The Blooming Heart

Why Don’t We Start Out Awake?

Meditative Rose — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:56:47 +0000

So what’s the point of most of humanity remaining spiritually “asleep” for years or even decades of their lives? Why can’t we all just be born wide awake? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we were? Is it natural to start out asleep, or is it a consequence of living in a fear-based culture that stunts and restricts us? *Do* we need awakening as an initiation on its own, and if so, does that mean that all the things that have wounded and repressed us before are actually good and necessary?

These are questions that I wrestled with for a long time. After all, it seems like one can get so much more done in the world, can live one’s purpose so much more fully and vibrantly, after undergoing an awakening– so was everything before that just a waste of time?

In the end, I genuinely do not believe that any experience in life is a waste of time (even if it’s hard to see its value just yet), and I’ve come to believe that there actually is good reason for spending the first part of your life asleep.

Let me say up front that I don’t think this justifies the ways that we as a society hurt, limit, disparage, and bully each other into being mere shadows of our true selves, nor does it mean we should shrug our shoulders and overlook those unhealthy, cruel behaviors. Just as we can have a productive, restful night’s sleep or a troubled, stressful night’s sleep, there’s a big difference between a natural journey towards awakening and a death march through life in which we can only hope that some form of awakening comes as a crisis intervention.

Likewise, “asleep” doesn’t have to mean “oblivious”. It doesn’t mean we should just blithely sail through life unconcerned with the big questions of purpose and spirit, or that we don’t need to live by any personal code of values or try to improve ourselves. Ideally, the time leading up to the awakening experience should be a time of learning and preparation, so that the awakening itself becomes a rite of passage like the transition to adulthood.

Perhaps the best way to explain the reason for a healthy state of temporary forgetfulness is metaphorical.

Imagine that you’re going on a long hike through beautiful and fascinating, but completely unfamiliar, terrain. Whether you’re a seasoned naturalist or a complete newbie, you still don’t know all the peculiarities of THIS path at THIS time. Your approach to it might be very different than someone else’s– maybe you just want to wander, living off the land and using the signs of nature to navigate, or maybe you have elaborate maps and expensive equipment to ease your way. Maybe you actually want to see what happens if you get lost. Point being, it’s a whole new adventure any way you cut it.

Now imagine that before going on this hike, you accepted a big project– a major test to study for, a presentation to give, whatever resonates with you. It’s very important that you complete this task, and there’s a lot to accomplish before it’s done. You decided to plan this hike because for some reason the change of setting and the change of pace will help you with this task. (Even if it’s just giving you a chance to take a break because you’re tired or frustrated with your lack of progress.)

So now you set out on this hike. What happens if you start out and your focus and awareness are totally fixed on your project? What happens if that’s all you can think about?

At the very least, you won’t really pay very much attention to your surroundings. You might not notice how beautifully the sun is dappled through the trees; you might be oblivious to the glimpse of the rare butterfly in the wildflowers by the path; you might not really talk to your hiking companions. Or the situation might be worse– you might forget to drink enough water or reapply your sunscreen, you might get lost because you weren’t paying attention to where you were going, you might hurt yourself stumbling over something in your path that you didn’t notice. Only the biggest changes or occurrences will jolt through to your awareness. And you still probably won’t come up with any new insights or solutions for your project. When you complete your hike, you probably won’t have learned very much from the experience because you spent the whole time in your own head.

Instead let’s say that you set out and you become totally absorbed in the experience of the hike. What’s the difference?

For a while you’ll probably forget all about your project and instead you’ll be aware of the weather, noticing when the sun is highest, when it’s time to seek shelter, when it’s time to warm up or cool off. You’ll learn to adapt to the differences in terrain, moving differently across jagged rocks than over soft needle-strewn paths. You’ll practice using your tools, be it map and compass or flint and tinder. You’ll be alert to strange sounds, potential danger, or unexpected delights. You might take a side trip to explore an intriguing area, but you’ll have marked your return path. It doesn’t mean it won’t be a difficult hike, or that you won’t get hurt, but you’ll be dealing with those circumstances instead of accidentally falling into them. And it’s very likely that taking your conscious mind off of your project will release the tension you’ve built up, and something you see or experience on this trail will give you a flash of inspiration, a whole new perspective on your challenge. You can bring your awareness of your project and your in-the-moment awareness of your hike together to make progress on your project that you couldn’t have otherwise.

Your soul’s purpose is your “project” and the life you’re living now is the hike. Your purpose, which is inseparable from your spiritual awareness, exists in a symbiotic relationship with your life. That is, each one feeds the other. Your purpose goes far beyond the limits of this one life, and your life will probably contain experiences and lessons that aren’t directly related to your purpose, but at heart they are crucial to each other. Purpose gives life meaning, context, direction, and power. A mortal lifespan provides a rich symbolic setting within which the soul can conceptualize and better understand its purpose.

Let me put that last statement in less abstract terms: Think of the way that wise teachers use parables, or teaching stories, to explain important ideas. Our mortal lifetime is like a teaching story, one in which our soul roleplays the protagonist’s part. (This is why we so deeply need our mythologies, our stories, our legends– they help us make sense of the nature of life and reality as a vast cosmic tale.) Everything we perceive as material reality, every action, every energy form we experience, even our own bodies, are the tangible forms of ideas. They are symbols distilled into form. The symbols we encounter– and most particularly the ones that most deeply affect us and penetrate our consciousness– make up the language of the story of our lives, communicating far more to our souls than we could ever hold in our conscious awareness. Just the way that if we hear a story where the hero encounters a lion, we can understand intuitively the ideas communicated by the symbol “lion” without having to have them literally spelled out in the story, our souls experience the symbols of our lives as a way to organize and absorb an infinity of ideas in a manner that is useful to our purpose.

(This is also why it is so valuable to develop an awareness of your life as a story, and to take an active role in telling and interpreting it; it allows your physical awareness and your spiritual consciousness to work together to achieve greater knowledge and deeper understanding, and to co-create the best possible setting in which to live according to your purpose, accelerating your soul’s development. Think of the way that psychologists sometimes work with patients to retell or re-enact a scenario from their lives in which they act in a more empowered way than they did at the time, or the technique for dealing with nightmares in which you are supposed to try to take control of the dream circumstances and turn them to something more positive and less frightening.)

A big part of the reason for incarnating in this world and this reality is that it is so different from other experiences your soul could have, but because of that, you need time to navigate this existence of form and matter, to learn its rules, to understand how to function in a body of flesh and blood. It requires “forgetting” your awareness of a higher spiritual reality, your purpose, all the great knowledge you had before you were born– but that experience of forgetting is not a hard separation. It’s not amnesia, but a shift in focus, the same way that you lose track of time when absorbed in a fascinating task.

It’s often been observed that children tend to be more psychically aware and attuned to things that adults are not, and that as children get older, “the veil drops” and they lose this awareness. I believe that newly incarnate souls do start out somewhat “awake” (though lacking the motor and language skills to communicate this awareness very clearly), and that the natural process is that over time, the physical, mental, and emotional demands of learning to live and thrive in this material realm gradually become more complex, and require more and more focus. Because the soul’s vast consciousness is now being filtered through a more limited human consciousness, it can’t hold everything at once. The denser and more immediate physical reality takes precedence, and the abstract spiritual awareness recedes to the background. The person begins to live more or less fully in this life and this world, and subconsciously strives to master it, to integrate it, so that there will eventually be capacity to sense beyond it and to bring in again an awareness of a higher reality. When this happens, the person experiences it as an awakening. The degree to which it is a joyful or frightening experience, or a gradual transition versus a shock to the system, depends on that person’s physical consciousness and whether it has been prepared to understand and accept the experience or not.

