A Life Well Used…

 

I wanted to share an experience that has been happening to me, more and more often.

It begins in my heart and surges upward as a feeling tone that soon surrounds and engulfs my entire being.  It isn’t until it reaches my brain that I can name it and it always comes with deep tears, and soft mewling sounds issuing from my throat.

Its name is gratitude.

When my brain becomes engaged and wishes to describe for me this up swelling of deep appreciation, it always carries with it my Beloved Teachers name.  Gone now for a year, his effect on my life will live until my last breath is taken…and likely long after that…

My gratitude is for the fact that I could not have imagined what my life would be like now, just weeks before my 58^th year begins, given the intense suffering that characterized all of my days until I was nearly 40.  Nothing outwardly has changed at all.  I still make just enough money to meet my bills and not a penny more, I am still obese, and I still live a life that is singularly alone, but not at all lonely.

So why, you might be wondering, should I be so gosh darn grateful for a life that most people struggle greatly with…(nearly broke, fat, and friendless)…

It is because the silence of mind, that began just a few years ago, is growing, stabilizing, and deepening.  With that silence comes control over the speaking portion of my brain that I once imagined was me.

Old, tired, useless habits of mind are dropping from my life like so much unusable debris; they slough away and leave me feeling pure, innocent, free, and deeply alive.

On a recent road trip for work, I drove almost six hours in complete internal and external silence.  I have become so accustomed to the wonder of internal emptiness, that I marvel at the ease of it…the relaxation and rest and care that can be deeply perceived, when the static of the speaking mind is not there to interfere.

I discover that the mind that narrates, (the one that everyone imagines that they are), is a turbulence and a drain on your vitality.  It causes irritation and discomfort that can drop cleanly away, when the silence that we naturally are, is surrendered to, and allowed to have dominion in our lives.

And of course, it must be pointed out, that with silence comes a complete and total end to suffering of every kind.

During this long drive, sitting in such an empty, yet vital interior, my lower hip began to ache from my posture, or the long drive or, perhaps just old age.  As it began its dull throbbing that started just below my waist and coursed down my leg to just above the knee…my silent mind merely watched it.

I went from gazing at the kaleidoscopic color palette of the high desert, to intense engagement with the pain.  It was as though my silent mind finds everything useful, or honorable, or valuable, or awe inspiring, or some combination of all these attributes.  Without the parsing, divisions, comparisons, and competitions of the speaking mind…the quiet mind accepts all, and finds nourishment in all.

It was about that moment that the, now familiar, feeling of gratitude overwhelmed me.

Gratitude has always made me cry…and sometimes it can make me cry so hard that I cannot speak, as was often the case when I tried to communicate to my Teacher the enormity of the gift that he had brought into my life.

Many, many times over the years, that I was his dedicated and appreciative student, I would try to express my gratitude to him.  I would start with speaking the words, and would invariably begin to cry, and more often than not, the tears would become a flood of emotion that would be so intense that I would bend over at the middle, as though I needed to be closer to the ground in an attempt to manage the fierce flood of gratitude that was overtaking my nervous system.

As these episodes would calm down, I would invariably raise back up, to see him merely watching me, impassive, calm, quiet, undisturbed…and now…finally, I know why.

His mind was so quiet, that all near him could feel it.

His caretaker, in his old age, would often tell stories of how much people were drawn to him.  How the dentist would not let go of him and needed to wheel him, in his chair, back to the car, rather than let her do it.  Or how if she would stand in line with him at a check out counter, where someone was angry or disturbed, how those around him would become calmer and quieter as well.

I saw it and felt it, every time he was nearby…but I did not know what it was that made him so different and unique, to all others I met in my everyday life.

It is only now that silence is becoming a more stable and accessible experience in my own life, that I fully understand, why he had such an enormous effect on me.

I cannot remember ever missing an opportunity to sit in his presence.  If he had not been teaching… I would have been just as content to merely sit with him, and bathe in his calming influence.

And I know, as an absolute certainty, that silence would not now be growing in my own mind, had it not been for my proximity to his presence and to his teachings.

