Your Temple

Everybody needs to have a temple of their own. A place of peace, where you can come close to Nature and the Divine. A place where all things begin to make sense, where confusion and troubles give way to clarity and opportunities. Where you learn all the things that you already knew, which somehow seem new in contrast with your current struggles.

When problems make their way into your heart, or you're exhausted from always battling with the same questions that keep you up every night, don't find a distraction. Don't blast it away with loud music or hide it away with smoky darkness or drink it away with temporary elixirs. Don't sweep it under the mat or settle for impermanent solutions. Don't run away to a distant land, only to find your monster waiting on your doorstep. Don't bury yourself in busy-ness and work, only to find your assailant working right beside you. Don't ignore it for so long that your bottled-up emotional trauma suddenly becomes somatic and you become so ill that you can't do any good for anyone.

There's something absolutely terrifying about looking fear in the face. Lost hope and unmet expectations are even worse. Defeat and doubt probably the worst of all. But once faced, these enemies can no longer haunt you because you see them for what they are: spiritual imbalance. Something is out of whack between how you perceive your inner soul and how your soul really is. Someone's singing off note and you think it's your soul but your soul thinks it's you.

The only way back is through the doors of your temple. Stepping away from the worries of the world and allowing, for only a moment, your mind and heart to get back in tune. Taking all the little pieces of your emotion that life has flung around your soul and connecting them back together. Permitting a higher power to cleanse the filth that collects in the cracks of your heart. It's like defragmenting your spirit.

I just got back from one of my temples (yes, I have many) and I feel like I've been liberated from a wicked tyrant who has held me hostage for a long time. I entered with a specific question, and got the answer almost before I sat down. After 2 good hours of meditation, I have no clue what went on around me but I know that my life has been changed and a new direction set. Actually, it's the old direction that I knew I should have been following anyway, but refinding it has made all the difference.