Just as we often wake from a good night’s sleep with a sudden new insight to a problem, or having had a dream that helps us make rapid progress in waking life, I believe that our “sleeping years” can be a rich and fertile environment from which we can harvest great wisdom and clarity once we’ve awakened. The challenge of our time is to bring awakening into our cultural consciousness as a rite of passage and a new stage of life rather than an unexpected upheaval, and to cultivate teachers and guides who have themselves been awakened, who are capable of wisely and compassionately helping others through the process. Bringing the awakening experience into right alignment with our understanding of the stages of life’s journey, we can build from a purpose-centered life towards a purpose-centered world.

This article is part of an ongoing series on the topic of spiritual awakening. You can read the previous article here.

Soul-food Reading

Meditative Rose — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:53:41 +0000

My poor neglected blog!

It’s been an unexpectedly busy summer, leading up to a couple of big projects in the fall. I’m off this weekend to Free Spirit Alliance’s Fires of Venus gathering, where I’ll be teaching sacred dance, presenting a sensual puja in honor of the Divine Beloved, and co-running a Trance Dance for the spirits of love, beauty, romance, and sensuality as a lead-in to that night’s fire circle. Fun stuff! I’m looking forward to a weekend of intense fire dancing and spiritual sublimity on some of the most beautiful and energetically-charged land in Delmarva.

So for now, I offer a couple of links to some good-for-your-soul reading that I deeply enjoyed:

Tom Robbins on the nature and feeding of the soul (I love that nutty bastard)

Karen Salmansohn in the Huffington Post with advice on winning the “happiness lottery”. Probably not anything you haven’t read in many other places, but it’s a good summary of key steps to a happier and more soulful life.

Enjoy!

Zen and the Art of Texas Hold ‘Em

Meditative Rose — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:06:54 +0000

Last week a friend of mine made a comment about tournament poker being a good metaphor for life. I assumed he was just being cynical, but when I thought about it, I realized that the current Texas Hold ‘Em craze does, indeed, have some valuable life lessons for the budding Romantic.

I won’t belabor the metaphor, because I’m at best a casual hobbyist at poker. There are just two things that really stand out for me:

First, you play many fewer hands than you are dealt, and even the ones you play, you don’t always see all the way through. Even a relative novice should know enough at the table to look at a hand, recognize that it’s crap, and junk it. And there’s going to be a lot of crap hands.

Second, in order to win, you need to know when it’s worth it to put your whole bank on it.

In the first case, the thing to take away from it is that you need to get in the game, but you don’t have to play every hand. Life demands engagement. The bare minimum is for you to sit at the table and ante up. Most of us approach life as though we are only willing to put up the ante if we can guarantee we’ll get a hand worth playing. We cling to our chips, unwilling to suffer a bad hand, and so by default we become non-players in the game of life. Actually playing means we get out there and try things out, invest some time or money or effort into taking a small chance on something new and interesting on a regular basis.

And a lot of the time, you might drop it. You take a semester of French and hate it. You buy a tennis racket that becomes your prize dust collector. You start dating someone and then decide you’re just not that into them after all.

We tend to, unkindly, refer to people who habitually do these things as “dilettantes” or “wannabes” or “flakes”. What happened to good old fashioned stick-to-it-iveness? Commitment? Perseverance?

Those things are great, but they should be reserved for the worthwhile investments. A smart player learns how to quickly assess what’s worth her time and what isn’t. She’ll give the hand a try, give it the benefit of assessment, maybe even follow it for a little while if there’s a glimmer of promise, but she doesn’t force herself to stick with a bad hand to the bitter end just because it’s the one she was dealt, nor would any sane aficionado expect her to. She saves her resources for the hands she thinks she can win, so she has something substantial to put into that calculated risk.

The value of those folded hands, then, is that it keeps us in the game so we’re already playing when that killer hand is dealt. Sure, so we tried out sixteen things that we didn’t stick with. We had fun along the way, right? Learned something new about ourselves? Got a bit of knowledge to apply to future situations? And, on top of that, we were there and open to it when a great new passion grew from one of those relatively low-risk attempts. *That* was the hand we followed to the river. That hand didn’t get dealt to the guy next to us instead while we were too chicken to play.

Which brings me to the second big lesson offered by Texas Hold ‘Em– when the situation warrants it, don’t be afraid to go all in. Put your whole heart and soul into the thing you truly believe will pay off in your life (and I HOPE you know that I don’t mean “pay off” in purely monetary/competitive terms!) Holding back, wussing out in the face of a big raise or a bluff, is bad strategy. You’ll never win, and losing is a bitter pill washed down with the salt water of “what might have been”.

Yes, maybe you’ll lose if you go all in. But you know you played your best, and it brings up one more piece of poker wisdom to play us off: There’s always another game.

The Shadow Side of Awakening

Meditative Rose — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:40:05 +0000

Following up to my post titled “What Is Awakening?”, I wanted to address the down side of soul awakening, because it’s very real and, for many people, it is a very confusing and painful time.

First let me say that it isn’t always traumatic, especially for someone who’s “hit the snooze” a few times and because of it, has started to become aware of what’s going on; or for someone who is fortunate enough to have an experienced teacher capable of answering questions and guiding them through the experience. (If there’s one need in this world I’m certain of, it’s the need for compassionate, wise, strong spiritual teachers who are not in it for mere ego gratification…) Some people do experience it as a predominantly joyful and exciting time, or they feel relief because things make so much more sense now.

However, living in a world where there *is* a dearth of real teachers, where religions have become politicized bureaucracies, where there are few remaining rites of passage and our public rituals have become commercialized within an inch of their lives, and where there’s so much information with so many competing agendas, most of us are left feeling alone and bewildered. We hack our lonely way through that wilderness, often frustrated, eager for any tiny sign that anyone has gone ahead and left a path. And when something extraordinary happens within us, we may not know how to handle it.

Remember the movie Carrie? For a girl who’s never been taught about her own maturation, her first menses is terrifying. She thinks she’s bleeding to death from some unseen injury. It’s a normal biological process, an initiation into womanhood, yet because she was not taught what it is or how to handle it, all she has to go on is her existing knowledge that blood equals pain and death.

When an awakening happens spontaneously, in someone who has not been prepared for it and doesn’t know what’s happening, in many cases all they can see is the outward manifestations, the emotional upheavals, the unexpected life changes, even physical symptoms that manifest seemingly out of nowhere. Without a context or a support network, they may feel “cursed” or think they’re going crazy, when in fact, it’s the exact opposite.

It’s not limited to those who are caught totally off guard. Even those who have been taught about awakening in some form, who have sought it and expect it, may find the experience much bumpier than they’d been prepared for. After all, it’s one thing to contemplate something intellectually, and quite another to experience it with one’s whole self. Initiations are birth processes, and like births, they are often messy, painful, frightening, disorienting– moreso if there is no one to midwife them, but sometimes even if there is.

