I recently came across an article by mindfulness and meditation teacher and author Jon Kabat-Zinn that really resonated with me as I started looking back on the two years of sharing a whole variety of meditation techniques and mindfulness tools via Dreamers & Schemers. My tendency is to try anything and everything at least once or twice; build a wide-ranging toolkit that I can draw from in any mood, context, or occasion; and to share what’s worked or at least sounds highly promising to me. Lately, however, especially over my latest silent retreat, I started feeling the need to strip everything back down to the essence, to dispense with the bells and whistles and just drop right into joy, light, presence, pure love, and BE-ing.
Even in my own Akashic Records practice, I’ve largely dispensed with the need to ask questions and chase answers in favor of simply opening to the field of unconditional love and quite literally sitting in it, doing nothing but basking in it, taking whatever I need to take in and receiving it fully in my heart and in every cell of my body. This is a deeply healing practice that I believe is really at the heart of experiencing the Akashic Records. But, I digress.
And yet, I can’t seem to get to my point without continuing on with another anecdote about my Akashic Records practice: A couple of months ago as my opening process and blessing started to undergo tremendous changes quite to my surprise, I came across a sentence that is attributed to Mary Dean Parker, one of the teachers who worked in service of the Akashic Records by spreading news of its existence and sharing techniques of how to work in it with the masses. She teaches that we can simply say this sentence out loud and let it work its way gently into our consciousness. All we have to do is witness its effect on us.
Similarly, Jon Kabat-Zinn observes that so much of what we learn in meditation or mindfulness workshops are really ways to “scaffold” our experience of the meditative state, which is at root a wakeful state of presence. He urges us to simplify our concept of “meditation” by letting go of the thought “I am meditating” and just open to being. All we have to do—and as always, this is perhaps easier said than done—is to pause, drop into the moment, and become awake to what is. He specifically says that beginner’s mind is paramount to being able to do this effectively.
For some reason this article, which he appealingly titled “How to Meditate Without Meditating,” seemed to resonate exactly with my experience of becoming awake to Mary Parker’s sentence. When I first said it to myself out loud, I had no idea what to expect, but I was gradually overcome with this feeling of utter calm that grew into a profound sense of peace, and that peace stayed with me as I walked about my apartment, took notes, wrote emails, etc. I was not “meditating,” per se, and yet I had managed to attain and maintain this wakeful state for hours on end.
So, I offered to Dreamers & Schemers the line once written by Mary Parker, which now opens my new Akashic Records blessing. Try it out for yourself. Say it aloud with your eyes open, and feel free to go about your day as you normally would. Let it work on your consciousness and simply witness how that magic manifests in the moment. The words are really simple, and as with everything of this nature, intention and trust count more than the words itself:
“And now I am aware of the radiance of light.”
I would love to hear your experiences with this phrase below!
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