The Road Taken

Close your eyes and breathe comfortably.
Imagine you are walking along a long road.
The road is a symbol of your life.
Its first milestone indicates the year you were born.
The subsequent milestones are all the years you have lived so far.
As you pass each milestone, look at your life events up to that time.
Feel the memories that are still fresh.
For all the pleasant memories, put a green flag.
For every painful memory, post a red flag.
Go on walking and go on placing these green and red flags.
At the place where you gained self-consciousness, put a white flag.
Also, continue to look at the faces of people associated with each of these memories.
Who were the people who made a real and positive difference in your life?
Who were your teachers and mentors?
What did you learn from each one of them?
In particular, mark the milestones where you see the influence of your parents.
What did they teach you?
What did you actually learn from them?
Now, go back to the place where you put the white flag.
What was so significant about this point in time?
Who assisted this emergence of self-consciousness?
Look at each of the red flags.
Pull them out slowly and gradually.
Let the images of those painful memories shrink in size.
Shift the color of these memories to black and white.
Let the sounds associated with these memories become dim and inaudible.
Complete this process so that your life’s road is cleared of all the red flags.
As you move forward, make sure that you travel in the glow of white light, the light of spiritual awakening. This light should brighten your path for the rest of the journey.
Open your eyes when you are ready.

Copyright © Surinder Deol 2006

A Place Where Heart and Soul Meet

In this meditation, we are going to look at the totality of our life—the path that we have chosen for ourselves, including the priorities that others have imposed on us.
We are going to revisit our childhood--a time of our life when we felt like skipping school and spending all the time playing with our friends.
Listen to the words of our parents and teachers.
What are they telling us?
You have to work hard.
You have to be ahead of everyone else in whatever you do.
We are listening to two messages--one coming from our heart and the other from our parents and teachers, and we don’t know what to do.

We have just finished high school.
How do we feel?
Let us revisit our dreams about how we wanted the whole world to stop and take note of us.
Did anyone care?

Now we are going to college.
Again we hear similar messages that we have heard before: achievement, competition, and the need to get ahead.

We just finished college. How do we feel?
Now we are in our first job.
There are pressures to succeed and to prove our ability.

If we are married now, revisit the early years of our married life.
If we are single, what is going on in our life?

One day, the boss calls us. He is very impressed by our work.
“I think you have a great future in this organization,” he says.
“I want to show you something that you have not seen yet.”
He presses a button and a wall opens up and you see a ladder.
“This is the corporate ladder and I want you to climb it.”

We are hesitant but we have learned by now to obey all orders.
We start climbing the ladder, one step at a time.
We are climbing and the view of the world around us is getting better.
We can see clearly that we are much ahead of our peers.
But we are getting tired and old.

We miss the love and care of our family.
There is an artificial community here. We call it team or teamwork.
Other people are also busy climbing the ladder and they don’t have much real time to spend with us.
Finally, we see the end of the ladder.

We are happy that it is going to be over soon.
We reach the last rung of the ladder and we throw ourselves into a chair and instantly fall asleep.
Suddenly, someone shakes us and we get up frightened and confused.
“You are sleeping while others are passing you by. Did you think you reached the end of the ladder?”
“Yes, I did. The ladder ended here,” we protest.
“You are sadly mistaken.”
The boss takes a remote control from his pocket, and the wall opens again and we see a new ladder.

We reach deep within ourselves and pose the question: What should I do now?
I don’t want to climb a ladder anymore.
There is nothing more for me on this ladder.

We get an answer:
If we look carefully, there is a path in front of us. We can take that path.
We listen to our heart.
We take this path.
There is much more light on this path and many more people – there is a whole community over there.
We enter a garden where all our loved ones are waiting for us.
They hug and embrace us.
Now we are walking with them, holding the hand of our dearest companion.
We still need to work, but work is not the only thing that matters.
And work is not just a pile of ladders; it is a place that provides us with a creative space; that make us contribute to the wellbeing of our fellow human beings.
This is a place where our heart and soul meet.

Copyright © Surinder Deol 2006.

The Crucible

Objective: To have an intense experience of higher love that transforms our entire physical and psychic being.

Close your eyes and breathe comfortably.
This is an exercise about the crucible.
A crucible is a vessel made of a refractory substance, such as graphite or porcelain, used for melting and molding materials at high temperatures.
When applied in the human context, it means a severe test, as of patience or belief, a great trial.
Crucible is also a place, time, or situation characterized by the confluence of powerful intellectual, social, economic, or political forces.
But here we are concerned about a personal experience, basically our own transformation.
Imagine walking into a chamber that is hot and where an extreme hot wind is blowing.
Also, consider yourself to be made of metals and not of bone and flesh that would burn completely.
Because your body is composed of metal, you will not burn into ash, but you will slowly melt.
The force that is melting you is a Higher Force.
Imagine that you have surrendered yourself to this power; you are not resisting the heat or discomfort.
You know that the Artist molding you will make you better in every sense of the term.
As the melting and molding process starts, what base energies would you like to remove from your “metal” structure?
Do you want anger and jealousy to be melted away?
What about the craving for material things?
Competition with others to have more of the same things?
Mistrust of others’ intentions?
Cheating when no one is watching?
Little concern for the natural environment?
Physical and mental corruption?
Say “yes” to whatever you think is relevant in your case.
And what do you want the Artist to add: more love, understanding, compassion, empathy, knowledge, more self-fulfillment?
Feel the process as it takes you through various stages of melting and recrafting. Feel good about what you are losing.
Let the heat reach your inner core.
Let this transformation be a total transformation.
Let this be the moment when a new person is born.
Feel the decreasing heat.
Feel the Artistic Hands that are giving you a new form and shape.
Enjoy being a new self.
Celebrate your new identity.
Cry with joy over what you have just gone through.
Open your eyes when you are ready.

Copyright © Surinder Deol 2006.