I want to talk a little first about some of the “symptoms” that awakening can cause, and then talk about why something that is ultimately so positive and beneficial should cause so many problems.

Each person will experience awakening differently, so there isn’t a single checklist of symptoms that everyone deals with. However, there are many common ones, and many similarities in the types of things that happen.

Physical effects are fairly common, and not all of them are troubling. Fluctuations in appetite and sleep patterns, tingling or heat along the spine or at the top of the head, twitches or tics frequently occur. But there may also be extreme jitteriness, racing heart, or trembling (often accompanied by anxiety), or conversely, extreme exhaustion. There may be mysterious pains or sudden sensitivities to particular foods or substances. There may be a dramatic change in perceived temperature, feeling often far too hot or cold for comfort. Sensations of lightheadedness or clumsiness may result in the body feeling oddly alien, heavy, to oneself. There may be unusually frequent breakouts on the skin– pimples, boils, rashes. There may be metabolic shifts, especially in women, who may also experience changes in their menstrual cycle.

There are two things that are extremely important to note about these physical symptoms. First is that awakening usually has some kind of triggering event; at the very least, a moment of awareness that “something” has happened or changed. Someone who is experiencing these kinds of physical effects and thinks they might be related to awakening should try to think back and see if they can remember something like that. Second, and more importantly, physical experiences like this must still be checked by a medical doctor. In many cases, someone experiencing an awakening will present symptoms that completely baffle their doctors because there’s no obvious physical cause. Discovering an existing medical cause doesn’t necessarily mean that the sudden onset of the symptoms isn’t related to the awakening, however it DOES still mean that the condition should be treated medically! Take a wholistic approach, please, and treat the physical and spiritual sides alike.

Also common, and sometimes even more frightening, are the unexpected emotional and psychic effects. Some people may begin having extremely vivid or even lucid dreams, experience moments of psychic awareness, or feel prompted or compelled to do or say things that don’t seem to make a lot of sense yet seem terribly important. Some people who have strong spiritual faith may suddenly feel alone or abandoned. Some may have very strange experiences in the world– strangers saying odd things to them, or very noticeable chains of coincidence.

In many cases their lives may seem to be falling apart. They may end relationships, or discover that they have been ended. They may have unusual trouble with electronics– their car breaks down, their computer shorts out, their phone dies. They may suddenly move, or change jobs, or lose their job, or become more stressed by work. If they are dealing with any kind of addiction or recovery, those issues may suddenly surge. Old or existing emotional issues also may come blazing to the surface– bad relationship patterns, old traumas, negative attitudes, strange fears. They may experience periods of free-floating anxiety or deep melancholy, may even feel despair. They may find themselves overwhelmed with sobbing for no reason, or consumed with irrational rage. There’s often a sense with these things of “I just can’t take it anymore!”, whatever “it” may be. Things they once cared deeply about doing may seem futile, pointless. There’s a sense of needing to re-evaluate absolutely everything, but accompanied by a feeling of being utterly overwhelmed by the idea and with no notion what criteria are worth using as a standard against which to measure.

Oftentimes, especially for someone who is consciously trying to make positive changes to make the circumstances of their life align with their awakening, the experience of a rash of seeming misfortunes ranging from petty and annoying, to major and frightening, may seem like a punishment. You’ll hear them say it. “God/the Universe/the world is punishing me for thinking I could do better in life. I should just give up and accept a sucky little life.”

A similar, and similarly frustrating, experience comes when the universe seems to be throwing down old challenges right in one’s path. For example, someone who has often suffered from falling in love with unavailable people may suddenly become consumed with desire for someone who’s married, at a point where they thought they’d gotten past that and become ready for a more fulfilling love. This, too, can cause feelings of despondence and helplessness, a fear that the universe is trying to shove them back into an endless cycle of dysfunctional patterns for some unknown but cruel reason.

(Again, people mystified by these experiences should look for a trigger, and again, professional help should still be sought. It is entirely possible to be both undergoing an awakening, *and* a recovering abuse victim or bipolar or an alcoholic, and awareness of the former does not eliminate the need to treat the latter.)

So, if awakening is such a great thing, why should it cause so much pain?

I suppose I should acknowledge my own bias first, that *I* think awakening is a great thing, in that “how did I ever get by without this before” sort of way. I see it as a positive, even priceless, step in one’s journey through life. Ultimately, though, like most initiatory experiences, it simply is. Whether it’s a positive or negative depends more on how one integrates the experience afterward. It’s like the act of marriage; we tend to perceive marriage as a beautiful and positive thing, but really it has the potential to be either glorious or terrible– or simply blah. It is what we make of it. To me, if you’re going to expend so much time and energy on something, you might as well try to make it into an experience that feeds your soul.

But to return to the question–

First of all, any major life event is inherently stressful. Have you ever seen one of those psychological checklists designed to assess how stressful your life is? You check off every item that applies to your life at this time, including “change jobs”, “death of a loved one”, and “money worries”. But you ALSO check off “new house”, “getting married”, “graduating school”, things we tend to see as positive. Awakening is no less stressful, and it can be even moreso when we consider how much more limited our understanding and support network for it is likely to be. The simplest explanation is that any source of stress tends to manifest in other areas of our lives, cropping up in strange illnesses or rippling outwards to affect our jobs, relationships, states of mind.

On a deeper level, a soul awakening is a new state of heightened spiritual sensitivity. Just the way that people who’ve had laser eye surgery go through a period of serious photosensitivity before they adjust to their new vision, a newly awakened person sees their life, and the state of their soul, in often-painfully stark relief. Things that seemed mildly irritating or oppressive before become unendurable. Areas of life that need serious change or repair are impossible to ignore any longer.

At the same time, a component of awakening is a surge of clear, strong spiritual energy that occurs when the conduits between the individual and the Universe are suddenly cleared, a surge that also stimulates dormant energy centers within the individual. That energy fills their being, and (sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly) begins to force out old blockages, unresolved traumas, limiting beliefs, anything that isn’t congruent with that energy flow. This happens at all levels of the individual’s sphere of existence, the changes reflecting both externally and internally. Therefore, issues left unresolved and long-buried are put square in front of them demanding attention, and at the same time, they find them particularly painful to face. Think of it as the soul detoxing.

Too, someone who is unprepared for an experience like this may be quite literally overwhelmed by the magnitude of it, unable to manage the energy surges or to contain the changes. It may drive them to ever more extreme coping behaviors, or it may quite literally drive them mad. This is why most teachers experienced in raising kundalini, for example, will not help just any old one to do it. Awakening requires truth, a stark unadorned look into the mirror of the soul. It calls one to do some difficult work in order to integrate its energy, and to be willing to face some painful or simply transcendent things in order to do that. (As I wrote in an earlier post, it can be just as traumatic for someone to honestly see their own glory as their own shortcomings.) It is a beautiful act of courage to meet that initiation and to agree to the things it asks of you. But it is also courageous to know your limitations and to say “not yet”. In truth, there’s never a perfect time to throw your life into a tailspin, but some times are more perfect than others. And in my experience, once the call has come the first time, something changes. The universe will keep circling back, ever more insistently, to see if you’re ready to get up yet.

