Into the tender space of wholeness

If a child were to appear at your door – cold, scared, and tired from a long journey…

If he or she were anxious, heartbroken, raging, and confused…

Would you refuse entry to the little one? Would you first demand that his fear dissolve, her anxiety be healed, his confusion clarify, or her heart be mended?

In your most authoritative spiritual voice, would you urge the little one to first "get over it,” to accept everything the way it is, to urgently forgive those who have harmed him, to fall into the bliss of the moment, or to drop into the state of no-self?

Or would you provide sanctuary and safe passage from a long journey? A warm home in which the stories, the emotions, and the sensations of the little one can unfold, be illuminated, and be metabolized into the tender space of wholeness?

As Rumi reminds us, “Look as long as you can at the friend you love, no matter whether that friend is moving away or coming toward you.” The friend is always appearing, in both obvious and disguised forms, as the others in your life as well as the unmet ‘inner other’ of your heart.

Honor each of the forms that love take, allowing your heart to break when these forms change, for it is their nature to do so. This is not evidence that something has gone wrong, but only in the relentlessness of love to do whatever it must to find you.

An extraordinary meeting

While it may appear to be another ordinary day, an extraordinary meeting is being assembled. The hidden members of your inner family are the honored guests: the achy one, the confused one, the vulnerable one, and the one who is uncertain about what is coming next.

At times, it can seem that these ones are obstacles along the way, clouding your path and interfering with your longing for intimacy and connection. But in one moment of clear seeing, it is revealed that the path is everywhere. And that the nature of any obstacle, when metabolized in open awareness, is none other than the way home.

Something is being reorganized, but it’s not possible to know who you will be on the other side. It’s just too creative. None of the old reference points around which you have come to organize your experience are all that relevant any longer. While this sort of groundlessness can be terrifying to the one longing for certainty and resolution, it is simultaneously exhilarating to a heart opening into aliveness.

Love is always appearing in new and ever-creative configurations. It will never give up on you and will continue looking for you into eternity, taking whatever form necessary to remind you of how vast you are. In this way, it is a great shapeshifter, willing to use both dark and light to remind you of something important that may have been forgotten.

As your lovers, your children, your friends, and your feelings – as the colors, fragrances, and essences of the phenomenal world – even as the sunrise and the deer and the trees and the wind, love will continue its journey, until the luminous purity of all form is unveiled.

Photo credit: Senja, Husfjellet, Norway, by Daniel Kordan

Your confusion is not pathology

Your confusion is not pathology, it is path. It has something to show you that clarity could never reveal. The nature of chaos is wisdom, but you must provide a home for it to receive its mysteries.

Your feeling of disconnection is not neurotic, it is intelligent. It has something to show you that oneness could never reveal. If you will allow it to unfold and illuminate – resisting the temptation to convert it via spiritual process – it will disclose an unmet doorway.

Your loneliness, your shakiness, and your fear are not mistakes. They are not obstacles on your path. They *are* the path. The freedom you are longing for will never be found in the eradication of the unwanted, but only in the love and the information it carries.

There are surges of somatic activity that contain very important information for your journey. If you will offer safe passage for the unknown aliveness, you will meet the messengers of illumination. Nothing is missing, nothing is out of place, and nothing need be sent away.

Yes, you may burn until you are translucent, but it is by way of this burning that your wholeness will be revealed.

Art by Lyse Marion
 

The cosmic exhaustion of becoming

You’ve been on such a long journey… so many moments of turning from your raw vulnerability, in the hopes of becoming something different. Someone who fits in to a crazy world, who can be seen for the eruption of creativity that you are, no longer needing to pretend and hold back, even for another moment.

You sense a miracle is unfolding here and yet it somehow it seems out of reach. You feel the veil parting, but the aliveness, the intimacy, the connection… somehow it remains hidden. How much more surrender could possibly be needed?

Tossed by the core belief that you are not enough – that there is something wrong with you – you have become exhausted. This is not just a physical tiredness, though, but a cosmic sort of weariness… you are so tired of becoming.

In this moment, which is the only moment that is ever here, you can give yourself the gift of primordial rest. For this is the greatest act of self-love. Lay your hand on your heart. Replace the urgency of becoming with a moment of pure being. Create an inner temple in which your emotions, your sensations, and the longings of your heart can be held in sanctuary and provided safe passage.

No one can tell you the nature of this rest and what it means for you. But it is wired within your neural circuitry, and is longing to emerge and erupt by way of new pathways of inner attunement, care, and presence.

As the exhausted one, the disappointed one, the unworthy one, and the abandoned one appear, they do so as secret emissaries of wholeness. Please do not send them away into an empty, deserted forest within you. In ways a crazy world may never understand, they are seeking your holding and your warmth, to be metabolized and re-integrated into hidden places within you. For they carry a sacred light that is unique to them.

It is only you who can take care of this tender, raw, ragingly beautiful and broken and naked heart. There are forms of aliveness all around you now, longing to take form in a weary star. They are coming out of the unseen world to remind you of something you may have forgotten.

Photographer unknown
 

A prayer of wholeness

As an alive, sensitive human being, there will be times when heartbreak will visit – coloring your perception, soaking your emotions, and painting the sensations of the somatic world. As you wake in the morning, look up into the moon, and fall asleep at night… it’s just there waiting for you. This vague sense that something is missing.

Before you send the heartbreak away, turn into it and open. It is bestowing a transmission of pure revelation, but it is not easy to receive. Hold the offering close and see if your heart truly wishes to be mended. This raw, tender, broken openness is your lifeline to intimacy with all things. Offer safe passage for your vulnerability, for this is your gift to a world that has forgotten.

Long ago, you made a prayer of wholeness. The response to that prayer has come, this time as reorganizing, shaky aliveness. Dare to let in the implications of being here in a star where love is alive. Consider that your heartbreak need not be cured, fixed, transformed, or healed. Encode a new circuitry of empathic resonance, of attunement, of presence, and of compassion. What you are need not be healed. Only held. This is the new way.

No, heartbreak is not easy. As one of the fierce and wrathful emanations of love, it will throw you off at times. It will pull the rug out from under you and remind you of how fragile it really is here. But no matter how difficult or confusing things may be, you can start right now.

Slow way down. Breathe deeply. Attune to the heartbroken one inside you and start a new world.

As you make experiential, embodied, intimate contact with the tender one within, you can finally meet her. You can hold him. And you can renew your vow to never, ever abandon who you are.

Keep this one close, feel the unseen ones all around you, and give your heart to this world.

Photo by Elena Karneeva