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A Week in the Window: whispers from La Ventana

4/28/2023

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This morning, the soft voice of my waking state whispered a message it has shared 10,000 times: “Write to God.”

​“With pen and paper, sit in the predawn silence and write to God. Letters of human grappling, letters asking why and when, Love letters that help you see and feel your only Source.” 
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More often than I’d like to admit, I hear this voice and instead check email or refresh my to-do list while my tea steeps. My left brain takes over since, after all, I told it that it was most important at the very first start of my day. This Voice for God — for Love, for Light — slips softly into the background and its message dims…

…until the dark stillness of predawn is here again. 

​Today, I listened. 
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What does your higher self tell you over and over again? 

In those first moments of waking, does it ask you to pray?

I just spent a week in La Ventana, a little desert town near Mexico’s tip of Baja California Sur. Matt Cone, my boyfriend’s close friend of 20+ years, lives there to kitesurf in winter when the winds are strong. As he said in his 2016 
TEDx talk on Abundance, “Abundance is a state of mind.” Every morning at 5:30, he goes to his meditation hut for a 2-hour — we could say abundant — meditation sit. 

While meditating, 

he listens, 

he asks, 

he listens more… 

​I don’t know what Matt hears when he sits and listens, when he chooses to come together with the divine awareness within his being. But I do know that people feel the presence of this devotion when we interact with him. Unlike normal conversations in our society, where conversations are often shallow and superficial, every interaction with Matt has power in it. 
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When I choose to commune with the divine voice within, I feel more alive and radiant, and the experiences that follow feel far more worthwhile. 

Aren’t we all meant to do this one thing? 

To begin our days with an act of devotion expressing our desire to remember oneness?

To acknowledge that although we are living in separate bodies — with the stress and sickness of society constantly pressing at our backs to try and keep us down — we are not separate from each other and the divine?

It comes down to this:

It is a choice.  

My post-NDE glow has dimmed a bit now that two years have passed. I still feel the Light inside more than ever before, and… I am in the human experience. It is made of ebbs and flows. As I greet my current human bumps — feeling a desire for this and that and wondering when they will appear — a voice inside keeps gently whispering:

What is God?

I keep asking the All: 
Show me God. 

And I listen. Sometimes. 

When I do, I hear and see:

God is everywhere. 

God does not exist inside any sole religious or spiritual path. God is everywhere because God is Love, and Love is the most powerful force in the universe. It is universal. Christian, Buddhist, Hare Krishna, Taoist… it is all of ours. This has always been a clear feeling inside my heart. 

When I turn my attention away from Source, eventually, I am guided back — often through the gift-in-disguise called pain — because nothing else is ever as satisfying. It’s all like flickers and glimpses of the one long gaze my soul most desires: the being we call God, Spirit or Source, the Tao, the All… Light and Love. The energy beyond words. 

When the winds of Baja pushed desert sand in my eyes and I couldn’t play frisbee midday, the clear voice within guided me to wind-free mornings. 

When I didn’t find myself as amused as others were about the art of kitesurfing, that same voice within reminded me I didn’t need to be. 

​When my small friend, Frances, had left and I could no longer dance with the Light in her eyes, I was reminded a child resides in every one of us.
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When I’d had enough time with men and wanted the energy of women, I laid in bed appreciating the touch of my own skin and breath. 

Whatever struggles you face today…

Wherever you find yourself on the spectrum of joy and sorrow…

​Remember that every morning, Life invites you to set the tone for the rest of your day. It is an invitation to wake in reverence, and however you choose to meditate or pray, to make it so. 

To illuminate your morning session:
Consider who you love and what you love. 

In 1997, I attended a conference in San Francisco called Peacemaking: the Power of Nonviolence. While there, I met two great men: the Dalai Lama and Michael Meade. To explore what to bring to your next prayer or meditation, listen to Michael Meade’s Living Myth podcast #329, What We Love is the Cure (22 min). 
​

In Meade’s words, “What we love as well as who we love connects us to the life-enhancing energy of Eros and to the original force of creation that wishes to continue. An old proverb states: What we love is the cure. That we love is our connection to ongoing creation. We are being called to imagine the world anew and to open to how our own souls can grow and blossom in greater ways that might contribute to the re-imagination of community and the healing and renewal of the earth.”
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For a boost to inspire your morning process, watch this 12-minute video from Neale Donald Walsch: The Little Soul and the Sun. ​
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    Author

    Jessica Rios, Founder of Leaning into Light, was born with a divine pen in her pelvis. She is a lifelong letter writer, a thought leader in Love, and she writes memoirs. Our blog and conversations are devoted to Jessica's greatest passion: illuminating the beauty of the human spirit.

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