Sometimes, however, all of these seemingly terrible things are meant to be genuine gifts. The Divine Wow saw the spark of hope and excitement and awareness that flared in you when you glimpsed the true possibilities of your existence and saw who you are meant to be. And then you backed off a little, wishful but afraid, wanting to take it slow, to think things through, afraid of what you might lose if you followed that call. Instinctively you surrounded yourself with all the obstacles in your life that you believe will prevent you from going towards your true self. However, what you saw as insurmountable, the Universe sees as merely inconvenient, and reaches out to knock them out of your way. On a Soul level, things like jobs and cars and relationships, money and home repairs and chores are just Ego-constructs of an illusory reality; to the Universe, the greater benefit of eliminating obstacles to your soul’s growth outweighs the temporary pain that your human Ego suffers from their loss. (This idea is very well explained in this post in Paul Piotrowski’s blog as well.)

But part of any initiation experience is the presentation of a set of challenges for the initiate to overcome. And so we find circumstances cropping up in our lives that demand action and response, that refuse to allow us to passively drift along anymore. This is all the more true when the circumstances are ones reflecting old repeating patterns that may or may not have been resolved in our lives. We do have to do the work. We quest towards our true selves by proving we are willing to meet challenges; and we prove to our Selves that we are genuinely ready to integrate the experience of awakening by facing the patterns and people and situations that used to have so much control over us, and by responding to them, this time, as the true selves we are striving towards would respond to them. We overcome the challenge by proving that we have broken those bonds for good, that we have the wisdom to act differently and not be sucked back into old cycles, that we are learning to steward our energy in smarter and healthier ways.

What should you do if you find yourself in the aftermath of an awakening, experiencing all kinds of strange symptoms and upheaval, when it’s already too late to choose whether or not to accept the experience? We are, after all, at a point in time where more and more people are spontaneously awakening and finding themselves alone, adrift, and desperate for understanding and guidance; and I believe that our world needs all the awakened and healthily integrated souls in existence.

Aside from finding medical and/or mental health professionals to deal with the particular manifestations of the experience, a good first step is to read everything you can get your hands on relating to awakening (enlightenment, transcendence, samadhi, fana and baqa, kundalini rising, dark night of the soul). There’s a lot of garbage information out there, but after a while, patterns emerge. You will begin to see sensible, straightforward people saying very similar things, things that ring true on a deep, intuitive level, even if you initially feel resistance. Listen deeply to your innermost voice. It may not always be easy to interpret, but it will never steer you wrong.

If you know someone personally whom you believe has already undergone and integrated an awakening, seek them out and ask for guidance, or simply ask them to be someone you can talk to about your experiences. If not, form an intention to bring someone into your life who can guide you and teach you. Sometimes you’ll get a little guidance from a lot of people, like a pinball bouncing off numerous bumpers and paddles before zooming up the bonus ramp.

Try to see this time as an opportunity for deep, positive transformation in your life, rather than a punishment to be endured. We all have wounds in our souls to heal; it’s part of making our way through human life. This is a time to work on healing those raw and broken places, and though it may not be easy, it will ultimately be worth it. Meet the challenges. Do the work. Stop reacting the same old way and expecting a different outcome. It’s time to take a new course and learn new solutions. How would your true self overcome these challenges?

Be gentle with yourself. There is no need to compound your pain by being harsh and unforgiving towards yourself. Try to feel compassion for the self you see in the mirror of the soul; as ugly and weird and broken as you may seem, as wasted and messed-up as your life appears, as ashamed as you might feel, you are, as it says in the Desiderata, “a child of the universe, as much as the trees and the stars/you have a right to be here.” You have needed every moment, every choice and experience, to arrive at this point, even if its gifts and lessons are still mysterious to you. Trust in that, and give yourself time and space to work through everything that has been thrust upon you with this awakening. Stay with it, patiently, lovingly; these things will all pass, in time, and you will come out the other side more the person you were meant to be. Remember to breathe. Remember to make time to have fun and to laugh.

Seek for purpose. Awakening happens to bring you into better alignment with the meaning in your life, to give you better tools to do the things you came here to do. Its attendant chaos and pain is easier to process and live through if you are spurred to explore the great mystery of your life, the mission coded deep in your soul. As you discover your purpose, and dedicate yourself to it, you will also discover a context and meaning for all the joyful and difficult things in your past alike. It will help you make peace with things you could never previously comprehend.

Approach the world with love and hope. This may seem absurdly difficult, pointless, hopelessly naive. But it will be your lifeline, the golden thread that you follow through the labyrinth of your awakening out into the sunlight of a new awareness. Love the world, and it will love you back. Love this opportunity you have been given, let your hope light your path, and each step will be revealed to you.

You will eventually complete this part of the journey, and you will find that, after all, you were never truly alone.

Note: This is the second in a short series of posts about spiritual awakening. You can find the first post here.

What Is Awakening?

Meditative Rose — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:43:43 +0000

“Awakening”.

It’s a word you’ll hear tossed around a lot in spiritual circles, often sounding like a New Agey version of Eastern concepts of enlightenment. It’s a word you’ll hear a lot around here.

But what, in practical terms, does it mean? How does one awaken? How does one know if awakening has occurred?

I’ll start with that last: Like with orgasm, if you have to ask if you had one, you probably haven’t.

That’s not intended to be as flip and unhelpful as it sounds, but rather to assure you that it definitely won’t pass through your life unnoticed.

It can’t, in fact, because conscious awareness is an inherent part of the experience– part of what defines it as awakening in the first place. One of the definitions of the word “awaken” is “to be made aware of”, and that’s what we’re talking about here.

I like to think of awakening as the experience of becoming “differently conscious”. I resist terms like “more conscious” or “heightened conscious” or “enlightened” because they suggest a very ego-based superiority (and it irks me to see discussions amongst so-called spiritual people who enjoy putting down their opponents by suggesting that those people are too benighted to get it, whatever “it” happens to be in that case). Comparison is beside the point, and largely pointless; you can be the most awakened being alive, and you still crap and itch and pay taxes and you still have to do the work of this incarnation.

Imagine you found yourself suddenly wearing heat vision goggles. It’d be weird and a little freaky, and you’d stumble around a bit, and everything would look sort of blobby and indistinct at first. Depending on your temperament, you might spaz and want them off, but there’s a decent chance you’d be interested, even fascinated, and find even the humblest items newly compelling. You might want to explore the world to see what other cool stuff you could see through these goggles, you might concentrate on trying to see different details, you might strive to understand what you were looking at, you might feel an intense urge to find the friends who are most likely to also think this is cool, and try to share the experience with them.

Now imagine you’ve worn them often enough, or long enough, that when you take them off and go back to looking at the world in the usual way, you find that you’re seeing things differently that way, too. Sure, you might not literally see, as in cones-and-rods see, the heat signatures of everything around you. But your mind’s eye can guess what you’d see if you were looking through the goggles, and so you can perceive it anyway, much like when you’re immersed enough in a foreign language that you find you’ve looked at the animal and identified it almost simultaneously as “dog” and “chien”.

Awakening is like putting on those goggles for the first time. It’s the moment you realize that you’re seeing the world in a whole different way. It’s powerful enough that it stays with you and affects how you see the world from there on out.

