balance creates harmony
libra full moon
There is a lot we need to hold right now.
Too many things to name, I know you know what they are.
In normal times we aren’t forced to hold so many things - in our bodies, in our minds, in our relationships, in our energy, in our hearts…
These are not normal times. These are hyperbolic, out-of-balance times.
Which is why our theme for the Libra Full Moon is balance. As these times are hyper-stimulating mentally, the practice I’ve decided to share is a walking practice. As we do the walking practice, we naturally experience balance.
If you’ve never done a walking practice before, you are going to think we are going SO SLOW. It is an 18 minute practice, stay with it if you can.
If you have done a walking practice, you are going to find a modern treat about midway through that is non-traditional - but hey, we are living in decidedly non-traditional times.
This is the first time I’ve featured walking meditation in a video - I wasn’t sure it would work. But it DOES!
Library People - the walking practice (along with the complete Libra Full Moon practice) is waiting for you in the Lunar Library. Thank you for supporting that space and be sure to check out the new Pure Sound offerings in the Main Library.
Everyone else - I put the walking practice on the Free Page - which, this month, is really for the real ones. In April I am sharing more advanced practices. Not only do we have the walking practice to help us with balance, but we also have the Crown of Light mini-talk and meditation for vision 96 from our 99 VISIONS audio project; and I am also sharing a heavenly piece of unguided music (no talking, pure sound) that is perfectly short - seven minutes - an inviting musical space to practice within.
One more note about balance.
Imagine a system with just one weight and one counterweight - a simple, binary system. Picture an old-fashioned set of scales, with a dish on each side. One side goes up, the other side goes down. Put something heavy in one side and to achieve balance you need a lot from your counterweight. If something happens to your one counterweight, balance becomes a far-off fantasy.
Now imagine a system with many nodes or “sides” or balance-points within it - MORE THAN two sides. This system radiates forever out into infinity. This system is more like a 5-dimensional galaxy or a web. This system experiences the flux-ing in and out of trillions of moments of balance and asymmetry, but overall, one heavy thing CAN BE balanced by the rest.
One heavy thing in that second system is more easily balanced (or expelled) by the multitude of points dancing in every direction and dimension.
The second system undulates - like waves.
The second system has flex, knows balance.
The second system has us.
Sending you all LOVE through that second system.
Until next time,
Jess
“Our survival won’t depend on political or economic systems. It’s going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth, and to speak it lovingly and not destructively. It’s saying what you really know and feel is the truth, in all directions. Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and mis-conditioning of humanity.”
- Buckminster Fuller
“If I had the influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, sterile preoccupations with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
—Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
“We believe everything is out there.
We often act as if we understand everything. This is very egoistic. When we see the world only in terms of ourselves, we lack a broad perspective.
We think that all is as we see it. We are unaware of our ignorance. We want to have an idea we can hold on to. We want to know.
The real world consists of both a conceptual world and a nonconceptual world. But we ignore the world we cannot get in our hands. When you cannot understand it, you reject it. But reality is not just the reality you understand. Even before you create any ideas or concepts about it, it is already present. It consists of the merging of what can be thought of and what cannot be thought of. Words cannot touch it.
This place, where nothing can be pinned down, is where we actually live moment to moment. If you think you can understand your life with just your ideas, you are ignoring where and how you actually exist.
All things - good and bad, right and wrong - are manifestations of the real world. You cannot understand the world just in terms of your own views. You must open to what you don’t understand as well as what you do understand.”
° ° °
“Usually we live our lives only in terms of the world we can see. When we do, we emphasize ourselves. We place the I first. Even when we take up the spiritual life, we place the I first. In other words, we pull everything down to the level of our personal views and feelings. We never forget ourselves.
What we tend to ignore is the world that sees us. This is not the world you think you see or hear. It is actually the world as it is before you are conscious of it - before you form some idea about it. If you emphasize yourself, you will completely forget this world.
