Category Archives: Inspirational

Trees

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I see you
in all your beauty-
Glorious Guardians;
Protectors of Life.

I see you Young Ones,
like children.
Seedlings, saplings, sprouting
bold new buds.
Full-body leaf-laughing,
arms open wide.
Bright spirits breathing in
sunshine and hard, driving rain
in equal measure.
Accepting everything, all of It.
Tiny flowers shimmy-shaking
in the breeze.

I see you Grown Ones,
raised arms to heaven;
in prayer and praise to
The Magnificent One.
Full-spectrum color-dancing
until Winter comes
bearing icicle bracelets.
I feel your presence
without even looking up;
as I trip-trap through switchbacks
and lose my way.

I see you Ancient Ones,
knotted and gnarled
(wisest among us) and
centuries old-
Testament to Time
and Truth; you
hold up a mirror and
tell future’s fortune,
both. You, who know
each star and constellation
by sight, by name, by heart.

Look-
Did you ever notice?
Those bent and broken,
lightning-struck and rotted out,
how they (even the weeping ones)
can’t help but bow
before it all?

Resurrection

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Black of Night
had steadily eaten

away at the
Moon all month.

Until, at last
nothing remained but

heart-break and
the absence of

Her Light.  Just
when I thought

I could no
longer bear my

moon-gone grief,
a tiny miracle;

sliver of resurrection
rose like Hope

in the Eastern sky.

Please share a comment or question under this poem.  I’d love to hear from you!

Listen

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Listen.
Listen now.
The Heart
inside your heart
is telling you
Everything
you already know.
Listen, Dear.
It helps to hear-
all that striving
and searching,
fearing and pretending
is not who you are.
Listen close;
closer still.
Your Heart is telling you
who you Really are.
I told you before.
You already know.

Elena Schreiber
3/16/17

The Tidal Wave

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Every now and then something strangely wonderful happens to me…in between everyday tasks and destinations, usually when I’m driving by myself, scooting around town between the grocery store and the gas station, safe and secure in the comfort of my car (although occasionally it occurs when I close my eyes to meditate).  I think it has to do with getting really quiet and just being with my Self for a few uninterrupted moments, free from distractions. There’s nowhere else to be and nothing else to do.  It’s one of those things that therapists, and other like-hearted people get to experience if we’re lucky, and willing, and open.

All of the sudden, the profoundly deep emotions I’ve been sitting with (but not consciously aware of) for the past few days or weeks or months, wells up in my heart and comes over me. For a few minutes, my heart becomes flooded with empathy for the suffering I’ve seen or heard about in my office; sitting across from the incredibly brave, resilient people who share their stories of trauma and triumph with me in therapy.  It is large and powerful and unstoppable, like a tidal wave of compassion.

It sounds awful to be hijacked by emotions like this, but it really isn’t.   I don’t mind crying, even when I’m sitting at a red light and someone in the next car can see me.  I’ve actually come to feel so grateful for these moments and the fact that I am still able to feel my feelings to this extent…that I haven’t become so hard-hearted, desensitized, or cynical about life.  Instead, I feel incredibly blessed that I haven’t built a wall around my heart.

Many of us build walls to avoid the intensity of our feelings, for fear of being swallowed up by them.  To shield and protect ourselves, we use sarcasm, apathy, stoicism.  At times, I too have fought back tears in an effort to remain composed, in control.  And sometimes that’s necessary, important and even wise, depending on the situation.  But eventually those feelings must be released and dealt with, or they become embedded, patterned in the cells of our mind-body.

In reality, when someone builds an actual sea wall, not only is the beach spoiled by the wall itself, but over time sand is lost in front of the wall until the beach eventually caves and sinks.  It is the same with an emotional tidal wave.  Ironically, our anxiety about being engulfed causes us to bottle everything up, which inevitably leads to drowning anyway.

It is a risk and a leap of faith to trust in the process of allowing and expressing our painful feelings, especially if we weren’t given permission to do so by our families, communities, or society, for various legitimate reasons.  And it may be that we need to do it with someone secure like a therapist, mentor, wise teacher or spiritual leader… someone who can help create a safe container for those feelings and show us healthy ways to cope with them.

