Life… and how it is
I don’t love you with my heart and mind. I love you with my soul. In case my mind forgets and my heart stops.
- Rumi
I have been reflecting upon life and how it is. Knowing the ineffable “I AM” of the ground of all being, having a full felt sense of the energetic force that animates all of life, me included, and experiencing the very here and now of this body and psyche as it grows and evolves.
When I first got involved with the non-dual community its emphasis was on the transcendent. Understandably, the teaching was focused on what people were missing in their lives (something greater was pulling all the strings) and the teachings were geared to help folks who were overly focused on their personalities and their suffering.
I had done a great deal of therapy by the time I seriously turned towards the non-dual world and yet, upon awakening, I continued to be aware of irritations, conflicts in friendships, and anxiety. It didn’t change or question the dramatic shift that had happened; there was no denying that, but I was left with a sense of something left undone or more needed or, in lower moments, that something was wrong.
Since that moment it has become very clear to me that attempting to solely live in the transcendent was not the whole picture. Rather than there being something wrong, the experience shined a light on what was being asked. Embodiment! Manifestation of the realization! Turns out I was fortunate to intuit we are never “finished”.
Embodying the qualities of the Ground of All Being is an integration that meant, in part, saying yes to whatever memory or wound or physical sensation was showing up. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stay only in the transcendent . . . which is rather ironic, since one of my primary (delusional) motivations for wanting to wake up was to be done with the pain I had experienced all through my life. Good luck with that!
As the awakening saturated my heart much in my life began to soften. I felt peace and well- being, no longer at the mercy of relational conflicts (my neurotic neediness began to dissolve) and found I was no longer lonely or moody. I felt a deep peace as my heart opened and I gave less credence to my critical and conditioned thoughts. Presence, as is its way, permeated daily life and I became more and more in love with our messy humanity, including my own, as it got clearer and clearer that healing and awakening are one and the same. In fact, I came to awakening through healing . . . as if trauma itself was the doorway into the light.
Healing and awakening are one and the same. The glue . . . the magic . . . the juice that binds healing and awakening is love – a love that is invisible and ungraspable, and yet, is the realist thing I have ever experienced or known. I have come into contact, over and over again, with a dynamic force that expands and ascends every fiber of my being at the same time it pushes me straight into any and every wound that has not been sufficiently cared for and folded into my being. The force is of one thread; awakening to the ground of our being and healing us back into our original wholeness. Presence permeates all of our being; spaciously softening and loosening the denser energy that is unconscious and buried.
Throughout my childhood, into early adulthood, I had a re-occurring dream that I was in my home and was discovering rooms I did not know were there; it kept turning out that the home was much larger than I knew and had many more nooks and crannies, hallways, and hidden spaces to discover. The dream, each time I dreamt it, filled me with excitement and joy.
It is as if this dream portended this dynamic force. Something in us knows we are here to open and evolve; Presence is, by its very nature, expanding and healing.
Healing. . . squarely landing inside our humanity is humbling to say the least. Knowing we are Love; we are Presence; we are Peace and Goodness is a gift beyond measure. The humbling part comes with knowing we are also unconscious to some degree and prone to messing up (usually relationships). We are, all of us, subject to the afflictions that comes with living on this earth as fragile, here-today/gone-tomorrow beings. There is no spiritual get out of jail free card for heartbreak, loss, pain and wounding, nor from everyday ordinary life, absent of fireworks and magic.
In fact, the beauty of all this is that it speaks to how gorgeously spacious and vulnerable (to all of life) we are and how, regardless of how deep our pain and sorrow runs . . . perhaps even beyond imagination, our hearts can and will open so gigantically, allowing Healing and Love to flow no matter what.
Life and how it is!
All that being true, I found myself bewildered and shook from being sick with Long Covid for over three years. I entered a dark tunnel (of uncertainty) which upended that sense of well-being no matter what is happening. I had been consciously aware of embodying the realization of awake-ness for many years, watching as my body came alive – feeling, often for the first time, sensations and movement . . . like when your arm has fallen asleep and tingles when it begins to wake up. And now, Long Covid landed me in my body in a way I had not experienced before. It opened doors of wounds and caverns of unconscious identifications for me to see into and feel.
As with awakening being the beginning of a life-time evolving and growing into authenticity and Love, healing, as well, is often layered and subject to its own timing and ever deepening.
Long Covid allowed me to fully feel the darkness of uncertainty. The odyssey of living in profound darkness, without a candle – the medical world has little to offer in terms of treatment or possible recovery – and the unsettling darkness of living inside my traumatized body, clueless as to how to go about being alive in such a state – the odyssey of living this awake jarred me.
The odyssey of sacred love and light, shining a holy beacon on unseen and unfelt places in my traumatized (childhood and being sick) body and its authentic feelings of terror and fury, compassionately, slowly, lovingly revealed, held, and healed me until I knew, viscerally knew, embodied all the way down to my toes knew, that all is well. No matter what. That is what Presence does. It softens, it melts, it embraces, it, like air or water, over and over, lightens the darkness. The light will penetrate into soil which has been loosened and receptive to it.
