There’s an action in the movie version of A Wrinkle in Time called “tessering.” It’s supposed to be like a wavy time and place machine that transports you through the universe. When the main character defeats the darkness of “It,” she gains her own power and conviction to tesser them home. Now that she’s found the light, the tessering process becomes more graceful. She floats between streams of color and sparkles as she’s in the glowing bounce of a lava lamp. She smiles as if she’s high.
For the record, I’ve never done drugs before (unless you count alcohol). Sounds a little out of control for me. But this is how meditation feels like to me — a natural high where I loosen my grip. When I first started meditating, I would nod off. I’d read all the books and even tried to keep my eyes half-open. Maybe it was because I wasn’t fully engaged with the rest of my life as a broke freelancer, wrinkling away in my own time. I was too lazy and undisciplined. Over time though, it helped to have great anchor teachers, especially when I started working for a meditation startup called The Path. But even then, sometimes I would drop too quickly.
But when I spent nearly a month as a meditation and yoga teacher at Bali Silent Retreat, I’d get up at 5 a.m., prepare, sneak into the kitchen to put my hand in the cookie jar, and “hold space” from 6-6:45 in silent guidance, to be followed by an hour-long morning yoga session led by yours truly. Bali is a magical place anyways, but with the people who didn’t want to chat at all and stay in the own headspace, I started to experience something.
Here, seated cross-legged in a hexagonal open room with blankets and sprays to ward off the early-bird mosquitoes, I started to, in effect, hallucinate. Behind the lids of my eyes, I’d focus on a third eye that started to take shape. Sometimes the eye was big or would throb while growing, as if my eyes were trying to focus. Then I’d transport, or tesser, into breezy swaths of purple or blue or pink across my dark field of non-vision. I had to stay present without trying too hard. If my attention wandered into more of a busy conscious state, I’d gently come back to my present breath, because in the back of my mind I knew I would get snapped out of this beautiful, otherworldly wandering.
Meditation is like soft blocks you build up in reserve for times when obstacles come up for you
ie so you don’t get annoyed or disheartened or whatever. It served as a portal years ago overseas when I first heard God’s voice in my head. And years later in 2018, I’d be silent and still enough to hear it in whispering boom again. Recently in fact, through the shadows of trees, God would whisper, “Go.”
Originally published at konakafe.com