You Don’t Need a Weatherman (to know which way the wind blows)

The body: this is where I feel everything.  Feeling comes like the weather – truly unpredictable – we have all seen how very wrong weather predictions are.  But there is some freedom in knowing absolutely that I do not know what feeling will arise at any given moment.  I have had plenty of beliefs in my lifetime, thinking that I knew how I would feel in this situation or that situation or if this or that happened.  I have been plagued with a lifetime of anticipatory fear which my mind not only conjures up but literally feeds on, adding more and more potentially dire scenarios to fuel the fire of my fear.  This is painful for the body which becomes contracted, anxious, in full fight or flight mode with all the adrenal stress.  Anticipatory fear - nothing is actually happening!  It is literally all in the mind but the body suffers.

A few years ago, Dec 11, 2011 to be exact, I had a pretty dramatic Wholebeing Awakening.  I had been in Trillium (called Waking Down in Mutuality at the time) for 9 months.  Over that time what I call my “constructed” self began to unravel.  Over the months I noticed that something was happening – parts of me, including ways of being and feeling that I held for most of my life, were falling away bit by bit.  It came to a point where I was aware that I no longer had any idea how I was going to be in any given situation. My known personality was unraveling.  I knew that I didn’t know anything for sure any longer and therefore nothing was predictable.  Along with this very unsettling experience came a greater and greater feeling of aliveness.  My teacher asked me if I could simply be where I was, rest in the not-knowing.  I said yes to this and I did just that. 

During the weekend retreat of my Awakening I found myself in the space in between, holding both the infinite self, the fullness/emptiness that is Consciousness, and the finite, poignantly human self at the very same time.  I “dropped in” and it felt amazing.  I felt marvelously luscious deep relaxation. I found knowing within myself and it was both very familiar, as if I had come home to my original self, and totally fresh and new.  I felt my connection with everything.  I sensed this Onlyness so much that there were times I did not know if the person, animal, thing, I was seeing before me was me or not me. I was in awe and wonder. 

Now I am living the paradox daily and being with whatever arises next with a grounded sense of well being.  I know that I am loved and cared for on a level that my mind is not able to understand.  It is a sense that is ever present.  If I ever doubt this mentally, I lean in to silence, anytime and anywhere.  It is possible to sense the silence in anything.  In the silence I sense the well being and love flowing from the Source of everything.

​There is a lot of both/and in this awakening to embodied consciousness. I sense this continual flow of well being and also I sense at the core of my being alive in this body, a feeling that there is something wrong.  And I am pretty sure that I felt this as a child and decided that this feeling was about me, that there is something wrong with me and if anyone ever found out about who I really am at the core of me, I would be in grave danger of rejection isolation, and withering away to die alone and unloved.  Hiding this “truth” felt essential for my survival, a life or death issue. So I constructed a whole set of patterns to defend myself against feeling it or anyone else seeing this truth about me: that I am unlovable on a core level because there is something wrong with me. 

​This is what we call the Core Wound in Trillium which is the rub between our Infinite and Finite selves; the rub of incarnated existence is a natural part of being in the body and can never be resolved.  It shows up in each of us a little differently as to what we’ve decided it means – I’m not good enough, I’m not worthy, I don’t belong, etc. In my awakening, the defense patterns around the Core Wound relaxed and the judgments about whatever kind of feeling weather came through relaxed along with them. If the feeling there’s something wrong with me came up I felt the feeling of it, a deep ache or grieving in my heart.  No judgment, no need to hide, no fear.  I might say “I feel kind of core-woundie” today and I then lived as that until it shifted. 

Some things are slow to shift; some patterns are slow to unravel; they are so complex and deep that they need to unravel slowly over time.  They come up over and over in an ever deepening spiral. Recently I find that I have arrived into the subtle systems that still hold the belief that I am insufficient, that there is indeed something wrong with me.  It is difficult to relax and allow this, to live this at this level. When this storm arrives it feels like the bottom has fallen out, like a scream or wail, a ripping through, like a calving glacier.  It is the scream at the split perhaps between the Divine and the Finite.  This is the human condition. Yes, it is hard to be here stuffed in this limited body with its very good mind, for a mind with its limitations and inability to understand the mystery of who or what I am or we are or what is going on here, what is real and true.  We know these things but not with the mind.

​So, okay here I am 6 years into a totally transformed life, a true 2nd birth, and I am feeling the rub, and as it turns out, still susceptible to “adding on” interpretations to this human condition, this true crucifixion, this living death of a Core Wound. I get it. It is hard to be here and the mind is so ready to say I know why.  Some of us blame others and feel victimized - it is the fault of the world, society, family, husband, wife, partner.  And others are more like me and accept all the blame ourselves.  UGH, relax already.  There is nothing to DO, nothing to think or figure out.  Relax, breathe, take care of the body, and be whoever and however you are.  Take a big long breath of freedom by letting things be exactly as they are.  There is unraveling and it is the evolution of me. I tend to be impatient but there is no rushing this. It will happen in its own time.  I may feel a bit of insufficiency all of my life and this particular stormy weather will blow through now and then.  But truly I don’t believe it “means” something.  These judgments we make about ourselves are the ties that bind us to what we think we are.  And they are simply untrue.  We are ever changing reality, we are the wind that blows through, we are the perfection of Life itself sourcing through us right now just exactly the way we are.