Article by Stefanie Johnson

There are magical places that exist within each one of us, inside our minds, hearts, and souls. By visiting these places, we can tap into the infinite and bring peace and abundance into our lives.

Each journey will be unique, as we are unique, so you may want to have a notebook and pen nearby to record your experience afterward. You may choose to have another person read the meditation to you so you may experience it more fully.      

Find a comfortable place, close your eyes, open your mind, and prepare yourself to travel within.

Let’s take a stroll through the rose garden, a place of perfect beauty and perfect peace.  Has a hectic life filled you with stress?  It sounds cliché, but this is your chance to literally stop and smell the roses. 

It is a beautiful day in the garden.  The sky is crystalline blue, with puffy cotton-candy white clouds drifting lazily across it.  The light is golden and sweet like honey, giving everything around you a faint warm etching in gold.  The air smells sweet and wondrous, and with good reason …

You are walking on a well-tended path through a magnificent garden.  This garden is filled with lovely statues, gazebos shaded with beautiful wisteria, pavilions with flowing fountains, and mazes of flowers.  You sit down for a moment on a white, wrought iron bench beside a path, surrounded by tiny, delicate pink tea roses.  You close your eyes for a moment and smell the air, hear the cheerful birdsong from the well-manicured bushes.

A male peacock ambles past, then stops a moment to look back at you.  You gaze at him and marvel at the beauty of his colors, the richness of his plumage.  He resumes his walk, and melts back into the greenery of the garden.

You become aware of how many different lives are contained in this beautiful space.  The peacock was just one of them.  There are hundreds of birds singing around you, and multicolored butterflies flitting amongst the flowers.  There are bees, too, tiny and golden.  They pay you no heed, simply go about their business of keeping the garden vibrant.

All the creatures here are the guardians and keepers of this garden.  You are merely a guest here, enjoying the fruits of their labors.  You’re grateful, and humbled, to see what these little creatures have accomplished.

You stand up and continue along the path, as your goal is in the heart of the garden and it will be dark soon.

You pass a fanciful marble fountain and stop to pitch a shiny penny into its clear waters.  You also pass a line of wondrous, fantastical statues.  The statues are of mermaids and manticores, angels and nymphs.  One calls you more than others, and you go to it, look at it, touch it.  (What is the statue of? Why does it call to you?)

You have come to a maze in the center of the garden.  The maze contains roses of every color, leaves, thorny vines, tall trellises.  You can’t see past them.  You know that there is a special treasure at the heart of the maze, and, more than anything, you want to reach it.

Now it’s sunset, and the sky is filled with the same jeweled watercolor tones as the roses that surround you.  You walk through the maze as nighttime slowly fills it up, making the path difficult to see.  But you don’t need to see.  There is no rhyme or reason to your path; you simply keep walking, drawn to your destination by mere instinct alone.  If you hesitate, if you lose trust in yourself, not only will you not reach the treasure, but you may never find your way out of this maze.

So you trust.

You walk.  And you find it, the heart of the maze.  In the darkness, small fireflies throb with light, lending a glow to the beautiful white gazebo where your treasure sits.

What is the treasure to you?  You walk up and touch it.  You have found it, and it belongs to you.  You can come back and visit it whenever you choose.

“Just as a prism of glass miters light and casts a colored braid, a garden sings sweet incantations the human heart strains to hear.  Hiding in every flower, in every leaf, in every twig and bough, are reflections of the God who once walked with us in Eden.”
-Tonia Triebwasser, The Color of Grace

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