Tag Archives: pain

don’t be fooled. stand your ground

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Pema Deane. What a light she is! This piece was posted on her blog – The Vibrant Heart – with the title Stand Your Ground. I’ve included the sentence “Don’t be fooled” in my title because my experience emphasises how pointless it is to try to stand my ground unless I’m deeply cognisant of the fact that an erroneous belief – as Pema reminds us – is constantly trying to fool us into believing we are separate from the “ground of Self, of Presence, of Light.”

stand your ground - Pema Deane

 

Scenes and circumstances continue to play out in front of us, their one seeming objective being to convince us there is something wrong with us – that we are unlovable or we lack, that the love is over there, not here.

Don’t be fooled. Stand your ground. It is time to blow this whole, bad dream apart. Recognize whatever you’re seeing and reacting to is coming straight out of your mind, a mind that believes it is separate and whose only function is to keep that belief alive.

The scenes are a set-up. They are out to suck you into misery and to prove to you you are NOT the incredible Beauty that You are. You made it all up. This recognition is your lifeline. It is your point of authority over this dream of pain.

I am not denying the incredible amount of self-nursing, holding and releasing of pain that has happened over many years but when you have reached the point of being able to simply witness the shenanigans of ego, it is to honor that with all your heart. And it is a wonderful thing. You have endured countless lifetimes to come to this point.

So stand your ground. The ground of Self, of Presence, of Light. And let the movie show of separation roll on by. It has no power to touch YOU. Ever.

– Pema Deane

The Vibrant Heart

 

grounded by love

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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

wounded, weary, and wideawake

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The invasion was unexpected and uninvited; it happened
one numinous now
when the minder of memories had her back turned.

In crept wild wideawakeness, sleuthing
through this dormitory of sleeping stories,
slipping from cocoon to cocoon
dubbing each bedded-down memory
with its diamond dagger and pronouncing each one
an esteemed and luminous Member of the Matrix.

It lifted up the wounded and the weary,
the lost and lonesome, the betrayed
and the broken, saying

 

To know this pain, beloved
is to know That which is beyond time
for That alone has the capacity to be aware
and in your naked awareness of your pain
you are naturally ever-enlightened.

You imagine your enlightenment to be
other than this wretchedness –
you take it as proof that you
haven’t yet “made the shift”
yet how could pain (or pleasure) be known
if enlightenment were not fully present?

By what function of cognition
would you aware this knowing?
By both logic and experience it’s found
that the unlit light of awareness
is prior to every sensory perception.

Will you stay tucked up in your cocoon
dreaming of the mirage of your awakening
shimmering in some distant space and time
or will you blink now
and own up to your feral freedom?

 

I blinked.

 

Tantric painting, India, C1800, detail

 

Image: Tantric painting, India, C1800 or earlier, detail

 

nothing ever dies but a dream

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I’m celebrating an anniversary this morning. Three years ago the dream had a daughter holding her beloved mother as she breathed the breath that would never return.

I’m also celebrating because, for the first time in those three years, the pain has vanished. The passage of time is a great healer, as is the time spent silently aware-ing on the zafu.  But I also honor the beloved mentors who have appeared in the story, their healing tools in hand. They are many, but I particularly want to thank: A kind, wise Lama, who sent me away on a retreat to find “the mother” I mourned. And a dear, dear woman whose energy healing (EFT) triggered the release of volumes of stories held in this body’s cellular vaults. And – Byron Katie. The work of the Work leaves no lie uncovered, and o-m-g some monster furphies were happily beavering away in this wee dream called ‘me’. One of them, running below the limn of  consciousness in spite of intellectual clarity about and acceptance of impermanence and the impossibility of independent self-hood, was a subtle and sneaky belief in death.

Nothing was ever born but a dream.
Nothing ever dies but a dream.

Reality is the always-stable, never-disappointing base of experience.
When I look at what really is, I can’t find a me.
As I have no identity, there’s no one to resist death.
Death is everything that has been dreamed,
including the dream of myself,
so at every moment I die of what has been
and am continually born as awareness in the moment,
and I die of that, and am born in it again.
The thought of death excites me.
Everyone loves a good novel and looks forward to how it will end.
It’s not personal.
After the death of the body, what identification will the mind take on?
The dream is over, I was perfection,
I could not have had a better life.
And whatever I am is born in this moment
as everything good that has ever lived.
~ Byron Katie

One dream ends. And here’s the beauty of it – this unlit light | reality | primordial awareness – abides, even as new dreams appear.

And I can hear her l a u g h t e r . . .

Gladness! Gratitude! Grace!

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having loved enough and lost enough

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Photograph by Robyn Gordon

 
 

Having loved enough and lost enough,
I’m no longer searching
just opening,

no longer trying to make sense of pain
but trying to be a soft and sturdy home
in which real things can land.

These are the irritations
that rub into a pearl.

So we can talk for a while
but then we must listen,
the way rocks listen to the sea.

And we can churn at all that goes wrong
but then we must lay all distractions
down and water every living seed.

And yes, on nights like tonight
I too feel alone. But seldom do I
face it squarely enough
to see that it’s a door
into the endless breath
that has no breather,
into the surf that human
shells call God.

