Flow down and down into ever widening rings of being
Rumi
I began this blog in December of 2021 and was setting out to explore living an authentic life - being one with all there is. What it meant to be real . . . whole . . transparent and undivided. What it meant to not pretend, or hide behind a role, or deny whatever didn’t appear “spiritual”. We live in a world of pretend. Pretend you know what you are doing. Pretend you know who you are. Pretend you are strong. Pretend you are alright. Pretend you are good at your job/school/relationships. For this blog I was headed into mystical land – being real as in being one with reality . . . being reality. . . being!
I had this much written:
One of my first recollections of seeking and intuiting there had to be something more than the way I was living was a refrain that announced itself . . . on its own, unbiddenly – “I want a personal relationship with God.” I was a young wife and mother and heard this call . . . this quiet, persistent and mysterious call, over and over again.
I wanted, more than anything, to find the real, to be real . . . to find my way out of the maze of pretense and illusion I felt stifled by. I didn’t have those words at the time; I just knew I was “acting as-if”, wondering if everyone but me had been given an owner’s manual for life. I had no idea most people felt that way – that we were living in a world that rewarded accomplishment or doing and seemed terrified of being, simply being.
“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Be real – sounds so simple and yet . . . and yet . . . most of us spend our lives avoiding it, chasing it, and digging our way out from under all that keeps us from our natural state of truth-telling . . . our natural state of wholeness, simply being. Don’t we long for the genuine, even as we flee it? We long for the genuine and, yet, intuit the immensity and totality surrender of being one with reality, which often scares us.
(A bit of a side note here – I find it uncannily ironic how life works. I muse and reflect on oneness; intuiting an even deeper experience of beingness . . . I ask in a sincere fashion and the answer appears. But many times, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to its own mysterious cosmic timing, and often in disguise. And it often comes in a way I am not prepared for, or I cannot imagine wanting, or can’t, at first, be gracious about accepting it.)
In early January I became ill with Covid and have, since that day, 7+ months ago, lived with long Covid.
Covid has become a guru – enforcing the reality of being sick, day after day, and taxing me in ways I have faltered over and over, – mainly, what it is like to be one with bodily misery? Being miserable.
It is one thing to be open and present when things feel good or even good enough. As humans we don’t really want to stay with the nakedness of our present moment when we are in pain. It goes against the grain to stay present to misery. These are the times that only tender gentleness and caressing love can give us the strength to settle into the truth of our experience. To fully be one with pain and suffering.
Since awakening . . . that profound shift in perspective . . . life has focused on embodying that perspective. Sinking the realization into the body, unfolding and expanding the mystery of “I AM” so the body can absorb the good news increasingly and be progressively more fully alive. Given my history of trauma and dissociation from my body, it has been a marvel and a challenge to inhabit my body consciously, intentionally, and persistently. Walking and hiking trails I become aware, over and over, how alien my body had been to me, how foreign the concept of balance had been and I have marveled at what it was like to live in a dynamic body. As I grew in confidence and awareness of what my body could do and what its limitations were, I experienced subtle and not so subtle ways of living in the world in a more aligned and carefree way . . . it was as if awareness had a more viable and capacious vessel for expression and movement.
Being sick for a prolonged period of time, (and given the newness of this ailment there are no answers as to how long it might last), I come face to face with my body in a much less pleasurable state – what it is like to be sick. What it is like to wake up each morning feeling lousy.
Consciousness narrows – focusing solely on the body and its discomforts and feelings of wretchedness. Given how the body keeps the score, I discover deep patterns of fear and anxiety in my cells; fear of my body and fear in my body; (this is not new news; I have, for the most part, been phobic about being sick)but I am taken aback when I come upon a deeply buried stone in my heart.
Self-awareness is a magic potion. It gives us insight into what we are not, what needs to be released so we know ourselves as the transcendent and it gives us guidance for expressing the divine through our unique personalities. It clears the way for being – being presence, being reality.
I am in the land of having to learn more about my body – given the lifetime of ignoring it and distancing from it, I am often clueless as to what it needs, especially when I am sick. I am called . . . pulled, actually, into the whirling waters of body awareness, right in the middle of the storm.
I feel miserable, day after day. The medical world is unprepared for this malady and I have no idea what to do for myself. I am too fatigued to brush my teeth and months of being profoundly depleted from the fatigue impacts my nervous system, which begins to panic from insufficient energy. Being aware, being awake, living here, now, in this moment of being sick, means being miserable – I am pierced as I notice having no distance from this feeling – the first time this happens – I actually feel forsaken. Where did peace go? Where is the light of conscious awareness?
