Coming Home Meditation Tuesday 9am EST ~ Listen...

Let's practice deep listening together.

Mandala: For Eleanor, for the Future, July 11, 2022

Dear Friends,

I am thinking of doing a series on the senses. Summertime seems a good time to do it. We’ll start tomorrow with sound and listening.

I’d like to create a space dedicated to listening in unexpected ways. It should be a very expansive experience.

I’ll start by listening to you. Then we’ll talk about some different and deeper ways of listening. For example: listening to the body, listening as receiving the other, listening to the earth, listening to the cosmos, listening to the future, listening to the ancestors, listening through trauma, listening to the yearnings of the heart, listening to guides, listening to inner voices, listening to the intuition, listening to the Higher Self.

Then we’ll sit and practice listening in different ways through the body, into the earth, into our innermost heart, into the past, and into the future.

Join me from 9-10:15am EST here…

Coming Home is a pay-what-you-feel event with a recommended donation of $10-20. Please join us! You can Venmo me @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown or send a donation via PayPal to schuyler@artofemergence.com. Paid subscribers are already covered, thank you!

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I made this mandala (pictured above) today and dedicated it to my daughter and her generation. While walking through the woods, I found the Blue Jay feather on the right and knew I needed to make an offering. Half a mile later, I found the second one! Blue Jay feathers are a rare find. Two in one day felt like a real blessing. I also found some beautiful, dead moths on the trail; pale and ghostly.

The experience of making the mandala told me a little something about the prayer I was holding and offering to the youth. First of all, I was gripping the objects. They were so precious and I was walking a long distance. I felt how I have a tight grip on the future so I loosened it. I relaxed.

Secondly, many of the things I found were very fragile and there was a strong wind. The moths nearly disintegrated when touched. The feathers were so light they seemed to want to fly away. This emphasized for me the fragility of childhood and the changes these kids will see in their lifetime: a strong wind blows.

Finally, as I searched for a place to make the offering mandala, I scratched my leg and drew blood. This felt significant…the blood of our ancestors; the blood that has been shed and will be shed yet. There was something so…corporal and genetic…about it. That seemed reassuring in a way. We are still human beings made of flesh and blood. If you prick us, do we not bleed?

What to make of the moths? I see them as ethereal, almost angelic. And the fern for me is always a symbol of the fractal nature of reality. The two birch leaves were taken from a tree that has for me the energy of Lakshmi, abundance.

The last message was about doubling. The two feathers were significant for me. Two is not a number I work with much and I enjoyed the symmetry of it. I wasn’t sure what to make of it except that I know in dream analysis two of anything, doubling, gives emphasis to the message. If you see two women or two cats, it’s double the feminine, double the feline…like a symbolic exclamation point. I felt the doubling was for the prayer I offered for their safety and thriving…that they would live to see a better world than the one they were born into. I appreciated Mother Nature’s exclamation point here.