– Mark Nepo

marknepo.com

Photograph by Robyn Gordon
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[This post was edited on September 25 2019, to remove broken links and add Robyn Gordon’s glorious photograph. ml]

I want to die comforting someone

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Mags Deane has kindly given me permission to repost this jewel – which touched me to the quick – from her blog.  In the post, called Tenderized Heart, she writes:

This is one of my favorite pieces of writing, from Jeannie Zandi.

I like to come to it when my heart is looking for some softening.

May we live for this dear hearts.

There is nothing between you and I.  My heart is tenderized to the extent that when your pain rises, I feel it in my chest, and there’s simply this love that doesn’t have a two.  Because that extra one, that “me” and “mine”, is over, it went when the will was broken by life’s refusal to do it “my” way.  So there’s no longer anything between us.

In that, this love rises that knows the beauty and the heartbreak of our shared humanness, the heights we can soar to, the depths we can sink to, the heartbreak that we must bear because we often cannot embody what our hearts wish to embody in all its beauty and perfection, the love that we are and have the potential to express.  We long to be love in every cell and we fail so miserably, and it hurts us to the core.  We’re so beautiful, and so brave, and so screwed.  We can’t get away from the unconscious aspects of ourselves and we can’t commit ourselves entirely to the dungeon.  We are all crucified on that cross of humanness.

And for this there is such a rising of compassion and mercy in the empty heart that has taken that crucifixion to the end, such a sweetness and a desire to give whatever kindness or assistance one can to these brave and beautiful creatures – you as a servant are born.  And then God moves us deeply to see that everyone is not only Her creation for me to give myself to, everyone is actually Her.  The feeling rises that says anything I have I will give you, oh brave children of God, oh sweet faces of Her.

I could never repay the debt I have to the Beloved for the gift of being allowed to see Her face, to see that everyone has always been Her, and that I’ve spent years treating them and myself, which is Her, as objects or enemies, or merely walked by so many in need or failed to look upon Her face with the love that is so obviously due Her.  What was I doing?  What was I thinking? As Donovan sang in Brother Sun, Sister Moon, “preoccupied with selfish misery”.  That’s what I was doing.

And an awareness of every moment of this selfish obliviousness is there, alongside the clear sight that all are so worthy of our love and kindness.  We know there just aren’t enough years to praise Her name, to love Her tender face in the faces of our brothers and sisters.  There is no bad guy!  There is only the embodiment of Her, on the cross of heaven and earth, angel and creature, struggling to live up to Her heavenly gift under the weight of this unconscious conflict and self-hate.  There is nothing so compelling as that and to offer whatever we have to that.

This is something that rises when you get broken.  There’s this wealth of gratitude, this feeling that the debt can never be repaid for the beauty of Her in every being.  I couldn’t possibly give any of you enough to serve the liberation of the love that is hidden in your heart.  Ammachi says I want to die comforting someone – she’s hugging herself to death and it’s her joy, because everything in her says I am here to be given to You who I am as well.  That is the feeling when we’re emptied out. It’s what we are underneath the conflict.

And it keeps getting deeper.  We keep getting more sensitive, more transparent.  Pretty soon we might as well sit inside everybody’s pants, it’s so intimate.  You have a feeling across the room and I feel you.  And it’s my joy to have you guys fill my body with your angst.  I’m dying to help you with that.  I’ll meet anything you have.  You have a cold?  Give it to me.  I can’t even imagine the joy Christ must have felt to die for his God in the form of his brothers and sisters.  What else can I give?  All I’ve got is my life, sure.  What a joy it is to love you, to be this love, to know you as love, to break the bread of love with each other, to give you, my most precious, whatever it is I have to give, which is never enough to glorify your beauty and Her name, and to liberate the dove of gorgeous tender love that lives in your heart.

And guess what?  All the while She is loving Herself through you.  THROUGH you.  So you get loved as it moves through your body.  Your entire body is radiated by God’s love as you apparently love.  There’s only Her radiant love.

So, yes, that’s the only thing worth longing for.  If you have the longing for this love, yeah!  Stoke that fire, burn in that place where you want it so bad.  Don’t calm that down!  It’s worth it.

~ Jeannie Zandi

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what is it with steps and falling?

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An old friend dropped this question into a recent email. It took me a while to understand where she was ‘coming from’ – it’s been a long while since analyzing events for their ‘deeper’ meaning has interested me. But I still love a good question, so I took a look.

I now understand that how a question is answered depends on where it’s flying in from. If I am zipped into my bodysuit – busy being a body – steps are solid forms to be negotiated in space and time. Falling happens when space and time are out of sync. Falling hurts; body might be crippled or disfigured. It’s an experience to be avoided: fear is body’s brand.

If I’m aloft in the thought-propelled balloon called mind, a fall down steps will trigger endless analysis of what it really means, what I need to know that I’m not looking at, what I need to avoid, what I must fix, change, rewrite about the story of “my life.” It will keep me very busy, very anxious, and very stressed out.

If I am neither body nor mind, but the spacious aware-ing that they and all their activities arise within – energy is simply dancing. It appears to take a tumble. It appears to be painful. It has no owner; it wears no name. Since there is no division possible in spaciousness, denial isn’t an option – nor is acceptance! Awareness knows itself intimately. And it knows exactly what’s needed for healing: rest and relaxation.

What is it with steps and falling? It’s a gift. It’s pure grace. The blessing of injury is that it delivers you, helpless and humbled, back to base: relaxation as Life, as the pure Light of awake, aware Livingness.

Gratitude!

~ miriam louisa