“But they say it should go like this…” Somewhere there is a healthy balance between what others have experienced or say that things should be and what the individual experiences and needs. Because in the end, each of us is unique and no one theory or practice or method is going to work for everyone. I’ve hit up against this a few times recently and it is always such a shock to my clients that I thought it would be worth mentioning.
I first came across this when I started working with my elders concerning the use of stones. In Western culture there is an assumption that black is related to earth, that it is heavy, pulls one downward, is not associated with good or enlightenment (light is part of that word) and keeps one from moving ‘upwards’. Therefore all dark stones will, of course, be grounding and help in meditation and centering if you are needing to get out of the clouds, as it were. However, this is an over generalization and an influence from religions of the Book which make up and down somehow related to good and bad respectively. My elders pointed out that stones don’t care about these theories and assumptions and therefore ignore them as irrelevant. Or in other words, not all dark stones are grounding so stop sitting on THAT!. 🙂 LOL Obsidian is not a grounding stone, in fact is not a stone at all. It’s glass. However it is special to me and helps me in many ways, none of them grounding. The same for Onyx and Hematite. Not grounding. They have their own properties and if used for trying to ground and sleep deeply, you’re in for a rude awakening, so to speak. So leave the assumptions at the door and open yourself to your own experience.
This is the same for all the common tropes out there about spirituality. For instance, grounding makes you able to think more clearly, settles energy, brings you down from that jittery over energized place, and makes you feel peaceful. Well for a great many people it does that, but for others “nope”. For those who are deeply attuned with Earth energy getting ‘grounded’ is how they get energized, how they work with their personal spirituality, and opens the door for their enlightenment. For them they need to get down to get up and out. They need to get still to move. They move and are moved by mountains. 🙂 Another example is that almost all books in Western culture that talk about Chakras and the chakra system talk about it, not as a holistic system of sensory nodes that the body uses to maintain health and interact with its environment, but as a means to achieve enlightenment. And to do so they specify that one work from the root chakra at the base of the spine and move upward until reaching the crown of the head and connecting with Divinity. Great. However, what if your need or your purpose is to manifest Divinity in physical form? What if it is to bring enlightenment into the physical and the practical? Well then, moving from top to bottom is how you would work with your Chakras, not bottom to top. Bringing thought down into being means working from crown to feet, which is just as powerful an exercise and can manifest amazing feats of healing and social reform.
So it doesn’t matter what common knowledge tells you or what the experts say. Listen to the techniques they offer, learn the skills to use the tools, but also listen to your inner wisdom and pay head to your own personal experience. If what you do creates the opposite effect from what you are trying to achieve, you may not be doing it wrong. You are just doing it backwards. 🙂 Try turning it upside. It might just make your world turn right side up.
