Oh the crowds that gather in my head!

The psychology of the crowds of stuff inside my head would make your head explode if you tried to wrap your brain around it all. When I try to wrap my own head around the crowds, it usually results in something like, oh I don't know, an implosion into a little pile of ashes.

So sometimes I try to completely escape my head all together. I do this meditative exercise which I'll offer you today as a sort of creative prompt if you want to try making up your own process:

1. I sit at the edge of the ocean or some body of water that is much larger than I am. 
2. I stare for a long time at the huge amounts of water. The crowds of water. 
3. I imagine the BEing of water looking back at me. Like imagining the entire huge body of water is the body of a BEing, conscious, with character and personality.
4. I imagine how small I must look to the huge BEing of water. 
5. I imagine it looks back at the small speck of me. Just a speck of a girl, sitting there, trying to consider the immensity of it.
6. And then I imagine that I become the water, looking back at my speck of a self. 

And you know what happens? Like a FLASH, the crowds of my speck of a head become so small that they require almost no effort to see, map, deal with, whatever. And I come to realize the following:

• I am just being. 
• The Water is being. 
• We are each other. 
• There is no crowding. 
• No crowds of anything anyone anywhere. 
• And there is immense space again, inviting me to rest.

Often this process allows me to sleep a bit. Or to recognize that my speck of a physical body wants to stretch into that immense space of Water BEing. Or things just quiet down enough for me to see there is no immediate emergency, nothing is on fire, and my breath is breathing me. Okay, no imploding into a pile of ashes today then!

It seems the psychology of the crowds of my head are best seen from way up above -- from a place where it all looks like specks on the horizon. From a perspective where the crowds don't look like snarled monsters, but instead look like a thing of beauty. Perspective, I love you.

So what about you? What helps you shift from the snarling crowds to the immense body of water BEing state?

Miracles,
k-

[Original version published in Radical Creativity, Saturday, May 10, 2008]