Thursday, January 26, 2017

An open meadow of awareness


As young children, we did not have the capacity to discern between feeling bad and being bad. In the little one, I feel bad equals I am bad. Observe how this leftover association continues to color the landscape. When you feel sad, depressed, anxious, or ill, what meaning is automatically associated with these experiences? What judgments, shaming, or interpretations do you unconsciously add onto the raw embodied experience?

Pull back slightly and enter into relationship with the feelings. Provide a home in which they can unfold, dance, and communicate essence. Separate a bit, but not so much that you disembody. Stay close, but don’t lose perspective. There is so much space around your experience. Touch the space, the emotion, and the sensations all at once. Practice intimacy while not fusing. This is a holy art that you can learn.

You are the warm, open meadow of awareness in which all feelings come into being, dance for a bit, only to dissolve back into the vast ground from which they came. Find the sacred middle and rest there, between the ancient pathways of denial and fusion. It is in this crucible in which the great process of metabolization by love will unfold.

Listen carefully for the invitation – early in the morning, late at night, as you wander through the day, as you take the risk of heartbreak and mingle your awareness with a sunrise or with the moon in her fullness. Come closer. Open into. Breathe with.

The new way is alive and rippling. The pathways are revealing flexibility and their longing to be reorganized. Soothe the fire with presence and healing compassion. Renew your vow to no longer abandon what is moving within, to no longer pathologize your sensitivity, vulnerability, and the full-spectrum nature of what you are.

There is guidance emerging, taking whatever form it must to reach you: an old feeling, a charged emotion, an eruption of somatic aliveness. What you are is a field of wisdom, though it is a wisdom not perceivable by ordinary means. Open into what is appearing now and behold the creativity that you are. Hold it within your heart and provide illumined passage for the revelation.


Photo by Evgeniia Litovchenko


The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now 

New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April