Let me tell you a story about how
the peacock and the pearl got its name

 

 

 

 

 

Almost 20 years ago, I arrived home to Australia penniless, heartbroken and seemingly defeated by fate.

 

After two years living in London, some fabulous career opportunities, travelling through Europe and Africa and meeting a man that made my heart absolutely sing, it seemed the universe was demanding my return to Melbourne. Bricks piled up at every door I tried to open, and stubborn as a mule because I was madly in love, I was eventually forced to accept I would not get the visa upgrade I expected and I was going broke without a legal way to make a living. I said a tearful goodbye and came home.

 

When I arrived back to Australia, I felt like I was lost at sea, at a deep soulful level in my heart. Everything felt grey (granted, it was winter in Melbourne, everything was grey). Love songs on the radio made me cry as I drove to my new job. I might have felt pathetic if I wasn’t in so much despair. How…why would this happen? Just when everything had started to go so well? What was I supposed to do now? Every day blended monotonously into the next as I struggled to gain a perspective that made sense of it all.

 

A few months after my return, a beloved long-time, spiritual mentor invited my mother and I to a special meditation retreat dedicated to personal and planetary healing in the gorgeous little mountain village of Jamieson. Frankly, I needed it, and gratefully accepted.

 

We were to stay at the tiny village’s quaint old Post Office, now turned into accommodation. When I arrived I decided it was time to do my own meditation in an attempt to ground and attune myself, calming my ever-frayed nerves.

 

I lay down to listen to Tom Kenyon’s meditation, The Ghandarva Experience, based on a mythic realm of heavenly music that Tom channels through his voice.

 

I am the first to admit that many of my attempts at meditation until that point seemed utterly pointless, spending the majority of the time contemplating such existential questions as what to have for dinner and how to resolve the issues I faced at work tomorrow.

 

This time was different.

 

As the ethereal sounds of Tom’s voice floated through the room, ‘I’ disappeared beyond time and space. I opened my mind’s eyes and I was a young darker-skinned man of around the same age, sitting cross-legged in a white cotton tunic and trousers with a white turban, in the middle of a saffron-coloured desert under a bright, sunny sky. I had a beard and I felt I was somewhere in north west India, though I’d never been there.

 

I looked up and saw a beautiful elephant with a face painted with pastel colours walking towards me in that sweet, waddly way that elephants do. It picked me up with its trunk, placed me on its back and continued on towards some distant hills, where I saw a smattering of low-lying trees and a temple at their foot.

 

We arrived at the entrance of a magnificent, intricately carved, white marble temple. The elephant placed me back on the ground and I removed my shoes, climbing the steps into the cool, dimly lit temple, where I knelt down and began to pray.

 

Next, I saw two huge angels appear, picking me up by the shoulders and whisking me up into the clouds where I ceased to be the Indian man anymore and was simply an awareness, watching something like a movie.

 

Against a pale blue sky, I saw a fist, palm-upturned, unfold its fingers. I somehow knew this was the hand of God, and as it unfurled, a beautiful big, dewy, white pearl rolled down the palm and into its fingertips.

 

An exquisite peacock appeared with such vibrantly-coloured feathers, they almost seemed to glow metallically, and I watched as the hand placed the pearl into its eye. The peacock blinked.

 

And then I once again saw myself as the woman I am now, and watched as a pearl was placed on my forehead along with many different colourful crystals of greens, reds and blues down the middle part line of my hair; it looked beautifully feminine in an almost medieval way, though I did not know what any of it meant.

 

All was gentle and serene.

 

And then suddenly the reverie was over. The Ghandarva Experience ended and I was back in the post office, in the freezing cold Victorian high country, in the body of a slightly bewildered, utterly awed 27 year-old Aussie girl.

 

I’ve had many prophetic, other-worldly dreams and psychic moments but this one was the most special. Like a very profound initiation with the divine, in which I knew something magical had just happened. Some kind of opening. And that the mystery of it all was mine to uncover.