I have just come home from a weekend of meditation and creativity. My daughter is tucked in, I have made a cup of tea and am now lying on the sofa, landing on the external and internal processes of the previous days. On my stomach lies the cat Berta. She is purring. Her soft fur meets my hands. Silky softness. Her relaxed body and the vibrations from her purring affect my nervous system. I sink a little deeper into the sofa. Berta can be completely relaxed, devoted – like now. And she can be completely focused and purposeful when she goes hunting. I suddenly see her as Yin and Yang. Her white and black fur supports this image and while I maintain contact with Berta, internal images from the weekend find their way into the space between us.
First, the loving couple arrives, whom I do not know personally, but whom I – apparently by chance – was allowed to experience in a very brief meeting. The luminous flow between them touched something in me. It still moves me now. Their open faces touched my heart and opened the door to a deeper connection with both the feminine and masculine in myself.
Now again, while I'm lying here on the couch with Berta, it opens.
Then the tree arrives, with which I meditated on the East Jutland ridge in Nørre Snede, or the meeting with the tree itself. Meeting myself through the tree's gaze, without judgment, without agenda, without doing, a gaze of being. My inner self became quietly devoted, without judgment and with breadth both at root and crown. And then suddenly, as if made possible by this very state, a teacher from the past arrived. The Tibetan Dzogchen teacher Longchenpa, whose words were read out, provided clarity in a split second. The two together, the tree and the teacher from the past, conveyed through the contemporary teacher: They became a kind of union of Yin and Yang that created an opening inward. The kind you don't easily forget again.
As I continue to lie there and breathe with the vibrations of the purring Berta, another series of inner experience images from the weekend emerge. All of them revolve around the same theme, which becomes connected through the contact with this black and white cat on my stomach, Yin and Yang, the relationship between light and darkness, the relationship between the feminine and the masculine within and outside myself, the relationship between doing and being, between day and night; the clear starry sky of the nights, the sunshine of the days and blue, blue, blue.
What is clear to me is that the continued work of creating an inner love relationship, a union between Yin and Yang within myself, is crucial to the immersion in practice. Perhaps because if I do not overcome the duality, the contradictions in the many apparent oppositions we create in the mental and linguistic landscapes, then it will be quite impossible to reach the place I long to know – the landscape that the Persian Sufi poet Jalan ad-Din Rumi describes in the words:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
I look at Berta and feel the gratitude towards her, towards the loving couple and towards the tree and the teachers. Sometimes even the briefest encounters with people, with animals, with a tree can leave deep impressions, spin threads, and create paths towards the heart's innermost being.
Perhaps such encounters are also arising in your consciousness right now?
Connection – invisible threads
In many cultures and stories, there is the image of the common thread – a thread of fate that weaves people and events together. Often we only see the threads when we stop. When we listen.
In a time when so much divides us – politically, socially, environmentally – we need, perhaps more than ever, to find what binds us together. The invisible thread that, according to an old Chinese proverb, “can be stretched but not broken.”
At a writing workshop in Kontemplation's blog team, we invited the writers to explore just that.
We started close up. With a single object – a stone, a feather, a seashell – something we could hold in our hands. With open senses we listened to the object’s history, to memories, to nature. From here we wrote freely, investigating and listening.
Here you can read how our writers have let the invisible threads emerge through words – as clues, as testimonies, as small glimpses of the larger context we are all woven into.
is an anthropologist and has written a PhD thesis on life and death processes among the shamanistic Chukchi people living in eastern Siberia. She researches existential themes such as belonging and longing, people's relationships to time, place and space, and the relationship between inner and outer relationships. She is currently investigating, among other things, the relationship of a group of Faroese people to the landscape and the sea through oral narratives.
She teaches mindfulness training, is a supervisor and leads reading groups on the course. Inner practice and working life, and has for many years combined academic work with a personal meditation practice
Jeanette is part of Kontemplation's daily life and practice.
She has broad and multifaceted responsibility in daily operations and a unifying role across courses, retreats and platforms, with a focus on well-being, collaboration and communication.
She has been a regular retreat participant for many years and has been involved in Kontemplation since 2015.