So you can see why I tried so many times to tell him of my gratitude, while also sobbing like a child…

I, as yet, have no experience with the “Universality” that he would often speak of.  The union of all things everywhere that he could experience and express, and the place from which he taught.  I have no idea if that will come into my life, or if I will share in that measure of depth…. and I do not need to know.

As George matured and ripened, as a teacher, he strove always, to simplify his lessons.  In the early years his written lessons would often be narratives, describing the awarenesses that life was giving him direct experience of.  But as he advanced and deepened, his lessons would get shorter and shorter, more and more simple.  As this one, that I still feel so deeply…”Don’t compete, don’t compare, give up the need to know.”

As I traveled through the desert, driving in total silence, I realized in a deep and profound way that I need know nothing, about life, about my life specifically, about the way things work, or how it came to be thus.

As a direct and intense experience, I could feel the absolute wonder of not needing to know.  The silence, that has become my most valued experience, was not something that I could have brought into my life, by virtue of a plan, or a goal, or a need, or even a want.  I have no idea how it happened, or why.  I do know, without doubt, that it is the only thing worth having in a lifetime.  I know that it ends suffering and fear, that it bestows trust and faith, like a bloom bestows beauty and fragrance.

If all that ever comes my way, is a continuing development of this silent mind…a deepening of relationship with it, and to it.  I will have been gifted with all that matters in the world.

I look forward to the day that it no longer comes and goes.  I have no idea if that day will dawn for me, and I have no way of doing anything at all to encourage it to be so.  I must wait and see if it continues to unfold, but, if all I ever get, is what I have already experienced…then my life has met with more grace, than can be described or expressed.

And thus the enormity of my gratitude, for a life so well used…

Adayre R. Miller

7/23/13

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and meli_bee; to see more of this artist’s work, please follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23385506@N06/2257819205/in/photolist-4rvUZk-cuGbXh-cL5cFE-6zF8oM-9hA7Yb-87Ygch-UHZvx-9CrSAf-3icfqH-81CxxW-boo4a8-sxGY7-7sLhoM-36XKRK-9pkojb-eREuSp-e88uvq-dd9Kc9-evSaCm-a9hx62-4xDrzy-9qGs5m-9sPbfM-dmViC6-p6ThU-9jHzMS-9dFad5-JHYz5-5KTHtu-7u5mpz-bYXCg7-aAGSK-d27EeQ-7qJLCQ-8A1F1J-7EmTR7-fd56DJ-8fDSav-dRiH2F-8p2BpJ-9syTJz-NKWpH-7emint-2e3mFL-KDxhk-f4U5A8-7xycfk-6Uizq7-p2oku-feVMXp-r9Uii#

Teachers Open the Door, But You Must Enter By Yourself. – Chinese Proverb

My life has been punctuated, by moments of such intense development of understanding, that they cause me to gasp and catch my breath, as though I have been caught in an avalanche or been grazed by a bullet.

Normally, no one standing near me would be, even in the slightest, aware of these astounding transformational moments…and thus there is no outer marking for such a landslide of experience, as is mine, as I go through one of these moments and come out the other side.

This most recent one is vitally important… not because it represents a landslide of shifting understanding, and with it functional clarity, but also because it is the moment at which I truly “became my own Teacher”.

One of the many dictums that are written on my heart, as I continue to develop my capacity to live the light that my Beloved Teacher so selflessly shared with me, is his oft-repeated lesson regarding the development of one’s soul. 

He said, “At some point you, must become your own Teacher, Teachings, and Student.”

I freely admit that I; A. thought that would be an astounding trick indeed – how could one teach/learn/and embody lessons all at the same time, and B, how could you possibly know if you had developed into your own teacher, while you were still in the mindset, behaviors, and adaptations of a student?

Well now I know how…

Last night I was invited to join a small gathering of folk, who are intent on bringing into the world a new level of growth, of an existing business.  I wasn’t entirely sure why I had been invited as I have so little to say on the subject that seemed to be at hand, but liking the people involved, I agreed to participate.

I picked up a young woman, for whom I have considerable affection, who does not have a car and drove her and another friend to the event.

