Bats Flying In
25 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
A good friend of mine is going through what I would consider a highly alert and conscious phase of transition… She has made a conscious decision to shift the path beneath her feet in a new direction toward greater authenticity after many years of being led by her ego and monkey-mind as so many of us do. One of the tools of assistance she is embracing is an in-depth massage therapy and healing realease process with a well trained and skilled practitioner. Yesterday, after completing a particularly freeing session, she drove home to discover a bat flying around in her living room. She reacted to the bat in her former manner of moving through life, reacting with panic and desperation to kill and remove the creature, assuming it was a threat to her. As soon as I heard her account I did a little research and discovered that the great shamans say that when a bat flies into your life it is a symbol of rebirth, moving from darkness toward light. I shared this with her and she chose to see the message as profound and decided not to kill the bat. I am hopeful she and her gentle-spirited husband will find way to assist the bat out of the home with gratitude and blessings.
This has really made me reflect this morning on how often messages and messengers fly into our life only to be met with our automatic rejection, disgust, dismissal or panic. We so readily slip into the old ways of unconscious reaction rather than alert, conscious, gentle observation… and then mindful response when needed.
I laugh at myself writing about this because I noticed that I was slipping just yesterday into my former tendencies when I had a full blown, mindless reaction to being served with a subpoena to testify in a case involving a former young client. I automatically went into angry-mode when served with the subpoena, thinking only of how this was completely not supposed to happen and this was going to wreck my entire weekend and inconvenience me thoroughly! I didn’t catch myself right away. In fact, it took a couple of hours of complaining to others, and frantically seeking legal counsel or supervisory suggestions of how to get out of this. It wasn’t until I was on the phone with the prosecuring attorney who surpised me with her patience and compassion for my anger at being called with such late notice after having been previously released. In this phone conversation in which this attorney (yes an attorney with compassion!) allowed me to feel and express that frustration fully without reaction and with sincere understanding, that “gentle observer” inside of me crept up and showed me that maybe this was all an opportunity. My anger melted. I began to listen. The attorney offered me a late afternoon time to show up in court and went on to explain how and why my testimony was important. A window of awareness opened. I then realized – without judging or being harsh with myself – that I’d been automatically operating out of unconscious reaction, thinking only of my own inconvenience. Realizing this, everything shifted. I relaxed and I will be ready to appear in court on Monday afternoon.
Perhaps there are bats flying into our lives all the time in different forms. This thing called “rebirth”, moving out of darkness, moving from unconsciousness to an awakened and aware observational state is a process we step in and out of and back into again and again by choosing to return to the awake state.
Here’s to bats in the belfry!
Om Shanti,
Lynn Louise
