by meredith murphy
At times it's hard to feel your connection to anything.
Life seems hard. You wake up even at the dawn of the new day with a sense of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, frustration, even anger. This is part of life in our evolution--that these feelings come to the surface. Are triggered by our relationships. Are fed by what we think about. Are deepened by our memories.
When we're in one of these experiences, it can feel all encompassing. It can feel like there is no way out.
When this feeling has gone on a while and as the mornings have come and gone, it has not lifted, it's easy to lose your orientation. You might even begin to feel just angry and outraged by the whole thing.
All of this just continues to stir up the muck. And yet, even knowing this, when you're in this space, that doesn't help. It seems like nothing helps. That no searching frees you. You lose your faith in asking for help. You stop calling upon angels and your higher self. You may not even feel their presence anymore and again, you find yourself astonishingly, seemingly, not connected to anything.
In truth, you are one with the vastness of being, the divine realm from which you and all life is continually emerging. Yet you don't feel this. And it is feeling this and living as this knowing that is what we're evolving toward. You know this and you are committed to this and the reality that you can't get there right now, only increases your suffering.
When we find ourselves in just such a depressing, frustrating state of being, it's really good to just slow down. To not worry about the fact that it seems like we'll never be happy. To not fuel the anger, but to sink into it. To become deeply intimate with it all. Yuck? Why yes. Uber-yuck. Yet it is by allowing ourselves to acknowledge what is happening, that we begin to reinstate our wholeness, and our alignment with ourselves.
When we're at odds with our feelings, we're at odds with ourselves. When we feel unhappy about our feelings, we're fragmenting something that is actually whole--our experience. We're aggressive toward ourselves and our experience. We resist it. We hate it. We fight it.
By starting with just acknowledging what is happening and being aware of it, we start to return to an experience of wholeness. We start loving ourselves! We didn't even realize it, but we weren't loving ourselves, in fact that is what perpetuated this whole mess! Even though it might not feel like it, it's true. By paying attention to what we are feeling. By greeting what is happening to us without fighting it, by recognizing it--not by labeling it necessarily, but by feeling it consciously, intimately--we are actually coming into agreement with the moment and with our own life, our self our experience, our very being. We're saying "Yes, I see that." We don't have to like it, but we're no longer at odds with ourselves. By acknowledging what's happening we stop fragmenting ourselves. We're coming into clarity by doing this and we're coming into wholeness.
Staying with ourselves is the most important part of being alive.
If we don't stay with ourselves, we're not loving ourselves. We don't want to be conditional in our love of self. We want to love ourselves in all ways. When we make the same mistakes again, when we feel crappy, when we're unhappy, when we get angry over something we know isn't even about us. When we don't even know why we feel bad, we still want to stay with ourselves. Whenever we fall short of our own ideas of ourselves and what we think we ought to be, we're living in dis-harmony with ourselves and we lose the experience of our own wholeness.
In this process of awakening, many of us have experienced expansive bliss, had visions and insights that are radical and life-changing. We've felt our bodies changing and we've devoted our focus and our life to the collective awakening and our own personal evolution toward embodying light and love.
To find ourselves in the muck after all this, can feel like an enormous disappointment. Or worse.
Yet perhaps in this incredibly difficult state, we're might actually discover and be able to see our own divine embodiment progressing.
By staying with ourselves, we become the love we wish to be. We say to ourselves, "I love you no matter what you're feeling." We put the truth of our eternal, divine nature into practice by behaving toward ourselves and our lives with the compassion of knowing we are still pure, perfect, radiant love. Regardless of appearances.
As we learn to love ourselves this intimately, this deeply, we grow the capacity to create a love-filled world. Even more important, we cultivate the embodiment of wholeness as awareness. We deeply support Gaia and our whole world, with this seemingly disconnected, personal activity of becoming better at being intimate with ourselves.
There is much in our experience that arises that we may not understand. Yet we still stay with ourselves!
We can see what is. In doing this we can be clear about what we're feeling. We can more intimately know our experience. We can trust that in this close, attentive, love-filled relationship to our life, that we're doing the most important thing--staying with ourselves. Learning to be whole.
Amazingly, by doing this, life settles. It might not happen immediately, but life is in motion, it's not static, and merged with it, with our experience, we enable this to flow into a new arrangement. And the more we love ourselves in this moment, even if that only looks like accepting, or noticing, or tolerating...all of it is a start to returning to wholeness.
Our mind is naturally peaceful, as is our being.
When that feeling, that state eludes us, we can interpret this correctly: we are out of alignment with ourselves. There can be, as we all know, peace in the midst of any and all storms. So we don't have to change what's happening, we just have to stay with ourselves. We can trust that if we stay connected and with ourselves we're reinstating our wholeness, feel the peace of not fighting things, pay attention to ourselves instead of wishing we were somewhere else (thus fragmenting our wholeness and our presence) and instead, go the distance, knowing eventually joy will return. We can sidestep worrying and feeling bad and acting in faith, just stay with ourselves. Like we stay with a good friend through hard times--reassuring and present. Paying attention. Noticing. Gentle.
By slowing down we can see our experience more clearly and stop saying "no" to our life! We can stop basically ignoring ourselves. As we hang in there with whatever is happening in our life, and live saying "yes" to it we begin to notice the energy of freedom. Realizing this is the ultimate submission to life. Not fighting it, actually liberates our innate freedom! And as we become one with it, returning to ourselves, then one with our life, we can gently, from within the wholeness of our being, allow a shift to arise.
When we've been feeling badly, or disoriented, confused or filled with despair, finding the subtle energies of love and grace can seem hard--like learning to taste the rich flavors of food without salt!
When we come into full presence with our experience, we re-instate our wholeness.
As we speak to ourselves with love, reminding ourselves and remembering that all is well, that we are one with everything, that it is our innate state of being to be in peace, to know ourselves as love, we give ourselves company. And we experience comfort. By slowing down, by allowing ourselves to settle, we allow this memory of our true, luminous nature to surface. It arises naturally. And organically, without effort, we plant within our consciousness, the seeds of eternal joy as love.
