A friend who once belonged to a particular spiritual group was telling me how some of the members, when feeling unhappy, frustrated or disillusioned, deliberately wouldn’t attend for fear of being judged as having ‘failed’.
Since when did spirituality become about denying our experience in order to uphold the image of a smiley, happy, untouchable, unflappable, super-positive, spiritual know-it-all?! Isn’t it precisely the longing to be free of this kind of self-repression that draws us into ‘spirituality’ in the first place?
We can change the scenery, the characters and the costumes as much as we like, but until we fundamentally examine who it is we really are then that same old familiar script—of carving life up into what we should and shouldn’t be feeling, denying and resisting the ‘bad’ whilst trying to cling onto the ‘good’—will continue to play out.
So what if we look right now, in this the only moment that we ever truly have?
Whatever you are that is aware of these words is not bounded by a suit of skin, rather the image and sensation of skin arise in and out of You: You this awake spaciousness, this unlocatable, alive presence, this undeniable am-ness—that draws no dividing lines, that supports and sustains everything in experience, just as a mirror gives existence to the image of every reflection.
You are immense. You give life to life. You are an infinity of possibility!
There is truly nothing to fear, because there is no-thing here to protect, and nothing outside of You to be a threat. Our well fortified defence system has been operating under false intelligence!
With that realisation, instead of contorting oneself to try to ‘fit in’, instead of settling for the conclusions of others, we begin to trust, to revel in our own dear and precious uniqueness; to courageously meet those repressed, ‘unwanted’ visitors such as ‘fear’, ‘anxiety’, ‘misery’, ‘regret’; to get to know them more intimately, beneath their sinister cloak of stories, in-the-raw, closer than close, and discover them to be nothing other than the energetic dance of aliveness.
What seemed like a prison is a playground once more, in which to explore, to discover, to follow our joy, our fascination, to celebrate and savour this mind-blowing, heart-flowing, wild roller coaster ride of being alive.
