Lessons From Swamiji.

I was playing a frivolous game with my higher self when I lost sight of her. Perhaps I pawned her off for a pithy glance from one I considered to be a more worthy being than myself.  Maybe she was traded in exchange for another’s love and adoration.  However it happened, she seemed to have departed and I was left with a feeling of deep loss.  Why I thought that someone else has the power to provide inner strength and love and radiating sustenance in the same way as oneself, I do not know.  That is a bigger question for another time.

I blindly filled myself up with manifestations of charm and collapsed into anger due to the lack of her presence.  Without her strength I protected myself with a sometimes placating but more so messy and sputtering ego.  And it worked.  I survived.  Until a fetid inquietude erupted with raw force that left me questioning my strategy.  And my practice.

The realization of my irresponsibility struck like a thunderbolt.  Or perhaps more of a being-quake from deep within the dense folds of my consciousness that exploded outwards.  Regardless of from whence it came, it hit with an unnerving, clenching thwack to my energetic composure.  At the time, this realization was not yet defined by words nor had a name but I had a gnawing feeling of utter sadness.

Instead of being overwhelmed and rejecting the pain, I wrapped it around me like a blanket, hiding myself in its folds until the fear of its existence was overcome. And in the acceptance, in the cloaking, the holding, the touching, the grasping- I understood the texture of the sadness; the threads of mistake and inexperience, patches of rough falseness, patterns of self trickery. And also, the warmth of my dear humanness.  The fuzzy, worn and scrappy humbleness of humanity.  I clung on until I was done with the weight of this ignorance and ready to see.

Never was she, was I, truly gone.  Never was I without my higher self, my grace, my brilliance.  Never was I alone.  There is no lack, it is here, I am deeply, intricately wound, I am one with my higher self.  At risk of sounding like a schizophrenic; my higher self, lower self, middling reality, inner child, physical being, my spirit- we are all one. One fabulous tangle of existence enmeshed in a web of humanity trying to weave through this life.  There is so much, so very much to navigate.  Maybe sometimes it takes the periscope of the higher self to see an honest way through the beautiful myriad of exquisite struggle of life.

For a moment in time we might forget. Or I do. When I am distracted and a lens of fear or the blinders of attachment are haphazardly perched before my eyes, I cannot see clearly.  And so it is.  On goes the great patient quest for defining and thinning and clearing out of that which stops me from seeing, from shining from love, from soul, from the place of integrated connection and unity and harmony.  There is a layered depth of human form through which my soul luminates.  Fractured and reflecting light uniquely shining.  But may I let it shine.  Brightly.