It turns out that son Colin did not join me for today’s meditation. I was secretly glad, since I had something planned for it that not many people could handle. I knew Janet was one of them. (See synchronicity, last Sunday’s meditation).

It appears that I, and we, are being guided to deepen our meditations. Here’s how this came about:

My 21-year-old housemate Ethyl, who sadly, moved out after eight restless months, while she was here, reorganized the den. This included asking me to look through all my books in there, and decide what really needed to remain on those shelves. Which is how I came across, after many many years, the Right Use of Will series of books, channeled by Ceanne DeRohan in the mid-80s. I and all my female cohorts in Jackson Hole began to read this series at about the same time, and were profoundly moved.

Ethyl brought one of these books to me just before she left, HEART SONG: Vibrating Heartlessness to Let Heart In. Bingo. This is what is needed. If we are to meditate with full couer-age, then our hearts need to be completely open and vibrating with the Love that fills and fuels the universe.

However, opening one’s heart is the work of a lifetime, as I, and many others have discovered. And that includes Janet,  the dear old friend who decided last Sunday she wants to meditate with me, and today exclaimed “Of course!” when I asked her if she remembers the Right Use of Will series.

So, during this past week I began to read the HEART SONG book, just a few pages a day. The books are intense! And this made me realize that I need to quote from this book as an introduction to what we need to do now in our meditations. Janet readily agreed, to both the quotes and what would come next.

From the book, page 46:

” . . . there is a long lost song of the Heart that needs to be sung, a lost Heart Song that’s never been sung.”

“It’s a song so plaintive, it will be hard to recognize as song the way son has been defined on Earth for so long. Judged to be the worst sounds you could ever make, you were told not to make them, told to shove them back down before it was ever known how they would sound. It’s not going to be easy to sing, especially at first, but even though it is a very painful one, this unsung Heart Song must be found worth being sung. This wailing, wrenching, keening, long lost Heart Song must be allowed to be sung.”

“It is not love’s way to make you hold this down anymore in order to make you hold what you can’t hold anymore. Now that I know what was down there, now that I know what has been held back for so long is really there, I want to help you find relief from the frozen terror, and the rage and the grief in the song choked-back sounds that died in your throats from the pain of never formed Heart’s aborted birth.”

Yes, what Janet and I decided to do this Sunday, rather than, as before, to chant the sacred “OM,” prior to formal meditation, was to allow the icky, yucky, ugly, furious howling buried inside humankind to finally find expression.

In my own life, when my husband Jeff died, I had found myself howling, on a daily basis, for some months. Deep wracking howls, issuing from such a profound place in my body that they ended up completely rewriting the script of my life. See This Vast Being: A Voyage of Grief and Exaltation.

So the idea of howling grief was not new to me, and I knew it’s function as a healing balm.

This morning, not wanting to scare anybody, I decided I’d better close all doors and windows. Janet decided to howl into a pillow, given that she lives in an apartment with other people just beyond her living room wall. In any case, we both began to howl the whole world’s ugly wrenching, heart-felt keening for about three minutes, and agreed that we will need to do it again, perhaps many times, to get the frozen buried fear and grief moving.

Given that this was the first time Janet had done this meditation, she was not surprised to find herself going back through her own life, to once again recognize how fear (and hate) had infected her as a young child whose mother not only beat her regularly, but would yank her daughter’s hair viciously whenever she brushed her hair. Janet remembers one time when she was very young, at a friend’s house when her friend’s mother was carefully, slowly, combing out her own daughter’s hair. This loving act struck young Janet in a profound manner. But then, as an adult, after many years of working through her feelings and memories of her mom, her mom happened to invite her to her home, and said she had something to give her. Silently, she sat her daughter down at the kitchen table, and then proceeded to brush her hair from behind, carefully, slowly, lovingly — just the way Janet had remembered her friend’s mother doing —  as tears coursed down her daughter’s face. That was the moment, Janet told me, when any remaining traces of resentment, hate, fear held within towards her mother completely vanished.

In my own meditation, I could sense what had been the thick stuck cesspool of fear that envelops the earth now developing holes in it — thanks to our howling? I spent my 20-minute meditation breathing love through the heart into all those holes. Soon I began to sense that Earth herself — which still harbors, usually in denial, the detritus of so much horror, cruelty, fear, hatred, terror that humans have inflicted upon one another and upon her for so long — begin to open up a bit. But Earth is shy. Is it really safe to come out? She fears we will simply tromp on her again. Can she be coaxed into responding? Into letting some of the horror go?

During the meditation I also realized that, if people are like me, and they probably are, then in order to open the heart they must first release the will, the immense expressive power contained within the solar plexus. That until this chakra is cleared, it will feel heavy, stuck, leaden. At least that was my experience. I had to spend several years breathing into the thick, stuck solar plexus area on my long daily walks, asking it to release, to expand and lighten, to begin to vibrate. Finally, it did! And what resulted was a series of dreams, in which a connection was made between my solar plexus and my heart. The energy released by the solar plexus, could then flow upwards, into and through the heart.

I sense that what prevents people from feeling either their own deeply buried feelings or the feelings buried within Earth herself, in short, what prevents people from connecting with their own bodies or the Earth of which those bodies are composed, is this awful, stuck solar plexus energy. That the massively compressed feelings within, built up over lifetimes of living in denial, when they do finally move, will also, as we say, “move mountains.”

Janet spoke of excruciating grief, as well as excruciating love. Yes. Both are so strong and so intimate, that we, in our culture, taught to be “rational” and “in control of our emotions,” find both very hard to to admit, to feel, to bear.

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Once again, I ask anyone who also wants to comment on your own experience during these meditations, please do so! The more of us who speak of our own experiences, the better for all of us, the deeper and wider will be the impact of LOVE alchemizing the FEAR that still envelops our world.