What does it suggest to live from wholeness? Or as Muktananda wrote: “There is boundless love within. Go within and find it.”
It is more to the point to talk about what keeps us from our innate liberation. What keeps us from going within, from seeking the boundless love we hear is within us? What keeps us looking “out there” instead of within? So often it is fear – including, and maybe especially our fear of pain and distress.
How often are we afraid of feeling fear? Weakness? Or anger? How often do we avoid feeling hurt, disappointment, shame, confusion, humiliation and so on and so on - avoiding ourselves so intently that before we know it we are closed off from our emotions, from how we feel, from the small, quiet voice of our hearts.
We are emotional/feeling beings and when we turn away from ourselves in this way we are losing much of our juicy-ness. Like keeping our car in first gear . . . only . . . and missing out on the higher gears. Chug, chug, lurching along. Maybe we are staying in first gear for some apparent safety and perceived control sake, but we lose out on the freedom that comes from living life in the fullest way possible, feeling and sensing the wide-open road, feeling and sensing our full selves, being in direct contact with life.
Fear of: When we are afraid of feeling, when we turn away from our first, and often our most natural response to some sensation or circumstance we have added another layer that is blocking our direct contact with reality. Now we are not only distanced from pain or hurt or fear; now we have added debilitating resistance. Fear of and resistance to is how we do it – it is how we are taught. It is how humans from the beginning of time have been taught.
Resistance – the granddaddy of all suffering! If you want to get a feel for the power of resistance pay attention to how it feels in your body when you say no to something that is already happening – a feeling, a sensation, a circumstance. Notice the contraction, the tension and the discomfort. Then pay attention to your body when you lean into and allow what is actually happening, what has already happened. Your body softens and eases, like a crying child welcomed into a warm and supported embrace. And this ease, this softening is the opening into more creative and more open ended responses.
Living from wholeness is surrendering and trusting in something higher than our small selves, our limited minds. It is letting go . . . surrendering the ego – the voice in the head that is saying don’t go there, don’t feel, don’t be vulnerable or open.
It can feel counterintuitive to your way of thinking but when you are devoted to remembering your deepest nature you will allow yourself to break, to crumble and be held. When you surrender into whatever you are feeling in this moment, in its’ rawness, when you stay open to the sensation in your body, including the fear of feeling, including whatever resistance might be showing up, it is likely you will slide deeper and deeper into yourself and into the real heart of the matter. And you will soften into a different reality, into a more expansive state of being. Science tells us there is an emergent order as things disintegrate – an entropy that reveals a bigger picture.
We experience an opening in our interior when we allow what is being revealed. In fact, the mere movement of noticing what you are feeling, what is showing up is powerful in itself. Bringing presence to a feeling can be transformative. In the wash of presence, the feeling can, and often does, dissipate, like clouds in the sky.
And yet . . . what about the feelings that do not dissipate? What about what persists, even though bathed in presence?
All that is unhealed, unseen, undigested and, especially all that is unloved, is heeding our undivided attention and might be sticking around for a deeper look – for acceptance. All the repressed, hidden away, tucked into corners of our bodies and minds – the hushed and silenced shame and rage and grief lives within us, consciously or unconsciously. So, why not listen; truly listen and engage.
Feelings come and go.
Presence is everlasting
Bringing presence to deeper . . . getting honest with oneself deeper . . . encounters are transformative. Looking with a genuine curiosity – being sincerely open to what is revealed (scary feelings that stick around or come back again and again- deeply embedded habits and patterns) - will open things up and bring in sorely needed spaciousness.
Having repressed anger most of my life it is deliciously liberating to feel a sense of outrage that might arise in the face of some egregious behavior. Now that I am not afraid of anger, it is exhilarating to be one with the pure animal energy instinct of oxen’s hooves pawing the ground or horns banging into trees. I am not only more in touch and more alive, vibrantly alive, but the energy it took to suppress anger is freed up and available. There is more space.
Something . . . call it consciousness, awareness, the ground of being, presence, or creative intelligence . . . whatever name you give it . . . is silently holding and infusing every cell of your being, every cell of all matter. Learn to trust it, giving over time and time again to its’ call and its’ wisdom. Feel what you are feeling. Sense what you are sensing and let something deeper and wider speak ITS’ mind. Follow its teachings. Trust the creative intelligence of expression.
The conditioned mind tells us something is wrong with us when we feel frightening and vulnerable emotions. Instead, by turning towards and by turning inward, we are given the opportunity to bring what has been left out or behind into consciousness. Wholeness is calling us home, inviting us to be as we naturally are . . integrated, undivided, one.
Die into oneness.
“In all chaos there is cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order.”
Carl Jung