I now know what it is like, and I intend not to forget. It is not like remembering my home address or what my car looks like. It is more like remembering what it feels like to walk through the door of my home or sit behind the wheel of my turquoise car.
The memory of five days is known in my body, through my whole body. It is the relaxed ease of feeling and has little to do with deliberate intellectual recall. The memory is that of hands knitting effortlessly and not from following a remembered pattern but from a deep sense of just knowing what to do.
Five days of relaxing the tight constraints of learned habit behavior have taken me to a deeper ability to feel and know my world. I was ready, I suppose, to take the dive and it happened almost effortlessly. All I had to do was let it happen.
I now find myself in a place where knowing and feeling are one. It is a knowing that flows naturally from relaxing and allowing my body to absorb.
I am aware that parts of me have finally awakened, and I have the joyful memory of what it feels like to be so open-hearted. I intend to not forget. I now know where that place is in me, and it seems so readily accessible now. I know the familiar feeling of walking through the unlocked door of my home or engaging the movement of my turquoise car.
The wholeness that I feel is not only within me but includes whatever I touch. It is easiest to know what does not resist. For people, it is easiest for those in whom I experience a similar open-heartedness. For trees, rocks and flowers, it is so easy because they so readily present themselves. Unlike most people, plants and rocks know how to be fully present. They have no resistance to being known. Like me, people must first discover what it feels like to be open-hearted.
I am slowly learning how to know, how to be open-hearted and what it feels like. I also can better recognize when it appears in someone else. There is a kind of relaxed kinship that emerges and we see in one another what we have come to know and feel in ourselves. People are different in that way from plants and rocks. Unlike plants and rocks, people can decide whether to be truly present.
Consciousness is naturally present in plants and rocks simply by being. I have had to learn to deepen my own consciousness by relaxing and then allow it to happen naturally. I have had to undo a lifetime of constraints to be able to know and feel as deeply as I do now. I am aware that there are more constraints yet to be relaxed.
I now remember, I know what it is like to feel deep open-heartedness. This is not a memory to be deliberately repeated. For me, the “how to” be open-hearted is already a knowing part of my muscle and bone. All I have to do is allow it to flow.