Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 12

6

There is a danger in describing how this path unfolded for me. One person’s experience recorded in detail can leave the impression that there is a pattern, a usual way for things to happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. One person might slip easily into meditative Journeys while another spends years practicing, yet each is walking in the center of their own road, discovering what is theirs alone to discover. The Universe helps people toward clarity through many different means. There is no formula, no right way. Each traveler is held by the same loving hands, guided by the best wisdom toward their own particular destination. For some travelers the path may include meditative or shamanic Journeys; for others it may not.

In my case, though I had an aptitude for Journeys, I stumbled on this speaking-aloud business. I could understand what Chris meant when she said that it tended to help the mind stay focused on what was happening in the Journey. I could even appreciate that recording a Journey, as she recommended, would help jog the memory later about its nuances. But speaking aloud? It just felt strange.

Nevertheless, two days later when for the first time in my life I fumbled on my own toward that inner connection with Bear, I did it with cell phone in hand, narrating what I experienced into a phone app—modern technology applied to an old, old kind of meditation.

Just after six that morning I climbed out of bed and wrapped myself in a blanket to ward off the night’s chill. The world was dark and still. Tim wouldn’t be up for a while yet, and Bodhi, our blue heeler mix, was still curled up in his favorite spot on the sofa. I turned on the phone recorder and tried to bring my mind into a still center.

Immediately images of the locomotive returned. Click-e-ta, click-e-ta, click-e-ta. A train moving along the tracks, steady, humming. I described what I saw and heard into the phone. There was a feeling of confidence in the train’s momentum, as if I were suddenly a passenger on that train, traveling swiftly forward. How I wished for such a feeling in real life! What would it take for me to travel that smoothly? Then a thought, like a very gentle voice in my ear. I spoke it into the phone: “Notice how putting yourself there imaginatively already makes you feel more put together. More hearty. More here.” It was true; the sturdy rhythm beneath my imaginary feet was helping my physical voice grow a little stronger. “Try starting here. Every day,” the gentle presence suggested.

Just then, more than three miles from our house, a train approaching town laid on its horn. Though all our windows were shut tight against the wintry dawn, the sound of the horn slipped inside the house and into my quiet time with Bear. The phone mic even picked it up. “Is there more about being on a train?” I asked, wanting to understand the image more fully.

The train blared again. Whooooo. Whoooo-hoooo.

I waited for more insight. Then waited a little more. I had no idea where to go from here. Finally it dawned on me: this not-knowing point in the conversation was exactly how I felt in outer life. As soon as I spoke that thought, a new suggestion arose: that just as I was learning to trust that some little piece of a picture would show up in the Journey, this would be good to practice in outer life as well.

The train bellowed once, then again. A double exclamation point.

As the train receded and finally grew silent, different images appeared. I caught a glimpse of jigsaw pieces—familiar from years I’d spent putting puzzles together in childhood. What was it about puzzle pieces? Bear responded immediately: “They come in from different corners. You sometimes have to search a while for the right one, the one that fits. But when it fits, it really fits. There’s no making it fit. It’s made to fit.”

That’s when I lost it, sobbing quietly into the phone. How fervently I longed for such a fit, how afraid I’d become that it would never be possible!

Bear’s thoughts continued. “There will be no sense of having to trim the corners. It is a smooth and perfect fit because it was cut that way.” And then a piece of advice: “Reside in the feeling that you know so well from hundreds of hours of putting puzzles together—a piece slipping into place with the ease of water flowing downhill. Look for that.” Bear explained: “Don’t get sidetracked by the pieces that almost fit. Look instead for the one that slides rightfully into place. You will know it when you feel it.”

My voice was growing lighter, almost playful, with each passing minute. Finally I glimpsed an image of a large puzzle completely put together and heard the Helper say, “Take comfort from knowing that this piece fits into a larger picture. There is an intention behind it.”

This was followed by a feeling of completion, except for one parting image, a bear standing up with one forearm placed quietly across the heart: a greeting, a pledge. “Remember the heart connection. Come here often.”

I thanked Bear, turned off the recorder, and glanced at the clock. In only twenty minutes my life had changed.

Something big had just happened, though I couldn’t grasp exactly what. This much I knew: I’d experienced an unseen partner in this conversation. All those years I’d spent praying as a young person, sending out pleas to a huge and empty sky, but now, at last, I had heard someone speaking back. The words felt familiar yet unfamiliar as well. They were not mine, yet I felt their truthfulness in my body, in my heart. I heard their message in the silence of my mind and then heard it punctuated in the “real” world. In a twist I couldn’t have engineered, a train sounded its horn across town at the very moment I was experiencing the sensation of being a railway passenger.

Something more than I could fathom or control was going on here.