Sometimes you don’t even need to leave town in order to travel.  New adventures await in many forms, some of which you may not have considered yet.

In Chinese Medicine, we discuss the Liver as not just the anatomic organ known to filter your blood from toxins, but also the area of the body that is connected to your dream state. It is said that when you dream, the part of you leaves your body is called the Hun and it resides in your liver.  The Hun, part of your essence, leaves your body and enters the dream state having lots of grand adventures for the purpose of returning to your body with the memory of your dream travels and the gift that you can glean from these exotic experiences: Vision, Planning, and Insight.

Our dreams often give us a short view and a long view of where we are on our life path.  Dreams can validate that uneasy feeling we have about a new co-worker or our friend’s new boyfriend.  Dreams can gently nudge us towards saying the big “YES” to going to grad school or finally planning that life long dream trip to Europe.  We get to process our unconscious desires, wants, needs, and insecurities in our safe place while we are dreaming.  Often we will see our ex-lover, our spouse, our pets, family and friends in our dreams, sometimes even our deceased loved ones make an long awaited appearance.

The travels we experience in our dreams are meant to give us insight and encouragement to nourish our destiny.  Falling asleep at night allows us the opportunity to dive deep and explore, but so does daily meditation.

Meditation uses the same essence of the liver, the Hun, to travel to ethereal plane and gather insight.  Most of the time, meditation is about letting go of the rational mind, letting go of the mind chatter, the busy brain that talks incessantly about “what are eating for dinner tonight, do you think our co-worker got offended by how we said XYZ, let’s worry about that one family member we have no control over, can you believe she said that?” and so on and so on…

Gracefully allowing oneself to slip into meditation is much more than letting go of the chatty mind, it’s also about what you gain- a sense of ethereal travel, sometimes you actually feel as though you have left your body altogether and come close to kissing the edge of the divine.  Sometimes, I have seen the most beautiful and exotic, the most artistic and mesmerizing scenes of my life while in meditation.  Of course, these visual travels are but a distraction, but they also give some of the best epiphanies and insight possible.

In my meditation travels, I have touched the tip of a mountain top, placing my hands on the Earth causes the planet to rumble and all of the Earth’s beautiful animals come peacefully and quickly to surround my healing hands, still touching the Earth. This experience came to me during a period in my life when I felt very ungrounded.  I had just moved half-way around the country and I was feeling very unsupported in my arrival to a new place, a new business, even though I had lived in that area before.  The unsettled feeling I had been feeling was allowing self-doubt to creep in about my healing gifts and make me reconsider my life path – should I give up the healing arts and go do something more stable?  More reliable, more dependable and just work for someone else?  NO!!!!  I would hate leaving the healing arts, and probably strongly dislike working for someone else.  My vision in my meditation quickly helped bring my mind at ease and quite my Ego that was freaking out big time.

When I have days that drive me crazy I remember moments like the one in meditation, the peace I felt from experiencing being supported by Mother Earth and all of her creatures.  It was from this meditation I also realized (again) that offering healing to people (through acupuncture which is an energetic medicine) ripples out into the world.  Healing spreads through families, communities, through every piece of nature that a person encounters, the peaceful energy continues.

If you’d like to help spread peaceful energy and cultivate your meditation practice, ask Laura about the next meditation group or workshop.

Acupuncture is another avenue for such serene travel, to quite the lower mind and tune in to the softer energy within.  Often when I enter the room, my acupuncture patients will say something like, “wow, I was really out there, somewhere.”  I know the feeling!  Here’s to more travel this summer, whatever your preference for adventure is.