The Beauty of a Beginner's Mind

BEAUTY . Abstract art aqua marine background with blues greys and magenta by Mark Ross

A beginner’s mind is open to deep truths in life, open hearted and not attached to something in a way that interferes with our destiny.

In the Andean shamanic tradition, this is called walking with beauty. Being present in Munay (love) with a tenderness for all living things. As Keats says in

An Ode to a Grecian Urn 

“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Keats treats beauty not as ornament but as a doorway into deeper understanding — and so is aligned with the non- duality teaching I follow and my Peruvian Shamanism; if we shed the clutter and lighten the mental bandwidth of old stories and experiences we hold on to, we begin to see with a beginner’s mind.

Now I know this might be a scary prospect  and you may be experiencing  some resistance – me too at first and the thing that helped me was looking at how I make meaning in my life. I moved from being caught up in every detail to being the observer of my meaning making. It prevented me from focusing further on the personal thinking I was caught up in.

For example, I had a client who had a huge row with her daughter and the daughter left home suddenly while my client was at work. She came home to am empty house and all trace of her daughter had disappeared. She was devasted, her daughter had gone without a note or sharing where she was. My client experienced grief in that sudden loss, even though her daughter was only 7 miles away with a new flat mate. She told me iot felt as though she had died. That was the way she perceived it at that time.

The mother made meaning from every conversation in the row and before , and piled on all the past worries since the daughter learned to walk. She was distraught and overwhelmed when she arrived to our session.

There is a, inner space ( a doorway into deeper understanding) before we make meaning out of all this content, our inner  spirit or wisdom is here and is free of all the heavy meaning we give to life. We come into harmony and ease with it. The Qu'ero call this ayni or right relationship.

Ayni as a Way of Being

• When we are in Ayni with all living beings, Munay (love) becomes the guiding principle.

• Reactions rooted in fear, anger, or overwhelm dissolve away.

• A greater capacity to create and to do good becomes available to us.

• Our true creative being ends the victim thinking we get caught up in, like the Mum in my example.

This is pure unconditional Love (not romantic love – pure Love). From this space everything we created falls away again, dissolving back into the life energy it was created from.  Now we sense that we are in ayni – in right relationship with ourselves, humankind, and the earth.

Key Points on Ayni, Destiny, and Truth

I want to begin with a few lines from Lord Byron’s poem  She Walks in Beauty as a reminder that beauty is not something we look at, but something we walk in.

‘She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies…’

When Byron wrote this, he wasn’t describing a woman so much as a state of being — a harmony where the dark and the bright meet without conflict.This is the state we enter when we come into right relationship with our destiny, with the sacred truth, and with the earth.This is the beginning of Ayni a state of being Love.

In Right Relationship With Our Being

• Aligning with the sacred allows our deep wisdom to be heard.

• In this alignment, wounds and traumas become the content of our experience rather than an identity.

• Past stories lose their grip; future fantasies loosen. We come into balance.

• This state of harmony is known in Andean tradition as Ayni.

Walking the beauty way is to surrender(or not become attached to ) the experiences of life and yes that even means my grief for my son Ant. It took me a while to see this , but I have. I noticed my attachment to being a grieving Mum at first, then I completely surrendered the self and asked for help to see this. I would say I am still learning the final part to surrender all.

 Rupert Spira in his The Heart of Prayer book talks about surrendering in the same way, although it isn't quite this linear.We surrender:

·       Firstly, our resistance

·       Secondly, we surrender the one (self) who resists.

·       Thirdly we surrender the surrendering.

This is what I have been learning about in Rupert’s work, The Way of Mastery and A Course in Miracles. It feels easier and lighter in my grief because I have grief, but it is not my becoming a Mum in grief. I have silver hair and brown eyes, but it isn’t who I am.

I AM.

Becoming something adds another tenuous layer of trying hard, more content, more experiences to live up to or live with. When we understand surrendering, not a letting go but as being without all that content.

“As a result, right at the very heart of the experience, we find the peace and joy.”  Rupert Spira. Ibid.

We were born with beginners mind, that curious way of being in life divested of those personal qualities that we invent along life's path - the content of our experience. When we remember this we do find peace and joy.