Our feelings hold sacred messages for us, and it is a gift we give ourselves to let emotions like these rise to surface to be released, explored and soothed.  Afterwards, it is often healing and refreshing. In fact, much like how real tidal waves actually clean beaches and restore animal and plant life that has long been absent to the affected region, these emotional tsunamis have the capacity to cleanse and restore the soul.

The ocean within all of us is vast and mysterious.  As life circumstances change, our internal tectonic plates shift from time to time, causing all of us to quake.  Tides of emotion will ebb and flow, too.  Eventually there will be another tidal wave.  It is inevitable, and that’s okay.  Let it come.

Please share a comment or question below this article.  I’d love to hear from you!

 

Waking Dreams

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Sometimes I have the most extremely lucid, spiritually-awakening dreams.  I have always been a vivid dreamer, ever since I was a very young child (for better or worse).  Perhaps that is why I find dreams, especially spiritual ones, so magical and fascinating.

Recently, I dreamed I was able to experience my True Self as a Being of Light.  I saw and felt myself as I really am (as all of us are)- a presence and an awareness of pure, golden, radiant light.  It was such an intense feeling of powerful energy coursing through me, as me…the most blissful state of pure energy/electricity, vibrating at an incredibly high frequency, like I was exploding, but with love/bliss, not pain.

I could see and feel all around me that everything else was made up of this exact same light energy, too.  Trees, people, objects, the ground, even the air/space between everything.  All of it was this exact same field of light energy, but it was brighter in some places and beings than others.  For example, light trees were brighter than the light space or light objects around them.  But people were illuminated much brighter than anything else.

At one point, I was watching a woman who was standing and talking, and all I could see was her light in the shape of her body, and I could feel her light too because it was the same as mine, and all of the light was interconnected.  There was no separation, but it pulsed and glowed brighter within the light field depending on who or what the light encompassed.

I was just bursting with this overwhelming sensation of light energy, completely at one with it, when all of the sudden I became aware that I was feeling it.  Once I became conscious of the feeling and the intensity of it, I immediately woke up.  I could still feel the energy coursing through my body but I quickly became afraid of the overwhelming power of it.

As soon as my mind had noticed it, that amazing sensation of love turned into adrenaline/panic racing through my bloodstream, as though I had just woken up from a nightmare instead of a magnificent spiritual experience.  But I gently reminded myself it had been a beautiful dream, and there was nothing to be afraid of.  As the fear subsided, I had an inner knowing that this was not truly just a dream.  It was a glimpse of Reality, of who and what we really are…spirit, light, love.

Luckily, the dream has stayed with me, and whenever I remember it I am still able to feel that glorious energy, but only a fraction of it.  I can’t quite evoke it fully, but I know it exists.

I had another dream a few days later where I was standing in a room with a group of people, and although we were all wearing name tags, we were asked to go around in a circle and say our names.  My grandmother who died 9 years ago was there, and I noticed she had written her Americanized name Helen on her name tag, instead of her given Italian name, Helena.  When it was my turn to speak I said, “My name is Elena, and I’m named after her (pointing to my grandmother, who smiled sweetly).”  Then I said, “Her real name is Helena.”  I woke up from that dream, and instantly remembered that our shared name actually means Bright One, Shining Light. I recalled my dream from a few nights earlier, and felt flooded with gratitude upon making the connection.

I am always in awe when synchronicity brings things full circle, in waking life as in dreams.  We are loved and supported here, so much more than we know.  So I look for the signs and pay attention to the messages of my dreams.  Over and over again, I keep waking up to the awareness of who I really am (and who we all are).  The more I able to do this, the more I allow the full brightness of my True Self to shine.

 

Please share a comment or question below this article.  I’d love to hear from you!

If you enjoyed this essay, you might be interested in this link I found about Light Bodies (which I discovered while researching art for this article!):

http://www.celestialwellspring.com/lightbody.html