Perfection-In-Process

A technique I use periodically to maintain the wellness of my energy system is the retrieval of my own psychic energy (which we may simply name “attention”) through a “golden sun” meditation. (See Karla McLaren’s Your Aura & Your Chakras.) I call my attention — all the sprawling bits of awareness that track so many different topics “out there” — back to myself in present time by envisioning a golden ball of light a foot or so above my crown chakra. This ball has the qualities of a small personal sun, luminous and life giving. It has magnetic properties that attract only my own energy to it. As my own energy returns to my personal sun, it is clarified and purified. When the sun is full and bright, I call its radiance down into me.

The golden sun meditation is a profoundly nourishing and replenishing energy-management practice. Because it is just one of the resources in my self-care toolkit, it’s not a daily habit. It’s more of an on-call tool.

Recently, I was guided to use this tool. As my golden sun began to re-call my energy from the gravitational fields of all the people I know, love, and/or interact with regularly, I began to notice how much of my energy was bound up in worry for them.

The impetus to worry is genuine concern and simple human caring. However, as one of my teachers likes to say: “Worry is a misuse of your visionary capacity.”

How many of you express your caring through the language of worry? “I’m worried about you,” you say to your friend who’s going through a crisis. Though it may come from a seed urge for wellness, worrying for the welfare of our beloveds takes our life force energy and puts it to use imaging outcomes contrary to the caring impulse.

My golden sun meditation was revealing the degree to which I had invested my energy in worry, and it surprised me. It served as a wake-up call for me to reclaim and corral my power to create the world in the image of go(o)d. For me, this means holding a detached compassion for all beings and radiating love. It means not being insistent on an outcome, but offering my thoughts, words and actions toward an outcome I desire. It means maintaining the practices that benefit my wellness.

We each have the power to live from and toward our greatest good. In a balanced, healthy human energy system with a means for self-renewal (like the golden sun technique), this power burns with a steady light. Sometimes, it takes the light’s dimming or a glitch in the system to reignite the awareness of our own power.

Doing this meditation was like performing a psychic systems-check and discovering that an out-dated program was running. I could respond to that discovery by running some other old programs, like self-criticism and perfectionism. But, thankfully, there’s a new program that takes precedence in my system. It’s summed up in these words from a Leonard Cohen song:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

The cracks in our perfection — the places where we recognize we need to grow or transform or recommit to what keeps us well — actually reveal our perfection-in-process. Just as the thermostat of a healthy body is set at a temperature a few degrees shy of the 101º needed for optimal enzyme functioning, we may be a few degrees (or more!) short of enlightenment. The gap between our understanding and our actualization may be exactly the room God needs to maneuver.