I would venture to say that *what* you see is a somewhat individual thing, something that can and has been interpreted many different ways. But, based on the descriptions offered by people who have had this type of experience, there seems to be some common ground, for example:

A sense of peace, well-being, safety, bliss, joy, hope, and/or possibility not rooted in any tangible cause;
An awareness of connection on a soul or spirit level to all other beings, even to matter itself or the entirety of the universe;
A feeling of having glimpsed “beyond the veil”, of having seen past illusion and facade to a vast and overwhelming truth underlying all things;
A sense of one’s self as an eternal, ethereal being temporarily housed in material form; an awareness of the Ego as a construct of this material existence, a necessarily limited lens through which the unlimited Self is focused (and consequently, the awareness that the Ego and the Self are related but distinct from each other);
A radical change in perspective regarding the Ego and aspects of the material world, reducing material concerns from movie-monster hugeness and often ascribing to them a deeper spiritual/archetypal meaning within the context of this incarnation;
A realization of a greater meaning or purpose that serves as the context for one’s entire life, whether or not that purpose is fully understood right away, a sense that we are each here for a reason;
As a consequence of the perspective shift mentioned above, an increased ability to release outworn attachments, old griefs or neuroses, past traumas, grudges and resentments, and pent-up rage; the ability to resolve long-standing problems in the psyche and move on to new challenges and initiations;
A “click” of recognition and ease when reading things related to the experience of awakening, which may have seemed puzzling or opaque before;
A heightened desire to be of use to the world, to undertake more meaningful work, to connect on a soul level with more of the world, and/or to try to share one’s experience with the world;
A sense of the sublime, expressed in religious or spiritual longing, often accompanied by ecstatic experiences, vivid dreams, unexpected and powerful moments of bliss, and/or psychic or empathic experiences.

Not everyone will experience all of these, and not all in the same way; some may require conscious work and effort, and some may come very slowly and gradually over time. I have probably left some out, but these seem to me to be the most common feelings arising after an awakening experience.

To me, awakening is an initiation, something that takes place when a person is ready to do the work of severing Body and Soul (or Ego and Superego, or Persona and Anima) and then reintegrating them in a more wholistic relationship.

Let me repeat that. It’s what happens when a person is ready to sever their material self from their spiritual self *and then re-unite the two in a new way*.

My beef with a lot of transcendentalism is that it tends to see the material world and the human existence within it as something to be suffered or at best endured, that the spiritual state is “pure” and that the material state with its attendant messes, desires, quirks, and mood swings is just a big trap for the spiritually unwary. I don’t really see a difference between a spirituality that says that sex is dirty and sinful, and a spirituality that says that the only path to spiritual mastery is the renunciation of the world in favor of endless meditation on a mountaintop. Both of them treat physical existence like an appendix, something vestigial and useless and occasionally troublesome.

I don’t think this is wrong so much as I think it doesn’t go far enough. I actually think it’s useful for the first part of the equation– the initial separation of Body and Soul. Generally speaking, even those of us immersed in churchgoing throughout our lives are deeply mired in the illusions of the material world. We’re living in Plato’s cave, with maybe at most a deeply-suppressed instinct that the shadows dancing on the walls aren’t as real as they seem.

After the initial experience of awakening– which seems, on the whole, to normally be a blissful, exciting, or relieving one– the realization of the Self as distinct from the Ego begins. There’s an element of trauma to this, even when overall the sense of excitement or relief persists. To redefine oneself and one’s world is unsettling and often difficult, especially when the Ego is fighting to hang on to the status quo. Traditional enlightenment teachings can be very helpful here, providing guidance and context for the spiritual realm and identifying the toxic nature of the ego-based beliefs that are hanging on, so that they can be completely released. Having spent however many years immersed in the material world, it can be a wonderful and necessary balance to retreat as much as possible to the spiritual world for a while, to enjoy rest and contemplation.

But that’s only half the story.

That level of ascetic, transcendent spirituality might be enough if it meant it was time to experience a physical ascension as well, to be taken up to some gently-lit spirit realm and leave physical cares behind.

Generally, though, we still have the material world to contend with.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with going to live a hermit’s life on a mountaintop, eschewing material comfort and spending one’s days in advanced meditative states. If that’s what you feel called to do, and you manage to arrange your life to do it, more power to you!

What I’m saying is, there’s still a physical body there. There’s still a material existence. Ignoring it in favor of purely spiritual existence is as limited and lopsided in its way as being mired in the physical world at the expense of the spiritual.

And perhaps more to the point, many people who connect to their spiritual natures feel a great desire, not to transcend, but to return to the material world with a new perspective and new understanding. The philosophy of ascension doesn’t really support this, except maybe in a somewhat condescending way (ie, since you have to stick around for now, you might as well show some compassion to the less evolved), and those who still thirst for the sensuality and experiences of their incarnation are stuck feeling like maybe they’re only kidding themselves about making any spiritual progress.

To me, the re-integration is a crucial part of the work. You’ve just done a whole lot of work to shatter the bonds shackling your eternal Self to the illusions of the Ego, right? Now you have the opportunity to come down from the mountain and go back into the world, but to do it with a much healthier perspective and a sense of purpose. Putting Body and Soul into right relationship with each other, you become liminal, someone who walks with ease in both the material and the spiritual realms, who understands how they feed into one another, and who can use the tools of one to do work in the other, and vice versa. Believing that there is a purpose and meaning to your life, you become better equipped than ever to fulfill it.

So how does awakening happen?

Asking whether you can will yourself to awaken is a little like asking if you can will yourself to fall in love with someone. Certainly you can hold the intention, and you can prepare fertile ground for it to happen, but at some point there’s going to be a spark that is beyond reason and will, the sense of a revelation of a mystery which is what makes it an initiation experience. So I would say, yes and no.

Some people awaken completely spontaneously. They read a book or even just a quote, they meet someone who says something that shatters their worldview, they have a powerful dream, or an intense ritual experience, or they have a brush with death. Something comes into their life and kicks them in the head and demands that they pay attention.

Some people are guided there by good teachers, or guide themselves there through extensive spiritual exploration. Usually they have a nagging sense that there’s something more to life, and so they cultivate circumstances that allow it to happen.

Sometimes it’s a gradual process, like someone who needs to hit the snooze button five times before they can really get out of bed. They may have spontaneous experiences or guided ones, but usually they’ll have periods of insight and perception that are not quite strong enough to outlast their current worldview yet leave impressions for the next period to build on, until something finally tips the balance.

It’s not too hard to tell when you meet an awakened person. You’ll probably feel drawn to them, but not in the way you might feel drawn to a charming charismatic (the kind that dazzles you and throws you off guard). Around an awakened person, you’ll feel strangely comfortable and safe, like you’ve known them for a long time, like you feel that you could tell them deep things about yourself and not be judged or scorned. Other people will find them approachable, too– it won’t be just you. People enjoy being around them, and it makes sense, because they’re probably warm and compassionate. They smile a lot and exude peace, even if they’re being rowdy or silly or even angry. They aren’t quick to anger and they tend to be thoughtful. People value their opinions and advice. They may be quite perceptive, but they are also forgiving. The real key is that they have at least a measure of humility about their place in the world. They may share their insights, especially if asked, but they don’t wield their spiritual state like a weapon to beat down other “unenlightened” souls in argument, and they don’t put themselves forward as the final authority on anything, even if they are teachers or leaders of organizations.