During that ride she began to ask me questions of a spiritual nature regarding the understanding, which I hold as the dearest legacy of my Teacher’s life, and of my time on this planet.

At this stage in my life, there is nothing in the world that captures my attention so cleanly and so committedly, as the spiritual understanding that was bequeathed to me by my Teacher.

I pursue no goals.  I have no interest in the comings and goings that I see all around me.  I attempt no assimilation with the culture at large, or even with the sub-culture of the “spiritual” movement.

I am wholly and completely content to regard the ever unfolding nature of what I have been taught, and much more, to witness its effect upon my life, my peace of mind, my behaviors, my attitudes and my heart…and thus feel no need to acquire any other bright and shiny objects.

So as this lovely young woman expressed her interest in my understanding and thus in my Teacher’s value, I was more than thrilled to engage with her queries.

I am gifted with the ability to describe something in a hundred different ways, using a hundred different analogies, metaphors, similes and examples.  This is born of my attempting to connect with my fully disengaged mother, over breakfast cereal, in a  “what happened the night before on date night” raft of stories.  My mother who was either in a death dealing rage, or mute and absent, like the emptiness left behind by a sudden storm, developed in me, this quite valuable gift as I strove mightily to illicit some change in her dull repose.

So, as Katie peppered me with questions, that skill came to the forefront and married my ever-present-deeply-held-enthusiasm, for the gifts of understanding I have been given…and I was off to the races with my erudition.

The words flowed forth, with the same zeal and joy that they have always rolled out of my mouth with, and my heart and mind hummed with the joy of it.  So much so, that I could not turn it off when I arrived at our destination, there too, I spoke when I probably oughten have.  I waxed poetic about the subject on the table, when I probably should have held my tongue.

So prepared in this manner, I got up today, and gathered myself together to arrive at a job interview that had been scheduled two weeks ago.  As I made my way downtown, with a large time buffer to spare – lest some hindrance appear, I was met with a wreck in the tunnel and trapped for a long time in a scarcely moving line of never ending automobiles.

As it became clear that I was to be there for a good ling while, I began to worry around, in my mind, the problem of what to do with my house that has been bugging me for a long time now…

I say to myself that I want to leave Arizona.  I have said that since the day I came back here, (continuing to be my Teacher’s student was the only reason I could be pushed into returning to this climate).  And thus I am currently thinking about what I need to do to put the house up for sale, and new flooring is at the very top of that list.

As I sat waiting for what seemed hours, I began to work on the only idea that has presented itself that even remotely satisfies.  I want to empty my house…right down to the baseboards.

So as I made mental images of acres of open, but still beautiful space, that idea suddenly got hooked up with last nights verbal expressions, and before you could say Jack Sprat, I had married those two ideas together, and come up with the notion, that perhaps I could teach in my now empty, but still, elegantly beautiful living room. 

Well my dears…that is my oldest and my absolute favorite fantasy… cut to me: teaching…

Gone are the adoring masses, replaced by a small but deeply interested few, who have gathered themselves to hear what it is I have to say.

I cannot begin to describe the physical sensation of pleasure that oiled itself through my innards, as that fantasy took hold of me.

It was excitement layered with fun, pumped up by joy, and dancing electricity, as it spread itself through my veins and caused me to almost call the company I was intended to interview with, to tell them to forget it, that I was going to be occupied elsewhere and ecstatically so.

Just then…I glanced out the window and saw the clouds drifting by, an unusual sight here in the “Valley of the Sun”, and a lone blackbird was slicing his way, through that cerulean blue and fluffy white field.

At that precise moment, filled to the brim with quite delicious excitement, listening to my mind making all manner of plans about how my empty dining/living room would become a sanctuary of holiness, wherein I would pass on the great goodness that has been bequeathed to me, I suddenly and quite profoundly became my own Teacher, Teachings, and Student.

As I sat fidgeting with pulsing electrical zeal, it suddenly dawned upon me that I had traded the “here and now” truth, for the lie of a better tomorrow, without even the hint of understanding that it had occurred.

