Lotus by teZa Lord

This surprising rendition of the derogatory of “Come off your high horse!” was actually said, not to me, but to someone very much like me. A woman who is both a longtime meditator and student of consciousness, as I am, plus a healer, a body-worker, which I am not. My profession has always been artist and writer. And now, since I’ve become more confident of my other role in this wild and crazy world of ours, I also call myself a Spiritual Activist.

Bonnie and I agreed as we chuckled about being chastised for being “too spiritual.” We both reinforced ourselves by our similar commitments. We have chosen to focus on things of a loftier, more positive nature than lower aspects of being, such as what we both consider the minutiae of national economics, politics, and other fields requiring much specific training, such as that undertaken by physicists, brain surgeons, fire-fighters, endodontists, lawyers, etc. … so we laughed. “Guess we’re guilty of being labeled a Lotus Sitter because we think being spiritual is just as important, if not more so, than being a well-trained professional offering humanity its needed services.”

Each of Us Is Important

Bonnie and I concluded that our chosen fields — she a healer, and me a spirit artist, both of us activists spreading the word, and “walking the walk” of higher consciousness — to be as necessary, as important as any other person’s worthy occupational preference. We laughed some more, thinking it funny how some people find it a “waste of time” to be spiritual, especially when life’s crashing in on us, as this challenging, dangerously deadly year of 2020 has been for everyone worldwide.

My friend elaborated. “The person who said ‘Come off your lotus’ to me was annoyed, even angry, because I wasn’t buying into the sheer awfulness of what was going on. And it’s not even important what it was. It might have been another erratic tweet from the White House, or a sure-to-come tidal wave of more grief. It didn’t matter. My friend was pissed I wasn’t dismayed, getting depressed as she was taking in the terrible news that 2020 has been one gigantic tsunami of awfulness after the next wave of challenges, after the next. She wanted me, in her own words, ‘to stop being so damn spiritual about everything!’”

Bonnie and I shared a moment of serious compassion for the person who criticized our spirituality. Of how we accept that Nature’s wrath (in the form of a spiky coronavirus) was What Was Happening. And Acceptance of All That Is (after a reasonable effort to make positive changes, per the Serenity Prayer) is the spiritual way, not resistance or denial. Perhaps she preferred being miserable? we wondered. Perhaps she just never realized she had the choice to see life from another perspective than the one she found so fearful, so filled with grievances.

How Much Is Too Much Spirituality?

When my friend related this recent interchange to me, we both chuckled. Both of us understood the truth was simple.

“We need to be as spiritual as we possibly can during these hard times!” both of us loudly, enthusiastically exclaimed.

Facing hard times with anything less than a “spiritual” outlook, we agreed, was not only a less-than-optimal choice, but it was totally missing the point of what we were all going through.

The lessons brought to us by adversity are abundant. Some of us crumple when we’re hit hard. Others, like my pal Bonnie, realize that each negative aspect of life represents the swing of life’s pendulum, as regular as clockwork, with its back-and-forths, and up-and-downs — and that the next, equally forceful swing in the opposite, uplifting direction to which it will swing, inevitably indicates growth and deeper understanding of life’s intrinsic meaning that will replace the current trend of sad loss, fear, and depression.

But to see and understand this concept … one must be willing to let loose of the “normal way of looking at things.”

Thus … the lotus sitting.

Stilling the Busy Mind Is the Lotus

Eastern spirituality uses a living lotus to symbolize a person who has higher understanding. Like the lotus, whose beautiful blossom opens fully to the sun on the surface of a muddy pond, and whose roots go deeply into the muddy bottom below, life is “not what it appears to be.” Peace of mind usually results from not intellectually understanding, or studying facts, but letting go of trying to use the intellect to understand. To “feel” the essence of life with one’s deeper senses is our lotus mind relying on having our roots (our understanding) deeply entrenched in the mud of a messy life. Which 2020 has certainly been!

The still and silent senses that get activated when we switch off the “thinking mode” of one’s mental capacities, and let thoughtlessness or no-thought take over our consciousness by stilling our minds, creates a greater, deeper way of “knowing” than can ever happen with our intellects trying to figure things out. When people tune into their Inner Power by stilling their busy, chattering, need-to-know minds, they become more prone to recognizing that everything happens for a purpose. Then happiness becomes, truly, theirs for the asking.

This kind of acceptance of What Is is called “higher” or “deeper” consciousness, and it happens without needing to understand anything.

When one is stilling the mind—vis à vis meditation, mantra repeating, breath-watching, or merely Being Present—a person is exercising their free will to go beyond “ordinary” to experience the available “extraordinary” perceptions we all are capable of. It happens just by opening the door, the portal of wanting to experience more than so-called “normal.” Each person who takes the time to practice stilling the mind, “sitting on their lotus,” will slowly imbibe the state of internal stillness, the stopping of our chattering mind. When that occurs, we experience acceptance of All That Is. The more we experience this, and the more we can bring these extraordinary perceptions to our everyday “normal” way of interacting, the more our mundane life becomes spiritualized.

Choose: Normal? Or Spiritual!

If a person doesn’t make this choice, and succumbs to the many negative forces that always surround each of us, every second of every day … chances are that person will have a harder time claiming happiness that is not contingent upon being occupied, entertained, or pleased by some sort of sense objects.

We are faced with so many negative factors in today’s world: the pandemic and its sorrowful losses, lacks, and uncertainties, economic hardships, and our horrible political divide. Many people are tired of it all, and scared. For those who wish to experience the other choice available to all humans, whether you’re suffering or not, you can learn how to still the mind. And when you do, you experience inner serenity even in the midst of the harshest, most terrifying of life’s woes.

As Shakespeare put it: “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

The choice is yours. If you wish to learn how to still your chattering mind, please try my MindStillers: 14 different audio snippets of a few minutes each that I offer for free to help anyone learn to stop the negative thought-robbers of their Inner Peace. Click here: I suggest you start with MindStiller 1 and go consecutively higher.

May these days of winter’s darkness be filled with the Light of Love emanating from each of our opened hearts and peaceful minds.