Being awakened doesn’t require you to be anointed by a spiritual hierarchy. You don’t have to buy a particular author’s books or take a seminar. It doesn’t require that you be any specific race, age, political party, nationality, religion, or level of education. Your wise and loving grandma who never finished high school and always wore secondhand clothes is as likely to be an awakened soul as that Indian guru whose lecture sold out at the city stadium. The only requirement is, as Coleman Barks translates it from Rumi, “Don’t go back to sleep. Don’t go back to sleep.”

The incomparable Rob Brezsny has a quote that really sums it up: “You are the Chosen One, but so is everyone else.” We’re all “chosen” for something in this life, in that we– our higher selves– chose this incarnation for a reason, and part of the work of this life is to listen for guidance towards that reason. Awakening is simply the moment when you hear the universe calling your name, and you begin to pay closer attention to what it has to say.

Are you ready to get up?

Note: This post will be the first in a short series on the topic of spiritual awakening.

Back in the saddle

Meditative Rose — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:36:52 +0000

Hello again!

I put this blog aside for a while, not entirely intentionally, as I made my way through an incredibly busy several months. Much of that time has been great– I’ve been teaching, writing, organizing parts of events, doing some very exciting work! Some of it has been not so great; but then, I’ve never claimed that living a life devoted to Love was always going to be glitter and roses…

I’m looking forward to updating this space a lot more often, as I evolve its voice and style, and post things that I hope will be beautiful and meaningful.

I also wanted to announce that I will be teaching a track on Sacred Romance at Free Spirit Alliance’s Mythical Journeys event, which is a long weekend of very focused, intense spiritual work. I’m thrilled to be doing it, and excited to share the news!

Be welcome here, all, and enjoy!

Muliebrity

Meditative Rose — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:05:36 +0000

I love that word…muliebrity. A friend taught it to me many years ago, when she made it the name of a grrl-power mix tape she made for me. It is to “woman” what “virility” is to “man”. And that’s what this entry is about—how to be a woman, in full possession of her feminine power. (For the inspiration and reason for writing this piece, read How To Be A Man at Steve Pavlina’s site.)

There are many ways to be a woman, more than I will list here, more that will no doubt be discussed by many other fine writers participating in this friendly competition. The ones I list here are the ones that I have witnessed and admired in many women in my life, the ones that I strive every day to embody, the ones that resonate also with the principles of a Romantic life (as I began to explore in this post).

They are the things that I would teach to my daughter or to any girl who came to me seeking advice on the path to womanhood. Whether you agree or disagree with me, I hope they inspire you to contemplate what you believe about womanhood, regardless of your gender.

1. A woman knows who she is. She appreciates praise and critique, but does not require anyone’s opinions in order to see her own truth. She cannot be manipulated by flattery or insult. She may sometimes turn to those she trusts for a perception check, but uses it as a tool, not a measure. She chooses the identities she will reflect to the world, and does not let others rob her of this power, no matter how well-meaning they may be.

2. She has the worldly wisdom gained through experience and through the mythology of her community. A woman sees no experience as pointless and wastes no time with regret, understanding that every moment of life is rich with meaning and deep with wisdom to be harvested, and she boldly goes forward into experience knowing that ultimately she will take some treasure from it. Yet her movements are guided by the experiences of her community, whose tales she has heard and collected and whose wisdom she heeds, and because of this, she is able to pass on not only her own hard-won wisdom but that which she has derived from those around her.

3. A woman is endlessly curious about herself and the world around her. She is not too proud to learn something new, and she seeks out people and skills and languages and experiences with passion and delight. For her, curiosity is a means through which she encounters a sense of unity, a connection to her own soul and the flame of spirit in everything around her. She asks questions, and remains open to the answers, even if they are not the ones she hoped for. For a woman, knowledge and truth are their own rewards, and the path towards them is an adventure.

4. Yet at the same time, a woman embraces and embodies mystery. She understands that some things are revealed in their own time, and engrosses herself in the contemplation of those mysteries that cannot ever be truly known in this life. She is a careful steward of her own internal landscape, and is never so eager to be liked or accepted that she opens the tabernacle of her secrets too freely. There is always more to learn about her, and yet she can never be fully known, and this irresistible light glows enigmatically at the edges of her smile.

5. A woman is perfect and peaceful in her beauty. Regardless of the specifics of her physical appearance, and whether or not she has the slightest interest in the current modes of fashion and cosmetics, she intuits her existence as a child of the universe, and crackles with the spark of spirit within her. It is a spark she recognizes in everything around her—rocks, flowers, buildings, storms, other people, music—and sees that just as they are all sublime in their divine interconnectedness, so is she. She has no need of self-absorbed vanity, because she knows her beauty encompasses far more than an artificial social measure of sexual desirability. It comes from the grace of form and function in busy hands, the breadth of her life in the contours of her face, from motion and emotion, from her unique vitality. And because of that, she will not be cowed or limited by the expectations that anyone else places on her mere physical appearance, be they fashion magazines or feminists.

6. A woman has a great and generous good humor, and a laugh that is wild and free. She sees the pranks and puns and absurdities afoot in the cosmic game as it plays out, and joins in the merriment unselfconsciously and wholeheartedly. Life does not weigh her down, and she thoroughly enjoys her long strange trip through this incarnation. Her joie de vivre is infectious, and it draws people to her, making her—perhaps ironically!—a center of gravity holding together the heart of her community.

7. Elemental forces flow through her soul. She is in tune with nature, feeling kinship with moonlight and tides and the shifting of seasons. She remembers her own wild soul and respects the wildness of the natural world, seeking out its majesty and its energy, learning the secrets offered by even the smallest plants and the role and purpose of both the humblest and the greatest of creatures.

8. A woman is resilient and resourceful. She does not expect anything to be merely handed to her, does not expect to sail through life without obstacles, but she moves with the graceful strength of a reed, bending and swaying but always rising again towards the sun. She sees deeply into every thing, seeing its potential and its unexpected gifts, and when there is a need, she knows how to turn her environment into the instrument of its fulfillment.

9. A woman has both meaning and community. She lives with purpose, according to her soul’s code of honor, and therefore her every action has grace and import; yet she does not fall into the trap of the Horatio Alger story, believing that she can serve her highest ideals alone. She is skilled at bringing together a tribe of common purpose, be they family or friends or coworkers, and further enriching her own life and theirs through shared experience and work and passion. She is protective of this community, and expects their protection in return, because what they protect is something greater than the sum of their hearts.

10. A woman’s heart is vast and open. She does not shy away from emotion, be it great love or deep sorrow; neither does she reject the challenges offered to her in life by those emotions. She says Yes to life whenever it calls, and wherever it takes her. She is by turns compassionate, fierce, silly, frightened, courageous, loving, brassy, bold, shy, gentle, raging, grief-stricken, peaceful. She allows life and its beings and its experiences to touch her heart, to move her, to work on her like the motion of water over stone, to shape her and fill her and teach her and to help her become the woman she is meant to be.

