entering a richer identity. Preferably, the field is porous and open to energy exchange with the world beyond. (If necessary, the eggshell can be made solid and impermeable, an adamantine shield). I stay in the experience for as long as feels right, allowing myself to be recharged and rejuvenated.

Finally I allow the porous egg shape to thin and become insubstantial. Boundaries dissolve. Experience can be imaged as an awareness of tiny sparks winking in and out of existence in a vast indigo field. It is a place of freedom and possibility at the threshold of being and unbeing. There is awareness without boundaries, and no localised sense of body. Sensations and perceptions rise and fall.

When the time is right, I return to my normal physical bandwidth and the journey is over. I enter a period of quiet contemplation.

After the meditation, standing in the centre of the circle, I say I give thanks for this meditation. May it nourish and illuminate my life. In the name of Wisdom, Love, Justice, Mercy and Oneness. Awen.

(1) R. J. Stewart The Dreampower Tarot: The Three Realms of Transformation in the Underworld London: The Aquarian Press, 1993 Illustrated by Stewart Littlejohn

(2) R. J. Stewart The Miracle Tree: demystifying the Qabalah Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2003

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August 12, 2020

MEDITATION: WISDOM’S HOUSE

The Wisdom’s House meditation descends from an earlier ‘Temple of Sophia’ practice (1). It owes something to the ‘art of memory’ of the ancient Greeks, a system of impressing places and images on the mind. The art of memory flourished again in the European Renaissance period, and late practitioners included Giordano Bruno and the English alchemist Robert Fludd (2). This post provides both an introduction and the full text of the meditation.

Many of the visualised images have a strong archetypal resonance, but I do not now look to them for dramatic experiences or insights. They are a familiar Innerworld landscape whose influence grows quietly over time.

I enjoy this meditation. It has a strong aesthetic and cultural dimension, valuing time and memory. It is an affirmation of belonging within modern Druidry, and an individual expression of what how my location in this tradition works for me. At the same time, it points to a more universal and perennial wisdom tradition. My current version has a clearer tilt towards the evening of my days than do earlier ones. As in the older versions, Wisdom is omnipresent, but She does not appear as a person within the meditation. The image above is from R. J. Stewart’s Dreampower Tarot. (3)

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2017/05/03/temple-of-sophia/

(2) Frances A. Yates The Art of Memory London: Pimlico, 1966

(3) T. J. Stewart The Dreampower Tarot: The Three Realms of Transformation in the Underworld London: The Aquarian Press, 1993 Illustrated by Stewart Littlejohn

TEXT OF THE MEDITATION

Closing my eyes, I check out my body and sensations, and I let go of potentially distracting feelings and thoughts. I take 9 Awen breaths, and open myself to the images of the Wisdom’s House meditation. They generally appear as a sequence, but not as a fully connected narrative. I may follow the sequence, or I may linger on particular images – allowing them to change and develop beyond the script.

I find myself on a lake shore, looking westwards, out over the water to a wooded island in the lake, where Wisdom’s House is found.

I walk down to a small beach where a blue rowing boat is waiting to ferry me across. The rower is a person of indeterminate gender, robed, hooded and wearing a mask, somewhat in the manner of Greek and Japanese classical theatre. On seeing them, I bow. They bow in return, doffing their mask, and revealing the emptiness behind it.

I am in the boat, being rowed towards the lake. I notice light on the water, and the descent of the sun. The island is getting closer.

On reaching the western shore, I thank the rower before turning my attention to a cliff path, which is stepped, quite steeply, in certain places. Its base is marked by two carved stones. The one on the left shows Pictish dancing seahorses and the concealed image of Modron; the one on the right shows the Tree of Life, as a trees, with a serpent coiled around the bottom of the trunk, and a dove perched high in the canopy.

At the top of the hill, I am walking, east to west, through woods and then pasture, until I reach a gateway in a wall, behind which are the grounds of Wisdom’s House.

Entering the gate, I walk through a fine orchard before reaching the House itself, which has some church-like characteristics. It is a domed stone building. The main body is round, though arms are extended in each of the 4 cardinal directions to create an equal armed cross. These extensions do not run out very far – only enough for a porch, a modest side chapel, and room for covered flights of steps.

I enter the House through the porch that comprises the eastern wing. I look across the interior to the western wing, somewhat like a small chapel. Its most striking feature is a rose window with clear, though slightly pink-tinted, stained-glass. It is designed to catch the sunset. A little way in front of it is an altar whose white cloth is embroidered with a golden gnostic cross and strewn with white and red rose petals. At the centre stands a chalice, white candles on either side. Looking around me I see steps spiralling downwards to a crypt, right (northern extension) and steps spiralling upwards to an upper room, left (southern extension).

