Collapse is an essential part of spiritual evolution. Enlightenment is a destructive process, an awakening out of a false understanding of self.  It is the complete crumbling away of falsehood.

There are times in our lives when we are ready for the collapse of our psychic infrastructure, when all that has been built on false terms crumbles under the pressure of our longing to liberate the true self.  This can disrupt our relationships, work and daily living.

My life is under renovation right now and I find that I am vacillating between deep uneasiness and profound relief.  I feel I can survive this only by carving time out in my daily life to pause and take a deep in-breath, to observe and allow space for this soul realignment.

The external elements which first catalyzed the collapse are less important now.  When I become still and present they move into the wings, revealing a higher self whom I see has called this meeting to order.

In my meditation, I see that I am halted in a silent mist with only a portion of the path visible before me and a vague understanding of the path behind.  I see myself holding a handful of threads that extend in both directions. I recognize that what has stopped me here has threaded through my life and caused me to stumble many times before.  I feel as though I must pull apart the strands one by one, to know them and follow them back to source.

In my hand, I hold the key to my re-membering.  This forgotten part of the self is a benevolent guide that can lead me forward into deeper reunion with the higher being within me. Pausing and simply allowing myself to look without resistance or judgement is breaking the spell of the mind-created self.

As daylight decreases in this region of the world, we are pulled with even greater momentum toward the inner sanctum of our being.  It is the time of year when many of us are given to the deepest descents.

I wake each morning before first light and find my way through dim passages to my seat in the quiet darkness.  I have resisted and hungered for this surrender, for this deep pause in sacred silence where the whisperings of my heart and soul can be voiced and heard.

My peripheral vision is crowded with the messengers I have been avoiding.  In the quiet darkness they move to center to be in conversation with me. I feel my aloneness in this space, aware that I am the only rightful host to these clamoring guests.  I have given them life and they are here to do their purifying work on my behalf.

They enter me through the stillness – the shrill, the mournful, frenzied, desperate vocalizations that in the light of day, I thought I could not bear. These voices can overtake me, some seem like they could completely annihilate me.

If I can be bravely present to them, in the end they sweep my heart clean.  My life can speak to me again with clarity and without the manipulation of my ego attempting to protect itself from its inevitable shattering.

I resolve that I have come to this life to awaken.  I consent to these times when the path before me seems arduous, when my past elicits regret in me, when idealism folds. I bear witness to this intense life review.  I invoked this healing, this dissolving of all that is not based in truth.

I am relieved as I peel back my own image from the mirror and see a nameless and insignificant face, and recognize simply a heart of love and a steadily evolving consciousness. I devote my life to this return.

I will not die an unlived life

I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire

I choose to inhabit my days

to allow my living to open me

to make me less afraid,

more accessible,

to open my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance

to live so that which came to me as seed,

goes on to the next as blossom,

and that which came to me as blossom

goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova – Fully Alive

Sometimes we hear music, see beauty and feel great love and still forces beyond our creative doing do not collude with our vision.  Life presents no other option but the deep surrendering of our own ardently cultivated dream.

The path in front of us changes before our eyes and all we can do is follow our own footsteps into the mist without a plan and naked of our dreams – an initiate once again.  We “peel back our own image from the mirror” and reexamine who really lies behind the one we have created in our likeness.

Perhaps our dream has become a prison for our own spirit.  That’s when we can once again bear witness to the overall integrity of life. We can allow and trust another crumbling, another cleansing, where all appears to collapse into dust.

Take heart.  Illusions crumble.  All that is true remains.  And sometimes, the universe has a bigger and better plan for us.

Love after Love:

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving at your own door,

in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome

and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

Give Wine.  Give Bread.

Give back your heart to itself, to the one who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another,

who knows you by heart.

Take down the box of love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes…

Peel back your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

Finding the meaning in our life experiences, especially in the most challenging times, makes it possible for us to not only survive but also thrive in the difficult times.

Life is a symbolic journey.  Just as we can read the symbolism of our dreams, so we can read our life experiences.   A hidden gift is always wrapped within the challenge. It can be a grand opportunity to heal, strengthen, expand, transform and refine our contribution.

We are here to evolve ourselves, support one another and uplift the quality of life on this planet.  If we can see ourselves in this light while in the throes of physical illness, loss and other challenges, we are more able to be curious and ask ourselves, ‘How might this be serving me?’

