Finding Our Center-Deep

Draw into thy Centre-deep . . . thy Heavens within.
. . . Take present care of the Heavens of your Mind.
Dive into your own Celestiality, and see with what
manner of spirits you are endued: for in them
the Powers do entirely lie for Transformation.

– Jane Leade
From A Fountain of Gardens
1696

How do we find our center-deep? We have hid from it all our days, though it beams upon us like a lighthouse and continually shows us the path to the center. This path of light can be discovered in times of quietness and solitude, when we withdraw from the bustle of life and contemplate who and where we are in the great web of existence, when we still our minds from the spindle of anxiety and redefine our being as a partaker in the vast macrocosm.

In the stillness of our body, mind, and soul, we discover the special spirits who are our guides and helpers on the spiritual path. These spirits are not fantasies or psychological archetypes; they are real, living beings.

Finding out which spiritual helpers we are gifted with is the primary task for those who would seek out their center-deep. All of us have our own spiritual friends – those beings who do not have a human or earthly existence but who nevertheless exist and accompany us. We do not choose them; they and we are drawn to each other according to the gifts we share. They cooperate with us in the work of transformation; for, by our encounters with the spirits of our center-deep, we grow and change as we are accompanied and taught.

Sitting in silence, become aware of your own center-deep. What kind of landscape does it have? Who is there with you? What has drawn you both there?

– Caitlin Matthews
Excerpted from The Celtic Spirit:
Daily Meditations for the Turning Year
HarperSanFrancisco, 1999

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Time to Go Inwards
• Within You
• In the Stillness and Silence of This Present Moment
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• No Other Time, No Other Place
• Today I Will Be Still
• Allow Everything to Rest Right Now
• A Sacred Pause
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• A Season of Listening
• Eckhart Tolle on Silence and Stillness
• A Prayer of Anchoring
• Cultivating Stillness
• Inner Peace
• The Source Is Within You
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Centered Life as An Advent Life
• “Call Upon Those You Love”
• Mistwalking
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• Forever Oneness
• “Window, Mind, Thought, Air and Love”
• To Dream, to Feel, to Listen

Image: Saaxiib Qurux Badan (“Beautiful Friend”), Minneapolis, MN – Michael J. Bayly (7/26/23).