Monday’s Candle Moments is a meme. If you’d like to participate, please refer to this post first.

Recently, I wrote a post for Blog Action Day…about creating roots for vision to manifest, which today’s Moment will be a follow up to.

As I thought over this vision rooting post, I considered something that I’ve been doing for many years; querying my deep self about all sorts of things in order to understand myself and to guide myself from my center of balance; or my “pivot”, as my friend Anjolie calls it.

I think it necessary to ever clarify perception and vision, as they are not static experiences. They evolve as information, emotion, understanding, growth and experience infuses you with new and change. What is true today for me, may not be so tomorrow and the only way to ensure that I’m in full self understanding is to query myself regularly.

This meditation practice, which I call Dropping in a Question, is simple. I don’t generally just do this meditation. It is usually a part of a longer, deep meditation. I never really questioned why that is, until now when I’m writing this….and I suppose I find that just doing it only scratches the surface for me. There’s deep wisdom from my center, and then there’s deep wisdom from my core. Yanno? If I’m in the center of an intense meditation, I get to core of any answers that I drop a question in for. Otherwise it is simply wisdom. The core stuff is the source of your wisdom/belief; the stuff you live by. You may have wisdom or simply belief…but it is not always in use…you may not be living by it. It is simply stuff you carry with you. The core stuff is what is informing everything in your life, coloring it, telling you myths and truths about you. It may or may not be True. It is what you are living.

For instance, I may be living the core belief that ‘I’m not lovable’. This belief lives in my core right along with all the other stuff I know such as ‘you are Divine’. Both are true in terms of what I believe and live by…so dropping a question into that core will bring up answers that tell me a whole lot about what I’m believing about me right now.

Another example would be dropping in a question about decisions…Is this the right financial goal at the moment? What should I focus on next in my life? How can I deal with _______who is really hurting my feelings right now?

So…I’m in the midst of my deep meditation and I choose to look inside to the belly…the well/chasm/volcano/tree trunk…it is infinite space. It is warm, dark and full of truth…full of portent and mystery. It is the axis upon which my life swings…it is the pivot in my center of balance. Here is where all will be known…

I wordlessly seek in Higher Wisdom…a sort of knock at the door which says, ‘Look over here at me, I need guidance…’

I speak my question into the silence of that inner space and feel it drop into the primordial truth which bubbles inside me….

And up rises a myst…a mysterious mist that is full of images, sounds, scents, emotions, experiences that I can view. Avid for answers, I put myself into the mist to become one with that answer, that I might understand it.

I don’t judge the answer. I don’t reject it. I don’t accept it wholesale. I just take it in and let it be what it is…This is archetypal. Sometimes you’ll get succinct answers. ‘Yes.’, ‘No.’, ‘Over there.’, ‘Not today’…but mostly, it will be like a dream…full of symbolism.

Recently, I got answers that I just do not understand when I dropped in a question. Not only that, the answer was utterly unexpected. I had no idea that this possibility was at my core. If I embrace what I think I understand of this answer, then I will have to give up a part of my current identity.

I’m reeling a bit from this one. Not only that, in one swoop I am finally understanding my gay friends from a perspective that I never did before. I am learning that a part of my sexual identity may not quite be what I thought it was/would be. I never really understood before how much sexual identity effects one’s whole view point on life. I have always known that freeing sexual energy makes many non-sexual aspects of life charged with new vitality…but I didn’t realize that a change in identification could shake one’s whole viewpoint of oneself.

Wow. I have far more sympathy and understanding than before.

I am not ready to share deep details about this revelation as yet, because I need to sit with it. I need to let the imagery trickle down and see if I understood it right by waiting for more portents from dreams, more answers from query, more life…

I guess the bottom line point is, I would not have known this about me unless I queried myself. I have a vision for my life…but getting there seems so littered with road blocks. I know for sure that this is the right purpose for me, but I am throwing up those road blocks over and over and I have not been able to get a handle on it. Dropping in a question is a powerful meditation practice which helps me root such roadblocks out for me.

I suppose that since sharing this part of my healing journey led to sharing how I get there, I should say a little something about designing a question before I close this post.

Yes/no style questions are good ones for simple decisions that you are relatively sure of, but need a final deep confirmation about.

Other questions should be ones that will generate something interactive. The question should not have the answer included already. That’s presumptive.

‘When should I go to Ireland?’ is an example of a presumptive question because perhaps you shouldn’t go at all, you just desire to..perhaps Ireland is only one of many possibilities that should unfold for you. Perhaps there are ten trips between now and Ireland that ought to happen first. Perhaps there’s some important stuff about going to Ireland that you ought to consider first. Yanno?

A good question is ’show me the sources of this grief’. Here’s another: ‘I feel sure I am to do ___, so how should I prepare?’ After I drop in the question, I expect that I’ll get some images that relate to the sources of my answers…and in the case of the first example, I should also get some indicator of what’s powering most of the grief.

Now to continue with that subject of grief, its important to understand how intense emotion will effect your core. Grief is no simple issue. One trigger usually gets a ball of wax going on many levels. For instance if I feel sad about loosing my lover, I may also feel sad about not having closeness with my friends, with some other old hurt from the past and about disappointments with my goals…all because grief is a powerful hemispheric sort of emotion and it will jangle loose all sorts of junk in you once it takes hold. That’s just how it works.

With grief and complex emotions just like it, you’ll find it hard to be impartial to the answers and even difficult to formulate questions that are open ended, so think on them a bit and just write down what you saw without speculation for a day or so and then go back to ponder aloud with it.

Generating the right question is key to getting answers that are useful to you. Blessings!