The interior is lit by chandeliers hanging from the ceiling as well as natural light from clear glass windows. On the floor is a large mosaic given definition by the golden outline of a circle, crossed at the cardinal points by golden lines which merge at the centre within a fully golden circle, which includes 3 white seed pearls in a triangular cluster at the centre.

Just outside the outer circle, around the wheel of the year, are depictions of 16 trees: yew, north-west; elder, north-north-west; holly, north; alder, north-north-east; birch, north-east; ash & ivy, east-north-east; willow, east; blackthorn, east-south-east; hawthorn, south-east; beech & bluebell, south-south-east; oak, south; gorse, south-south-west; apple, south-west; blackberry & vine, west-south-west; hazel, west; rowan, west-north-west.

Moving into the main circle, I find images of the elemental powers associated with the four directions: north, a white hart; east, an eagle with wings outstretched; south, a red dragon; west, a leaping salmon. At the golden centre of the circle, the cluster of three white pearls recollects the three drops of inspiration distilled from Ceridwen’s cauldron and the visionary power of Awen. There are also other trinities – the triple goddess; the Christian trinity; the divine mother, father and child; the 3 triads of Kabbalah together and separately, or the singularity of Tao becoming the two, three and 10,000 things.

Spiralling out of the circle, and exiting north, I descend into the crypt. Here I find an empty sarcophagus dimly lit by candles. Two or three steps below the sarcophagus is a small, warm pool, lit by night lights – a ‘birthing pool’, perchance a re-birthing pool. A dancing seahorses/Modron image is painted on the ceiling. I can spend time lying within the sarcophagus, contemplating change, death and dissolution. I can also move on to the birthing pool, immerse myself in it, and taste the experience there.

Leaving the crypt and moving across the house, I climb the steps to the upper room, which has a meditation chair at its centre, with a chalice, or grail, on a small table in front of it. A field of stars, white against an indigo, is painted on the ceiling; otherwise the room is plain. I centre myself on the chair and drink from the chalice.

I find myself in a garden. It has a fountain at the centre, surrounded by four flower beds of alternating red and white roses. There are fruit trees, apple, pear and plum, trained around the walls. It is noon and mid-summer. I can hear birdsong, and feel the warmth of the sun at my back.

My attention is drawn into the fountain until I experience myself as part of it. Propelled to the top, I fly as a single drop into the air, shot through with sunlight, as I begin my descent, which feels slow and gentle, into the pool below.

On coming back from the vision of the garden and the fountain, I sit and rest for a while, in the upper room. Eventually I leave the upper room and go down to the ground floor of the House. I walk to the south point of the circle and from there move, spiralling, into the centre. I face the altar at the west, bowing and giving thanks before I leave the House through the porch on my eastward return.

Finding myself in a dim pre-dawn light, and facing towards its source, I return to the lakeside and take the ferry back to the mainland.

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June 16, 2020

WISDOM AT MIDSUMMER

The picture shows the power of sunlight on trees to an observer – me, using my sight and my phone camera. I am not sure what it is like for the trees themselves, but I imagine it to be a positive experience.

This post is about the effects of the same power in my own psychic life. In a personal meditation, “I find myself in a walled garden. It has a fountain at the centre, surrounded by four flower beds of alternating red and white roses. There are fruit trees, apple, pear and plum, trained around the walls. It is a warm and radiant midsummer morning. The full bright sunlight strikes the dazzling water of the fountain, warming and illuminating each drop as it falls. I can hear the plashing of the fountain, and birdsong a little further off. My bare feet are on the lush grass. The air is sweet. The sun is at my back, recharging my energy, in particular activating the sun in my heart”. From that point, the meditation can continue and deepen in a number of ways.

This garden is the Garden of Wisdom, the Wisdom of William Anderson’s Green Man poem (1), a poem of 13 four-line verses, where each line covers a week. Though the Green Man has a lover in the spring, Wisdom is named, as Wisdom, in only one verse.

26 Oct-1 Nov: The reedbeds are flanking in silence the islands

2 Nov–8 Nov: Where meditates Wisdom as she waits and waits.

9 Nov-15 Nov: ‘I have kept her secret’, say the Green Man.

16 Nov -22 Nov: ‘I have kept her secret’, says he.

But at the present time of year, the focus is on the transformation of the Green Man himself, his head having been offed between 25 May and 7 June.

