creating our own cosmologies
this is the way
Happy Holidays my friends!
I hope this is a time of ease and play and laughter, good food, lots of love and joy for you and yours.
In this highly charged time of year, let’s remind ourselves that:
1. Escaping “into our phone” may leave us (and our bank accounts) feeling some kind of way as we feed the data surveillance machine
2. Intentionally taking some moments to dive into our inner realms will leave us feeling another kind of way – centered, healed, inspired, renewed…
For many years I’ve been encouraging us to develop our inner cosmologies for a few good reasons (for a deeper dive into cosmologies, check out episode 4 here…).
The main reason we want to explore/discover/create an interactive map of places inside us is because that is where we will find the ingredients for our unique type of magic.
Likewise, when in daily life we want to escape or “go somewhere”, instead of our phones or the tv, we can instead meditate and “go” someplace much more interesting and evolutionary.
And, when we have firm experience that our inner cosmologies positively affect our outer experience, well - those are the kinds of riches that a billionaire might never experience.
I’ve been intentionally building my own cosmology since 2002.
It started organically, after creating a consistent meditation practice. When I would go “in” to meditation I kept finding myself at this one place – a place that was familiar, but that wasn’t exactly like anything I’d known or dreamt of in real life.
Then I started to radiate out from that main place (now and forever my “home base”) and have little adventures to find new places.
Once I had the sense of this ever-expanding space, things started to get even more extraordinary. I started to discover places in meditation that were truly otherworldly in the best, most life-affirming ways. For example, for many years I explored horizontally - moving around on the ground and in the water like we do in “real life”. Then, I realized I can dig down, go underground, fly, travel interdimensionally - even through wormholes and portals…
It has been 22 years of discovering, visiting and revisiting different “places” or “spaces” in meditation.
This is where my work definitely veers off from traditional “mindfulness” meditation. This is where my work goes beyond just noticing “what is”. This is where the heart and soul get involved with the meditative experience. This is where we open to the energies of life itself instead of being a constrained meditator in a bubble of petty self-concern. This is where we find out that meditation is not a dry chore, but a connective, life-enhancing, glorious art.
Many of the meditations I share with you would not exist if I didn’t have these inner places to turn to.
As a parent who does not play video games, when my kid plays Minecraft I am transfixed by the way they are seamlessly taught coding as they both discover and build out worlds. Or, if you or your kid plays Fortnite – picture your cosmology map like the one in the game, except as the Fortnite map shrinks as the storm comes in, our inner map expands infinitely out over time.
So, how do we build our inner cosmologies?
1. Meditate regularly.
2. Make/find a home base. It doesn’t need to be a “big deal” type of place…
3. Visit home base a few times. Begin to understand how what happens there affects daily life and vice versa.
4. Start to venture out from the home base, and find spaces and beings that help you with various things. For example, if I need a good cry, I go to a special field of lavender in my inner realms to do just that. Once done with my little cry (the world is very sad right now for many reasons) the lavender field offers me solace, strength and magical repair. This, for me, is WAY MORE HEALING than just crying in the regular way. Likewise, I have many creatures and beings that I’ve found in my inner realms who help me with this or that. Some of them I visit all the time, some of them I haven’t seen in years; because they were that good at solving whatever problem I had brought to them.
5. Visit those spaces often.
6. Continue to “build out your map”. If you have a sticky problem in daily life, find or create a space in your inner life to help you through it. For example, if I am feeling a lack of clarity, I can climb a special ladder that goes all the way up to the moon. Then, I can sit up there, look down on my life a little bit and listen to the moon’s cool perspective. Or, if I’m feeling the need to be more visionary, there’s a tall tree I can climb and look out towards the horizon. Or, if I’m feeling the need to turn my back on the “real world” and rest profoundly for a moment, I know a good cave I can crawl into.
7. Walk around in daily life knowing you have this inner, secret superpower as a world-builder, discoverer…
8. Pay attention to the cosmological effects on your daily life and bring those impressions back into meditation next time.
So, this holiday, if you find yourself with some quiet moments, dive into your favorite meditation - Solstice on the Free Page would be a good one - and start discovering the places in your inner worlds and what powers they’ve been waiting to offer you.
Have a great few days, I’m so grateful for your presence in this space. This Friday we’re featuring a BEAUTIFUL meditation called Candles All Around You which also would be a great place to start building your cosmology...