As the jittery high of my fantasy, began to rapidly empty from my veins, I looked up at that blackbird, and knew in the deepest way possible, that I had just experienced the full tilt power of the impact of the illusions of mind.

The truth was that I was sitting, looking out a window, and seeing clouds, sky and a lone bird.  The lie, of a deeply desired and often hoped for future, was so intense and so enticing that I had almost gotten up and walked away from the opportunity to interview for a job, that I could really use, so caught in the embrace of illusion was I.

This moment knocked me out of my shoelaces.

This is what they all mean…I thought to myself… not just my Beloved Teacher, but all the ones that I have ever respected and looked to for help, sustenance, support, and deeply needed guidance.

This is how we are lost to ourselves, and to the moment in which we are actually living, in favor of some imagined moment in a non-existing future.  Some hope comes into our mind, fills our bodies with lusciousness, and compels us away from the actual and the real.

No doubt, you are that this exact moment, stuttering out a … now-wait-just-a-cotton-picking-minute-here, protest … what if this were the angels, or the gods, or the tarot card readers message, that this is what I am supposed to do, the formulation of some new spiritual guidance wrapped up in a bow, and feeling like a hit off a heroin syringe?  Isn’t that possible?

To which I respond, not a chance.

I am not saying that I may not indeed, empty out my space, get new and more suitable flooring, set up some chairs, and extend an invitation to those around me, to join me in sharing in spiritual understanding. 

That cannot be known by me until the day it arrives.

That potential is one of millions that may or may not occur to me, as the days and weeks of my life unfold.  But for this moment, I am sitting, looking out a window, and seeing a blue and white sky and a black bird.  That is all that can be known, and all that is currently true.

And here is the veil’s width of the difference between living in the lie of illusion, or dealing in the truth of the moment, which is the only place reality exists.

And in this dawning of realization, I became…

“my own Teacher, Teachings, and Student.”

(A note about goals and the setting of such.  My bodies response to the future oriented fantasy of teaching, allows me to know that is still the one activity that I wish to experience and express before the end of my time on this planet.  But the type and quality of teacher I aspire to become, is one who lives fully in the here and now. 

I am not interested in helping anyone to achieve anything. 

I am only interested in helping others to realize their true nature…and here’s the thing, your true nature can only be experienced in the present moment, and will be denied to you, to the degree that you live inside the fantasies of mind.  The realization of one’s true nature, slow as it has been for me, has cured me of ills to horrible to describe.  Gone, or going, is fear, suffering, self-consciousness, embarrassment, comparison, competition and a whole host of other discomforts and dis-eases – in their place – relaxation, ease, peace, and well being.  So forgive me if I do not care that you reach your goals, or acquire your possessions, or achieve your desire for fame, or get what you want, or become rich and acclaimed…what good all of that…if you don’t find out who you are?)

Adayre R. Miller

7/11/13

Photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and "Say Your Piece" to see more of this artist's work please follow this link:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/30246759@N02/2838807264/in/photolist-5jRCuQ-8apBff-8amnSe-aEDKDN-7TRpp7-btNfu7-5mQ8bU-75xy4g-7JCYY6-otGEy-4C8Rza-7ZnDsE-f6d3Qc-9Rkv4N-6TMcyP-5KB3Eg-9U7vkx-74CoA2-Hyorj-LVq5g-zZ9uS-5o1YT8-5W9Jje-mWoYV-bjh9kK-dD9RS3-bzcExB-2nNQWM-9p9hbD-5cpPGR-dQGymX-bBDDX1-7p6cvR-4NTpwH-eCAExo-3ufnFU-kMBV9-9pKNS8-4HvFYM-9r38jS-9DGmvU-a47qQq-8EbP3k-umDiX-6J6daq-8vaDCC-4dt6iR-c3Ve2C-8agbAg-7Qynbz-9K61E4

Breathe With Me...

 When I was a child and my mothers intense and unpredictable rages made my life seem so tenuous and so deeply fearful, I prayed with a fervor that should have been years beyond my understanding.  I knelt on the carpeted steps of the local evangelical church and yearned to be free from the hell that I was living, and the coming hell my preacher had predicted for me.

