Jyoti describes a meditation session she gave to herself
I look inside, into my Secret Garden which magically keeps growing vines and creepers. The creepers have red tulip flowers and the vines are lush green. The green that is so fresh and fragrant, yet feels ancient and familiar. I don’t see anyone in my Secret Garden but I do see this concrete, ornate, historical, stone bench that I go sit on. I seem to sit waiting for someone or something. Inside me, I have this feeling of a big question mark, a question that doesn’t have words or that can’t even be uttered. So it just sits there, in my being, feeling like a large void.
I now sense some presence, a woman, coming and sitting next to me. The presence feels alive, soft, gentle, wise. It’s not quite a motherly presence and it’s not exactly a wild girl. It’s the spirit of someone mature. Someone who has seen life, seen its thorns and its beauty, someone with a sense of reverence for life. I just feel like sitting near this Spirit Woman. Being in her presence feels like I am sitting under a waterfall. If anyone has gently had water falling on the top of their head, they’d know how relaxing it feels.
Finally, a question emerges from my lips. Shaky but there. “Why do I find saying no so difficult?” I say with urgency and sadness. She (and I am looking at her face to read any signs) very calmly says, glancing at me with a sweet, reassuring smile that dissolves any tension inside, “Just be gentle with yourself.”
Beneath the words, I also hear the message: “This too shall pass. Just wait.”
I relax and look again into the horizon, following the gaze of my Spirit Woman. I realise that there are now red-bricked buildings behind me with iron-wrought windows with grills that are so intricately welded that they seem like art.
I gaze inside through this window, somehow hoping that I will be able to see inside it. I ask, longingly thinking of a lover whose memory comes back to me over and over. The Spirit Woman says to me, “You have spent a lot looking at him as he leaves. Let him go into his own corral, his own land that speaks to him. Your job now is to protect your corral. Your boundaries.”
I feel strong as soon as I hear this. A strength that seems to arise in the middle of my body, along my backbone. It almost feels like a golden, tall pole… As it appears, it dispels the shadows, the darkness inside my body. It transforms into a tree with a golden trunk, illuminating my shoulders, fingers, belly, head, legs… everywhere…
The Spirit Woman looks at me lovingly. With joy and gladness. Her face is filled with pride for how far I have come. For the journey that has unfolded, for my courage to not have stood in the way, for coming into this corral, this garden which is so full of life. In her, I see Osho’s gentle smile and his loving gaze. My heart wells up in joy and tears stream down my face. I put my head on my Spirit Woman’s lap, uneasy, but certain that I must, and I howl. I cry tears of an unknown origin.
Suddenly the sun has set, the sky is a midnight blue and the stars are peeking through the clouds. It’s as if the water from my tears had taken on the colour of the sky and somehow melted and merged into the sky. Crying, weeping, I pause. I look at the sky. The Spirit Woman is no longer there but I feel the aloneness vibrating in my being. I close my eyes… and the night is me. I have found the night inside me… In this feeling, I relax. I dive deeper, relax… deeper, relax and deeper.
My Secret Garden is now an abyss so grounding that it feels like home.
Related articles
- Secret Garden – Madhuri describes a meditation; “You journey inwards and enter your own ‘secret garden’, and while there, you meet a wise person and can ask her questions.”
- Boundary Meditation – Madhuri describes an inner journey that helps you see what is healthy for you to take in from your surroundings and the people in them, and what is not
Featured image by Geoff Oliver on Unsplash
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