“I'm so happy to be a subscriber ❤️ your meditations have more than paid for themselves in the few weeks since I've become a Substack member. Thank you!” - Celina
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. For all SoulCollagers and the SoulCollage® curious - We are going to be doing our annual Year Ahead workshop 10-noon (replay available) Saturday, January 4th. This is a SoulCollage® workshop, but the majority of the Year Ahead practice you could also do with any tarot or oracle deck. If you are SoulCollage® curious - check out this free video where we show you the basics of this MAGICAL process. This is cosmological world building at its finest!
“Think of your inner cosmology as places inside you where you can go for different purposes. There is no limit to the creative ways you can discover these magic places in your inner realms, but it really helps if you always do the same thing every time you go. Bring some structure to your dreamy work. These inner destinations get stronger when you enter them the same way every time.”
- Jessica Snow, Dreamworld
“I want them to spit onto their mobiles so that they can see through their saliva how the pixels are fragmented and understand how the technology is composed. I want them not to be afraid of technology, and I want them to break away from the idea of the screen as a square, a cage. I think there are different forms of empowerment, and I want to give them power, but on their terms…
I’m totally fine with being a hippie. I am Pipi. And I’m not afraid of the idea that art can heal. That’s what I expect from art—both my own and work by other artists. I want art to be consoling or at least to bring some kind of enlarged logic to the way we are. We are surrounded by so many humming sounds, cables, and things going “zzzzz”—electronic devices, and air-conditioning, and cars, and all this stuff that apparently makes too little sense and makes noise. Like with a homeopathic remedy, for you to heal, you need the same thing that makes you crazy. That’s what I am trying to do.”
- Pipilotti Rist
“And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the 'real' world - rock, bone, wood, ice - and elements of the real - not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself - inside stories and tales and dreams."
- Rick Bass
“The origin story of the Plum Village is one of the images that have touched me, and will continue to nourish and challenge me. This plot of land in a village in the French countryside was, during World War II, a site of bitter controversy and bloody reckoning. It is said that here, members of the local community who had participated in the Nazi occupation were executed. This ground was thereafter considered haunted, ruined for habitation or building. But Thay, upon visiting the site and hearing this story, decided that this was precisely where his community should settle. They were called, as he understood, to move towards and attend to the ruptures of this world.
And on the first morning of this retreat, the monk offering a Dharma talk invited each of us to clench a fist with one of our hands. Try this, if you will: move to force that fist open with your other hand. The fist only clenches tighter — as if by its own will, a natural reaction to force. And I invite you to try, then, a counterintuitive approach: cradle the fist with your other hand. With the same naturalness, but a wholly other quality of feeling and response, the fist releases. It softens.
A sea of clenched fists is a metaphor for our world right now. This exercise brings me back to a conviction I’ve long held, but can find hard to sustain in the tormented adolescence of this century: one of the most powerful ways we can be present to our world’s pain is with a countercultural tenderness.
I like that word “calling” above, as you may know about me. So many of us are asking how we can be healing forces, what we are called to in this moment. And as instinctive and right as it is that we creatively and imaginatively ponder how we can be actively present to our world’s pain and its promise, there is a quieter calling that each of us can pick up in the places we know and live: to be a calmer of fear. To soften the fist that so many of our bodies and hearts have clenched into. Like it or not — for an action plan feels stronger — this is slow, relational, essential groundwork that we must lay if we are to find our way to our belonging to each other and our shared callings to create a transformed world we want all of our children to inhabit.”
- Krista Tippet
“It’s one thing to briefly detach from personal story in the hopes of gaining a different perspective or giving your nervous system a break. It’s quite another to deny our storied roots altogether. What will we stand in, then? At a time when our stories have been shamed and shunned in the spiritual community and the culture itself, it is all the more imperative to revive them and make luminous their sacred, transformative properties. Our story is not an illusion, as many would suggest. It is the ground of our being, the field for our soul’s transformation, a living vibration that echoes on, the mystery that threads right through our history. Story is where we come from. Story is what roots us in the present. Story is how we arrive at the next place intact. A spirituality without story is like a body without breath. Dead to the world.”
- Jeff Brown
THE IMPORTANT THING
The important thing is to tell yourself a life story in which you, the hero, are primarily a problem solver rather than a helpless victim. This is well within your power, whatever fate might have dealt you.
—Martha Beck
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”
- Terry Pratchett
“Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.“
- Martha Nussbaum
"If you’re reading this, if there's air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories aren't finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going."
- Jamie Tworkowski
“I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.”
- Anais Nin
A prayer first just cuz i like to keep things thoughtful and positive…
Always within and
Always without,
Always surround
And reach for me too
As I too reach for you
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷
•
ཐི♡ཋྀ
- Sotce
Love this post, Jessica! Thank you for all your work and inspiration this year. ❤️
Wishing everyone a season of warmth and peace.