When Mindfulness Becomes a Spiritual Homecoming

Present moments in our own backyard

On the Yellow Brick Road I call life, I travel my path of spiritual homecoming rather than an awakening. It is a path of learning to believe in myself as I (and so were you) was born with the innate power and energy to accomplish miracles. Yes, there are continual moments of awakening; however, the true path is coming home to the spirit and essence of who I truly am, and you truly are.

I am blessed that my highest power spoke to me over thirty years ago through The Wizard of Oz and still does today. It allowed me to see beyond my limiting beliefs about GOD by taking me on the creative and fabulous journey of staying young-in-heart.

Ironically, people often view me just as a devoted fan of the movie, but it goes much deeper than that. The storyline resonates within my subconscious and heals my life in often unexplainable ways. The movie is the creative prompt that gives on giving.

I have always been an artist, but one of my biggest struggles is I can’t envision it with my mind alone. I need visual prompts to open the flood gates of my imagination. Every drawing I have ever done started with a tangible picture that my spirit would morph into something beautiful. I use the visuals, often created by me, even within my writing to focus on my vision behind the story. It is like the kickstart to or catalyst of the creative juices. Isn’t that what the spirit is? Each human, whether you see yourself as an animal on a spiritual path or a soul seeking human experiences, is a creative being. Divine oneness connects the creative energies of all of us. Our thoughts and feelings are creations of our lives, but they are inspired or placed upon us by others. It is our choice how we use the energy.

Our Yellow Brick Roads and foundations start the moment our energy takes on a tangible human form. Fed with the beliefs and guidance of parents, grandparents, and societal power structures, we align our energies to match theirs. Often, these put rules and limits and pressures on our spirit to comply and fit in. We sense our need to connect, so we try to force alignment with those around us. As we continue on our paths, we realize that each brick, turn, and crossroad (1) gives us a choice to align with our spirit or ignore it for the false sense of belonging. When we begin to surrender to the fact that each brick provides an energetic choice, we can see our limiting beliefs and begin to trust alignment to occur naturally — one brick, one moment at a time. (1) (My MWC Death at the Crossroads)

L. Frank Baum, the author of the series of Oz books, possessed creative energy ahead of his time. Born in 1856, he lived a life of many creative roles — writer, actor, singer, and entrepreneur. To his credit are 14 novels in the Oz series. (Side note: the place called OZ came into being because of a file cabinet. He looked at the drawer labeled O-Z.) The rest of his bibliography is impressive, with an additional 41 novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and a minimum of 42 scripts. At the age of 12, he returned home from a couple of years at military school after a severe punishment for daydreaming. Upon his return, he started a local newspaper, of sorts, with his brother. Theatre was his lifetime fascination but led to numerous financial disasters. Later, with his novels, his intention became to update the stories of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to more modern times. He felt their fairytales and stories used too much violence as moral teachings. Perhaps that came from his own experience of punishment for being the daydreamer he was. His personal spiritual path evolved into Theosophy and Buddhism with a focus on morality rather than religion. Scholars have suggested that the Yellow Brick Road actually metaphorically refers to the Golden Path of Buddhism.

Naturally, many people struggle with the concept of GOD, especially as taught by religion.

Religions have been designed to be believed and thus construct God as a deliverer of human wants if we do as we are told, which God is not. So people either blindly believe in God because the lie of what God is is believable, or reject God because the God defined by religions cannot co-exist with the reality that most people do not get what they want, or are not actually happy, and a world full of seemingly senseless tragedy and really bad things happening to good people. — Source

In our world today, with so much tragedy and trauma, it isn’t easy to keep hope and faith alive, especially with something we can’t see, along with the fact that we have become a society that often runs away from feelings. However, hope and faith are wholly based on and enhance positive energetic feelings. Hope more than springs eternal — hope and optimism are fountains of youthful longevity. (See this Dr Mehmet Yildiz story).

Along the same lines of faith and hope based on energy, I view mindfulness the same way. The definitions and practices of mindfulness and emotional intelligence often intertwine within each person’s personal energy. If I could create a different word for mindfulness, it would be momentfulness. These moments fill us with the energy of three — past, present, and future; mind, body, and soul; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; or Mother, Maiden, and Crone that bring fullness. The dash between beginning and end is our wholeness intertwining all the parts of the energy of thoughts, feelings, and fears. Having faith and hope is the path of least resistance to believing in the magical energy within.

