Revisioning Your Life
I was recently reading a book by Neville called The Magic
of Imagination that I had not read in ten years or more. When I read it
the first time, I don't believe that I fully understood what it was saying,
but this time, I found it delightful! Neville was a teacher back in the
50's and 60's, long before there was a general awareness about the spiritual
underpinnings of daily life. I want to share with you a technique he suggests
that can change your life.
The technique is called "the pruning shears of revision."
The metaphor he uses is that each day is like a garden in which you plant
things with your thoughts, actions, and feelings. At the end of each day,
if you look back at the garden, you will find growing certain things that
you wish to keep and other things - "weeds" - that you do not
want to grow larger. Both of these create energy that brings a harvest
tomorrow. So at the end of the day it is important to "weed"
you garden.
The way that this is accomplished is to locate a "weed,"
or some thought, action, feeling, or situation that you would like to
remove from the garden. Then you let it go (as opposed to beating yourself
up about it or worrying about it), and in its place you plant whatever
you would have like to have happened. While you are in a meditative state
you re-imagine in as much detail as possible the way you would have liked
the scene to have gone and feel it fully. You would continue "weeding"
the garden of your day by repeating this process with each thing you find
in your day that you would have liked to be different.
This process of revisioning the past is one I have used
to change the energy of things that have happened in the more distant
past such as childhood and I know that it works well for that purpose.
I can also see why it would work well on a daily basis. When things have
happened during the day that we wished could have been different, we have
a tendency to worry about them or obsessively think about them with negative
feeling. In Neville's garden metaphor, we are fertilizing the "weeds"
with our energy and attention. In addition, the feeling associated with
these things we would like to change is sitting inside of us and calling
forth more similar energy for the next day. If we don't change the energy,
the "weed" gets bigger.
When we can revision and feel our revised version of the
day, we give our energy and attention to fertilizing what we want more
of, and the energy around the situation we changed changes as well. We
then are able to attract different experiences that we wish to have in
the future.
Revision can be a daily spiritual practice that complements whatever current practice we use to create a more loving and peaceful life and world. Revisioning for others can be similar to prayers. If you come across someone who is ill, revision them healthy and happy. It is like seeing yourself or someone else functioning in a way that creates greater harmony and wholeness.
When I see clearly
Feeling how I wish to live
Visions become real
If you have comments on this newsletter or ideas for future topics, call Linda Heron Wind at (585) 924-5620 or send e-mail to LHWind@aol.com.
Heron's Home | About Heron | Calendar | Newsletters | Articles | Poetry | Workshops | Books and Tapes | Mystery School | CIRCLE | Links
Page last modified July 2008 by RMC