As the years passed and I discovered the New Age movement, I stopped praying and began instead to “shape my thoughts, vision my goals, and dream my dream of desires fulfilled.”

As I began to meet and engage with Teachers of Truth, I became capable of putting away – at least in my understanding – the last vestiges of the illusory uses of imagination, in favor of staying in the present moment living life on the level of its expression, rather than my desires.

As the turmoil of my job continues to push and prod me, I come to the full circle understanding that I have awakened in mind, and gut, as one of my teachers puts it, but not in heart…

I have not felt confused for a very long time.  When once, years ago, I sat in front of my Beloved Teacher and could quite literally understand nothing he said.  I was so confused by his words that I sometimes questioned my sanity, but the shear volume of his presence and the comforting weight of it, kept me coming back year after year.

But now, as I re-read the lessons he left behind for us, I am in full possession of their meaning…and I wonder at the confusion they once caused me.  I understand, fully, that the past and future do not exist.  I understand that my only chance at a fulfilled life is the present moment, or even more precisely the immanent arising moment.  (Having the privilege of watching a truly awakened being for so long, allows me to know that Enlightened Beings live, and have their being, in a tender “within something”…existing in all parts of the universe simultaneously).

This is the how and why of the fact that my Beloved Teacher, on more than one occasion, read my mind…and knew the darkest parts of my unknown-to-me self, from the moment he met me.

“Awakening on the level of gut” is also something I feel has been experienced.  I have met my worst terrors fully, I have died to the self I once imagined myself to be, and lived through that death.  I feel no anxiety about my coming, (I am approaching my sixth decade), physical death, and I have no fears about what the unknown might bring.

That said… I am sure that I have not awakened on the level of heart.

There was a time in my life when I was so emotionally sensitive that little more than a strong breeze could rock my world.  Terror had lived inside me for so long, that I was like a shell-shocked veteran, running for my life at the merest suggestion of a twig snapping in the woods.

But now, I can be treated to the most intense forms of personal rejection and I do not move an inch.  I do not attempt to fix, to shelter myself, to gain allies or engage in a fight that cannot be won, or to place blame and guilt anywhere outside of myself.

And that is, without doubt, progress…

BUT:

I do shield my heart.  I do not allow, into my deep and moist interior, the type of understanding that would allow me to sympathize with my rejectors.  I do not “turn the other cheek”, willingly allowing them to strike me anew.

One of the very few personal stories my Beloved Teacher ever shared with us, (he was well past expressing himself in such a personal way), was of the time a woman came to him to disclose that she had plotted his assassination two days prior.

She had come to class with a gun hidden in her purse, fingering it the night through…as she waited for her chance to send the demon to hell where he surely must belong.   (I am taking some poetic license here – my Teacher did not speak in this florid a way.)

As she described for him her experience, she stated that she had been near the back of the large room, and as she attempted to get close enough to do the deed, and take his life…each direction she turned the people seemed to knot up and prevent her passage.

As frustration grew and her task became more insurmountable, she decided to return the next time class would be held, sit closer to the front, and kill him then instead.

He did not relate the how or why of her conversion from her intention, to become the instrument of his demise.  He did not say what had changed her mind, nor why she had come to confess rather than to slay.  (We can assume she had experienced some form of redemption, at the very least.)

But what he did say…was that he put his hand out and offered her a home.  She became an integral part of the organization dedicated to its mission and purpose until cancer took her from, what is highly likely, the only home she had ever experienced.

This is the meaning and action of “turning the other cheek”.  It is also a testament to an awakened heart.

I have no such kindness for my “tormentors” and they are only attempting to take my job from me.  As they believe – as all deeply sleeping humans do – that their world would be better if some external attribute would change, in this case not having to put up with me, and thus they push and prod and reject in an attempt to make me leave.

And as for me, I do not run…but I do defend.

I wrap my heart in a cloak of hardness lined with self-justifications and personal righteousness, and refuse to see their pain and confusion.  I notice how much they need to be special and important and loveable, and I do nothing to help them move beyond such a damaging and debilitating approach to life.