Society today often races to instant gratifications to find happiness, despite numerous psychological studies showing the value of delayed gratification. We skip over the beginnings, the underlying meanings of techniques and practices to get to the end result. However, the magic lies in the history- the evolution of the people and the stories that brought them to their personal purpose and increasingly approaching enlightenment — the intentions and tenacity to overcome obstacles to create something better. Beyond emotional intelligence and brain intelligence, there is spiritual intelligence.

Danah Zohar defined 12 principles underlying spiritual intelligence:

· Self-awareness: Knowing what I believe in and value and what deeply motivates me.

· Spontaneity: Living in and being responsive to the moment.

· Being vision- and value-led: Acting from principles and deep beliefs and living accordingly.

· Holism: Seeing larger patterns, relationships, and connections; having a sense of belonging.

· Compassion: Having the quality of “feeling-with” and deep empathy.

· Celebration of diversity: Valuing other people for their differences, not despite them.

· Field independence: Standing against the crowd and having one’s own convictions.

· Humility: Having the sense of being a player in a larger drama, of one’s true place in the world.

· Tendency to ask fundamental “Why?” questions: Needing to understand things and get to the bottom of them.

· Ability to reframe: Standing back from a situation or problem and seeing the bigger picture or wider context.

· Positive use of adversity: Learning and growing from mistakes, setbacks, and suffering.

· Sense of vocation: Feeling called upon to serve, to give something back.

To me, that is the intelligence behind the Wizard of Oz. A spiritual path spun from a book written by a man who followed where his intuition led him. It invoked others to do the same for the classic movie adaptation. In the beginning scenes, Dorothy sits with a background of black and white stormy skies and sings of a land beyond the rainbow of vibrant colors. The film studio executives wanted to cut the song, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, as they felt it slowed down the film. An associate producer threatened to quit unless the song stayed. Composer Harold Arlen and Lyrist Yip Harburg embraced their childlike spirits and intuition while writing the song. Arlen was known for his octave leaps and incorporated a child’s piano exercises into the music. Harburg said the lyrics came in a burst of creative energy while he and his wife traveled to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He had his wife pull off the side of the road as he looked to the sky and wrote the lyrics to the song. The two became stuck for an ending and called in Ira Gershwin to help with the finish. Why, oh why, can’t I, is said to be placed as a question simply because it had been a long evening. The creative energies melded together out of moments of intuition between the three and produced a song that still lives on today. It plays into everyday moments of desire, at one time or another, to grasp at the hope of overcoming troubles and fulfill the dreams of a better tomorrow.

Further, the momentum of the associations throughout the characters, scenes, music, and playfulness builds an existence of spirituality and the power of mindfulness throughout. The spiral at the beginning of the Yellow Brick Road represents life as we travel along with the changes and growth. It is not the linear process as we are lead to believe. The scarecrow with his self-doubt and negative self-talk regarding his thoughts and mental intelligence. The Tin Man, with his lack of a heart representing feelings trapped within a suit of armor blocking the practice of emotional intelligence. The Cowardly Lion, with his fear of everything masked by his response to fight by “Put Em Up! Put Em Up” or flee as he did with Toto or the first encounter with the Wizard, leaves no room for the energy of spiritual intelligence to shine.

Mindfulness is blending our awareness and attention to our current moments of reality without fearing judgmental responses along a slow spiral of change to journey back to our inner energy. It shows us the differences that are, in fact, a part of us we keep hidden or haven’t brought forward yet, that we see in others. It is within those differences our spiritual homecoming brings us a sense of belonging and connection.

The magic spark of the Ruby Red Slippers ignites the energy of three within each moment. If you go looking for your heart’s desires, you need not look any further than your own backyard, your inner spirit, because if it isn’t there, it was never lost. You only need to use your mental, emotional, and spiritual intelligence to follow a path to believe it for yourself.

Here are a few other sparks of magic that you might enjoy