Module Two
Amy: Hello darlings, welcome, welcome. Oh my goodness, are you ready for module two of Find Your Calling? It’s Amy Ahlers here, and I’m so delighted and excited to be here with you, along with, of course, the marvelous Martha Beck, and the luxurious, luscious Lissa Rankin. We’re having so much fun interacting with all of you, and I know that Lissa and myself have been doing some Tweeting while these calls are happening. So if you want to Tweet with us, you can use the hashtag FYC2013. That’s #FYC2013. And if you want to interact with each other while we’re on this call, you can also go over to our Ning site, and go to the chat tab, and you can actually chat with other students – which has been really fun to see, because people are chatting up a storm during our live calls and having the opportunity to connect with one another, and so on and so forth. So you can do that at FindYourCallingNow.ning.com, and go on the Chat tab.
So with that, Martha, would you like to bring us in, my darling, here, with a little meditation?
Martha: I would so love to. Y'know, before I wrote my last book, I went and researched all these shamanic traditions and forms of self-healing and self-guidance, or guidance from another person that come from these traditional cultures, before our sort of rationalist, scientific, materialistic world view kicked in all over the world. And I sort of amalgamated a bunch of guided meditations into the exercise we’re going to do next. But I’m always updating everything, so the way I want you to picture this that you need a medicine.
So, we know Lissa’s a doctor. I’m so grateful for modern medicine. I think everything has to be used together. And today I have an eye infection, which has kept me from reading email or doing the things that I think I’m supposed to do for the better part of a week. And I knew by yesterday that I was really in trouble. My eye was swollen shut, the whole side of my face was all puffed out. I looked like I’d lost a fight with Godzilla. And I went to the eye doctor, and he gave me an antibiotic drugs. And I put the medicine in my eye, and my whole body said, “Oh, thank God for medicine. Thank God for medicine.” It started to heal immediately. And I’m so aware of my body these days that I could just – not just in my eye, but in all my cells I could feel, Oh, thank God we got help.
So I was thinking this morning through my meditation that showing up in your life to find your purpose is actually you going to find your medicine. Whatever you’re experiencing right now – anxiety, sorrow, anger, whatever is motivating you or leading you, there is a medicine for everything that is painful. There is a medicine that turns it into healing, immediately. And so one of my friends, who is an Apache Indian, calls this ‘your medicine’. Well, actually a lot of medicine men I met in the American Indian tradition call this your medicine, your personal, perfectly designed medication, that you distil with one drop and immediately your whole life is, Ah. And actually when you’ve found your medicine, it’s really kind of just about allowing it to work.
So we’re all talking one the phone about how we’ve put in motion projects that just feel like they’re on their own now. Like a little kid that you’ve taught to ride a bicycle, it’s like you’ve been running alongside the kid for a long time, and now suddenly they’re just off on their own, and we don’t really have to do anything – and that’s really interesting. It’s about doing enough inner work, doing enough work to follow your purpose, that you touch the medicine that only you bring into the world. And then it’s about just holding that, and allowing your body to move when it feels like moving. This is talking about riding as if, her hands are moving as if she’s not really having to do it, as if she’s just being at peace. Your only job is to be at peace. And then her medicine comes into her life and writes a book. And Amy’s medicine comes into her life and writes another book, and makes a baby. The three of us share this experience as writers. But the moment you touch your original medicine, it begins to flow through you into the world. And remember that your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Nelson Bolles said that.
So this exercise is meant to get you to your deep gladness. And it’s not just, okay, we’re going to tell you bunch of things that make you happy happy, because you may be in sorrow. You may be in fear. You may be in anger. And those emotions are legitimate and important, and part of the journey. But we’re going to use all of that to help take you to the place where you can find your medicine. So this about your going to find your medicine.
So wherever you are, get comfortable, close the door, get an extra blanket if you’re cold, let the cat in, put the cat out, do whatever you do with the cat, and just settle in and get your eyes closed, and let your muscles relax.
And now imagine that you look down at the floor – you’re not going to open your eyes. You’re going to imagine that you look down at the floor, and on the floor there’s a pair of boots, and they’re just your size. And so imagine sitting up and putting on the boots. Remember, you don’t have to do this in your body. Let your body relax, relax, relax, sleep even. Your soul is putting on these boots, and your soul is never tired.
So as soon as you put on the boots, the wall of the room dissolves, and you can just see the city, or the country, wherever you’re living, you see it right outside your wall. So you take a step in the boots, and you realize that when you step, you’re actually staying in the same place, and your step pulls the world toward you – like a treadmill. The whole earth is turning under your feet. So you take a step and it feels like it propels you, but it could just as easily be the world being propelled around you, outside your house, outside your apartment, wherever you are.
Take another step, and you realize that as you pull the world towards you, as you start walking through your city, it’s like starting a train. The first step was harder than the second step. The second step is harder than the third step. The fourth step is easier, the fifth step is easier still, and then you start to speed up. You start to speed up. You’re now walking through your city, and it’s going behind you. You have this amazing power in your legs to bring things toward you. And as you walk, you very quickly get to the place where there is no city. There may be suburbs, and you’re walking through those, and they’re pulling toward you, and going out behind you. And then you walk further and further. You’re out in the country now. There are farms, there are properties that people have developed. There are dirt roads. And then you go even beyond that, and see what comes up around you. Is it desert? Is it forest? Is it the beach? You’re walking across this terrain, and eventually you come to place where there are a lot of trees. Just see what kind of trees you’ve got. Smell. Maybe it’s sycamores with the fall leaves with their sweet smell. Maybe it’s pine, a pine forest. Maybe it’s a jungle with that beautiful floral intensity of a jungle smell.
