Sarai Beginning

Finding the Name

This morning I realised that I had been thinking too much of others in my writing. I was beginning to write with a specific audience in mind, trying to reach out and become intelligible to those I already know.

It came to me in meditation that this is not the purpose of the blog or the online venture, it is to put out my thoughts as honestly as possible. I do not need to hold anything back. I can write as esoterically and as personally as I like. I just have to put it out and see what happens.

It is not about drawing those to me who are already within my orbit, it is about seeing what can happen in areas in which I have no pre-ordained ideas or expectations. It is a real adventure. 

I had been wanting to write the blog in my real name as I have been understanding how important my name is to me, but I then realised that this was not relevant in this instance. What name could I put? I wondered and I was answered Sarai. 

Why Sarai? It is close to another name I was given, but I had no affinity with and have rarely used. I began to look up Sarai on the web and the first references were to the origin of the name Sara, the wife of Abraham. But I knew that had nothing to do with it. I pursued and found that in Hindi and Urdu it means: an enclosed space in a city, a meeting place where travellers join to express views. 

That was it! That was why it had been given to me, because that is the root of my intention. More than trying to reach those who feel distant, it is about me plugging into the grid, being able to spread to and fortify my energy with those who are already plugged in too. 

I am feeling that comfort more and more, be it in picking up a book and recognising so much of my experience, learning that which once learnt already felt known. I get to sink into the familiarity which is a balm to me. 

Much of the energy around me is heavy and it is not always comfortable to operate within it. I am getting better at it but I need the connection more and more. Not just my connection with Source, the Oneness which is all around, but with those who are actively working with the light and experiencing similar things to myself.

Connecting In the Journey and Taking Responsibility

I went to Mass today and it was a similar plug in. I sat outside with the energy of the trees radiating around me. The priest himself in front of the darkness of the sanctuary glowed against his own energy body and his words were uplifting. 

Here I felt I could connect with the truths that I have been coming to understand. Here it was simple. But the journey to it was not an easy one. As he spoke I could see the years of Self searching, study and living that went into his accessing of simple conclusions. I wanted to cry because I knew from experience that this path is a difficult one and you need to be brave and what you seem to come out with are the most beautiful simple accessible truths. 

With no fanfare, it makes sense and I was happy to sit and watch his light and listen to what is familiar to me now. I listened to him talk about the need to identify what we feel. That is one of the first steps, until we can identify what we feel and then accept it, we cannot move through it. There is a world of study in this step. 

He spoke of taking up one’s cross. As he spoke I passed over the word “cross” and took the meaning, that he stated too, which is that we must take responsibility for our own lives. Now what does this mean? He said that we will find happiness within ourselves. He also stated that this is profoundly deep spiritual work. I understand why.

To be responsible for oneself is enormous. It is the start of real love. It flashed to me that this is what happened to me at the end of last year. I had to claim the distance and difference of my emotional state to those I loved. This was a great lesson for me.

Caring up till that point had been resonating with other’s emotions, sharing suffering, feeling sadness when others cried, feeling frustrated when others didn’t know what to do. This was how I had interpreted feeling and caring throughout my life. Standing apart, feeling empathy but not reacting was alien to me. It felt as though I didn’t care. I felt hard and I felt cruel. 

But I was given a set of circumstances that guided me in this direction. So I started to learn a different way. I began to meditate for those I love. Instead of getting involved in their daily upsets over which I had no control, I began to invest my energy and my love towards a different reality. 

I started to paint a different feeling state for them in my mind’s eye. I would relax and start to think of them when I saw them happy, when I loved them profoundly for the happiness and love they radiated and generated.

I painted the different pictures of them till I had it clear. One example was when they looked at an animal and became soft their eyes welling with love and turning to me with joy to share it. Or when they saw their child and shimmered with laughter and joy, or when they spoke profoundly of spiritual things that passed through them without them holding it. 

I held all this, until I really got a feeling sense and I stayed within this. I then asked that this be expanded upon, that this spread, I don’t know by what means, but I ask that it be done. 

What I believe happens is that I hold open the potential for another possibility. By basing it in what the person has inside them, I am calling forth something that already exists, I am just asking for its expansion.

I see it as filling space with another energy, with greater light. If the person has a corresponding desire and chooses that path, then the space is available and more expanded for them. It is always their choice however. But what I got through that work was peace and disentanglement. I began to understand that I was “doing” something.

Relearning “Doing”

It has been a journey for me to begin to extricate myself from our society’s concept of “doing” to one that fits more with my reality and I still come up in conflict with myself over that. It is still hard for me to think that it is quite true that going and sitting on a bench that I have been drawn to near a homeless man and working with his guides imaginatively is doing. I know deep down that it is. 

But there is still a part of me that clings onto the old and says what if you’re just dreaming? And then there’s the even more fearful part that screeches you’re going mad! I succumb less to that voice, but it can still derail me for a little. 

When it does I withdraw, I tone things down a little, until I regain my balance and head forth again. I don’t want to push against that voice, I suppose I have to accept it and realise that it still speaks for a part of me. To completely ignore it would not be kind. But to heed it to the point where it stops me from working as I do now would be my undoing. So all I need to do is pause for a short time and then continue.