As we enter the body with breath and awareness – descending under the historic interpretations, and guided by new levels of curiosity, kindness, and care – we enter into uncharted territory. Here things are turned a bit upside down. In this new land, we may come to even appreciate our neurosis, our heartbreak, our confusion, our disappointment, our “failure,” our doubt, and our fragility. No longer viewing these forms as evidence of our lack of awakening or that we have fallen short… but as unique portals and invitations into the very alive reality that things are never really going to turn out the way we thought. It's just too creative here. You are just too wild, too unique, too unprecedented, too whole.
As the trance of shame, blame, and unworthiness burns up in the warmth of cleansed perception, we find ourselves at the threshold of the known and unknown, a liminal space where we can no longer find a familiar place or reference point around which to organize. It is exhilarating here inside the opposites, but simultaneously terrifying to a mind longing for resolution, certainty, and control. In the bardo, inside the vessel, there is no real place to land, other than where you already are.
As we become aware of the ways that we distract ourselves from the open, center-less, alive nature of immediate experience, we can then make a choice to re-embody. We can return to the life of the senses, to our uncompromised commitment to self-kindness, to no longer apologizing for what we are, and to fully participating here in an unfolding miracle... setting aside the dream of postponement until a future moment.
In this place of heart-centered, compassion-infused embodiment, we can no longer pretend we’re not feeling what we’re actually feeling; whatever guest arrives in the home of the heart is allowed, surrounded in warmth, and taken directly into the inner sanctum. Inside this secret chamber, your neurosis, your fear, the deep need to be special, the frenetic scramble to be seen, to be “awake” – all this begins to become dismantled, dissolved, and taken apart by love.
While this disassembling is sure to involve both sweet and fierce grace, it is a movement of wholeness, and evidence of the full-spectrum nature of the path of the heart.
My new book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available
The next event, The Magic of Being Fully Human, to be held in Ojai, CA on October 14-15.
