Is Your Life One Dimensional?

Right before Christmas, our full moon meditation group had their monthly gathering. It was a fine way to really get still and quiet during a time that is typically filled with more rushing and doing than just about any other. We had a small group…some last minute illnesses got the best of several of our dear friends. Yet as always it was a very nourishing and enriching experience.

One of the advantages of having different people host the gatherings is that we get to meet new people who show up because they are friends of the host. This time a neighbor who had not gathered with us attended. It was her first time sitting for a meditation as well. As we went around the circle to start the evening she shyly shared that she is just starting to experience for the first time that her life is more than one dimensional. In the past everything would be black or white, yes or no, but now other possibilities seem to be showing themselves.

I thought this was a powerful comment because I think we all experience life as one dimensional until we… well don’t. Much like the saying that everyone is heterosexual until, well, they discover that they are not. It is the assumed path until something within us realizes that there is a different option meant for us – whatever that might be.

To me the ideal of multi-dimensional opens up possibilities. One of my favorite mantras that gets told at Columcille are the words of St. Oran “The Way You Think It Is May Not Be the Way It Is At All”. This path of mystery and of inquiry leads us in my experience to a hopeful path, a path of possibilities and a way of seeing the world and our experiences in it with curiosity; with an openness that allows us to create our own interpretations and form our own realities. Our lives really are about how we create our own realities through our interpretations and the meaning we assign to everything – who we are and what we experience. And we experience our reality as we in turn relate to and connect with others and the greater collective consciousness of “one”.

Often times when we open up to this idea of multi-dimensional experience it can be very scary. It is not what we “know” nor can it really ever be fully “known” or certain. It is both safe and not safe. It forces us to experience our vulnerability in a way we may not have previously done. But the greatest gift of this opening up is a fuller and deeper experience — of ourselves, our relationships, our experiences, this world, and a level of presence and consciousness that is both firmly rooted in the “now” while being fully connected to all that is. (And of course since we are just opening up beyond our previously confining one dimensional thinking, that is huge — all that is is beyond what we might think and definitely beyond what we can “prove”.)

What struck me about the evening was the level of stillness in the circle. The meditation was so rooted, so grounded, and so still that we literally had no idea of the magnitude of the wind and rain storm that had occurred outside. On the drive home all we could say as we dodged downed trees and tremendous runoff was “What the hell happened while we were at meditation gathering?!” We were that still and that aware of the rain and wind yet not pulled from our center by the whims and winds (literally!) around us.

Once you open your life to the idea of it being multi-dimensional all you can say is “all possibilities are welcome here.”