My personality’s MO’s “comfort” of keeping upbeat flies out the window. The distance between “keeping my fingers crossed” and “we shall see” is thousands of miles wide – the difference between living with a certain hope for a certain outcome and living with a genuine not knowing and not pretending I can know or make something happen is breathtaking. Viscerally I am in the space of uncertainty – I genuinely cannot know how this illness will unfold. Uncertainty has taken a bigger seat at the table and truly means business. No amount of bargaining or arguing gets me out of facing the unknown.
I reflect upon Krishnamurti living in chronic pain with what he called “the process”. He spoke of it as his system having to adapt to his new levels of awareness and consciousness and what a toll it took on him physically. I reflect upon Brother Lawrence and his chronic sciatica and I reflect on Rumi’s guest house – welcoming everything into our being; i.e. misery, uncertainty, not being in control (implying all is God). I reflect on Ghandi being shot and calling out Ram, Ram, Ram with each bullet. Reality is reality . . . indifferent, benign, infinitely loving/accepting, and holding everything with equanimity. In our limited understanding of the sublime mystery of things we see things as good or bad. It can only be God if it feels good.
The truth of it, though, which I am experiencing in real time, in the cells of my being . . . is . . . it is Reality even when it doesn’t feel good. God as a bullet – the wonder of it, the very moment of shock, taking in all reality with grace and equanimity – a fountain of grace.
Deep inside myself I know I am being shown an opportunity – I might even call it a gift. With the tide gone out, I am able to see parts of myself washed to shore that were buried and unknown. I begin to feel a gradual ease and peace around being sick and less and less fear and anxiety. It is an opportunity to expand, to learn, to deepen and to release clutter and knots that are in the way of clearer wisdom and deepening unconditional love. Within the deep realization of my true nature - being, my personal evolution of becoming/maturing continues. There is no end, no arrival . . . spiritual maturity carries on, operates naturally– in eternal timelessness.
I am not shying away from the challenge of the experience. It has been brutal and at times I felt like a feral child with only a small flashlight at my disposal, woefully inadequate. But there is the beauty of it . . . the blessed beauty of this process of transformation . . . this process of increasingly becoming our true, true expressions, as our hearts open wider and our humanity becomes a clearer and clearer reflection and embodiment of being. It is the truth of that, the love of that, that lifts me and inspires me and holds me as I live smack inside the chaos.
Every living thing resides in the ground of being . . . Awareness . . . Reality . . . the Self, the Kingdom of God . . . Ground of Being . . .Emptiness. . . Infinite Spaciousness . . . Unconditional Love. (Call it what you will) Every one of us humans are in relationship to that ground of being and to the extent we are consciously aware of our true nature, we are open to and listen carefully as we become more conscious of that relationship and more and more authentically aligned with our pure being. Everything is energy – inextricably connected – the universal I of pure being and the relative I of personality. We all reside in and emerge from the very same source and are connected by the invisible tapestry of universal beingness.
The patterns we encounter in the process of becoming/evolving have been called many things – Carl Jung called them complexes, knots of unconscious feelings and beliefs, originating from trauma that are split off from the conscious psyche – Ken Wilber referred to patterns and unconscious behaviors as indicators that it was time to grow up (as well as wake up) and the spiritual world often speaks of being identified with the pattern or thinking. I, perhaps influenced by Jung, often experience our patterns as knotted and twisted energy, cutting off the life force of authenticity and flow.
We are designed to evolve in consciousness and become more of who we are in this world, our unique and fallible personalities – we can lean into our challenges, our messes, our imperfections, our misery – we do not have to pretend to feel any way other than we are feeling. As we recognize the interconnectedness between the ground of our being and our becoming/expanding/spiritual maturing, the more sensitive we become. The more we recognize that everyone, at the deepest level, resides in the ground of being, the easier it becomes to be kindly honest and truthful about ourselves. It actually becomes harder and harder to pretend we are something we are not. We are unable to turn away from ourselves. This is life in its completeness. This, which the mind has so much trouble grokking, is love.
At times I am cranky.
At times love comes up behind me and takes me in its arms, cradling my body or caressing my cheeks.
At times I sob and sob. The sobs coming from a pressure in my chest. I love that it is pure sensation – not coming from my mind or memories.
At times I sit still, eyes closed and content in silence
At times I have no contact with the outside world (other than doctor appointments and family and friends helping hands when needed)
At times I feel simply miserable.
At times my heart aches and breaks (maybe softening the dark, cold stone buried from long ago)
It is all a seamless, unbroken and undivided whole. Teeming with equanimity. It is all God; it is all Reality. It is all Being.
We fear our serpent,” he said,” as we also fear the numinosum –
so we run from it…
All we have to give the world and God is ourselves as we are.
But this is the hardest of all tasks.”
Carl Jung
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. –
Joseph Campbell