Love. We can almost say that love is everything that touches on eternity, that gives us a sense of something good and greater than the sum total of what we are, that points to what is best in the human spirit, and maybe what animates the glorious teeming life we enjoy on this little blue planet. We can almost say what it is, but not quite.
I attended the New Year’s service at CSE (Center for Spiritual Enlightenment) to set our intentions for Dharma 365, which is a daily practice of meditation and a reflective journal for the year. I placed the pinch of incense on the burning coal and then stood as we were invited to experience the fulfillment of our intention.
My intention was to manifest a primary love partner. I could completely create the experience the joy, oneness, and thrill of being in love with a partner who was my best friend and lover. Yep, it’s going to happen. I believed.
So, I set out from New Years in the online course, Dharma365, with purpose and curiosity. Early a.m. meditation had become a kind of life line for me, as a busy educator who was also caring for an 88 year old mother living with me who suffered heart failure over New Years.
Two years ago, when I took the Tuesday night class two month class on meditation, I had enjoyed about eight months of uninterrupted daily meditating. At that time, I had heard the teaching, the claim, that super conscious meditation can change the brain maps, or the force of the habits of mind we carry. And I frankly could not believe that. I told a close girl friend so, and she challenged me with, “And so, what if it does?”
Somewhere in the first 40 days of this year, my love candle I had purchased from the CSE bookstore was almost spent. I have a little altar, a small table where I sit in the predawn to meditate. I went to the book store to get a replacement and — what? Out of love candles? Surely there can be no shortage of love! And so I chose the “Confidence” candle – because I knew by now that I needed to place my confidence somewhere other than my lower case e ego.
What had happened, as the love candle burned into February, was that one morning the entire love joy/suffering I carried for my husband of 16 years whom I divorced about 16 years ago — the love I felt for James, that I didn’t realize was in my heart — was lit up in my full consciousness — the entire map. And I just sat there being with it. All of it. It was enlightening to realize that the relationship was not closed in my heart and that what I was intending in 2017 was somehow a version of having the ex husband back.
I also had bought Yogacharya’s book, The Moon Reminded Me, and there’s a line from the woman who wrote the preface in which she explained that her her spirituality was entangled with the pain of missing her deceased lover. Her words confirmed what I sensed had happened to me.
My relationship with that second husband had began in spiritual quest, in seeking God and rearranging our lives to serve Jesus in a small Christian community. (Yes, some things went terribly wrong in time there, but that’s another story.)
My morning meditation, when my heart was open by grace, had not only healed me of a lingering pain of attachment to a long gone relationship, but also showed me the triggers I was experiencing in Sunday services at CSE were not really about previous cult leader abuses. They were reactivation of my loss of love. Think I was giving this person a little too much power, or what?? 🙂
Needless to say, my recent visits to commune and meditate at CSE have not been fraught with those old maps from my brain. I hope not to underestimate the power of super conscious meditation again. If I do, the Universe will be happy to instruct me.
River Brown 
Leave a Reply