From the perspective of exhaustion and the longing for rest, it is compassionate to seek relief from the uncertainty, and to replace the groundlessness with something more stable. Honor the call to safe passage and something to hold onto. It is an act of kindness to practice self-care, to weave a new story, and to soothe an overstimulated nervous system.
From the perspective of open awareness, groundlessness and aliveness are one. There is nothing to hold onto, nothing to shift, and nothing to transform. There is no new person to become, no healing which must occur before you can fully show up and participate here. Your life is not a project to be solved, but a mystery coming into being.
While the mind may spin in the attempt to resolve the conundrum, it is pure as it is, of the nature of wisdom, and has been placed inside a temple within you. The mystery is not meant to be resolved, only entered more deeply into. Inside the temple is a primordial sort of rest, which is discovered not through the answering of questions, but by way of intimacy with the contradictions.
As Rilke reminds us, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Though the activity of love is infinitely tender and holding, in its essence it is everything. It is devastating as it is the end of one world, glorious as it is the beginning of another.
Art credit: “Feeling free” by Andycap
Some will tell you that fear is the opposite of love. And in this teaching the war begins.
But love has no opposite. It is whole and without division. Love is the field in which all form comes and goes, including the temporary, wavelike appearance of fear. It is the vast, tender space in which all thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise, play for a short while, and then dissolve.
Just like passing clouds could never taint the purity of the sky, the temporary dance of fear could never stain the majesty of what you are.
Unlike the density of the conceptual, love has no bias for the appearance of courage over fear, multiplicity over oneness, or clarity over confusion. All experience is welcome as valid and as a portal into presence. Everything is path, including the raw, immediate, somatic experience of fear, if it is not abandoned, rejected, and made into an enemy via spiritual theory.
In this embrace, a great mystery can be revealed: there is no suffering inherent in the direct experience of fear, but only in the movement away from it, in its invalidation, and in the conclusion that it is an error which must urgently be remedied.
Fear is a temporary visitor in the nervous system, longing to be known, integrated, and metabolized in the wholeness that you are. It is not an enemy to enter into imaginary spiritual battles with. Call off the war and set aside the pain of a spirituality of aggression.
By pathologizing fear – and concluding that its presence is evidence that something has gone wrong and that you have failed – you attack your vulnerability and keep alive the pathways of self-abandonment.
Love is not opposed to fear, but wishes to embrace it, hold it near, and provide sanctuary for its essence to unfold. Love would never turn from any of its children, including the temporary, wavelike child of fear.
When fully met and safe passage is provided, fear is able to reveal itself, like all other form, as none other than love in disguise. Fear is not the opposite of love, for love has no opposite.
In a moment of emotional activation, when we get hooked into those all-too-familiar patterns of shame, unworthiness, rage, and fear, attacking ourselves, and falling into trance… two ancient pathways appear.
The first is to move away as quickly as possible, to repress or dissociate from what has come, to place it outside awareness so as to not be overwhelmed. To flee from our bodies, to abandon the life surging within us, and do whatever we can to stay out of the underlying vulnerability.
The second is to become flooded by the material, to drown in it, and to become fused with it and lose perspective. It literally takes our breath from us, our life force, and our capacity to be present. There is no longer any space in which to navigate. We become one with the limiting beliefs and the painful feelings.
These pathways are not neurotic or pathological, some reflection of our own failure or inner wretchedness, but adaptive strategies which arose intelligently to protect a developing little nervous system. They were the best way we knew to care for ourselves and prevent unbearable feeling.
To begin to slow down and see the operation of these strategies is a gift of self-kindness and true care for ourselves and this world. In a moment of activation to flood our experience with curiosity, presence, and warmth, and just see how it is we are habituated to seek relief through the abandonment of ourselves. To cleanse our perception and from this more grounded and present place, then decide if we want to choose something different this time. No shame, no blame, no self-attack, just curiosity. And care. And kindness.
To explore that very shaky, contradictory, hot, sticky, pregnant alchemical middle territory, which can appear quite groundless and disorienting until we get used to it. To practice intimacy with our thoughts, emotions, and sensations, while not becoming enmeshed in them. Intimacy without fusion. Close, but not so close we fall in.
While it may seem like moving a mountain, we can encode new circuitry, both in these miracle brains as well as into the collective, into the psyche of the culture. It is an offering that each of us can make, as a practice that we can do, not by way of some fantasy of perfection.
This is an art that we can bring into this crazy world, which seems to need this sort of magic now more than ever.
