Since we didn't set a theme for this week, I'm just going to tell a story. (As it turns out, this is a fairly long story. Sorry!)
My high school used to have this event every year called Stay in School for School to support a charity called Wadeng Wings of Hope. Anyone who made a certain minimum donation to the charity could stay overnight at the school. There were always a few 'poverty awareness' type activities in the evening, but for the most part we just had the run of the school to do whatever we wanted.
When I was in grade 12 they introduced a few workshops in the evening that we could go to. I don't remember what most of them were, but I think there was yoga and tai chi and maybe acupuncture? Those sorts of health and wellness type things. We were supposed to go to two different ones, but I went to the guided meditation workshop, and the guy running it said we could stay and do it a second time, and everyone did.
So basically what happened was there were all these squares of felt, and we were supposed to take the one that we felt the most connection with, and he explained what they all meant, and there were also these 'power crystals' and we had to like rub them or something. I don't really remember. Anyway, after all the explanation, we laid down on the floor, and the guy was playing a little hand drum. There were four different drum beats. The first one was to go in: we were supposed to envision walking through a field, finding some kind of hole in the ground, walking through a tunnel, coming out into a different place. The second one was for while we were there: we were supposed to be looking for our animal guide. We would know which animal it was because we would see it three times. The third drum beat was to call us back: when we heard it we knew it was time to leave. The fourth one was just a fast running beat while we were coming back.
It was really hard to get into at first, because I had to focus so hard to picture everything and it felt like I was forcing it so much. By the time I got out of the tunnel, though, my subconscious had taken over and I wasn't controlling anything but my own actions within it. My tunnel came out into the woods, so I started to wander around. My first meditation was kind of rushed and weird. I don't really remember a lot of it, I was just running around through the woods looking for animals. I remember seeing a toad, an owl, some sort of bobcat or lynx or something, and a mother skunk with two babies. I'm pretty sure there were others, but those were the ones that stood out.
After we all came back from our meditations, we went around the circle and said what our animal was and told as much about our meditation as we felt like sharing. My skunk family didn't count because it was definitely three different animals and not the same animal three times, so I technically hadn't found my animal yet. The guy leading the workshop asked me which animal I felt like I connected with the most, which was the toad; it had caught my eye and looked it me in a way that felt like it knew everything about me. He asked me what I thought it would have said to me if it could say anything, and even though I had barely thought about the toad until that moment, out of nowhere I realized that it would tell me "everything's going to be okay."
On the second meditation I tried to go back and find my toad. It was enormous and orange, and it had been sitting on a flat rock next to a little pond. I got back to the pond, but the toad wasn't there. I looked into the pond and there were a zillion tadpoles in there. I carried on to keep looking for the toad somewhere else, but somehow came out at the pond from the same direction I had come from before. The toad was there this time, and it didn't say anything, but I somehow knew what it wanted me to do. I laid down on my stomach at the edge of the pond to look closely at it. The tadpoles were gone now, and I just laid there looking at bubbles coming up out of the mud at the bottom of the pond and floating to the surface. I stayed there until we got called back, and as I got up and started to run the toad spoke to me. It said "slow down."
That ended up being a very important experience in my life so far. "Everything's going to be okay" ended up becoming a bit of a mantra for me after that, and "slow down" was advice that I followed for the next couple of years. It's sort of a weird thing to talk about, telling people that a significant event in my life was talking to a big orange toad in my subconscious, but it's true. It doesn't influence me as much any more, but sometimes when I'm really confused about life and having a rough time, I wish I could meditate again so I could go to my toad for some more advice.
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