Love Bhakti #15: The Light Within

Meditative Rose — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:18:43 +0000

I just read this story about a pastor challenging his parishioners to use a small sum of money (that he gave them from a loan) to go out and do something with it that would double the money, in order that it then be given back to the church and from there donated to three very worthy causes. (Warning– the end of the article made me cry.)

What really struck me about the story was the way that it pushed people to look at themselves and their gifts in a new way, making them see what they really have inside them and to use it creatively, to share it with others. The money was, in a way, incidental. People take money seriously, so being handed the seed funds really just ensured that they would take the challenge seriously and not just blow it off as impossible or whimsical.

Last night was the winter solstice, Yuletide, the longest night. This morning, marking as it does the return of the light, seemed like an opportune time to talk about returning to the “light” we each have within us.

Everyone’s heard the saying “Don’t hide your light under a bushel”, meaning that each of us has gifts and talents that are meant to be shared with the world, and that it’s a sort of false humility to pretend they don’t exist. But that’s usually as far as it gets taken– so no wonder people still dismiss it! It sounds like it’s saying that you have to put yourself out there and take the risk of showing what you can do, what you love to do, and opening yourself up for judgment for no reason other than “just because”. (Or, for some people, “Because God gave you those gifts so it’s wrong not to use them.”)

The implications of that truism run much deeper, however. It’s not about showing off for its own sake, or for ego’s sake, or as a holy dog & pony show. Shining your light on the world not only brings you the joy of doing something you love, but also does great things for the world around you. Your joy is infectious; it creates joy and love wherever it touches. The work you do out of this shining is much more powerful than work done out of rote obligation or resentment; it ripples through the world in ways you may not even be able to predict.

Going back to the article, one of the most beautiful things about that story was how the challenge made people experience, tangibly, that doing what they love can be a way for them to help others and benefit the world. It was a glimpse at the kind of talent and beauty that lies beneath the surface of every community. These people all turned to the things they loved to do, things that in many instances they had never thought of as being worth anything to anyone else, and shared them with the people around themselves. They poured beauty and love into the world, and reaped a tangible return that would have a measurable effect on the places to which that return was given– hard evidence of the worth of their lights.

Steve Pavlina has a thought-provoking article on contributing to the world through your career that is a terrific take on what I’m talking about here. One of the difficulties many of us encounter, I think, is that we are taught to undervalue our gifts. In an unhappy culture it becomes necessary to cut each other down out of the fear of what it might mean for us if everyone around us took the risks and lived their love. Those with artistic gifts or talents that are equally difficult to measure in monetary/hierarchical terms are particularly discouraged from trying to make a life out of them. They aren’t “real” or “practical” (or dreary?) enough. Just to be safe, we should get a “safe” career.

Can you imagine Louis Armstrong choosing to spend his life as a factory worker?

Yet that’s what so many of us do. We relegate our loves to small corners of our lives and try not to get too cocky about them, and spend the bulk of our time doing things we dislike or at best tolerate, feeling that we are somehow fulfilling a vague sense of obligation through our martyrdom. And it impoverishes the world around us.

Suppose the pastor had gone to his congregation and said, “Here’s fifty bucks. Go out and donate it to a worthy cause and come back and tell me how you spent the money.” Everyone who participated would’ve dutifully picked some recipient for the cash, handed it over, and been done, and gotten very little out of it. Instead, by being challenged to double the money through use of their talents, they opened up their lives, hearts, and imaginations. They forged friendships, started new businesses, gave each other gifts, created exciting memories, forged whole new identities for themselves.

And when they nearly tripled, instead of just doubling, the money they started out with, the money that was offered to charitable causes was infused with the energy of love and joy, with the commitment and excitement of the participants. In a metaphysical sense, it’s like receiving a handful of fresh seeds versus a handful of old dry ones. The dry ones might sprout, but the fresh seeds will probably take root more quickly and yield much more.

If you’re feeling the tug of the season and thinking about making resolutions for the new year, why not consider one along these lines: If you were given a sum of money to double through the use of your talents, how would you use the things you love to do to achieve it? Maybe even take the challenge yourself– even if you just take a twenty and use it to fund the experiment, with a goal in mind for the money you make. Do it as an offering to the Divine Wow, do it to benefit a charitable cause, or do it to give yourself a reward for taking the risk to see what would happen when you value your gifts. (If you do something like this, please post a comment with the results, or email me– I’d love to hear what happens!)

As the literal light grows longer once again and ripens the earth around us, let your metaphorical light shine stronger and brighter than ever, and ripen your life, your self, your world.

Love Bhakti #14: The Story of Your Life

Meditative Rose — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:46:48 +0000

I did an exercise from Julia Cameron’s Vein of Gold book some years ago, when I was still trying to get my head screwed on properly and purge the most unproductive and least interesting of my demons. It was a simple one, but lengthy, and the instructions were merely to write your own biography. But– the important part was, you had to write it from your OWN point of view. Only what you remembered and felt, as you remembered and felt it, not as it had been told to you by family or friends. The point of it was to see your life through your own lens, and therefore to realize how much of your view of yourself and your life had been made up of others’ (often skewed) perceptions.

It was a very revealing exercise; I discovered, for example, that although I had always thought of myself as being a shy child, the evidence of my memories didn’t back that up. I remembered many times when I’d made friends easily, approached people without fear, spoken up, instigated play. But because I was often quiet and lost in my own daydreams, and sometimes reserved in new situations until I felt safe there, others had labeled me shy and I’d simply accepted it.

I want to put that aside for the moment and talk about the origins of the word “romance”. “Romance” comes from “romans”, which meant “of the people” or “vulgar” and referred to the vernacular language spoken in France (to differentiate it from the formal Latin) in the medieval era. During this time, adventurous and epic stories of chivalrous heroes became popular at court. They were called “romanz” stories originally because they were written in that common language, but over time the term came to refer to tales with the elements of heroism, adventure, daring, courage, chivalry, and eventually (perhaps due to their large audience amongst the ladies of the court) courtly love. The archetype of these romances became the story of a hero who pledges his love and service to a (usually married and highborn) lady, and proceeds to embark on one or more challenging quests to prove himself worthy of her. Given that these stories flourished in the south of France where the worship of Roman and Celtic goddesses had been sublimated into fervent Magdalene and Marian cults, it is not hard to see a connection between the figure of the untouchable domina in these stories and the feminine divine; they probably struck the same chord, for example, that is touched now by Superman stories in a country soaked in Christian mythology.

One more detour on the path of this post: Recently I was at a Pagan gathering and attended a guided meditation intended to address and heal old wounds. Part of the visualization was to view some of your most traumatic experiences over the course of your life, watching them from different angles, as if they were mini-plays. Honestly, I didn’t expect to get much out of it, because it’s work that I’ve largely done. But as it turned out, I did get something from it, something I wasn’t expecting: Visualizing these scenes from my life, realizing that I was done processing or forgiving and that I no longer felt wounded by them, I suddenly had the sense of the other people who were involved, still as themselves but also on a new level, as archetypes. I felt that whatever it was they were doing in these interactions with me, they were in a sense playing a role that had– for whatever reason– needed to be filled in my life at that time. This did not negate the fact of each of those people being separate and unique individuals having their own experiences at those times; they were simultaneously themselves, and the embodiment of the thing that was being brought into my life. I felt that those adversaries may not even have always known exactly why they were interacting with me in those particular ways. It was like these events from my life were teaching stories that had shaped and guided me to the place and the person I am now; and I found that, having released these events long ago in the course of my self-work, I could now embrace them as stories within the larger story of my life.

