grounded by love

This post is reblogged with gratitude from Pema Deane’s The Vibrant Heart.

Pema’s posts often have an uncanny serendipitous resonance with the unfoldings happening here.  I love her deep wideawake expression.  It gifts us that rare mix of savage wisdom and heart-full compassion.

Many of us in this extremely challenging and beautiful time of Self-realization go through periods where the experience of having a vital and energetic body is a distant memory.  And every attempt to restore wellness eventually comes back to ground zero.  We are left in ‘nothing works’ and ‘no control’.  Grounded by Love.

This is the time to let all ruminations about fixing go and simply receive the offering of the aches and pains of a broken body.  This is the time to see that every ache is like a kiss from the Beloved saying “Not here, love.  Not here.”  The answer is not here in the body.  Not only is the answer not in fixing it, it is nowhere near the body at all.

It is found in the seeing that a well body and a broken body are one in kind, they are both illusion.  That a clear, light body has no more value than a body filled with energy that is purging and releasing – they are both imagined into existence.

It is cultivated in the gentle, firm and knowing ‘so what’ and ‘nothing matters’ arising in the face of unwellness.

The body’s welfare is pre-ordained, the script already written.  Can we walk through the play holding its hand, letting the newly-shining truth of its unreality and ‘not mattering’ open the heart to great mercy and tenderness for all that is not real.  Mercy for the unresolvable issue in our lives, whatever that may be, for how in its unwavering relentlessness it is waking us up out of the heart of misidentification;  its tugs on our attention losing their strength through the sheer exhaustion of their known ineffectuality.

We rise up as true Self in the midst of the unfixable.  This is its job and this is its grace.  The rising up of the internal Real that sheds light on the unreality of all that is temporal.

~ Pema Deane

memo to exhausted spiritual practitioners

 

This Unlit Light - Letting go, resting in Presence

 

Here’s a little heresy for the Sabbath:  Nothing you can ever do, even if you do it a hundred thousand times in the most sacred spot on Earth, can bring you closer to the brilliant Light of Being that you are.

That you are!  Already.

Practice.  Path.  Method.  Journey.  Quest.  (Usually preceded by ‘my’ and ‘spiritual’.)  All are equally guaranteed to propel you away from what you seek.

Krishnamurti used to say, “Truth is a pathless land.”  We loved his “pathless path” the way Zenners love their “gateless gate”.  But both these cultified terms still leave one with the notion of a ‘way’ and a destination, even though they strive for the very opposite.

Nowadays we hear a great deal about the “direct path” to awakening or enlightenment, but I reject this term too, on the same grounds.  Truth is indeed a pathless land – but for some reason we find it impossible to accept that this land cannot be reached by paths or practices.  We are time and motion junkies.  Until exhaustion sets in.

So here’s my memo:

Please just rest.

Rest with this, right here, now.

Relax and enjoy the View

for the View is you,

naked and sacred.