Post 1
Discussing my own spiritual awakening feels taboo. There’s an old, mute prohibition inside. Sensing into it yields a kind of fear that seems to center in the solar plexus. Allowing the fear to be there and just making space for it in the body with the breath, it begins to murmur some faint words. There’s a kind of menacing feeling of some Other I’m in relationship to. Staying with this emerging sense of fear in relationship, my heart begins to warm and the warmth spreads into my chest. It feels as if there’s more room to breathe. The heart is almost breathing itself, emitting a kind of healing incense, bringing comfort and courage, compassion and gratitude. I continue to sense, look, and listen.
The faint voice has become clear now as I’ve moved through the fear of opening up. “You’re not good enough”. “Awakened people don’t have fear”. And there’s another voice, “Anyone who’s awake would never say it out loud, that’s just your ego talking”. And yet another one! “This spiritual crap is weak. It’s wishful thinking and a compensation for doing nothing real”.
I sense the particular brutality of the last one. It cuts close to home as maybe the voice of my father. And yet my heart is warm, the incense is still burning on the altar in there, and there’s plenty of room to breathe. Acknowledging these voices the tension in the solar plexus is consistently diminishing. My mind has stayed clear through the process too. No shutting down and fogging up, no curling up and cringing under these bullying voices. In years past, if I ever got past the initial mute taboo and fear, the shame response to the voices might come in and that was it. I’d be off watching tv or going to get a drink, pushing down the impulse to evolve and express my voice, building up frustration and resentment at “the system”, my family, or whoever else gave me a slight reason to make them the cause of my discontent.
This spiritual awakening was many years ago. Decades. And yet awakening alone is just not enough. I could have consistent access to the expansion and bliss of Spirit in good or neutral moments, but lose sight of it and be swamped by old reactive patterns in relationship, or when ill. It’s’ taken many years to digest the old stories and remain present in each of these situations. In the worst of emergency situations, calming, strong, or clarifying aspects of Being always emerge to carry me through, but it’s in embodying Presence through all the everyday annoyances and disappointments that the real work gets done.