Meetups in Meditations

Would you care to have a gander at my two beloved sisters and their hubbies in Maui?
Joan posted photos to our SISTER LINES blog.
It just warmed the cockles o' me 'eart, it did!

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I promised to tell you about my "intellectual self," and so I shall.
There may be no more dull reading than someone else's meditations, however, so I'll try to keep it brief.

I was reading a book called Huna. It's about a way of relating to the self, I guess, and originates in Hawaii. Anyway, there is nothing unusual about the advice to get yourself into a deeply relaxed state and then imagine yourself going to certain places — for instance, to your favourite beach, which is one of the places I commonly go in my mind to meet up with ... man, how to explain this so it doesn't sound too flaky? — in order to have a conversation with various parts of oneself or even with your dog or another person or someone who has passed or your spiritual guides or fairies. Shamans do this all the time; they go within to get where they need to go.
Hm.
Anyway.
I'm trying. If you don't do visualizations yourself, this may seem too intangible. If you do, you have no trouble recognizing what I'm talking about and knowing the value of it.
It's communication on a whole different level, and although it takes place entirely in your imagination, there is a quality of truth to it that can (and has, at times) take my breath away. I have even been brought to tears of joy by such an experience, once.

According to Huna, there are aspects of ourselves that we need to relate to consciously, and we can do this by reaching a meditative state (just some deep, slow breathing for a couple minutes) and then imagining ourselves going to the place where these aspects of ourselves can be spoken with.

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"... emotionally withholding people ..."
 "... there's an elaborate caste system out there ..."
Joni Mitchell talking about Saskatchewan.
And more:
MUCH MUSIC INTIMATE AND INTERACTIVE

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As I was saying ...

Huna advises us to make intimate contact with our inner self, our emotional self, our mental or intellectual self, and so on. Each serves a different function, though they are all part of each person.

I decided to not just read the book, but to put its suggestions into practice. The first time I did one of these meditations, there were interesting and moving results.

My inner self appeared as me at age three or four, and she was thrilled to see me in the particular landscape where I imagined meeting her. We joined hands and danced around and hugged each other with pure delight. And then there was conversation. And over time she has changed appearance; sometimes she looks like that exuberant little girl, and at others she is a very large and powerful being, and at still others she is a long-haired woman wearing glowing robes, and sometimes she is a type of nature who cannot be seen, is only felt.

I made the trip to meet my emotional self. She was more difficult to find. While my inner, child self had rushed forward to greet me, my emotional self had to be sought through a dark tropical forest. When she did show herself, she was cautious, shy, reticent, as if she didn't trust me. This surprised me, as I think of my emotional self as being obvious, visible. Ha! I had to think again. This emotional self was elusive.

My intellectual self had a room just across the hall from my emotional self. She was quick to call "Come in!" and when I entered, she had risen from her desk near an airy screen door and was advancing across the floor to meet me.  She had hair like Andy Warhol, like Haystack Calhoun (not the wrestler, but the children's book character whose hair looked like, well, a haystack). She was thin and bony, wearing a brightly coloured striped sweater. She told me I had an "Irish intellect." I didn't know what that was, so in the days to follow I asked a few friends and put the keywords in quotation marks into the Google search engine. No luck. It wasn't till a couple years later, when I put the question to WISE WEB WOMAN, who happens to come originally from Ireland, that I got my answer: it's intuition.

Since then I've come to know these "parts" of myself as individuals. All in my head, of course ... and yet it seems to me that each encounter has been absolutely truthful and more than a little enlightening.