two layers: true mastery is service

notes from a ten minute meditation

This is two layers from the top of August 2024. Would heavily recommend listening to this one!

I'm learning to exist outside of myself.

By way of introductions:

Writing about fear has really shown a light on these parts of myself that I otherwise do not wish to see. I don't often feel fear as I spoke about in the last one. And even if I am afraid, I feel that way after the scary part is already said and done. Rarely, if ever, am I tasked to do the scary thing while afraid.

I also just in my own person have like a, a delusional amount of confidence that everything will go my way, such that it doesn't really occur to me to think that anything could go wrong in the first place, but like truly, I mean, that becomes a self -fulfilling prophecy because… since when do things go wrong? Lol. Now I am in this tactile, sticky era where I have to force myself to write. And that doesn't often happen for me. Writing is like respirating— like it just occurs. I go with the flow of my body and mind. I let what needs to come out of me come out and I let what needs to be shared be shared.

But I'm feeling really sticky and stingy with my words and my thoughts and my time. And I can tell that it's stagnating. I can tell that I have all this stagnant water, stagnant energy building up inside of my person. And today, I caught up on the podcast of a dear friend of mine. I have spoken about her before: Micha Yvette.

She spoke really openly about how her experiences being in public, learning online, sharing tips about self care and productivity have fallen stale— in large part because she wasn't including the spiritual side of things. She's Christian. She talks about her relationship with God openly in that episode and I found it humbling and inspiring. I sat down to write this (this thing I'm reading to you right now) literally right after, because I have been feeling stale— or not just even stale. Stale is the by-product of what I'm actually feeling, which is fear.

I've had… time to re-examine the why of things, which is coming for me at a rather inconvenient time. I am supposed to be productive and expanding and releasing and talking about this text that I've been working on, really feeding into policy-making, which is a beautiful place to be, especially for being 25. Like I am living in the result of answered prayers, things that I prayed fervently for, even when I fundamentally did not believe they were possible. And here I am stalling.

My motivations lately have been really materially focused in ways that I don't love. I think it's a really easy trap to fall into when you are responsible for people's basic livelihoods. That's true in multiple areas of my life. Being materially focused— it means though, functionally, that I have turned my eyes away from the spiritual core that actually runs this ship, because it can't be about money. It can't be about money. It's about the fulfilling the calling on my life to be seen in ways that are radical, in ways that redo the blueprints that we have of what it means to be a writer or an artist or a healer or speaker or a public figure. None of these things were in my own conceptions of what I allotted my life to be. However, living this life has changed… not just the course of the rest of my life, but the course of my thoughts. It has changed what I have wanted and what I'm going to continue to want.

And it's changed my perception of service and how to be good.

It can't be about money. In many ways, it's about consenting to being seen, which has always been… contentious for me and God because I am prone to fight being seen. I like small secluded spaces— like my cat, she loves a cupboard. I love a cupboard. So where do I go? Where do I go if I turn my back to the sun?

Sunflowers that bend towards shade don't survive.

So I'm running from the path that I asked to be on (whether I knew it or not at the time) because I am deeply frightened. I am scared of the material aspects of life. I'm scared of money right now: having it, losing it, especially being someone that's publicly funded.

It's a huge leap of faith and trust that I took because God asked me to essentially. That's really what it comes down to. Yes, ethics, yes, morals, yes, wanting to do a radical thing. But ultimately the, the entity that planted those desires within me, it was divine. I would not have done this otherwise.

So in worrying about these things and in feeling fear just sit and well up in my body without actualizing it in some way, I'm running from the path that I asked to be on because I am frightened. And because I have to work through these fears about materially existing and not having enough and being scared to let people down, I have to feel through the fear to get to what I am actually supposed to be learning here.

Narrator Ismatu: So at this point, I was holding the pen. A song came on from high school called Five Days of Summer by Joe Brooks. I wrote down, “I think I'm going to meditate while Joe Brooks is playing. Hold please.” Unusual for me because meditation is usually something that I do in silence. But I took about 10 minutes with music playing softly in the background. And then I think in pictures, so my body and mind showed me what I needed to see in the moment. And then I came back and put those pictures and sensations into words. So here you're going to hear the voice shift a bit because I'm beginning a conversation with what I would call my conscious self and my higher self or in Yoruba traditions, it's called your Ori. Your, higher consciousness, the most actualized version of you that exists like exclusively on the spiritual plane that is helping guide you, your physical self toward through the marketplace of earth. So you are going to hear me use the second person because I, the self that I prayed to, in effect, I'm talking to the self that is receiving and penning all these messages.

moments from a 10 minute meditation.