And you start to move in among the trees, and the light begins to become dappled as it passes through the leaves. And you walk further in, and the light grows dimmer. It’s just shafts of light coming now through its thick canopy of leaves, or pine needles, or palm fronds. You’re going deeper and deeper and deeper, and you start to notice that the trees are getting bigger, and wider, and older. And you can feel that these trees have lived for hundreds of years, and that your whole life they have been holding the space where humans run around like little bugs.
You go deeper and deeper and deeper. The trees are huge now. And you come to a place where there’s a brook. A little stream running through the trees. Very clear water. You start to walk along the brook. And then you come to place where the brook comes out of the stone as a spring – very very pure, very very clear. Stop and take a sip of the cold cold, clear water coming from the spring. It tastes amazing. You feel your whole being energized.
As you stand up and look around, you realize that there’s a clearing very close to the spring. I think this is my medicine place. My whole life, my medicine has been waiting here for me, being held safe by the forest. Then as you go into your medicine place, you realize there are places to sit, there are places to lie down, there is dry sand for you to sit in and be warm. There’s a nook in a tree where you can sit to meditate. There’s a stone in the middle of the clearing that is big, that’s shaped strangely, so that it’s almost like a table. A big angular stone. Walk up to it, and run your hands across it. Warm with the sunlight, but it’s also cool where your hands touched it long enough to get through the initial feeling of the surface. Be with the stone.
Close your eyes and feel the stone, and then open your eyes. You see a box has appeared on the stone. It may be small, it may be large, it may be made of wood or stone or bone or plastic. It could be made of anything – jewels, but it’s light enough for you to lift. And you take it down, and you think, I’m going to open this box, my medicine is here. But before you do that, something steps into the circle with you, and you realize that even though you’ve never seen this being, it has been your guide since the day you were born. Is it an animal? Wizard? You can just see whatever you see, and realize, “Oh, you’re my friend. You’re my friend. You’ve been with me all along.” And your guide says, “Yes, yes my dear, dear, dear beloved. I’ve been with you all along.” And it comes and sits down with you. You put the box between the two of you, and you open it.
Inside is something that represents your medicine. It may make no sense to you at all. Just see what it is. Pick it up. It could be anything – alive or dead, it could be metal, wood, animal, vegetable, mineral – it can be anything. And you say to the guide, “How do I use my medicine? What do I do with this?” And the guide says, “I cannot tell you. It can’t be said in words, but I am going to go back with you. Put this gift, this medicine, inside your heart so you can carry it easily, and it will always be safe. And I’m going to be beside you for the rest of your life, whispering to you how to use that medicine, how to hold it, how to drink from the spring in your own mind, and how to give to others as well. The medicine is here to heal you, and you are here to love the world.”
So you stand up, and you take a step. The world gets pulled toward you. And you take another step, and the world pulls more quickly. And you pass through the forest of the ancient trees, knowing that you’ll be back any time you want, and that your guide is right behind you. You don’t have to look, you know. And you walk faster, and faster, through the areas of dirt roads and fences, through the farms and orchards, through the suburbs to the city, the city, to your home, through the opening in the wall of your home to the place where you’re sitting right now in your body. Click back in. Let your soul sit down and click back into the body, like a kind of second body. And now it reaches down and it pulls off first one boot and then the other. Then you put your feet on the floor, or on the sofa, or on the chair. You close your eyes. You let out a long exhale, and when you open your eyes, the room is just as it was before. No boots, no opening. Just you, the guide, and the medicine.
Okay, so that will spin out as it spins out. Amy, you have a lovely invocation that you sometimes offer on this.
Amy: Yes. That was beautiful.
Lissa: I was going to say, we could just spend the next hour and fifteen minutes being quiet, in the silence of that.
Amy: I know, so true Lissa, just really beautiful. Thank you so much Martha for that. And so I’m just going to ask everyone to go ahead and take a deep breath, and put your hand on your heart, or both hands, whatever feels right to you. And we’ll say the words together: I trust that I am being guided. I trust that I am being guided. And this is an invocation. This is an intention. This is an affirmation, this is a mantra for you to really feel in your bones the presence of your guide, the one that you just met in this visualization, or maybe you’ve met many many many many many times.
And so, on the count of three: I trust that I am being guided. One. I trust that I am being guided. Two, I trust that I am being guided. And here we go, three, I trust that I am being guided. Beautiful, thank you all so much for saying those words with me.
So, Lissa, darling, I’m going to hand the heart, the baton, the talking stick to you my friend.
Lissa: I’m so all blissed out from the meditation.
Amy: I know, me too.
Lissa: I’m going on like one mile per hour here. All right. So, Martha, when starting reading Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, which is such a wonderful book, the first line of the book, I read the first line of the book, and I called like ten people. I was like, “Okay, you have to hear the first line of this book, because this is the best first line of a book maybe ever.” So I wanted to repeat it here. “The imminent possibility of being killed by a rhinoceros isn’t bothering me nearly as much as I would have expected.” I love that first line. And then in the book, you then go on to tell us about how you found your rhinoceros. And I wanted to invite you to talk to all of us about what it means to find your rhinoceros.
Martha: Sure. Everything’s just a metaphor. One of my children once said to me, “Gee mom, it must be great to make a living extending metaphors.” It is indeed. You make a solid point, child. So, you know, everything is just a way of getting at experiences that are not really expressible in language. And the best we can come, I think; y'know we’ve all been taught in school systems where we’re lectured to, but the best way to learn is through story-telling, and telling each other the story of our own lives.