We are rarely, if ever, taught how to love the painful and unbeautiful things in our lives. “Ideal” lives, we are told, are ones privileged enough to be as calm and uninterrupted as an expanse of blue sea, gently ruffled now and then but with all hardships and challenges prevented. We are supposed to want for our children lives free of any care. When bad things do happen, we’re at best supposed to “cope”. To work through things or stoically stuff them aside until we’re functional in the world. To be not actively suffering from old wounds, seems to be about the best we’re supposed to hope for.

Yet, it’s problems that spur innovation. Times of hardship that sort out devoted friends from fair weather ones. Crises spin us off in directions we’d never have explored otherwise. Have you ever met someone who’s experienced very little struggle or trauma in their lives? They tend to be uncompassionate, to have difficulty sympathizing with others.

What if we viewed our lives, the good and bad alike, as romances, in the tradition of those old heroic epics?

The descendants of those old stories are our adventure tales today. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a romance like those. So are the James Bond stories, Labyrinth, and definitely Spiderman. Now think about these stories– does the hero breeze through them blithely, achieving his objectives easily, the seas of his world parting for him to stroll through on his quest? Hardly. He gets the crap kicked out of him. He gets shot, captured, tortured, threatened, dangled off buildings, booby-trapped, stranded, abandoned, betrayed.

And, of course, we wouldn’t care about these stories if he didn’t undergo and then overcome those hardships. We understand that they are tests, initiations, and that facing them and enduring them is what marks him as worthy of the role of hero. The success at the end of his quest, be it to retrieve stolen plans or to get the girl, is not the quest itself. The success is the symbol of what he has become as a result of undertaking the quest and seeing it through.

Our entire lives are, in a sense, our quest. (“The world is made of stories, not atoms,” says the poet Muriel Rukeyser.) Whether you think that means that just surviving in this life is a hero’s journey, or whether you believe that there is a greater objective you have been put here to accomplish, it is possible to see life very differently when its events are viewed archetypically, as if they are plot elements in a romance.

You have survived every obstacle thrown in your path thus far in life. There are some you may be currently surviving, but the point is, you haven’t been beaten yet. You’re still onscreen. The audience is still waiting to see what’s going to happen next. Don’t you deserve some credit for that? Isn’t it a heroic thing simply that you are still here, breathing, thinking, walking in the world?

Think about some of the bad things that have happened to you in your life. Start small, if you like, with something you’ve gotten over and put behind you. What happened to you as a result of that? How did it contribute to making you the person you are now? What did it teach you? How did you overcome it? See what happens if you describe it to yourself as if it were a pivotal scene in a movie. That was the moment when I knew…just when everything seemed lost…

Have you ever met someone who seems to have led an endlessly fascinating life, who is always full of interesting stories and experiences? Those people have intuitively mastered the art of storytelling their own lives, of integrating not only the joyful and funny experiences but also the dark, painful, difficult ones, into a greater narrative whole. Their lives are an adventure because they have left room in them for a full range of experiences. I have a friend whose anecdotes vary wildly from telling to telling; she explains that it is not the literal truth of the events that matters, but their essence. This is what I mean. Another friend of mine, a singer who grew up down the street from me, writes in his artist’s bio that he’s from “a little factory town”, the product of blue-collar parents with a deep-rooted love of classic rock. None of that is untrue, though I was amused when I read it, thinking, “Well…we were a relatively little town…and it did have *a* factory in it…” The point is, what’s more interesting– to say that you grew up in a boring little suburb full of houses all made out of ticky-tacky, or to paint a picture of a Springsteen-like rough-edged youth built on music and stolen cigarettes and dreams? It’s all in the perspective.

Where are you in your life? Are you at a climactic turning point, or the place of peace between sequels? Are you in a search for the love of your life, or in pursuit of a title or award? Who are the characters in your past– the Wise Mentor, the Childhood Sweetheart, the Nemesis, the Loyal Companion? What have they each brought to the person that you are now? What kind of hero are you in your story– the Jaded Antihero, the Knight Errant, the Trickster, the Devoted Lover?

Tell your story to yourself as if you were describing a great movie to someone. Who would play you, if it were a movie? What music would be on the soundtrack? (Doubling back to my post on music therapy, perhaps you could put those songs into a playlist for yourself to help reinforce the idea that your life is interesting, unique, dramatic.) Would your life be an epic adventure, a splashy musical, or a surreal experiment?

As you think of these things, let them start to reveal the events of your life to yourself in a different light. It may sound as though this would trivialize the things that have happened to you, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is your own personal mythology you are exploring, as rich and multi-faceted and vital as the tapestry of mystic stories underlying every spiritual tradition in the world, only this one belongs only to you. Within it are the archetypes, “good” and “bad”, that have affected you and taught you and directed you down the paths you’ve walked. Within it are your gods and demons, your hidden saints and alter egos, your initiations and your rewards. These stories are your own personal passion plays, full of messages known only to you. Let yourself contemplate them in the bigger context of your existence. Think about what they’ve taught you and how they changed you, how they advanced the plot of your personal epic. Let them become more epic in your mind– the way that the Celts had of telling war stories in hyperbole, where a great warrior did not merely charge into battle, they roared in on a peal of thunder with dragons bursting out of their heads and fire shooting out of their eyes.

Make your story romantic and compelling to yourself, rich and dramatic. Let it catch your interest and your imagination, so that you go forward with energy and engagement, asking the world, What happens next?

A Thanks-Giving Offering

Meditative Rose — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 02:13:09 +0000

Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you ever say is ‘thank you’, it will be enough.”

So in this perfect quiet moment, here is my offering on this feast day:

Thank You, Beloved, for the innumerable good and beautiful things in my life, the generous and fascinating people, the endless variety of color and music, the unseen hands helping, the benefits and triumphs. Everywhere I turn, everywhere I look, You have left me gifts that take my breath away, that teach me expansiveness and kindness and make me free. Thank You for the things that prove to me that life is beautiful and that this world’s natural condition is happiness and joy.

Thank You, Beloved, for the hardships, the sorrows, the times of loneliness and pain, the fear and rage, the injustice and cruelty. Each of these things has shaped who I am; has strengthened me and taught me compassion; has taught me what it is to be completely and fully present in every moment; has forced me to search for truth, and allowed me to see hidden saints among us. Thank You for the initiations I would never have asked for but that I have faced and come through, more than I was before.

Thank You, Beloved, for the mysteries and puzzles, the things whose role in my life I cannot understand or explain. These are the things that draw me ever deeper into the experience of this life, into the search for wisdom and meaning and higher knowing; they teach me patience and paradox, offer me adventure, keep this world always new and interesting. Thank You for the things that ask me simultaneously to seek answers, and to learn to sit peacefully within mystery.

Thank You, Beloved, for this life, and this world, and this Love that runs through everything like sun-warmed honey. Thank You for this moment, this breath, this pulsing heart, this self, this infinity.

Thank You.