Pat Taub
GUEST POST by EMMA MACAILLEN
I am unsure that I ever find my bliss. I think it finds me. I do sense that there are preconditions in order for it to present itself. Perhaps I need to get out of my own way in order for that to happen, or at least “out of my mind.”
I think bliss is a state of the awakened heart.
I have glimpses of it occasionally. Sometimes it’s a puppy prancing by or a line of geese honking their way south. I love the angelic sound of a baby’s laugh and the way the grandeur of mountains makes me gasp. The riffs of rivers mighty voices lift my heart into elation as does the whispers of trees that are most silent when it snows.
A Maine mountain range which prompts a state of bliss in the author
When she was little, my daughter and I often crawled beneath our favorite pines to catch the flakes filtering down upon our faces. I wondered if our laughter disturbed their quiet meditations, or maybe it helped to ease the growing weight on their shoulders. Or was it that the resinous breath from these conifers lifted the weight of life from mine?
These experiences and more, invite my heart to be present and to fill to overflowing. Remembering the words of Chris Williamson’s song, “filling up and spilling over, it’s an endless waterfall, filling up and spilling over, over all…” Yeah, like that!
At 28, my equine teacher found me. In my strong paternalism, I began to school her in basic dressage, a culmination of years of pony club and dreams. She went along for the ride, until I bought a farm and we could live together. She decided then that we would now refocus our agenda. If I tried to measure out a dressage exercise and teach it to her, she would buck and rear with great undisciplined airs above the ground. So instead, off we would go into the woods and across the fields on lively jaunts.
The author during her equestrian days when her horse led her to bliss
She carried me into unknown fields. I began to trust her implicitly, which was uncharacteristic of me. Through years of dressage we had learned very fine communication. The slightest touch or lean was a signal, but this was another dimension. We were so attuned to one another that we could collaborate on where we were going and how.
Try that at a gallop, bareback with just a rope. It felt like an altered state to me, sacred and holy. It also seemed cellular in nature as if every molecule was alive, vibrating, and knowing immediately what was needed. This was being alive like I’d never before experienced it, whole and right and full.
This state, this bliss, is on a mystical, spiritual plane that lifts me into a place beyond myself, or maybe more deeply into myself, into the mysteries that my heart knows as my truth. It’s warm and teaming with the possibilities of what I know exists as pure goodness, the life force found in everything.
To invite bliss in, I must learn to keep my heart open to my deepest self, to the quiet of listening to other “voices,” and to the rigors of change that these voices awaken in me.
