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#