july 5, 2019
The Slightest Movement Toward Waking
Throughout my life, I’ve often been unwilling to fully let in and honor as real the experiences that have left me leveled by love. They have seemed too profound to describe and too all-encompassing to co-exist at the level of mundane, day to day life. But I have come to recognize this as a gift—that death and disillusionment have been life-long companions. Their lessons, sometimes received as life-givingly joyful or murderously painful, have been constant pointers home. They teach that when the actual, physical death of someone or something so dearly loved, a presence and identity so taken for granted returns to the ether, we are left floating in the great space. Their body is replaced by pure love and light, a breaking down of what we thought we knew, and a new insight into what our existence points to. This morning, after a few amazing days with my beautiful family celebrating the life and death of beloved grandparents, I am sensing the following so keenly—
There is a subtle but great different between suffering and unnecessary suffering. There is a subtle but great difference—the one is a part of life’s tapestry. It is here and relevant and will never cease to be part of the ebb and flow. The other, while just as much a part of the tapestry for most of us, is absolutely extricable. Absolutely able to come to cessation. Absolutely meant to come to cessation.
This is why.
Unnecessary suffering is born simply from inner, unseen exclusion. In these moments, there is something I am honoring as more worthy, right, or acceptable than my current sense and thought experience. From this point of usually overlooked judgement, I am in a state of energetically trying to separate myself from an active presence in my perception. This is absolutely impossible to do, and yet so much of our time is spent in this place of limbo—trying to escape that which we are directly experiencing.
This incredibly minor movement away from what is—this is the cause of unnecessary suffering. It’s as though we are actually trying to pull off a limb or dissect our bodies, calling this organ worthy of helping us to live and this one not at all. It is a movement toward separating and sorting and judging something that can not actually be separated and continue to function. As much as we try, we are never actually able to separate from these active experiences. It is akin to rowing as fast as we can in a boat that is tied to a dock—so much energy expelled for little to no movement in any direction.
Acceptance. Acceptance of what is happening at its purest level without this frantic movement away ignites an opening of the heart. Letting everything in—the fullness of our experience, whether it is joyful or painful or totally mundane, most especially in the moments where we are trying to exclude—this is the constant invitation of this loving universe. This is the activation, realization, remembering of peace. It is a gentle and immediate waking up to everything that exists all at once, a merging at a profound level of all opposites. At once, the paradox of being separate and inseparable merge and I am simply here, perfectly with any experience and non-experience that is.
Resistance is a brilliant friend, a clear reminder that somewhere inside, in this moment, I am currently trying to separate from my experience, somehow judging it as unworthy to be experienced. The moment I recognize resistance as a friend, there is no longer an enemy. There is no longer unnecessary suffering. This simple surrender—this is dying before we die. This is being reborn to an existence where life and death, comfort and pain are equal partners in our experience of love.
May we regard both the joy and the pain that life delivers as a worthy part of life, an act of love we are built to bear and allow to change us, and nothing we need resist. It is from this place where we can truly live and be lived.
P.S. As I’m editing this, I’m recognizing that “be lived” is one space and letter away from “believe.” <3