Divine ladders, heart ley lines, and mental imagery to activate potential
Divine ladders, heart ley lines, and mental imagery to activate potential
Walking the world with one eye looking inward and the other out.
THE LADDER OF DIVINE ASCENT OR HOW TO LOVE BETTER
If life and growth is a ladder, we are meant to go up and down. The whole ladder is made of love. You fall only from shame, guilt and repression. Sometimes I find myself on that first rung — possessive and guarded. I know I’ve been up higher than this. I can love better than this. It’s easier to get back up there once you’ve descended so many times. Each step is a perspective you’ve inhabited before. The ascent is no longer arduous but swift. Just climb back up. Someday we’ll all reach the top of this goddamn ladder. There has been movement since the beginning.
LANDSCAPES AND MOVEMENT AS SYMBOLS
Last night around 1AM, I woke up from a dream about Oakland. The cities and towns you live in have energies and histories and destinies, just like we do. I found myself there when I was at the lowest point in my consciousness. Oakland cradled me when no one else cared.
My apartments were shit holes. I was chased, cussed at or threatened everyday. I listened to a man get stabbed and bleed out right underneath my window. I heard my neighbor — a young mother and sex worker — get bargained down to a ten dollar blow job. My best friend’s car riddled with gun shots. My building raided by the FBI. West Oakland was a ring of Dante’s Inferno, but it was my lovely hell.
The ley lines of cities map your heart. I was poor. I was broken. I was depressed. There were no pretenses. I was sad and so was everyone else around me, and I found solace in that.
In last night’s dream, I parked my car at the top of the highest hill in Oakland, got out and set off on foot to search for my love. The town became the edge of a cliff. There was no railing, just a single-track trail. I almost slipped twice, and I was scared, but I kept going. Eventually, I hit a chain-link fence and remembered how I tore my wrist open climbing one just like it when I was 8, so I chickened-out and turn back toward my car. At that moment, I woke up.
Some dream symbolism is so blatantly obvious it slaps you in the face. I still have chain-link fences posted up in my heart. It keeps me from loving the way I want to love. I need to tear those fuckers down.
Our personal journeys to evolve/ascend/bloom-then-wither-gracefully unfold like archetypes and legends and myths. The key to discovering what story you might be living, and obstacles you are to overcome, is to learn your symbols and patterns and rhythms. There has been movement since the beginning.
FIND THE HIGHER, ESSENTIAL ASPECT OF YOURSELF
One of the most magical books I own is The Encyclopedia of Mental Imagery: Visualization Exercises for Personal Development, Healing, and Self-Knowledge. It is a collection of self-guided visualizations to make your imagination malleable, practice movement and instantaneous transformation.
The prompt I did this week was simple. Close your eyes, breathe out 3 times, and:
See yourself as a seed becoming a tree and then reverse back into a seed.
I became a row of Italian Cypress trees. The process of growing taller and taller felt like love, and the promise of a higher vantage point fueled my self-assurance. This is what fulfillment feels like. I knew what I was destined to become.
Then I had to shrink back into a seed, and when I was a seed, I asked, “Am I not still the same tree?” The potential is latent but it exists. I remember what it is like to see the world from up high.
And it’s the same thing with my body. The cellular memory of being beyond this life is there, but concealed. As long as I live close to my heart and purpose, the potential is activated. The seed has no choice but to continue growing. There has been movement since the beginning.