There are five core qualities (flow, spaciousness, light, love, and stillness/peace) that are the essence of the meadow of your well-being and as you learn how to open into Life, you will live from these qualities. They have always been with you, but you haven’t noticed them because you have been too busy living inside your mind.
1. Flow
In the great circle of Life, flow shows up in the dance of day and night and changes from one season into the next. Death is also a part of this flow. Life arises out of mystery, expressing itself in an amazing variety of forms, and each and every one will dissolve back into mystery. Even the invisible world flows.
The only thing in all of creation that doesn’t flow is the human ego. It has declared that there is a me in here and then there is Life out there. It believes itself to be separate from the flow of Life and believes that its job is to control it. As long as you see yourself as separate, you will view Life as a potential threat and will withdraw from the flow of Life
2. Spaciousness
If you look carefully, you will see that Life loves space. Right now, you are sitting on a planet that is dancing through vast oceans of space and it is 24,000,000,000,000 miles to the closest star. Then there are stars that are billions of times farther away than that! Can you even begin to imagine how much space that is? And this is all happening in a universe that seems to have no end.
When you are open to this moment, spaciousness permeates your body, mind and heart. This is your natural state that can be accessed no matter what is happening in your life.
3. Light
We think of light as coming from the sun, but the leading edge of science is now saying that everything is made out of light. David Bohm, the grandfather of quantum physics, once said that matter is just frozen light!
You have so much energy within you that wants to be let out of the prison of your struggling mind so it can expand and dance, and when energy is free to flow, it shines. There is no accident that when a great burden has been lifted or you feel very happy, you oftentimes say “I feel so light!” It is also no coincidence that the word delight means ‘of light’!
4. Love
When you rediscover the spaciousness of being open again to the great flow of Life, feeling energy moving through you rather than trying to control it, you begin to recognize that the word that best describes this movement of light is Love.
This urge to connect at the heart of Life is all about Love. The great mystics of the world have all agreed that when you come out of your struggling mind, what you recognize and fully become is Love. And it is this Love, this allurement, this urge to connect, that brings all things together.
5. Stillness
Look out at the world and see this dance of form that has been going on for eons – things arising and passing away – mosquitoes, dinosaurs, your great grandparents, mountains and even stars. Everything in this dance of Life appears and then eventually disappears. This constant movement of Life extends all the way out to the dance of galaxies and all the way within to electrons dancing around the nucleus of every single atom of your body. But that is only half of it. All of this movement arises out of a vast stillness, a stillness that births all the varied forms of Life.
Excerpted from ‘What’s In the Way IS the Way.’ Mary O’Malley is an author, speaker, group facilitator and counselor in Kirkland, Washington.
Mary O’Malley
