This past weekend, Sam and I attended the music festival Lightning in a Bottle. While it is certainly a music festival, boasting
some of the biggest names in Electronic music, it is also an experience of intense
community and love. I spent most of my days at the Temple of Consciousness,
listening to speakers further on their journey than I am, and participating in
meditation and other workshops along with highly conscious people. It was located at the top of a hill overlooking a beautiful lake. At night, of course, we danced!
By the end of the weekend, I had three very clear
take-aways, which I plan to incorporate into my Real Life. They aren’t new
ideas to me, but the importance of them was stressed this weekend. This feels
like a very personal thing to be putting out on the internet, but here goes.
I will find the point
on my arrow.
Dream Rockwell, the woman who had the original vision for
Lightning in a Bottle, had a chance to speak to us at the end of the weekend.
She started out repeating the general beliefs of the crowd, about love and
light and higher consciousness, and then stopped herself. “My guides just told
me I’m telling you yesterday’s news,” she said. She sat there for a minute or
so, and decided to throw her notes out and speak from the heart. She said many
things in that next hour that I really connected with. One of these was a story
of arriving at Burning Man a decade ago and having someone walk up on the first
day and insist: “What are you doing with your life?” It jostled her to the
core, and started her on a journey to figure out the “point on her arrow,” as the
man put it. This wake-up call set her on the path to creating Lightning in a
Bottle, an event now attended by 15,000 people in love.
It’s a scary thing to ask the divine for the Point on My
Arrow. What if it’s different than the plans I already have for my life? What
if it’s too big and I’m afraid? I know that having a purpose and living life
within that purpose is the most fulfilling a life can be, and the time has come
to reject that negativity and open myself up to discovering what I’m here for.
Wish me luck!
I will be conscious
of what I put into my body.
Another thing Dream said that shook me a bit was about
eating meat. She said, as I already believed, that while there was definitely a
time when eating meat was done within a symbiotic relationship, what we have
turned it into is a complete disgrace and devastating our planet. Then she said
something I hadn’t thought of before: if we as humanity are trying to evolve toward
vibrating at a higher level, why on earth would we put something in our bodies
that has that extreme level of negative energy attached to it? I already knew
it was unhealthy to consume meat the way we do, but I had never considered it
from the level of energy.
I grew up hearing that your body is a temple, but that
really hit me in a new way. The Temple of My Consciousness. I simply cannot
continue destroying it in this way. It’s not just about meat, either… the whole
thing just really made me think about the energy involved in everything I eat. I
also don’t intend to never eat meat, but just not at restaurants where I’m
quite certain how it was raised and slaughtered. Free-range, organic meat is
much more expensive, so I’m learning how to better cook with tofu and beans and
other meat alternatives. And I definitely plan on partaking of my dad’s venison
burgers when I’m back in Dallas. :)
It’s been about four days without meat, and it hasn’t been as difficult as I
was afraid it would be. The more I read, the more I feel strongly that this is
the right choice for me right now.
I will see every
person as a radiant, divine being on a journey.
I have a tendency to be a very judgmental person. And I don’t
necessarily mean judging that something or someone is good or bad (although I’m
sure I do my share of that as well), but just… pre-judging people based on what
they look like or maybe the way that they talk, or something they enjoy doing. I’ve
definitely been working on it the last few years, but I finally heard it put in
a way that I think I can be successful with.
So, what I’ve been working on is viewing every person I come
in contact with, whether I talk to or interact with them or not, as a light on a journey. I have no
idea what they’ve been through, but I do know that we are both divine creatures
with a world of things in common, and I’m committing myself to love them
regardless of anything else.
This type of festival is going on, to a lesser extent, all
over California all through the summer, and I’ve pretty much decided I’m ok to
scrap our previous plans and spend the next couple of months basking in
community and music. And thanks to Sam for getting me to this festival, and making our Summer of Consciousness possible. I'm sure he has more to say about it, as he had different experiences than I did, and he got some good pictures as well. <3
