I recommended someone read Eastern Body, Western Mind because he was interested in the theory behind my Reiki practice. He liked the down-to-earth, non fuzzy-wuzzy language that he found in the book. Too often discussions of ki, prajna, chakras etc. break down because the initiated (the people who are used to these strange words and therefore ‘understand’ them) have no way of explaining alien concepts with everyday words. This book fills a hole.
Except ‘rainbow bridge’.
What the hell is a rainbow bridge? I can only guess. Maybe…the path (or bridge) to wholeness, which in the author’s experience comes through freeing and integrating the energy of each chakra. (The colours of the chakras when put together would look like a rainbow, I guess.)
This got me thinking. The path to wholeness. That means that where I am now is not whole (probably true), but that to become whole I have to go somewhere else. The people reading this have probably already clocked that it’s not through owning things that we will find this wholeness, so what other places do we look for it? Where are you looking?
Somewhere else. We can take external trips somewhere else (buy or get rid of some things, travel, change your job, start or end a relationship) or internal trips to somewhere else (get saved, get enlightened, get your chakras healed). But what does this change?
Suggestion:
As long as you are trying to be whole by going somewhere else, you will never find wholeness where you actually are.
I’m roughly the same person I was five years ago, only I don’t hate myself for it now. That’s the only important thing that’s changed. Yes it’s true that my mental and emotional bodies are a little clearer thanks to a couple of things you might call spiritual practices, but that’s not the significant difference. What matters is that I can live with myself in my imperfection-riddled state of being, buy myself a beer, and say to myself that where I am right now, that’s okay.
So I wouldn’t call it the path to wholeness anymore. I haven’t gone anywhere but further inside. It’s the path of wholeness.
It brings me back to the leathery old AJ Muste quote:
There’s no way to peace. Peace is the way.