Every year for the at least the past twenty years, my friend Nancy and I have created what started out as Life Maps but what I now call Mystic Message Boards. This has been a tradition that we look forward to every January and schedule an afternoon, complete with lunch, pink wine and good tunes to create our maserpieces. In recent years, we have invited our grown daughters to participate and so now there are six of us anticipating this annual event.
A Mystic Message Board (MMB), is similar to a vision board except, where on a vision board you cut out and paste images of things you want to manifest into your life, a MMB is images that your cut out and paste onto a board that your subconscious wants you to gain insights from.
After we have created our boards we pin it up somewhere in our homes where we can gaze upon it regularly and ponder the images. Mine is above my ironing board in the laundry room where I look at it at least once a week. We leave them up until the following January when we create a new one to replace it. What we have found is that our boards have been known to offer up insights throughout the year.
I was not happy with the MMB I created last year and while I enjoyed the images I pasted on the board, I intuited right away that there would be little in the way of insight to glean from it. And maybe that in it self was the message as last year was kind of a flat year for me with not much happening – just day to day life.
But this year’s MMB is a completely different story. Right off the bat I was pleased with my creative results. I couldn’t wait to pin it up and study it.
I sent a photo of my MMB to a friend of mine who was curious about what I’d created and the first thing she commented on (with great sarcasm I might add) was the wine glass prominently situated in the middle of the board. Feeling the need to defend myself, and perhaps my imbibing habits, I replied that it was not so much the wine in the glass that compelled me to cut out and paste this image onto my board but the soil and roots the stem of the glass is buried in.
I will admit here, that I too wondered why I was compelled to add this picture to my board but as these creations tend to have a mystical quality to them, I didn’t have to wait long to receive an answer.
First let me say that the position of images on a MMB can add to the insight of a message. This wine glass is front and center and I read that as something to pay attention too, or at least something that is a the center of my life.
The “aha” moment of clarity came last week in a random video on Facebook that I clicked on. Check out the story here.
At the 2:35 time point on the video, the head arboretum of Kew Gardens in London describes how he uses a wine glass – the bowl of the glass being the canopy, the stem as the trunk and the base as the root platform, to illustrate how a 200 year old oak tree was lifted up out of the dirt by a powerful storm and dropped back down onto the ground. Several years after the tree was secured back into the earth by Kew Garden staff following this epic storm, the tree was found to be flourishing and in better health than even before the weather event.
What was discovered, resulted in a new process to ensure the health of trees all around the world. It seems that the action of the fierce wind lifting this tree out of the earth resulted in the roots of the tree becoming aeriated with fresh oxygen. This injection of air, literally breathed new life into the tree’s roots which had been deprived of oxygen from years of visitors trampling the ground around the base of the tree.
Today, professional gardeners now use an aerator device that injects fresh air into the ground around the base of trees that was invented precisely for this purpose, based on the delightful recovery of this 200 year old oak.
Upon seeing this arborist use his wine glass anology, I immediately knew why I was compelled to cut out and paste the image of a wine glass with roots and dirt covering it’s base.
Mystic messages are divine pieces of wisdom from the universe. Like signs and symbols, one need only pay attention to the synchronistic events, curious happenings or serendipitous occurrences that happen in your everyday life to glean these insightful missives.
In the case of a MMB, your subconscious initiated a conversation with the universe when the board is created. It is up to you to pay attention for a reply.
So what was the reply from the universe? What did I need to understand from this image of a wine glass buried in roots and soil, and what was the connection to the story of this 200 year old oak tree?
Now before I go any further, let me just say that each message from the universe is personal in that what I comprehend from this mystical experience may be vastly different from what someone else might grasp from the same situation. This message was meant for me, I started the conversation by using this particular image and so the reply was mine alone, but there is wisdom in this story for all and you may gain insight by me sharing my understanding.
The message for me was that I needed to infuse some fresh life into my roots.
The more I thought on this, the more I understood that “roots” meant much more that my history or my family, although there was personal enlightenment towards those subjects as well, just by breathing a little oxygen at them and loosening up the hardpan soil that held their foundation. The “roots” that I felt this message is truly directed at is the beliefs that are firmly imbedded in my subconscious that no longer serve me. Ones that have outlived their usefulness. Ones that need to be shaken loose from the bedrock of my soul so that the fresh pure oxygen of life can freshen up the corners and crevices and blow out the cobwebs clogging up my ability to grow and evolve as a human being.
Think about this for a minute before you disregard my confession here as platitudes for the spiritual acolyte. When we have deeply rooted beliefs that we operate our lives from, unless we rip them out, shake them off and blow the nutritionally depleted dirt off so that they can be exposed to fresh, life giving oxyen, how can we ever grow?
Albert Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Would not believing the same beliefs over and over again when the world as a whole has progressed and moved on, not be considered a little insane also?
I see this mystic message as an invitation to consider what traditions no longer serve my ability to grow. What ideas and commonly held beliefs of mine are “rooted” into my subconscious and need to be ripped out, and which ones just need to have a little aeriation in order to thrive a bit better.
Like the wine glass, our lives are fragile but also, like that 200 year old oak, human life is robust and well rooted. But what that ancient oak taught the world with the ripping away of it’s root platform during that fateful storm is that sometimes unexpected events shake our very foundation but leave us far better off for having come through the storm.
Trees do not have the ability to change their perspectives and alter their future, they need the power of nature to do that for them. Humans on the other hand, can make different choices everyday and in doing so, can alter their destiny all on our own, but we too get stubbornly rooted in our ways. The mystical merging of the image of a wine glass with roots and dirt at its base and a random Facebook video of an oak tree who taught the world a lesson, taught me one as well.
Synchronicities, curiosities and serendipitous events are the calling cards of the universe and its infinite wisdom. The MMB is just an aid to connect with it and start a conversation but the answers that can be received may be very mystical indeed. That is, if you choose to pay attention.
How to create your own Mystic Message Board
Supplies: 1 poster board, 1 glue stick, scissors, and 10-15 old magazines in a variety of subjects (per person if you are doing this as a group).
The premise is really simple. Mark the time for one hour. Browse through the magazines and anything that you see that creates an emotional response in you, rip out the page and place it face down beside you. Continue to do so until one hour is up. Then go through the images that you ripped out and trim them up from the rest of the images and words on the page and paste them on your board in any way that pleases you. Some folks trim everything first then arrange on their board then paste and others trim and paste as they go. There is no right way to cut and paste and no right way to arrange the images on the board. Just let go and create.
What constitutes as an emotional response? Anything that creates a response in you. If you see an image and you go, “cool” rip it out. If you feel curiousity, amazement, love, hate, yuck, aha – any and all emotional responses even guilt, rip it out and place it upside down beside you.
Once your MMB is complete, have a good look at your results. Those first impressions are a good indicator of the overall message from your board. Is it bright and cheery, dark and moody, cluttered and busy, sparse and spacey? Is there a prominent colour or an image bursting out to be the centre of attention? Ponder your feeling about what you initially see, there is good wisdom to be intuited.
Pin your MMB somewhere where you can look at it regularly. More insights may pop up as time goes on but you will intuit when the MMB is done and holds no more insights.
Half way through one year I noticed that I had pasted a little image of a gold, swirling sun like charm with a blue crystal centre. At the time I was needing to speak up about something that was bothering me and when I noticed this little charm it reminded me of my throat chakra (blue represents the throat chakra) which is your energy centre for your voice, ideas and your ability to speak your truth. It was a message to use my voice.
I hope you enjoy creating a Mystic Message Board and would love to see what you create. Send me a photo in the comments.
