Meditation

Session 4. The purpose of today's meditation was to bring one closer to one's Essential Nature and to be better able to distinguish it from one's Essential Self. The Essential Nature is the underlying nature of all existence of which each one of us is a part. The Essential Self is what makes each one of us a unique person along with our interpretation of who we are and our self perceptions of the world we live in.

I recently have been reading about this same topic in The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz. He talks about how we, as humans, come to make sense of our world. "We put words together from nowhere; we make them up. Humans invent every sound, every letter, every graphic symbol. We hear a sound like "A" and say, 'This is the symbol for that sound.' We draw a symbol to represent the sound, we put the symbol and the sound together, (use them to create words) and we give it (them) a meaning (s.) Every word in our mind has a meaning, but it's not real, it's not truth. It an agreement with ourselves, and with everybody else who learns the same symbology."

This varies from language to language, from culture to culture, from belief system to belief system. The way we describe ourselves is not the truth, it is an agreement on the understanding of our symbolic language. The truth, or Essential Nature of each one of us is what exists from the day we were born and before we complicated it with our "Agreements."

Besides our creation and agreement with others on language use, we also learn from others as they assign values like good and bad, fat and skinny, beautiful and ugly, etc. These agreements are not truth (Essential Nature) but we come to accept them anyway from the important people in our lives like our parents, siblings, family, friends, teachers, religious leaders based on their agreements (Essential Selves.)

So to bring us back to the session, it was a difficult one for me. For some reason I became frustrated and fearful. I was unable to look closely at my Essential Nature and the Self kept getting in the way. I felt sad, very alone, somewhat depressed, focused on my lacks and faults, and on the continuing and increasing difficulties in being supportive of Gregory. I was quite far from being able to get past that to embrace the true me, with whom at times I am able to visit, but not this time.

Towards the end of the session I became anxious and as suggested early on in the beginning sessions, I visited my Internal Resource where I could feel safe and protected. I hope to write about that later but suffice it to say it exists in my visualization of an old forest, with a small house nestled among the trees, and at the edge forest - the ocean.

It did calm me down but after the session I carried the heaviness with me out to the car where I cried for a while and then went to Pannino's for an Italian Beef Sandwich with lucious hot French Fries. I'll feel better tomorrow.