I stand firmly across from them, rather than shoulder-to-shoulder.

And I justify my actions by defining them as my attackers…when in truth… they are attacking their own suffering, and using me as the instrument by which they are waging their personal war.

I count myself above them because I do not engage in the outward expressions of contempt and confrontation that mires us, both, in discontentment and disturbance.  I live in the lie that I am better than they, because I do not display such crude and unkind behavior and in so doing, I rob myself of awakening at the level of heart.

For months now…I have wondered and worried, like a dog with a bone, the reasons for why I do not experience the upwelling of joy that so many before me have foretold.

I catalog and tick off the many similarities between my current understanding and those of my beloved teachers, and I see so many shared characteristics.  I no longer believe in a personal self, nor do I experience myself as a singular being.  My mind can, and frequently does, drop into complete, deeply nourishing, and fulfilling silence.   I no longer experience projected or illusory fear, (I actively know the difference between fear as useful for the survival of the body, and psychological fear that is a horrific trick of the mind.)  I no longer create beliefs that must be undone to produce the state of liberation.  And I find in myself the strength to face life on life terms, and not filtered through the illusions of a better tomorrow.

But the surges of joy, born of contact with the real, that are reported by all who have gone before me… remains a “here again – gone tomorrow” phenomena in my life and being.  I have had moments of inexplicable joy and gratitude, but they pass away.  And like my Teachers, I now understand that anything, no matter how wonderful or how terrible, that comes and goes, is not ultimately real.

Thus I come to the diagnosis that I am not awakened at the level of heart.  My mind is clear, my will is surrendered, my direction is assured, but my heart cannot “turn the other cheek” and invite those who seek to harm me, using the tool I am most hurt by, that of rejection, into the bosom of my being.

It seems clear, beyond all doubt, that I must find the will and the courage to die to that first and most deeply experienced hurt.

How can I make personal and painful rejection into the healer it is meant to be?  How can I welcome its ragged nature into the depths of my heart?  How can I bare my flesh to the point of the knife?

I do not know…

But my Beloved Teacher, as always, has left me a clue.  He, quite frequently, taught lessons that in some form or shape illuminated the need to “sacrifice your own suffering”.  It took me years and years to even begin to understand such a demanding and challenging lesson.  To sacrifice your own suffering is to trust enough in the designs of the Universe that you would willingly take your only and beloved son to the summit of a mountain knowing that you will be asked to sacrifice his life.

We believe, (and wrongly so), that our favored sons are always the things about us that are most purely developed, our strengths, our courage, our shiny selves.  But it isn’t true.

Our favored sons are the places in us that we shelter from the storms of life, the very most, our darkest and deepest harms.  Our favored sons are the parts of ourselves that we justify, hold blameless, and view as having been severely victimized.

This is the “son” that must be willingly sacrificed.  The place in us that feels justified in our suffering, the place that yearns to be “understood” and agreed with, the place that is the most needy and the most tender…

We must become trusting enough to know that if we deliver our most treasured and most broken self to the alter of purification, that “sacrificing our suffering” will become the threshold through which awakening at the level of heart becomes a potential.

I do not know how to come into agreement with those that are so severely rejecting me, I know only, that aligning myself with the flow of energy that is moving toward me, is the only salvation that is possible.

Rejection is my oldest and most severe wound.  I have known its icy breath upon my neck from the first moments of my life.  And like all prisoners, I came to rely upon its severe nature to keep me safe from the fears that were conjured in me, every time, I tried to break its horrible hold upon me.

There has come into my being, at this juncture of my life, enough spaciousness to tackle this most deeply held harm.  I know this because I am surrounded by actual rejection in many different forms.  And more, I can now see the ways in which I see illusory rejection where there is only ignorance or non-attentiveness.

So how do we free ourselves from the one thing we want most to be rid of…while secretly and unconsciously holding fast to its claw like embrace?

By opening to it, telling the truth to ourselves, honoring the journey that brought us to the strength where truth can be made visible, by living, and having our very being, in the trust that must surely cause the Universe to breathe.

