It’s my one-year anniversary of writing Falling Free and this feels like a timely reflection! Thank you, every one of you, for journeying alongside me. I am more grateful than you know.
The skies darken, the world leaches light. We enter the gates of winter’s fast.
The time of inner light.
I find myself thinking of candles. And a conversation I once had with a mentor, about impact and feeling small.
Do you feel it in your bones, the need to create change? To gather all the world and let your voice be heard? A call that echoes down through the dark, resonating through every heart, together dreaming a loving future.
I do.
Sometimes that need has me feeling very small indeed.
As darkness draws its breath, a long and lingering sound calling the world into the coming cold, questions are filling my mind.
Asking me, what am I doing, and why? Honestly, what do I think I am doing, and why?
How can I ever truly hope to make an impact in this world, a world rushing by, unwilling to stop and see, a world constipated by its own noise?
New writer. New meditation guide.
One small being, her voice lost in the wind blowing in from the sea.
A pebble on a wide-open beach, swallowed by the oncoming tide. A tiny seahorse drifting amongst the weed, unable to find her way out into open water.
I wrestle with this for longer than I care to say.
Until my mind goes back, tripping through the years, to older days when illness had me so firmly in its clutches that my life was bed.
Bed and brain and breath.
No more, no less. I lay in darkness and sunk myself within.
This was the time I discovered meditation. What else had I to do? I lived in a body that would not move, with a mind stretched thin, in a head made of stone.
Day after day and year after year, alone in my bed as my husband went out to work and tried to make sense of the world.
It sounds hopeless, doesn't it?
And though I asked the darkness of God many questions in the quietness, I did not lose faith in the purpose of being alive.
*
All life has value.
It cannot be erased by lack of action.
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Every heartbeat echoes this value through the valleys of your body, every breath quietly complete in the billowing of form.
When you live without action, sometimes you see it, a silver fish darting in and out of the weeds - the startling enoughness of being.
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You will not lose value by growing still. You will find it.
*
When life took me by the hand and began to lift me up, out of that bed, I began to ask myself what I could do in the world.
This illness does not heal swiftly. My body rewrites itself, inch by inch, day by day.
When I grew strong enough, I began training as a yoga nidra guide. Nidra had sustained me through the dark times. I wanted to bring it with me out into the light, let this luminous meditation save others as it had saved me.
I wanted my life to echo the purpose I felt in the beating of my heart, that soft place I discovered inside me.
Body says, slowly, slowly.
I did not want slowly, slowly. I wanted to be the bright blaze of the sun overhead and not the spark of a candle alone in the darkness, dribbling out light.
I sat with it. I breathed with it. I spoke soft words with a mentor, who asked me questions. Could I allow small ways of being in the world to be enough?
Out of those questions came the following lines, pages of my journal I have not forgotten in the passage of time.
That small flame has the power to light all other candles.
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Impact.
I ask again, do you feel small? Insignificant in a world roaring its pain into the night? Desperate to kindle a spark of new light - for you and your life, and for the whole of us.
Can you release some of the urgency? Some of the need to be seen?
Change comes from still places.
Can you slow down and see - if we want change, if we really want change, it must come from this quiet voice, this still one, this humble creature choosing not to shout amongst the chaos.
Relinquish every craving we possess for influence, or power, which can only create more of itself.
This quiet voice - beside your, quiet, voice - is the one with the potential for a new world.
This still, small voice of calm.
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Friends, let us be like candles.
A multitude of bright lights in the darkness.
Perhaps for a time we shall blaze up bright and all the world will see our light. At others, we shall be the soft shimmer, the gentle glow humming quietly to itself. Already complete.
We shall grow content, lighting the very candle which is beside us, knowing ourselves part of a myriad chain of lights stretching out through the night.
Let the world be changed not by the bright lights of power, but the soul song of a thousand candles.
An invitation: come amongst the chaos of the festive season and rest with me. I’m hosting a gathering for subscribers on Zoom at 4pm UK time on 28th December. It will be a time to sink into silence, in fellowship and ease. Letting everything go at the virtual door and coming to a still point. We’ll close the year together in reverence, soaking in the healing power of silence.
It’ll be around 45 minutes, come as you are, camera on or off as you choose. You are so welcome to join me. I’ll send the Zoom link to subscribers near the time.
This speaks so much to me at the moment as I’m learning the same lessons. Slowly slowly. Candle light beauty! 🙏
Thank you for writing this! I loved every word and it really spoke to me.