The Legend of the Sky Maiden

Art by Selina Fenech

One of the best pieces of information that I learned helped me to discover a deeper meaning of meditation and the power we already have to liberate ourselves from destructive  pattern conditioning.  I heard Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist explain what happens when an emotion is triggered within us. She called it the 90 second rule. Saying that it takes 90 seconds for that chemical reaction to flush through our body and if we continue to feel that emotion, it is because we are the ones choosing to re-circuit that feeling. Surrey Mindfulness. 

Our thoughts are that which we deliberately choose whether we want to admit it or not. It is through my meditation practice that I was able to catch the reoccurring storylines that fueled my self-destructive patterns. 

As we are currently dealing with COVID-19 and the repercussions of it, the mind can easily fall into reruns of the past.( i.e. our life we had before this pandemic). Our lives will never be the same after this and we are now evolving into a new norm.  We can decide to see the things we don't have, once had, or wish we had and replay that script. Or maybe we decide to see that we have come this far and have gained so much from birth till now that we are indeed quite abundant.  Can you see an empty box or a full box? 

Here is the story.

'The members of a certain West African tribe tell the legend of the Sky Maiden.
It happened once that the people of the tribe noticed their cows were giving less milk than they used to. They could not understand why. 
 
One young man volunteered to stay up all night to see what might be happening. After several hours of waiting in the darkness, hiding in a bush, he saw something extraordinary. A young woman of astonishing beauty rode a moonbeam down from heaven to earth, carrying a large pail. She milked the cows, filled her pail, and climbed back up the moonbeam to the sky. The man could not believe what he had seen. 
 
The next night, he set a trap near where the cows were kept, and when the maiden came down to milk the cows, he sprang the trap and caught her. "Who are you?" he demanded. 

She explained that she was a Sky Maiden, a member of a tribe that lived in the sky and had no food of their own. It was her job to come to earth at night and find food. She pleaded with him to let her out of the net and she would do anything he asked. The man said he would release her only if she agreed to marry him. "I will marry you," she said, "but first you must let me go home for three days to prepare myself. Then I will return and be your wife." He agreed. 

Three days later she returned, carrying a large box. "I will be your wife and make you very happy," she told him, "but you must promise me never to look inside this box." 

For several weeks they were very happy together. Then one day, while his wife was out, the man was overcome with curiosity and opened the box. There was nothing in it. When the woman came back, she saw her husband looking strangely at her and said, "You looked in the box, didn¹t you? I can¹t live with you anymore." 

"Why?" the man asked. "What's so terrible about my peeking into an empty box?" 

"I'm not leaving you because you opened the box. I thought you probably would. I'm leaving you because you said it was empty. It wasn't empty; it was full of sky. It contained the light and the air and the smells of my home in the sky. When I went home for the last time, I filled that box with everything that was most precious to me to remind me of where I came from. 
 
How can I be your wife if what is most precious to me is emptiness to you?'

by rvcbard blog