Adayre R. Miller

7/9/13

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and the artist “To forget what I have done”…to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60748188@N05/6595091169/in/photolist-b3MyQr-8XNvFe-5LLd3s-5U6Zc6-9NhaiG-c2rJTE-51vKKt-dQLaHU-bGyw6T-7oh2vY-5NibP1-7mSrXg-byuHwS-7soorA-bURGjq-5VeHN9-7PUocn-hbibr-aXgb7P-5yCh1B-5g8qmJ-824uSt-4cDUcR-6n19Rm-7mGdMk-8WnMr7-9hqyG7-dnngqt-cUFMuW-98PLTN-cbwQ5S-bAkuz6-zg2D8-6isnPk-3sVNa-7v72Dy-6MwV33-7nXsYS-7owuFy-y1KWu-ea1dxK-6XbFRh-6X7G4p-e956t1-7piKAw-3BoTbx-9kRjwN-95tFNr-7vGhAS-dUim6k-6GREY3#

A Necessary Burden...

I have just completed a type of marathon.  It was grueling, as I am sure they all are, it was also debilitating in a way I can’t quite define…and I am not sure I have recovered, or if I will recover…

I think it began a year ago, when I was laid off from a job by email, a form of rejection so hurtful I could not even respond to it.

Thankfully, and with much gratitude, I found a new job fairly quickly, this one involved going to a church with a teammate or two, setting up a “studio”, photographing families, and then attempting to sell them portraits on a straight commission basis.

As the new kid on the block, I was treated to an astonishing array of hazing type behaviors.  I would say good morning to my coworker and get only stony silence in response, or I would do one less photography session than my co-worker and get ridden all day about the need to be faster, or one woman in particular would monitor my behavior and comment/counsel me on it, to a degree and depth, that made me want to pull my hair out in handfuls.

While this has been going on in the external of my life, in the internal, I have come to a deep form of utter and total understanding that no amount of striving will change the nature of the experience, I have repeated since they day I began forming memories.

I cannot imagine a life that is not surrounded, invaded, captured, bounded, and in bondage, to a deep and overwhelming sense of rejection.  From the day my mother gave birth to me, and handed me to my 12-year-old sister to be cared for, I have unconsciously believed myself to be experiencing some form of rejection.  All of my most deeply painful memories involve some form of being an outsider, and all of my coping behaviors grew up, in, and around me, as a response to that deep experience of rejection.

It is only in the last year that I can stand still with my internal experience of being rejected.  As these coworkers add weight to my perceptions of being shunned and vilified, as they bond together in their decision that I am the villain and need to be expunged, I find in myself a place where I do not feel the impulse to run.

I would say this is/has been, my forty days in the desert.

Alone and without the shared warmth of someone agreeing with me that I am being treated poorly, and that it should not be thus…I have met my Waterloo.

I can see, but only dimly so, the value of this experience.  The emotional storm that came with me into this lifetime, the karma that is mine to bear, has been at full volume and in full gale force for months now   …and I endure…   alone, still, silent, and steadfast.

As the false glow of my life’s “dream” has finally faded from my mind and heart, (this is surely the greatest gift of this past year), I have come into the strength necessary to live life on its terms, and not with the pacifying hope of a better tomorrow, somewhere over the rainbow.

As my perception of daily rejection from these people who find me so objectionable, swells and crescendos all around me…I do not seek another place to be, I do not run to the emotional cover of someone to agree with me that I am being treated badly, nor I do not seek out some other place to be, some other place to stand.

I stand here.  Right here.

…and I watch, and work, and carry on.

What is the work? It is the work of understanding what really matters in a lifetime, what really counts, what is mine to do and mine alone.

I have boiled it down to two simple notions.  I desire only peace of mind, and I wish to contribute authentic kindness to the degree that I am currently capable.

Now, you must know, that if you come to that clean an awareness that you better baton down the hatches, stoke up the fires, fill up the pantry, and button up your winter coat… for you are in for a wild ride indeed.

