On The Crystal Path
It’s the beginning of a new school year. What courses are you taking?
Do you know? Can you sense it?
Me? I’m enrolled in a Healthy Boundaries practicum and a course on More Than Enough. Through Schoolroom Earth, of course.
I finally passed the What Do You Really Want? course over the summer. I had to retake it many times because I kept getting distracted by what everyone else wanted. It was a prerequisite for my current courses. The final exam was buying a used car on my own, for the first time since my early twenties.
Thirty years ago, I sold a health club membership to a used car salesman, and we talked every time he came to the gym. When I needed a car, he had one for me, and I bought it even though it was a stick-shift, and I didn’t know how to drive it. (I sat in the passenger seat during the test-drive. How’s that for a metaphor?) My future husband gave me a couple of lessons before I picked up the car, and I’ll always remember that first ride home in my Nissan Sentra and how nervous I was at every red light. There was one light I stopped at on an incline, and I couldn’t get moving when the light turned green, so a carload of good-natured Cornell students behind me talked me through it.
That’s how I used to make decisions.
This summer, I took the 2.0 version. It was a lot of work and very frustrating at times. But finally I settled on a 2008 Honda CRV that was within my budget and felt right. It’s a burgundy, well-maintained, single-owner vehicle with no accidents and 100,000 miles. This time, I test-drove several cars and brought them to my mechanic who graciously took each car for a drive and a look-over.
At the beginning of my car search, I thought I wanted another Accord, like the 2003 I got from my mom a few years before she passed away – only a newer model. I printed out Dave Ramsey’s “how to buy a used car” checklist and went from there. As I got deeper into the search, I realized I wanted more space to haul my photography gear, exhibition pieces, and my granddaughter. And AWD to get in and out of my driveway during wintry weather. Shifting from what others offered me (including their opinions) to what really served my needs was the big jump that helped me finally pass the course.
However, I really wanted a newer (2011 or later) CRV or RAV4 with lower mileage (70,000s) in a certain price range. “Mountain Air Metallic” blue exterior would be icing on the cake. Nothing came up in that price range, and I was under a deadline because my son was starting a summer job, which would make sharing the Accord virtually impossible. So I had to choose between expanding my price range and compromising on specs. That’s how I ended up with the 2008 CRV, which I’m very pleased with. But would I be even more pleased in the long run if I’d paid $3,000-$4,000 more for a newer model or held out until I found exactly what I was looking for?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Naturally, the More Than Enough course begins with noticing how I’ve compromised in various areas of life. Deep-cleaning my bathroom yesterday really brought this home. One voice in my head insisted that I was not raised to live in a house like this (which we’ve been renting for 11 years now). Another reminded me that many people on this planet don’t have a bathroom with running water or even a roof over their heads, and what I have is enough. Fortunately, I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation long enough not to ruminate on all the questionable choices I made that resulted in me being down on my hands and knees scrubbing this particular bathroom. (This particular bathroom on the freaking river, the other voice would add.)
At any rate, I have my work cut out because it still feels like reaching for more when I already have enough is selfish and superficial. Even though I realize I can do more good in the world by making more of this precious life. I imagine that would be hard for people without this particular hangup to understand.
But then again, others have hangups I don’t understand. For example, this week in my mindfulness meditation teacher program (the actual one I’m taking with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach), we’re focusing on self-compassion, and expert-researcher, Kristin Neff, wanted us to understand the misconceptions people have about self-compassion that prevent them from embracing it. I don’t have issues with cultivating self-compassion…just as others might not have issues around manifesting more of what they want or enforcing self-preserving boundaries.
While studying transpersonal psychology in the mid-1990s, an image came to me of the spiritual path as a multifaceted crystal. Each facet represents an essential aspect of development necessary for attaining enlightenment. The facets are of different shades, colors, and luminosity. Different degrees of dinginess. As a person develops and refines each facet, it becomes clearer and cleaner until it’s transparent enough for the light to shine through. When all facets are clear and clean, you are a truly radiant, clear, enlightened being.
That image still resonates with me. Each of us has different facets that need to be cleaned and cleared so the light can shine through more completely. It’s not a path like a walking path where someone is ahead of another. It’s a multifaceted, 3D path, and we’re all working on different facets that block the light from shining through us more completely. We could spend an entire lifetime working on just one facet!
There’s something rather wonderful about the non-linear, crystal path on which nobody is better-than or less-than. If you accept that everyone is working on cleaning and clearing different facets, you won’t equate your true worth with your nasty bathroom, old car, or any other condition or quality that makes you seem less than anyone else. We’re all just working on different lessons, and each facet is a course in the Universal curriculum we magnificent beings are working through here on Schoolroom Earth.
© 2019 Susan Meyer. All rights reserved. To use any or all of this article, include this exactly: Susan Meyer (SusanTaraMeyer.com) is a photographer, writer, clutter coach, Reiki practitioner, and mindfulness meditation teacher whose work is infused with a deep interest in the nature of mind and appreciation of the natural world. She lives on the Hudson River in Upstate New York.