This morning marks the second occasion on which I gaze for 12 minutes and 10 seconds because I have rewound my experiment by a week and am doing the entire twelfth minute for a second time to make up for a few missed days. I went to the same railing by the edge of the water down the road my sister’s house and watched as the glowing orange frisbee hurled itself in slow motion toward the sky, still hunted and swarmed by gnats, but this time I didn’t care. I was reconnected to the sun, and reconnected to my peaceful bliss. In California I have been gazing at the sun from a mountain top as it emerges from behind another mountain ridge so I don’t catch my first glimpse until about twenty to thirty minutes after the official sunrise time. The sun is bright by then and shedding off the last thin layer of barely yellow skin, exposing a naked white burning center, that causes tears and squints. Here on the east coast I am watching the sun as soon as it peeks over the surface of the ocean, so I still see it when it’s almost pink and burnt rust, just moments after the official sunrise time. It’s gentle and sensual, like romantic candlelight. The sun is courting me, wooing me with a candlelit breakfast of solar energy. I picture it wearing a sexy banana hammock and doing a slow dance for me, not that it has any kind of ‘banana’ to speak of. Is it strange that the sun sometimes seems like a father, sometimes a lover, and sometimes a stranger to me? I’ll leave that for all the psychologists to figure out and in the meantime I’ll gaze into my lover’s deep set orange eye and continue to heal.
As I approach the end of Phase One I can support the claims made by other sun-gazers, in particular HRM on his website solarhealing.com when they say that the first three months center on emotional and mental healing. I feel calmer and happier. Indeed yesterday I was walking out of Wal-Mart, a store that usually leaves me languishing in fatigue and regret, but after my return to sun-gazing I guess I had a new bounce in my step, because I was stopped by yet another stranger with some random and unsolicited encouragement for me. This time it wasn’t a homeless person, or a drunk party goer, or a yogi on a mountain top whom The Great Whatever had called upon to deliver a message, but a young girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. As I was walking out of the Wal-Mart she was walking in, with a bright smile; as we passed each other she offered “you look so happy.” I laughed, surprised. Then in a reply that I realized was true as I was saying it I said “I am happy, thank you.” As we passed each other she told me to have a great day and at that moment I knew that I would.
Happiness is a funny thing. It’s available to us all the time, because it is simply a mood, and for the most part that is something we can create and sustain by making adjustments to our mindset. The sun has been making those adjustments for me over the last three months and as I write and reflect on them they become more true. Yesterday, however, God or The Great Whatever (my new nickname for the creative field of energy that connects us all) was again being particularly direct with me. I have taken five weeks off from my responsibilities in Los Angeles and I am still getting paid. I have a new born niece and a closer relationship with my mom and sister that the three of us haven’t enjoyed since Cheryl graduated from high school twenty years ago. My inner mental drama has been tamed by the sunlight. Emotional turmoil is easy to notice in its early stages and can be transmuted into productive energy for my art, also thanks to revelations from the sun. In short: I am happy, happier than I’ve been since childhood. I’ve been this way for weeks now and my circumstances continue to support me and offer prosperity. But somehow when that girl told me how happy I looked it made me realize how happy I feel, indeed how happy I really am. I’ve been walking in a rose garden but forgot to take the time to stop and smell any roses. After the comment from Wal-mart Girl I smelled nothing but roses for the rest of the day, even while my sister was changing little Charlie’s diaper.
SIDE EFFECTS: If you are slow to the dawning of your new mental states produced by sun gazing, the Universe is going to have people tell you directly that you are happy. Then you can stop and smell the roses
BENEFITS: If you but just realize it, once you get this far into the gazing process, everything seems to smell like roses all the time.
