In the middle is the secret place

Falling apart, holding it all together. Then falling apart, then holding it all together again. Cycles of integration and disintegration. Chaos and cohesion. Stillness and rest.

In ways the mind may never resolve, love is pouring through you, washing away everything that is less than whole, preparing you for what is next. But what is next is always of the unknown and will never be understood ahead of time by means of the conceptual.

Look carefully and see that you can never truly 'fall apart,' because you were never 'together' to begin with. You are the vast space in which 'together' and 'apart' dance in union in the world of time and space. Rest your achy nervous system and honor what is moving within you. Please don't forget what you are.

If you remain too identified with the falling apart, you cut into the naturally-existing aliveness that is here, now. You lose contact with the radiance within you, and you become misattuned to the unfolding of somatic experience, which is the movement of pure, luminous wisdom. You lose touch with the intelligence and the creativity of embodied presence, and with the direct realization that nothing has ever been wrong with you. You forget that the darkness, when provided sanctuary, is brighter than a thousand suns inside you. 

But if you remain too identified with holding it all together, you disconnect from your vulnerability and the spontaneous activity of the beloved within you, and disconnect from the wild reality that your heart could break at any moment. You forget that it is through this brokenness that your gifts unfold into this world, and how each and every crack in your heart is an illumined portal through which the poetry of your life will flow. You lose contact with why you are here – as a vessel of love for the benefit of beings everywhere.

Right in the middle of falling apart and holding it together is the secret place. Stay there. For it is there where the light and the dark are in union, where integration and disintegration emerge as one in love, and where lunar and solar weave together the particles of the sacred world. 

Photo by Alexander Khokhlov and Valeriya Kutsan