One: True mastery is service.

Skills, habits, any application of self, not necessary for the sake of completion, necessary for the process of mastery. [Like ballet or pole work for that matter. It just depends on the direction of the bar(re) lol. It sucks and it's painful for quite a while until you have enough automatic postures and practices in place such that the art and its physicality begins to flow.]

You have mastered a set of skills when the skills begin to service you.

Then on a spiritual level, Mastery of the earth as a passing ground or as a marketplace occurs when you are in consistent service to your own Benevolent Divine—whatsoever you answer to that creates goodness, peace, strength, mercy, et cetera.

[Like dancing. True mastery of the skill serves me in turn because the fluid proficiency brings me pleasure. But true mastery is service also and most especially to my body because she grows stronger and more graceful and more capable the more that I tone the skills. In the skills serving me, I service my body.]

The same is true metaphysically. Mastery of this physical realm— what you can see, feel, taste, touch, what you can affect— creates goodness and it plants peace. Ultimately, that services the benevolent divine. Thus, true mastery is service.

Two: Mastery of your dreams necessitates service.

And this is where service means or is a relinquishing of control. In the case of your dreams, you feel stuck and frightened because you want things to go your way down to the last detail. This directly contradicts with the reality of service to your Benevolent Divine who can see what you cannot.

The heights and depths of what you actually want cannot fit inside your head! That's why they come down to you in clearest moments when your consciousness is subdued, like when you're sleeping or when you've slowed your brain waves down to a meditative state. That's why your flow state while dancing comes to you when your body takes control over your mind, which painfully considers each and every step of the movement. Sustained service to causes greater than the self require you to relinquish control over your perception, your reception and your conception of the outcome. Just like a child, you see (in your perception) more than you can make sense of (your reception), meaning your conceptions (the combination of what you can see and what you can make sense of, or your perception and your reception)— your conceptions of what you think you want are always lacking.

So true mastery is service. True mastery is true service. And service is to relinquish control, which then means that mastery of your dreams (mastery meaning: seeing the effect on the physical plane, such as bodily fluidity to beautiful music), true mastery of your dreams necessitates service to said dreams.

Meaning you must at once give them your time, your habits, your thought space, your energies of creation, and allow them to serve you by giving up control. Does this make sense? Of course you're afraid. You cannot know what you cannot see. And what you can see does not yet make sense. However, if you wish to actualize your dreams in the earthly and material plane, you must engage in service to them. You give them your time and your energy to allow these dreams to overtake you and then burst from you. Such is the rhythmic cost of creation. True creation gives autonomy such that the new thing in turn can create life of its own.

Three: You are more than capable.

Even harder than the process of creation is the process of submission. To not be in totalitarian control of what happens next causes you fear. This is the root of your fear. Not that you do not believe yourself able, but that the truth of the matter will come to pass that you are in fact able to produce an entirely new thing and that new thing will be under its own jurisdiction instead of yours. You cannot see or imagine the fullness of the outcomes you create right now, and that knowledge terrifies you. If you are the image bearer of creator God, and you are, then you also bear the innate and bold ability and desire to create. God created good knowing that it would have the capacity to choose evil and created it anyhow. These are the rhythms of the universe: you create, effect, by way of the simple fact of being alive.

So then the question then is not actually of creation. It is of mastery considering you are more than capable. You are over capable with the process of creation. The question is mastery.

Who do you service? Yourself and your fear? Or that which is beyond you?

And if you choose the second, are you willing to step aside knowing that you cannot see everything you need to see?

[I do this to ground myself back in the moment]

You are sitting at the kitchen table, feeling how cold your feet are. It's a bit chilly for August. Your incense burns itself down to the last curl. The clouds of smoke spinning and spiraling towards you, dancers of the ether. You remember what it is to breathe, to root yourself within your own body.

[with big and steady breaths]

It feels good to be alive.

It feels good to be alive.

It feels good to be alive.

It feels so good to be alive.

The one beauty of feeling afraid means that you cannot deny your own pulse. Alive, alive, alive. You are still here through all these loops of time. Breathing. Alive.

[with big and steady breaths]

It feels good to be alive.

It feels good to be alive.

It feels good to be alive.

It feels good to be alive.

It feels good to be alive.

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