Blog

4 Easter Meditations For Your Soul

A Perfect Setting For Renewal

My family and I have been coming to Findhorn for many years now, but this year we spent our first Easter here. Findhorn offers a perfect setting for taking a deep exhale, for sanctuary and for renewal. We’ve spent Holy Week playing on the big wide beaches, meandering through the pine forests (looking out for fairies and nature spirits), and having nurturing soul conversations, with friends and family, about what is most sacred and true.

I would like to share some Easter meditations that are most personal and current for me.

RH1

1. Turning back to my Soul
I love to teach the Enneagram because it reminds us that, first and foremost, our true nature is the psyche (soul), not the persona (ego). Similarly, A Course in Miracles teaches us that we are not our body: “I am not a body, I am free. For I am still as God created me.” The soul is made of love; and our bodies are made of stardust. The purpose of Easter is to remember that we are not a body who has a soul; we are a soul that has a body. On Easter Saturday, I gave my Enneagram class this inquiry: “Tell me how you experience my soul.” Please try it! Ground yourself again in soul awareness.

2. Letting Go of Grievances
“God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction,” wrote Meister Eckhart, the German philosopher and mystic. Modern spirituality often emphasizes manifesting, attracting and adding things to your life. Yet, in letting go we often experience our greatest joy. What could you be letting go of this Easter? For example, an old role you play in relationships, (e.g. the martyr, the people-pleaser, the giver)? An old grievance, perhaps? A Course in Miracles reminds us, “Each day, each hour and minute, even each second, you are deciding between the crucifixion and the resurrection.” And that, “each decision that you make is one between a grievance and a miracle.”

3. Listening to Flowers Speak
How is life speaking to you? What does your life want you to know? At the Phoenix Bookshop, in Findhorn, I picked up The Book of Awakening, by Mark Nepo. I bought it without looking inside it. What sold the book to me was its subtitle: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have. The purpose of the Enneagram is to help you remove the blocks to being present in your life. The purpose of A Course in Miracles is “to remove the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.”

The first page I turned to in The Book of Awakening had this quote by Carol Hegedus: “How are you tending to the emerging story of your life? What a wonderful question. This question touched my heart, and I have been sitting with it ever since. I’ve been listening carefully. Listening to my heart. Listening to the flowers. Listening to what life wants me to know.

4. Birthing Your Soul Awareness
In my Easter talk, I shared the story of the meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus, as told in the Gospel of John. Nicodemus is a scholar. He’s read all the books. He knows the theory. He can recite the scriptures from memory. He represents the aspect of our mind we call the intellect. Nicodemus comes to see Jesus “at night.” This is symbolic. At night, the intellect is tired. The mystic stirs. Moonbeams pour love and wisdom into your heart. The heart speaks. The mind sleeps. The soul is awake.

RH2

Nicodemus recognizes that Jesus’s teaching isn’t based on theory. Jesus speaks from his heart and soul. He has direct access to the kingdom of heaven, which is our original mind, and the mind of God. Nicodemus wants to know to be inspired, like Jesus. Jesus answers, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.”

“Holy week is the symbol of the whole journey of the Son of God,” teaches A Course in Miracles. We enter the world as an ego (thinking we are just a body and an intellect), but we will leave as soul (united with the Mind of Creation). To do this, we must be born again into the awareness of our true soul nature. “Rebirth itself is merely the dawning on our mind of what is already in it,” teaches A Course in Miracles.

I would like to share this beautiful poem by Hollie Holden. It’s called What Wants to Be Born in You Beloved. This has been a very helpful Easter meditation for me.

What Wants to be Born In You Beloved

I have become grateful for the moments
When I remember to stop
In order to listen
To what the earth has to tell me.

This morning it was a flower
Who took me by surprise
And shared her secrets with me.

She told me of her journey.
How it began in darkness,
In the quiet, cool embrace
Of the quiet, generous earth

She told me how the light called to her,
And how, slowly but solidly,
She began to unfold towards
The simple inevitability of her calling.

She told me of the exquisite cracking-open
Of all she knew herself to be;
The opening that felt like death
Until she realised it was her birth.

And then, with her open petals,
She asked me in the way
Only a full-bloomed flower can ask,
‘What wants to be born in you, beloved?
What does the light want to call into being
From the quiet, generous earth
That waits patiently
In the cave of your heart?

I wish you a beautiful day.

P.S. Listen to my Shift Happens! radio show on Hay House Radio every Thursday (10am Pacific Time and 6pm UK time). I look forward to your company and I welcome your calls.

Tags: , ,


Comments