#8 Joyful Transformation 2021

Joy in the World

The Month of Joyful Transformation

October 8 – November 16, 2021

“Turn Me To Gold”

Kabir exhausted
Many yogic alchemies
But found none
Like the Lord’s love:

If even one drop
Enters your body
Your whole being
Turns to gold.

-From Andrew Harvey’s

Turn Me To Gold: 108 Poems of Kabir

The Great Goddess – that Beingness whom I call The Lady — offers Herself to us majestically during these forty days of awe and mystery.   Her beautiful child, whom we call our Earth, undergoes transformations of many kinds at this holy time of the year. She also invites us humans to envision and engage the transformative power that this season demonstrates so elegantly. So generously. Kabir calls this power “the Lord’s love.” I enjoy that idea, and also enjoy thinking of this autumnal time as “Lady Wisdom’s cherishing” which can also turn us to gold.

In this Northern Hemisphere, Earth prepares to nestle down to hold fast through the coming months while also pouring out her harvest gifts. The fruits and vegetables and crops have transformed themselves from potent seeds to sheer deliciousness and goodness. They manage this miracle through the alchemical gifts of air and sun and earth, plus human labor and attentiveness.

Watching the leafy trees do their alchemy — withdrawing one chemistry while allowing others to shine forth — offers a gentle teaching about the work joy can do by turning our sorrows, pains, harsh memories to gold. And augmenting our delights by turning them into eternal wonder and gratitude. Gold, indeed.

Here’s what I mean:

1. Recognize that sorrows and pains generally coagulate around subjects that were formerly things we cared for, even loved. The idea and ideals of democracy, or justice, or equity. For example: Spending too much energy feeling distressed, or angry, or enraged about current conditions obviously is of no help to the ideas themselves, or to the people who deserve and need them.
2. Just as the chlorophyll in autumn leaves shrinks away from the leaf, we can withdraw the energies of upset from these subjects, and listen carefully (led by the joy which is always present whether we feel it or not) for new chemistries to rise up, get stronger. To turn us to gold. Chemistries of prayer, of love, of honoring those ideals themselves, and also praying for, loving, honoring the countless numbers of people striving so gallantly to hold those alive.
3. Deliberately focus on leaching out the chemistries of hatred and fear, no matter what the subject. Withdraw them from your body and your heart and mind. Send them into the earth where they can be completely transformed.
4. Pull up the chemistries that suffuse you with beauty, poignance, deep caring, enchantment. Infuse your previously heavy thoughts, ideas, projects, wishes, with these nectars, and sense them turning, like the tree leaves, into radiant arrays of color: red, orange, magenta, and gold. And let the wind carry them to bless and refresh the world.
5. For your happy thoughts — memories or plans of and for joy, friendship, partnership, love, success and high play– place each precious one before your mind’s eye, and imagine coating it with a thin layer of golden joy and golden gratitude. Do this with infinite care and caring. Add precious jewels to enhance each thought, idea, memory. Then place them as gifts upon the high altar of your heart. This one action can fill these forty days with exquisite golden pleasure.

Joy in the World

And in me.

Praise. Praise. Praise.