An Inner Light
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(Lose the Net by Rasmus Faber Courtesy of Epidemic Music)
It never fails to amaze me good questions lead naturally to good answers, and that beautiful questions lead to even better answers! When we open ourselves to the things we don’t know, we’ve opened the doors to discovery and wonder and greater understanding.
I’m Scott Lennox and you’re listening to The Beautiful Question, a consideration of things that matter every day.
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As light illuminates the world around us, it arrests our attention and captures our imagination. Yet, why do we so often overlook the light within ourselves? What is that light and how do we allow it to spread?
Join me this week as we re-visit these and other questions that could serve to liberate us even more. Stay with me.
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As I ponder and make sketches and write notes in preparation to paint a portrait of an angel reaching for the moon with one wing as she gazes at it, I’m once again thinking about the nature of light in all its forms, including the light in us. Light, after all, is one of the things we’ve been fascinated by since the dawn of humanity.
Angel Wing carved by Scott Lennox
Angel Wing carved by Scott Lennox
We stop to watch it changing at sunrise or sunset. We grow spellbound as we gaze into a crackling fire. We become transfixed as we stand in the dark looking up at planets and shooting stars. We tell stories and write poems and songs about the light of the moon. Think of the heart-touching beauty Debussy created with Clair de Lune or Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
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At any age, our hearts leap in childlike wonder at the sight of fireflies on a late spring or summer evening. We gasp as a single shaft of sunlight pierces the clouds at the end of a storm. We marvel at the halo formed around someone when the sun is low and directly behind them.
Something primal in us knows that we’re seeing the energy of life luminously revealing itself, and that in a very real sense, we’re looking at the most essential part of ourselves. We’re looking at our true nature.
But unlike fireflies or the rising of the harvest moon or the radiant wonder of shooting stars, the light we carry within us isn’t seen with the eye. It’s found in the things we think and in the movement of our emotions. It’s revealed in the things we do and the words we speak, and occasionally in the things we create and leave behind when we are gone, including the love we shared.
All of those things are manifestations of the light in us.
At the most fundamental level, our luminosity is found in the vibrating and scintillating nature of what we are—in the fact of our existence. Look deep enough and you find that light is the basic building block that makes us what we are. Everything else about us spills out from that source, especially what is luminous.
Yet, how often our own habits of thinking and emotion and behavior get in the way and block the light in us.
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I’ve likened my own habits of thought and behavior to the glass filters on my late grandfather’s nautical quadrant. Long before radar or global positioning satellites, sextants and quadrants were the devices sailors used to plot their position on the open ocean. Looking through the instrument’s eyepiece, experienced navigators could focus on a star or on the sun and take a numerical reading. Then, comparing that reading to the previous one, they could calculate latitude and longitude with great precision.
To prevent damaging the eye, a series of colored glass filters were mounted to the instrument to reduce the intensity of the sun’s light. In fact, if all the filters were put in place at one time, no light could be seen at all, regardless how bright the source was.
My self-defeating thinking has often worked like those glass filters. When I think and act that way, I’m not blocking myself from seeing the light of the sun but blocking my awareness of my own luminosity—the essence of my humanity. If I tell myself that I’m not good enough, or that I’m never going to be successful, or that I’m not as good or smart or valuable or capable as other people, I can’t see my own light at all.
None of us can.
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Distorted thoughts like that always produce a diminished sense of self that leads to suffering in a variety of forms from numbness to depression to self-termination. The problem isn’t that we lack personal worth or luminosity or goodness, it’s that we’ve blocked our perception of it.
Yet, isn’t it good to know that at any moment, when we relax our guardedness and silence the dark voice of our inner critic a bit, we return to being flooded with light from the inside out.
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A couple of years ago, a friend sent an article citing research done at the University of Kassel in Germany. It showed that the chest area of the average person emits twenty photons of light per second. In contrast to that, the same area of someone who meditates on their heart center emits a hundred thousand photons per second—a five-thousand-fold increase in luminosity brought about by quietly and intentionally focusing on it.
Imagine what will happen when you accept that you are made of light—right now, exactly as you are—and you allow that light to stream out of you though the liberating things you think and do and feel.
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This week’s Beautiful Questions are offered to help you do just that.
Question One: As you sit quietly, what do you notice about the ways you’ve been blocking your own inner light and keeping it from moving freely?
Question Two: As you consciously choose to step out of your own way and allow your inner light to become liberated and more vibrant, where and in what ways will you focus that light?
Question Three: For the next week, are you willing to spend a few minutes a day quietly envisioning the Light in you becoming stronger?
As you do, write and tell me about what happens. I’m always willing to listen, and I love standing in Light with you.
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As I say each time,
My Light with Your Light!
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I’m happy we can engage this way as we consider things that matter and what to do about them. If nothing else, I hope you feel inspired to look more deeply at ways of caring for yourself.
You can be further inspired by visiting my friends at Kosmos Journal. That’s K O S M O S Journal. Their mission is to inform, inspire, and engage global transformation in harmony with all life. You can easily find them online at Kosmos Journal dot O R G.
And at thebeautifulquestion.com, you can read the illustrated transcript of each podcast as you listen. We’ve also included an archive of all previous podcasts, including guided relaxation audios that can help you practice letting go on a daily basis.
If you find these podcasts useful, I encourage you to share them and tell others about them. That’s a great way of helping me get a voice of calm and collaboration and balance and encouragement out into the world. It’s a great way of spreading peace.
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I’m Scott Lennox, and this has been The Beautiful Question.
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The Beautiful Question is a One Light production, written, produced, and engineered by Scott Lennox at HeartRock Studios in Fort Worth, Texas, as a way of paying forward to life, being fully present, becoming better engaged with things that truly matter in a complex world, and committing to a healthier future for all of us.