8 June – 14 June: Green Man becomes grown man in flames of the oak

15 June-21 June: As its crown forms his mask and its leafage his features

22 June -28 June: ‘I speak through the oak’, says the Green Man,

29 June – 5 July: ‘I speak through the oak’, says he.

Late in 2019, I stopped calling my inquiry path a ‘Sophian Way’ and re-centred it in Druidry. It was the right decision, and I have found it very fruitful. But at the psychic, Innerworld level, I have experienced a sense of loss concerning aspects of the Sophian Way, especially the space I called Sophia’s Garden. Now, thankfully, I have found that a simple re-naming as Wisdom’s Garden has been enough to re-integrate it within my current Druid practice. A more specific link with William Anderson’s Pagan, earth-centred poem also helps. Wisdom speaks through the wheel of the year, and acts as a companion and guide within my Druid path, on both the physical and psychic levels. She is also Zoe, the life beyond time, and the Green Man Bios, the life which is born, dies and is born again. It seems to me that we are both of them. Perhaps that is Wisdom’s secret.

(1) William Anderson Green Man: Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth: London and San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990 (Photography by Clive Hicks)

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May 20, 2020

AWEN: FRUITS OF DREAMING

The image above is from The Dreampower Tarot (1) by R. J. Stewart and Stuart Littlejohn. It is called the Sleeper, and concerns dreams and unrealised potential. The pack as a whole is underpinned by R. J. Stewart’s view that “the surface world is reflected out of the Underworld, not vice versa”. Its imagery is drawn from “the mysterious inner and Underworld story of life before surfacing or outer birth”. An inverted tree stands at the back of every card, indicating a path of interiority and descent.

Over the years I have been deeply impacted by R. J. Stewart’s work, and I think of awen as an Underworld gift. Although I am not using the Dreampower pathway directly, I share its sense of a staged descent from physical (stone) to psychic (pearl) to causal (whirlpool) dimensions. The whirlpool is a field of stars at the deepest interior level, as physical and psychic reality dissolve into creative void, and the whole cycle is repeated.

In my last post https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2020/05/17/touching-awen/ I described a dream, which moved through three locations. Today in my awen mantra meditation, I followed the resonance of the mantra into three discrete images distilled from the dream. Moments rather than narrative vignettes, I find these slightly different in their new constellation.

First, I am in an almost dark tunnel. It is all encompassing but for a very distant light. There is a feeling tone of unease. It is not due to the pervasive wetness. It is due to what I would now language as an intimation of being separate .

This is pre-birth and approach of birthing imagery, womb imagery, perhaps with elements of something like pre-personal memory. In an awen context, it reminds me of the womb imagery in Taliesin – the lake, the cauldron, Ceridwen’s womb, the night-sea journey in the coracle. I am also reminded of Thomas the Rhymer’s journey with the Queen of Elfland:

For forty days and forty nights, he wade through red blude to the knee

And he saw neither sun nor moon but heard the roaring of the sea.” (3)

Second, I am present in the sunlit city, on one of its hills, and looking down. A sense of appreciation, at-homeness and freedom – familiarity and belonging within absolute novelty and strangeness.

I am in a state of simple innocence, which I might call grace. In this otherworldly place, pristine experiencing is normal.

Third, I am on the promenade at the beach, for me the most significant part of the city. I am aware of the sparkling sea, and of looking at the beautiful café nearby, wanting to eat and drink there. But I have got hold of the idea that I am not allowed to. I do not know what the penalty for this imagined transgression would be. My worst fantasies involve permanent entrapment in this space, or complete exile from it, no longer able to walk freely between the worlds.

There is a different feel to this part of the meditation. Thinking arises, with a strong sense of dilemma. Am I or am I not meant to obey this instruction, if there even is one? Is it a test of obedience or initiative, of acceptance or self-determination? This time, I know, it is OK to simply visit the beach, enjoy it, and be safe. I can feel restored just by looking at the cafe and the sea. But if I come here again, and do nothing, I may fade into primal non-being. If I go to the cafe, I am likely to empower hidden or lost potentials – at an unknown cost. I am the Child of Light in my own universe. It is entirely for me to decide.

At this time of writing, I know that I am engaged. I am in the slipstream of awen. Although I have talked of an ‘awen inquiry’, this no longer seems like skilful framing. For there is a surrender here, that asks for my trust and a different language. Finding resonant and empowered language, and knowing when silence works better, are part of this path. All that is asked of me, at this stage, is to consolidate my practice and to continue writing this blog.

(1) R. J. Stewart The Dreampower Tarot: The Three Realms of Transformation in the Otherworld London & San Francisco: Aquarian Press, 1993

(2) R. J. Stewart The Underworld Initiation: A Journey Towards Psychic Transformation Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1985

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contemplativeinquiry

Tag: Visualisation

May 5, 2023

TASTING SOLITUDE

June 23, 2021

GARDEN VARIETY MINDFULNESS

August 15, 2020

MEDITATION: ENERGY BODY

August 12, 2020

MEDITATION: WISDOM’S HOUSE

June 16, 2020

WISDOM AT MIDSUMMER

May 20, 2020

AWEN: FRUITS OF DREAMING