A Practice to Help You Get Real
Seeing with the eyes of your heart. That’s the idea behind one of my favorite meditative practices: Visio Divina. To do Visio you sit with a piece of art—a painting, a sculpture—and open to what shimmers at the edges of your spirit. The practice invites you to grow still, so you might hear what the Greater Than is whispering to you.
Because we are all unique, because we all have our own deeps, our own relationship with the holy, our own calling to live into our fullest, realest self, two people can look at the same piece of art and have wildly different inner experiences. That’s because the Greater Than doesn’t want any of us to live inside the same box as everyone else, feeling trapped and suffocated by pressing walls and crushing expectations.
The Energy that lives and moves in every single one of us, as well as every creature and particle in all of existence, is ready to meet us where we are. As we are.
No judgment. No shame.
Only invitation.
When we practice Visio Divina (or meditation or yoga), we get invited to center, soften, and open into our wild call of yes. To move fully and deeply into our particularity, our strangeness, and it is there we can listen, really listen, for how to live deep and wide and how to be real. Absolutely Real.
We get so grounded in the center of our being that we can live on the edge of everything, because it’s at the edges where things happen, grow, and open into possibility. It’s at the edges where we can learn how to flow with energy and grace, doing our best to remain steadfast and curious about whatever happens next.
There’s a reason so many of us try to fit ourselves into boxes. Boxes are safe, contained, protecting us from mess and uncertainty. Boxes attempt to contain the chaos. I know how tempting that is. The last thing I want is more chaos in my life.
And yet chaos is where things begin. Where things change. It is where creation happens, and it’s there that we can find real meaning and a holy, strange purpose for our weird and wonderful self.
So, the next time you are looking at a piece of art or this photo or even an anthill, a fallen tree, or cracks in a sidewalk that look like veins—stop, still, center, and soften.
And listen.
Listen with your heart.
What is the Big Energy Playing in and Through the Center of Things saying to you, longing for you to pause and hear?
For me it is again and again: Live light and shine
.