Entertaining Two States of Consciousness
As we move into the holiday season the messages of consumer preoccupation in our culture become a little more intense. Advertisers directly and subliminally urging and encouraging us to focus our attention on experiencing this time of year through a materialistic and transactional lens. With these overwhelming suggestions, we tend to lose sight of the deeper invitation during this time of year. To turn inward, to open our hearts, to give freely without expectation, to offer what we have to those in need, to gather, to celebrate.
I am much more capable of this open hearted availability than I ever was in the past. I credit this evolution of availability to the spiritual benefits of yoga and meditation. Through my years of practice and teaching, I have found healing, resolution, transcendence and a new set of eyes to view the world around me. My continued practice allows me to remain connected with this reality. If I could sum it up, I’d say that yoga and meditation have given me the skill set to be able to entertain two different states of consciousness simultaneously.
There is the state of consciousness that is of the Material Reality. the part of my awareness that feels that progress must be made in life, making money to support myself, social relationships, challenges, successes, fears, highs and lows. There was a time in my life where this was my only reality. I only knew and understood ambition, acquisition, conflict and stress, with transient experiences of peace. There was always something within me that was longing for what I knew not. I would constantly seek outside of myself and attempt to perfect that within myself that I saw was flawed. Little did I know that this was merely a misguided desire to connect to another state of consciousness.
In the state of consciousness of Spiritual Reality, an awareness and understanding, that in addition to being a person navigating the material world, I am also an ancient soul returning this time as a women in my specific predicament endeavoring to evolve through living experience to educate my consciousness for return to oneness with the creative source. Every experience, challenge and opportunity is an intentional and purposeful opportunity for spiritual education of my inner being. In this state of consciousness, nothing can be destroyed, or killed, only educated, transformed and evolved.
When we can learn through spiritual technologies like yoga and meditation to hover gracefully between these two states of consciousness, we become what the ancient yogis defined as “being in the world, but not of the world”. There is an eternality to our awareness that assists us in not becoming overwhelmed by the gravity of the material impressions and keeps us in an expanded understanding of a bigger picture of ultimate purpose of returning to the one. Hovering between these two planes gives benefit and purpose to all things beautiful, horrible and benign and gives us an opportunity to approach this lifetime with profound intention.
