No matter what type of challenges or difficulties or painful situations you go through in your life, we all have something deep within us that we can reach down and find the inner strength to get through them.
Alana Stewart
There is a bit of a conundrum that I am experiencing lately. Maybe, in your own awakening, you are experiencing the same? There seems to be great discrepancy between what I "seem" to be experiencing and what I am coming to know as real. There seems to be a battle going on between the physical world and the deeper one as to which one gets "my" attention. I am so physically and emotionally exhausted, I am afraid the physical world is going to win. Sigh.
I am hit, it seems, with one external challenge after another, to the point I feel overwhelmed with emotion, thought, stress, physical pain and exhaustion ...so much so that it feels I am drowning in the suffering of myself and others. (It takes a lot of external stressors to get me to this point these days...there has been a lot of "big" external stressors). That is an indication that I am being sucked in again to the waters of Life passing in front of me. I am slipping from the peaceful center, from the shore/seat of Objective Observer. When I am lost in believing I am in those waters, rather than on shore watching, I feel myself just thrashing around trying to keep my head up over the surface. The "me" is just trying to survive in the physical realm and having a hard time doing so. My physical form and my mind (as a tool) is needed by others yet there this "me" is thrashing around trying to keep it all from drowning. On the physical level, I am devoting so much of my time and energy to helping others but because of the complexity of the situations I am not sure if I am helping them or not. I worry that I am enabling more than helping...while my own "personal" affairs continue to fall into taters ( to the degree that that alone would drown a " person" in the physical realm) . Yet so much seems to be required of "me" for others as I take gulp after gulp of water into my lungs. In this physical reality, there is so much to deal with...stuff that cannot help but to draw me in. All absorbing, it seems. I feel like the personal "I" is drowning in it and the line between "me", "my" needs and "others" and "other" needs is getting blurred. So I wonder ...do I even bother trying to swim to shore? Or do I just let "myself" drown? And what would that drowning entail? Letting my body go to the point of illness or death? Letting my mind go to the point of illness or death? I don't understand!
Now, I ask that because the deeper part of me says that losing self is a wonderful thing. The practice I have been throwing myself into over the last few years was all about letting go of the "me" and the "my" and the "myself"...So this sense that "me" is drowning in the waters of physical world stressors may be a good thing? It does not feel like a good thing though! Let me tell ya! I am perfectly okay with letting my personality go and many of my so called "personal" desires and needs go for the sake of others...yet I do need my body and my mind, and some form of "hope", don't I to awaken...to go farther on this journey of "being"?
Even without the giving of self to others, the external world sucks me in because there is so much pull to it in the form of "survival" stressors. I imagine I would probably drown regardless. Then I ask, why?? Why...why is there so much stress in "my" life? What have I done wrong or what have I got stuck inside me in the form of conditioning and belief that is pulling me down? I mean I accept full heartedly that Life is our greatest teacher, offering us the learning challenges we need to grow but at the same time I can't help but feel like a grade two student in an advanced calculus class. I have been sitting in that class, it seems, for decades and the lessons keep coming and coming and coming. I am overwhelmed by the complexity to the point I feel like I am being punished. It is like just a big, "Duh? I can't learn under this much pressure. Why are you doing this to me?"
When I hear people speaking about the notion that we cocreate our lives, when we fully believe in the goodness of Life, when we trust in the universe and let go of all our skeptical doubt, when we are at the wonderful point of surrender Michael Singer speaks about... everything will flow smoothly, I feel such a twisted knot in my gut. It is my main life purpose to be there ...yet there is no smooth about it on my path. If we can truly manifest all that we ever wanted and needed, with the right spiritual attitude, what is wrong with "me"? I mean I know that "things" of the external world will not make me happy ...I do... and it is not necessarily what I want. I am asking for so little of external world cooperation...just enough to get by and a little more peace in my external events, a little less suffering for those I love, and maybe a little more "hope"(though I am not too fond of that word. My goal is peace and awakening ...no matter what...but in the meantime, I feel I need the challenges to be diminished just enough to catch my breath. Why can I not get that? That is a question I have asked so many times over the course of the last few years.
Then I feel such shame and failure for asking that out loud, like I am failing in my practice. I know there are so many out there, who suffer so much more than I do, whose circumstances are far more challenging. Still, I continue to ask, why can it not be just a little easier externally or at the very least, why can I not find the peace I long for regardless of what is happening around me? It looks like the peace no matter what is my safest goal right now.
I am just confused ...and I share that confusion because I know I can't be alone in this conundrum. I tell myself that this, what I am experiencing, is normal for someone at this stage of their evolution...the challenge is all there for a reason. So I take my deep breaths, I bring myself back to the present moment whenever I catch myself swimming and thrashing around and I do my best to "float" to shore and observe it all happening from there. It isn't happening to "me", I tell "myself"...(whoever that is)......it is just happening. I breathe in whatever air I can, filling my lungs while on shore, knowing that I will fall in again and again and again. Maybe some day, just maybe, if circumstances do not change for the better I will discover the trick to spending more time on the shore than I do in the water.
All is well!
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