Like so many of us, I sought awakening because of a knowing that there was something larger calling to me and because I believed that spiritual awakening (when I first heard those words) would alleviate the effects of trauma and all its impact on me and those around me.
Little did I know at the time that it was by welcoming the pain and suffering, feeling the unfelt, seeing the unseen, that wholeness and well-being is revealed . . . hiding in plain sight.
The Buddha taught that life is suffering and I have not yet met a person who has not suffered. We find ways to cope and protect ourselves; we go out of our way to keep loved one’s safe, but, in reality, there seems to be no escaping the fact that life is full of broken glass and barbed wire and every one of us precious humans has come up against and/or caused some form of harm and pain.
The rub in our human lives is a paradox. Taking the suffering seriously (healing) and not taking the suffering seriously (knowing we are fundamentally whole and well and recognizing how little we really know about the vastness of Reality) is a dance we are all called to. We are called to recognize and live our Wholeness . . .the well-being that is felt and known when we are completely at home within ourselves and the world at large. We are called to reconcile (embrace and heal) all that eclipses wholeness.
It is said that hurt people hurt people and to that we can add whole people love people.
Wounding impacts our hearts, our minds and our guts. We learn early on the need to protect ourselves in any way that we think will help. It is a rare child who does not close down in the face of being mistreated and not sufficiently seen or cared for. Our hearts will close down, keeping us from feeling empathic, keeping us indiscriminately removed from feeling suffering; our own and all “others”; other people, animals and nature itself. A closed heart cuts us off from kindness, gentleness and generosity. A closed heart is out of tune, unaware of its constrictive smallness and the cost of being disconnected. We, by spiritual laws, belong to each other, but a closed-off heart lives unaware of its origin . . . its connection.
This is not an on-off switch. Every one of us, awakened or not, lives with some unconsciousness, some buried wounds and unprocessed material. It appears we are equipped to face, feel and incorporate what is unconscious, the trouble makers in our being, no matter how deeply suppressed or buried. We are called to transcend our human’s psychological survival instinct.
Our minds will close down. We might live within untested and rigid beliefs and illusions. A closed mind is unclear, foggy and has a strong tendency towards blaming and projecting. A closed mind is susceptible to following the crowd and finding refuge in collective beliefs. A closed mind can live within a loop – finding evidence for beliefs that would not hold up under scrutiny but keeps you feeling stable. A closed mind is unaware of being aware!
Living awake had opened my mind and my heart. One of the main symptoms, for me, of Long Covid, is a messed-up gut, giving me ample opportunity to see and feel the long-standing tightness and contractions that I can see in retrospect, held (in the body) emotions and sensations from trauma. It felt as if the gut was the seat of the psychological survival instinct and I was up against feeling the pain and narrowness of my closed gut. Growth is demanding and might feel threatening, for there is a facing of ourselves over and over again (in every nook and cranny) as well as gain in growth. In this demanding atmosphere, in a very loving way, I found myself in the innermost corner of my most secret and private self. A place I wasn’t even aware of before being sick; my body requiring a most honest reckoning – being more and more real with buried memories and emotions. And an opportunity for an open gut!!
We are human and wounded and we are pure Presence, and it takes enormous courage and faith to go towards our fullness, in every single form it takes. In my experience Presence smiles when we journey into the underworld . . . the unconscious. The power of Presence shakes loose the darkness (wounds, rigid beliefs, buried emotions) allowing the “old” to dissolve, to lose its grip, and makes room for Itself to spread and expand.
Being with my beleaguered gut brought me into the seat of existence (of my humanity). The entire encounter with chronic illness was such a jarring experience I felt a strong need to write about it – to expand on the learning and reckonings of living in the dark of not knowing. I wrote a new book to also address the common misconception that, once awakened, we are not impacted by real life. The little book is aptly titled Awakening is not for the Faint of Heart: Risk Everything for Love. It is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.
If you feel moved to read the book and to write a review on Amazon, I would greatly appreciate it. It is a way for others to find the book and I would love to have the book in the hands of folks who are seeking awakening and/or folks who are living awake and find themselves befuddled by not always feeling blissful and/or living with chronic illness.
Healing, for me, is coming home, over and over again, each time discovering new rooms, more hallways and larger spaces, nooks and crannies than I had not known before. I wrote the book, hoping to touch others who, whatever has brought them into the underworld, might, by making use of my flashlight, compassionately find the over-head light switch for themselves.
“As a Divine Messenger with His spiritual sight blindfolded, He will have to go through the most bitter hardships on earth, outwardly a man among men. After a certain time, when His spiritual sight is restored, He will inevitably recognize His origin and therewith Himself, as well as clearly realizing His mission. This mission will also bring redemption to those who are seriously seeking . . .”
Abd-Ru-Shin, author of In the Light of Truth