Most of Me Didn’t Move.
Field Notes 20260618 - Thursday
After a deep moment of quiet contemplation from the previous evening, I woke up early this morning with several loose threads having resolved and woven into my reality as integrated and whole. As good of a feeling as this is, immediately after is the default next step: I settled 4 questions, now I have 8 new questions. And the best part? That’s what we crave, forward motion and a whole lot more to discover and understand.
Today’s Field Notes illustration:
“The Devil.” The Devil is the fifteenth card of the major arcana and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck’s image of bondage and appetite. Pamela Colman Smith renders a horned, bat-winged figure perched on a dark panelled door, an inverted pentagram set between its horns, one hand raised palm-out and the other lowering an inverted torch toward the ground. Two small-horned figures, a man and a woman, stand chained by the neck to a ring at the foot of the door — his tail ending in flame, hers in a cluster of fruit — and the chains hang loose, the loops wide enough to slip over their heads. The card speaks to attachment, materiality, and the weight that seems to hold us fast. As a meditation focus, its lesson is less about the force that binds than about the slack in the chain: the loop loose enough to lift off, worn because it is believed, not because it holds. The chain hangs loose, and the door was never locked.
Afternoon
Meditation
- 30 minutes.
- Expand App, timer section, F12 (expanded awareness).
While contemplating what my focus should be for today’s session, I realized, like I have many times this year, that it’s been a while since I’ve done “release & recharge.” This is the shadow work meditation The Gateway Experience provides, and the only one that says outright: do it every day. I haven’t been doing it every day…
So today that’s exactly what I did. Before I’d even started, still in prep, it came on its own: limiting beliefs, it’s limiting beliefs. I ran the rest of prep, settled into F10 (mind awake, body asleep), where the exercise is traditionally done, and went to work. The F12 binaural was running underneath, but I never climbed up to it — ran out of time.
It ran rough in patches, awareness sliding out and back, but my trusty body checks kept me on track, and lately they seem to fire more often right when I start to slip, which is a neat feature to have developing on its own.
There was one big item I’d let slide over the last six months, and prep had already named it. We all carry them; most don’t realize just how many they actually hold. The insidious part is that they build into your worldview; they become part of the landscape and “just how things are.”
Today’s was the belief that the changes I’ve worked on and integrated over the last few years, especially at the end of last year, have transmuted me into a different person. That part isn’t the problem. It’s all true. The problem comes when the change claims more than it has, when it turns into the belief that by virtue of it, the way I operate in metaphysical spaces must have changed too: my access, my process, all of it. That is the limiting belief.
Once it’s named, it doesn’t hold. Of course, some things changed, but most of me didn’t move. My character is the one I’ve had since childhood, my preferences are the same down to peanut butter and chocolate for dessert, I’m still attracted to my wife. The change was real, but local — it doesn’t get to claim the whole instrument.
Which is the resolution, and it’s simpler than picking a side. I don’t need to believe the change reached my access, and I don’t need to believe it didn’t. Both are beliefs. I just need to be without the limiting belief. If access did shift, I’ll figure it out; I only have to stay open to it. If it’s the same, then there was nothing to figure out. Either way, the belief was the only thing in the way.
