The Universe Makes it Obvious: Heart Shaped Rocks and LOVE on Mount Kilimanjaro
Having dedicated a vast portion of my life thus far to the study of the meaning of life, I am happy to report I am starting to see some recurring themes. In philosophy, in religion, in yoga, at the bottom of a wine bottle, in a bakery, on top of a mountain, wherever you choose to look, there seems to be a few lessons that just won’t go away for those of us with the nagging urge to experience an existence of sweet, uninterrupted rapture.
In this living-well-game there seems to be kindness, compassion, present moment awareness, forgiveness, humour, faith, optimism, grace and allowance. However, the captain of the team always seems to be LOVE. I don’t mean “love’ as in I love yoga or I love coffee or even I love you. This is LOVE we are talking about. This is enlightenment, baby. This is the dissolution of self into the collective, the end of duality, the state of Samadhi, that promise of orgasmic lovejoy coursing through us 24/7.
One of the things thirty years on this planet, in this body, have taught me is that the unending pursuit of living in LOVE is the most worthy use of my time and energy.
And the Universe sighs, “I really thought I made that obvious?! Could I have made it any clearer??”
Okay, there were signs about the significance of love before, but I was busy, too busy to notice. So here I was on the mountain path, climbing to Africa’s highest peak, 7 days of pure awareness and deep conscious living, just walking and breathing. The Universe saw that now I might actually pay attention and took the opportunity to Make it Obvious.
Climbing mountains heightens your senses, melts you into the moment and focuses your attention in such a poignant way. Everything slows down and you see, smell, taste, feel and hear your world as if you had just been born. There is innocence in each step.
I knew such present moment bliss on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. I was thrilled to hear the crisp sound a bird’s wings make as it flies through the air, to see that trees dance with the wind so gracefully, to smell the red African soil, to feel the flutter of invisible angel wings brushing against my sunburnt skin and to taste the fresh kiss of walking inside a cloud.
Armed with acute awareness and wonderful openness, I could actually see the obvious signs the universe was providing. It was the mineral kingdom bearing a message.
We started finding heart shaped rocks on the second day and they continued all the way to the top. They came in all sizes and were unmistakably hearts, there was no room to interpret them in any other way. All four of us (and our 11 porters, guides and cooks!) saw the heart shaped rocks. Not one, not two, but dozens in a day.
Then as we approached the saddle of the summit, there were words spelled out in rocks. We were nearly at 4700 metres and the landscape looked distinctly lunar. There was no vegetation, only red earth and copious lava rocks. Fellow travelers had decorated the landscape with their offering to the summit gods of words spelled out with stones.
There it was in 4 foot tall letters, in front of me, LOVE. Everywhere we looked someone had put their own love offering with the classical coupling of initials. We walked for hours through these fields and I searched for the ultimate sign…huge letters declaring “M.W. + _._”. Nope, the universe wasn’t about to make it that obvious! We laughed at the strange, kooky romantic comedy we seemed to be in.
The stones of Kilimanjaro were urging us to love, be loving, be loved, live love and to follow our hearts.
Living lovingly is an amazing path to happiness and freedom. The measure of our mastery on this path is the state of our relationships, with ourselves, with a partner, with our children, with our co-workers, with our community, with our world.
The intensity of our interconnectedness is what makes this path so powerful. By dedicating time to stilling your own inner self critical wars, you improve your relationship with your beloved, you become less judgmental towards your family, you bring peace into your environment and you hold space for the whole world to heal. This is the revolution about to occur in the world. As we learn as individuals to have mutually fulfilling, open, truthful, kind relationships then we will know how to lead nations with love and how to evolve mindfully as a species. Our entire future as a civilization rests on our ability to make this work.
So I dedicated my summit climb to following the Path of spiritual partnership and LOVE, as the rocks had suggested would be an appropriate use of my resources in this incarnation.
The metaphor of a path isn’t completely accurate because you don’t actually go anywhere. There is no destination other than arriving back at the beginning with decidedly more wisdom and a few scars as souvenirs. The child I was knew this secret of LOVE without walking any path or reading any book or doing any yoga. So the path can be a maddening paradox…there is no where to go and yet you’ll know when you’ve arrived…the path leads to pathlessness…reaching the peak teaches you life was just as good at base camp.
One of the beautiful gifts of yoga is that it provides the time and space to meet yourself, get to know yourself and fall in love with yourself. This is really the beginning of the walk along this path. Can we awaken to our experience and our essence? Can we witness with compassion our patterns, our conditioning, our fears, our doubts, the stories we tell ourselves about me, myself and I? And can we find the truth in that mess?
In yoga class, I heard the rumblings of my own heart’s song. I felt at a deep cellular level what I was meant to live. My truth was whispering to me and I liked what it had to say.
This is an ongoing process of forgiving ourselves, accepting ourselves, being extraordinarily kind to ourselves. Taking time to commune with our inner self, to relax enough so the body can tell us how it’s doing, to be still enough to hear our spirit is the foundation to build all other relationships on.
I filled myself up on this practice of self-love for many months, hungry for the nourishment to my body, mind and spirit. I redesigned my life to make room for retreat, for silence, for cultivating a flourishing mind, and for teaching others how to look within.
In a quiet, serene, renunciate lifestyle I discovered how to live a lush inner life . Now I feel happy for no reason. I delight in the small details of my day, like standing at the oceans edge and breathing the salty air into my lungs. I feel safe in the world, content that I have enough and that I always will. I no longer wake up with my fists clenched up tight, symbolic of the scarcity I once felt in the world. I am clinging less and my body is stronger than it has ever been and I have a pervasive sense of ok’ness rather than impending drama.
Then one day, I started to see signs of over- indulging in self-inquiry, I had reached the peak of this mountain. I could see the first strains of self-obsession. I felt like I was in continual therapy about how to live without ever actually getting out there and living. While I appreciated my own company, I didn’t want that to be the only true love I ever found.
Besides, there were many moments when the tasks I am called to fulfill energetically seem far too big for my shoulders alone.
I recognize vast momentum now to the raising of our vibration as a collective and the energy is shifting with such speed, that at the end of a day I long for someone who understands this new world with me.
Then I discovered in my study of Patanjali’s Sutras that the karmic reward for Svadhyaya, spiritual self-study, is that the angel of your dreams appears as your next teacher. Yes! Where do I sign up for that please? Can he please have broad shoulders, strong hands, smiling eyes, plenty of charm, like lots of adventure, love intense philosophical inquiry, want to meditate with me and be really really kind? Can he be attentive and affectionate and like listening to my latest epiphany? Can we read together and breath together? And be a yogi, please. Pretty please.
This angel of my dreams as my teacher is not a standard issue boyfriend or lover or husband. I have tried all of those with limited success. The results were always moderate to mild pleasure followed by intense confusion and suffering.
This is an angel to love, in the form of a man. This is an altar to worship our innate divinity at, in the form of a spiritual partner. Could there be a connection between two people that would flow with ease and be about pure joy? Could sex be sacred? Could this be an opportunity to practice deep allowance and continual gratitude? Could we understand the paradox that it is freedom that binds, holding that repels? Could there be holy reverence for merely affecting the quality of the other persons day, a total awe for the gift of sending your partner into their day with a big grin on their face because they woke up next to you? Could I do this LOVE thing with another, one special chosen person, my angel? Could mastery of unconditional love with this angel be dedicated to together serving the emerging unitive consciousness of humanity while living a really sweet life of simple pleasures with each other? The next steps of the path emerged.
I tripped over some heart shaped stones in the middle of Africa and began a journey down a mystical path of spiritual partnership. This is the beginning....a perfect place to start from.
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