If you want to practice compassion, you must accept simultaneously the world you see and the world that sees you. You can’t judge your life just in terms of what you can see - that is, from your ego-centered perspective.”
- Dainin Katagiri
“The source of shadow is suppression.
Rather than suppress it, project it and attack it outside of us; it’s good to listen to it inwardly.
Feel our anger
Feel the despair
Feel the grief
Feel the sorrow
…
If we listen to all our voices within, it’s just like all the different countries of the world -
Each different country, each different culture, each different religion has something to offer the collective.
And we want to listen to everyone, we want to listen to every culture. And inside each one of us we want to listen to each aspect of our psyche, each aspect of our soul.
And as we integrate ourselves, so too shall we see the world integrate itself into a peaceful cohesive whole in the future.
As without, so within.”
-Kaypacha, Astrology for the Soul
“Rituals are gentler than resolutions. Where resolutions chase outcomes, rituals attend to process. Georgia O’Keeffe took a 30-minute walk each morning in the desert, often alone, believing the walking itself was where the work of painting began. Toni Morrison rose at 5, made her coffee, and waited for the sun to appear—or, as she put it, “watched the light come.” Ludwig van Beethoven, also a devotee of coffee, approached the ritual differently, counting out exactly 60 beans for each cup, the number he believed produced the perfect brew. None of this was about efficiency or output. It was about creating the conditions in which the work—and the self doing it—could come into being.
Rather than control, rituals are relational. They create atmosphere. They offer rhythm and containment. Where resolutions depend on willpower—a finite resource, especially in times of illness or uncertainty—rituals build scaffolding. They don’t ask us to muscle through. They anchor us in time, place, and meaning. Rituals are not impressive. That, I’ve come to believe, is one of their chief virtues. They don’t demand overnight transformation. They ask only that we return—to the canvas or the page, to the body, to ourselves—and see what shows up.”
- Suleika Jaouad
“our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark. It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is a mandorla.
…If we have a powerful mandorla experience (and what a joy it is!), we can be sure it will be brief. We must then return to the world of dualities, of time and space, to continue our ordinary life. The shadow is created all over again, and a new experience of transformation is required. The great individuals in history have only momentary glimpses of wholeness and they, too, return very quickly to the world of ego-shadow confrontation.
… To balance out our cultural indoctrination, we need to do our shadow work on a daily basis. The first reward for this is that we diminish the shadow we impose on others. We contribute less to the general darkness of the world and do not add to the collective shadow that fuels war and strife. But the second result is that we prepare the way for the mandorla - the high vision of beauty and wholeness that is the great prize of human consciousness.
The ancient alchemists understood this process. In alchemy, one goes through four stages of development: the nigredo, in which one experiences the darkness and depression of life; the albedo, in which one see the brightness of things; the rubedo, where one discovers passion; and finally the citrino, where one appreciates the goldenness of life. After all this comes a full-color mandorla. This is the pavanis, the peacock’s tail that contains all the preceding hues. Once cannot stop this process until one has brought it to the pavanes, that concert of colors that contains everything.
Wrongly done, the many colors of life produce a grayness, and all the colors neutralize each other into a dull monotony. Correctly done, the pavanis comes and all the colors of life make a magnificent and rich pattern. The mandorla is not the place of neutrality or compromise; it is the place of the peacock’s tail and rainbows.”
- Robert A. Johnson
“In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all. We imagine a house, a rectangle of hope. A room with a single bed with a pale coverlet, a few precious books, a stamp album. Walls papered in faded floral fall away and burst as a newborn meadow speckled with sun and a stream emptying into a greater stream where a small boat awaits with two glowing oars and one blue sail.”
- Patti Smith
“You want a heart in this life, you pay for it.”
-Sylvia Plath
“I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves - we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”
- Mary Oliver
I thank you a thousand times for being you and choosing this work and putting the effort into all you do. What a gift. ❤️❤️❤️