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Heart Like a Lotus Blossom
by DEBORAH CASTELLANO
Zen has been one of those things that
I should do. You know, like I should call my mom more, I should
exercise more, I should eat healthier, I should meditate for
an extended period of time. As one of my circles is fond of
saying, Thou shall not should on oneself. So, it's been something
I tried to ignore as much as possible. My significant other,
Josh, has considered himself Zen since before I met him. It
was one of those things that was cute, but made my eyes glaze
over, like his love of Dungeons & Dragons, and rambling
about his day at work.
No one was more surprised than I when,
after studiously ignoring all the Zen hype and Josh's prattling
on the matter, my brain abruptly started to ponder the topic
of meditation. See, I hate meditation. When my yoga tape gets
to the part where I'm supposed to "let my brain become
a distant observer," my brain inevitably replies, "Hahahaha!
You are so funny! No. Go do another downward dog and leave
me alone to do the important thinking bits." And if I
can't stand to meditate, you can imagine how much my students
enjoy it. Trying to get the girls that I teach to sit still
and be quiet within themselves is like trying to figure out
how to make a bag full of angry kittens serene.
I rolled it around my head for quite some
time, trying to find elaborate rituals to do for meditation
or some kind of work-around ("Maybe if we built a Zen
garden in the living room . . .We could rip up the carpet
and get boulders from Japan shipped in . . ."). But as
the time for the ritual grew closer and closer and my brain
started to get quieter and quieter, I decided to do the obvious.
We were going to meditate. At first this was something of
a grim revelation about which I felt a kind of stoicism but
then the revelation started to blossom into a kind of peace.
And the more I gave into the peace, the more assured I felt
about the ritual.
Peace is not something I feel a lot. I
have my own demons, like everyone else. Mine can be loud at
times. I work in a high-stress environment and I tend to be
one of those people who is only happy when she has eight hundred
different things to do in a day. The closest I come to peace
is when I sew my Goddess Dollies. After a long day at work,
sometimes sewing is what I like best. The dollies don't nag
me about their travel arrangements, or ask why was I ten minutes
late getting in, and am I being proactive? I like that. It's
as close to a meditative state as I've gotten in recent years.
My new feelings didn't come naturally
to me; I'm more of a Paxil-Xanax kind of girl. But somehow,
I felt …calm. Even serene. At first I was suspicious
because I figured it meant I was getting hit by a Mack truck
on Route One on my way into work. But the more I let it bloom,
the better it felt. And you know what? Feeling good is better
than feeling crummy. No, really. No, really...
Two nights before the circle was to take
place, I stumbled into New Hope (the Pagan Mecca of Pennsylvania)
while driving around. I roamed from store to store, smiling
and talking to the shopkeepers, looking for components I needed
for my ritual. I found them in the store with the Chinese
silks and brocades that smelled like a high holy day; and
in the tiny shop with the apologetic husband minding the store,
who offered food to me and had his tiny dog keeping him company;
and then in the store with the Buddhist monks outside who
smiled at me when I smiled shyly at them.
"When you make your heart open and
willing to receive blessings, it happens." "When
you are willing to consider small things as blessing, you
will be blessed." These are phrases that don't fit into
my life at my stupid corporate job. I am still one of those
people who is leaning on her horn cussing out other people
on the road while talking on her cell phone and putting on
lipstick. I want food on the table at a restaurant yesterday;
I'm impatient, sometimes mean and often gossipy. My glass
is half empty with a cocktail of broken glass in it. But I
was (and am) blessed anyway. It happened in the Tibetan store
with the kindly middle-aged man who stumbled to tell me in
words he thought I would understand about how to use prayer
flags properly. It happened in the Wiccan shop with the blond-haired
witches, smoking as they made me incense for Kuan Yin in a
long slow careful process exactly as I wanted. All of these
things were blessings, further blessed by that night by my
always-patient best friend and my ever- amiable significant
other.
On Sunday, the day of the ritual, I woke
up feeling peaceful and restful. I cleaned the house, which
is a kind of moving meditation to me. And even though I thought
it would be impossible to make the mountain of dishes, dust,
and laundry into a molehill, it happened. Josh and I went
to a diner and ate all different kinds of bread (herb, raisin,
cinnamon) and drank peach tea. I smoothed out the edges of
my ritual as we sat and talked. At the food store I found
a perfect oriental lily and white-fleshed peaches.
Before the ritual, I took a walk to the
woods and just breathed. I saw a little girl twirling a red
umbrella gleefully, though it wasn't quite rainy enough to
need one. When we got to the house, everything felt so perfect.
The hostess had on Sarah McLachlan (one of my favorites),
and candles and mirrors everywhere, and wine and cheese and
fruit and crackers for us to eat and drink. I set up the altar
with my bamboo tray, the clear glass bowl with the amethyst
stones at the bottom and the lily floating on the top, a small
Kuan Yin statue, rose quartz, prayer flags, our Asian tea
set, the peaches. In my pre-ritual briefing, I explained that
we would not be casting a circle that night because we want
the energy to flow without restraint. I led them through a
simple Tai-Chi meditation to ground, and then guided them
into meditation.
And then we were silent. I expected it
to be hard, to stay so still and to stay so within my body
without the distractions of spirit questing or going somewhere,
even internally. But almost as soon as I closed my eyes, I
felt my own heart. Felt my heart's energy. Felt it radiating
pale pink in a vague heart shape with a diamond jewel at the
center and the thought came suddenly and simply and powerfully,
my heart is a lotus blossom. I had told the girls about the
lotus flower and why it's important. How it looks frail and
beautiful floating on the surface of the pond, but if you
dove under the water you would find a complex system of roots
that go so far down into the earth, you couldn't pull them
out if you wanted to.
My heart is a lotus blossom.
It became my mantra. So simple but so
profound. The time went by so quickly, maybe because I was
ready for it; ready to be still. I gazed at the lily and the
candles blurring together so perfectly when I relaxed my eyes.
Before I knew it, the twenty minutes were over. We chanted
Kuan Yin's Om as I clicked off the numbers on my prayer bracelet
to reach her magical number. We offered praise to her. We
lit incense and asked for the things we needed. We drank the
tea and toasted her and ate the peaches so that we may have
a better connection to her as a bodhisattava. It was a good
night.
It's not a perfect process. I am still
me, which is to say terribly flawed and not always thinking
and acting compassionately and with love. I tend to distract
myself with the business of being a twenty-something ("She
said what?" "You want to go clubbing tonight?"
"You want to go to the bar tonight?" "So then
I said…") and tend to not give myself time for meditation.
But I still sew. And sometimes at night right before I have
my dreams - the ones about my bosses demanding that I buy
them tomatoes and vodka on the corporate Amex even though
they know they're not supposed to charge personal expenses
- I think about my heart. And there is peace in the moment
before I fall into my dreams.
- When DEBORAH
CASTELLANO is not busy avoiding meditation, she is the founder
of Salon Con (www.salonconvention.com)
and Goddess Dollies (www.goddessdollies.com).
She is an Executive Assistant by day and a freelance writer
by night. Deborah considers herself an eclectic Pagan.
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