To have true peace of mind, you must be willing to come nose to nose with every single thing that disturbs you.  And more, much more than that, you must be willing to let it have you, take you, devour you.  Like Prometheus, you must be willing, ready, and capable of pushing that boulder up to almost the summit, only to have it roll all the way back down, and over you in the process…crushing the breath from your body and the wind from your will to carry on.

Peace of mind is not the pot of gold sitting at the end of the “enlightenment” rainbow.  It is not borne into your life on the wings of butterflies, nor dusted upon your brow by the sparkle of fairies.  It is a hard won, hard fought, crucifixion.  It comes only after, you have swept your gaze skyward and wept the phrase…”my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

This is why so many billions, will settle instead, for the utterly illusory value of “goals” set, achieved, and ultimately realized to be useless, rather than fight the good fight of self realization, self understanding, self release, and the ultimate winning of the prize of peace born of true acceptance.

Lest you think that contributing authentic kindness, equally simple, yet just as difficult to achieve, is any easier to define…  Let me stand to say, that too, is almost beyond my capacity to truly illuminate.

There is no kindness in sparing someone from himself or herself.

If you make their road easier, their burden lighter, their way simpler, you quite clearly are robbing them of the only thing that really matters.  Self-realization.

So how can you, and I, put a hand out to those in need?

By not having a horse in that race…

True kindness requires that we have no agenda, that we are not trying to save another so that we may feel good about ourselves.  Being that free, that available, we become an instrument of great usefulness, so that we may fill the moment with its needs, not with our thinly veiled desire to be special or important to those around us.

I am not very good at this, I discover.

I want to be finished with my old friend…rejection.  I want to put it behind me, but now, I am finally mature enough to know that it will never be behind me.  It is my companion, my best good friend, my bellwether, my benchmark, my compass, and my hair shirt.  It comes with its painful claws and marks the place in my psyche where I have not yet surrendered, it makes me bleed where I am, yet still, broken…so that I may turn in that direction and invite those unloved parts of myself home as the prodigal son was welcomed with fierce and just love.

When all else is swept away…I discover there is only ever one thing occurring, and that is the relationship of the self to the Self.

Can I see deeply enough to recognize that rejection is a long held pattern that lives in the bones of me?  That feeling unloved, unwanted, undesirable is the dirty little secret at the bottom of every single one of us…not just in my life’s pattern, but also in the patterns of us all.

Could life be only about healing that sense of separation?  Can another do that for you?  Do you have the courage to stand in the face of your own sadness, longing, weeping, and dissatisfaction…long enough to hear the call for home, and to turn toward it?

I marvel at the ways and means by which we run from this deep truth about ourselves, the busyness, the achievements, the outcomes, the searching, all a vain attempt to outrun the deep truth that somehow in some indefinable way, we believe ourselves to have been abandoned and are left bereft because of it…(despite the fact that is not the truth of our Being).

In the face of this deep truth I commit to desiring only peace and giving kindness where and when I am instructed, by the moment that I find myself in.  I don’t know that a life could be made simpler than this…but if it can, I will bend to that as well.  I am done with the complications of the mind-made self; I want only wholeness and simplicity now.

I invite you into its embrace as well.

Adayre R. Miller

7/4/13

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Step_A to see more of this artist's work please follow the link below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29766674@N07/3859032226/in/photolist-6T1xQo-57yRYG-rqD4W-5WzVQZ-636TBd-ew3kXW-8JzERb-dp53ye-7REeqX-bCcpjA-aB7rYS-beVLBB-4ZMhvN-akdfuf-6XG3hd-7RX4bb-7yo67R-77iHdB-dfo4sS-8ZRKir-8ZRKtF-8ZRKpv-arrjUk-biWbqF-9fgCMr-7SZKro-y3hNn-aHNYAe-8giHR7-5WCX7S-Eykb9-bwebuo-4yfeMt-4yfftz-9wuo4Y-9wunbj-9wuauU-9weTXy-9wGBWS-9wGFvJ-9weYGN-8CaqpN-8CaqkE-8Caqn9-B18ey-8a6SeR-DJJST-aFbK2b-7EmWTv-4vNid9-6H9z9M#