When we are able to frame our life circumstances in the context of a larger story, we can ascribe a purpose and better tolerate the disturbance and instability.  Fear will have less of a hold on us and we can regain our sense of humor for this mad journey, we call Life.  I think Hafiz portrays it well:

Tripping Over Joy

What is the difference
between your experience of
existence
and that of a saint?
The saint knows
that the spiritual path
is a sublime chess game with God
and that the Beloved
has just made such a Fantastic Move
that the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
and bursting out in Laughter
and saying, “I Surrender!”
Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.

For myself and many people I work with, these have been the moments of truth.  There seems to be a pressing demand coming from somewhere in the universe for us to fearlessly embody the larger, unlimited version of ourselves that we hold in our highest vision.

Small self has been lagging behind for some time, begging to be released, along with lives that no longer have the capacity to hold the full dimension of who we are.  Relationships, self image, life work and world view are all up for reinvention. We are called to make drastic and far reaching changes in how we behave and think. The moment of self-realization and full empowerment is no longer reserved for a later someday.  It is now.

Many of us feel we have been ripped from a comfortable shore and swept into the turbulent tides of an utter unknown. It might help us to remember that we called for this.  We carry this longing inside to be whole, to be complete and to fulfill the promises we made in those crucial moments before time.

Birth is not easy, nor convenient.  I have given birth naturally to three children. I will contest that giving birth, when you are in it, looks much more like death.  Though I had a midwife, a supportive partner and a bed beneath me, I never felt quite so alone.  No one would or could come along to take over for me.  I, alone, had to bear the indescribable discomfort of something larger coming through.  I could not stop it and I had to trust that, though this seemed like my end, it was life expanding.

Babies notoriously wake an expectant mother in the dark night to be born, a mysterious force determining the moment of birth.  This emergence of the complete self has a similar timing.  When it is time, we are powerless to delay it.  Resistance only creates suffering.

We have to trust this temporary groundlessness and our inability to see beyond the challenging, often painful moment.  There is power in surrendering to this energy and allowing ourselves to be broken open by this new fullness.

I believe the body speaks in metaphors on behalf of the spirit.  Illness brings a message from the inner planes that we likely ignored earlier on when our emotions attempted to signal us. I have learned that is if I respond to the early messages from my emotional body, then physical illness does not manifest.  The gift of illness is that it provides us an opportunity to re-right our lives and realign with our soul’s desires.

Recently, I began to have some troubling physical symptoms and attempted to heal myself by doing all the called for regimes, the appropriate remedies, tonics, diet, exercise etc.  But I was not getting results and was getting worse. When nothing worked, I probed for some deeper spiritual meaning. What could the metaphor of this illness be?  Why might I need this?  What is the message that my body is bringing?

The back story is that I am really driven, okay, obsessive and hyper-focused. Lingering beneath my passion for what I do is a quieter voice that I often suppress. Though I was loving my projects and all I was accomplishing, I was not pausing enough for something else that I also really love.  I was missing a whole part of life that I truly have a desire to participate in! It is the part where you stretch out, look around, sigh, wiggle your toes and twittle your thumbs.  It is the part of me that just wants to smell the breeze, cook, chew, lay in the grass and stare off into space, basically accomplishing nothing.

Once, I responded and made the effort to bring doing and non-doing into greater balance, my body was able to heal along with the support of my other remedies.   It is a wonderful kind of magic and a science as well. I bow to my body for alerting me to all that I would be missing in my compulsive doing, even though I was doing what I love.

Though we are conditioned to fear illness, it really is an important opportunity to re-orient ourselves to the life that we truly want.  And because illness tends to be no fun, we hopefully can learn to sensitize ourselves to the earlier signals.  Finding the meaning in our illnesses and conditioning ourselves not to fear them is how we reclaim and empower the innate healer within.

The purpose of this blog is to add my voice and invite yours to the enduring dialogue regarding the nature of being alive – spirit embodied in human form.  As we wake up into life scratching our heads and wondering what the %(*@ this is all about, may we be surrounded by reflections that we are not alone in our longing and questioning.  As we continue to see beyond the material realm toward a greater awareness of our total nature, may we recognize ourselves in one another, as well as be at peace with the myriad of perspectives.  These writings are just one more voice in the symphonic chorus that comprise this rich universe and the one true voice of humanity.

The concepts contained within emerge from my practice of being silent witness to the partnership of my human and soul nature.  They are the voice that arises out of my morning meditations and over light my day, bringing me increased clarity and lightness of being.  They are born out of an instinct and a deep desire to bring forth my one true voice.

Aligning with our individual and collective one true voice makes it possible for us to live out our purpose, drink deeply and receive the full nourishment of this life, as well as give with an abundant and full heart in return.