I have encountered an old friend this last couple of weeks…the feeling of being left out.
I almost can’t remember a time in my life, that the feeling of being left out was not a nearly constant companion.
I was born into it really.
A turbulent and pain filled family, with two siblings so much older than me that one of them took on all of the mothering duties, but they both left me out as much and as often as possible, and understandably so…
In the company I now work in, there is a distinct inner and outer circle. I understand that, it makes sense to me and is probably necessary. I am not in the inner circle.
But a co-worker is and he was once warm, open, confiding and inclusive with me and now he is terrifically polite, cordial, and distant…I have no doubt that I have given offense in some unconscious way, and in some way I couldn’t have even known about.
I have asked him on three different occasions to explain to me what I have done and each time he reacts with excessive denial and an unspoken emotional demand that I stop asking…and so I shall…
Letting him go is painful, I wish it didn’t have to be. And yet, I am the one that chose confrontation over comfort, I am the one who decided to risk everything to save myself, and I am the one that must pay the piper. (Letting go of the desire for approval and inclusion is one of the heavier prices that may allow me one day to get through the Bible’s “eye of the needle” and into “heaven”, free of the burdens of the man rich in opinions, beliefs, goals, conditioning, and knowing what is right.)
I have been thinking a lot about what I have had to give up to get what I have received. I am not smart like my Teacher, nor as clear as I wish I could be, but I am willing. Always willing.
I have noticed recently that I am becoming entirely free of the fear of death. I think about death a good deal, looking to see what it can teach me about living, about risking, about willingness. And I have encountered a decidedly large shift in my experience of the idea.
For most of my life I have had heart palpitations. Armed now with the understanding that my heart is not wired correctly, it makes more sense to me. The nerves that should branch out and pump each side do not do so, and instead one long nerve wraps around from top to bottom, causing each side to pump in this unusual way, so said the cardiologist.
In decades gone by, it used to scare the living daylights out of me.
On top of the fluttering, my nervous system would shoot me chock-o-block full of adrenaline, and cause my poor heart to jump and twist inside my chest.
In recent years, I learned that if I coughed really hard I could sometimes get it to settle down. No longer actively afraid, I still didn’t like it and would always strive to make it stop.
Now however, it happens a great deal, and I notice that I do nothing at all.
The job I have undertaken is very physical, I am decidedly out of shape, and have been pressing really hard to accomplish the outcome. My heart protests nearly every day, beating irregularly and seeking some measure of self-discovery.
It fascinates me the response I now have to it. It causes my attention to become laser focused, and I sit quietly and watch/feel its attempt to find the correct path. As it bounces along its bumpy road, I find in myself no fear at all. Instead there is a kind of warm bathing of trust that enters into my Being… it travels all the pathways of my circulatory system all the way to the smallest capillaries. It feels like an inside out hug.
I suspect it means that finally, after five and a half decades, I trust my life.
I trust the losses, like the loss of my friend/co-worker, as much as I trust the gains. I trust the “bad” things as much as I trust the “good” things. (I no longer really see the distinctions, just as my Teacher promised would be true, when I discovered the Impersonal Being at the foundation of my life.)
I trust that goals, and desires, and wanting, are a functioning of the mind’s conditioning and that I should always and evermore be suspect of anything that I “want”.
I have found a new teacher. I am only able to listen to him via tapes, as he lives in another city. He is not a replacement, but rather an addition, and I value him and his way of explaining the depth of understanding that he so clearly can provide. Most of what he says I have already heard from my Beloved Teacher, but he says it in a way that is very satisfying and wonderfully nourishing.
For instance, in a recent talk, he was discussing the experience of “becoming limitless”. The moment he said the phrase, he realized how easy it would be to misinterpret that statement, and to view what he had said from the much-misplaced notion that we can have anything our minds want. So he immediately strove to correct that potential and stated clearly that he did not mean what the current spiritual culture means when they use the term “limitless”, that instead of getting your every whim fulfilled…he said that true “limitlessness” is coming to the awareness that you don’t want anything at all.
I can see the horizon of that, coming into view, in my own life.
I want my friend/coworker to return to valuing spending time with me, but the wanting has an extremely light, almost frothy, consistency. More like an echo than a real sound. I will let him go with no rancor or disturbance, if that is his wish, which it appears to be.
I want to be included, but not at the cost of my own salvation…and that too, is like a long ago sound still just echoing in my nervous system.
I have turned some sort of corner, or reached some sort of tipping point, or gathered enough fuel to keep the blaze burning…because now, it is enough for me that I can sit quietly and watch my heart navigate its pathways in a bumpy and irregular fashion, and totally trust the intelligence that designed it to be unusual in this way, as much as I trust the intelligence that caused it to start beating in the first place.
I have turned away from my mind’s conditioning, far enough and long enough, to finally understand that to place my trust in what I say to myself, is the source out of which all hellish experiences bloom.
I once heard Eckhart Tolle say that after his awakening experience, he estimated that 80% of what he used to say to himself simply stopped happening. He described that what is now his normal life, consisted almost entirely of silence, unless he was being spoken to, or speaking.
It is not that way for me.
I would say a good 25% of my time is spent with no voice in my head. It is the best 25% of my day, and it shows up in the most surprising ways. I will be climbing a ladder, something that is hard for me, or holding my hands above my shoulders, something that is really hard for me, and suddenly I will realize that I have been intensely engaged in watching the discomfort with out a single smidgen of commentary.
Further, I realize that the discomfort only ratchets up to pain, when I am talking to myself about resisting the discomfort.
In the other 75% percent of my waking life, I work diligently at reminding myself to not believe anything I am saying internally. It is shocking to discover that your speaking mind cannot be trusted, that only the clear silence of the eternal One is real.
My Teacher said often, and with as much emphasis as he ever spoke with, that we must come to the place that we totally rest in the understanding that “we will know what we need to know, the moment we need to know it, and not a second sooner”.
I always interpreted that to mean that the ground of life is trust, but I now understand that he also meant that the mind that “knows” is the conditioned one, the untrustworthy one, the misguided one, the judge, jailer, and judgment…and the only evil that has ever been.
My only prayer: “Please give me the courage, fortitude, willingness, and will to walk away from the conditioned mind, in favor of the mind that does not speak to me, but rather holds my fluttering heart in the palm of its hand, secure in the trust that all is well…”
Namaste
Adayre R. Miller
3/24/12
photo courtesy of Orkun Ozbatur and flickr photo sharing…to see more of this artist’s work follow this link http://www.flickr.com/photos/37360382@N08/
