You don't face the day, you participate in the day. Every moment is a chance to dance with God.
Michael A. Singer
How beautiful is that?
Those words grabbed me as I sat to listen to Michael A. Singer, in one of his weekly talks from the Temple of the Universe, today. In this lecture he was talking about the need to let the stuff that "bothers us" go...because really..it isn't the stuff that is happening out there that is bothering us, it isn't reality that is bothering us...it is what we are doing with it. We make the mistake of judging, first of all, all stimuli as "good, bad, or ugly". As soon as we place a judgement on something, the mind we trained to be a little crazy, attempts to either push it away or cling to it. In either case, doing so does not let the natural vibration of the thing ( be it a thought, emotion, or an external experience) pass through us as all stimuli is meant to do. We stuff it inside.
It is obvious we are holding on to stuff when we cling to something we desire and think of as pleasant but we do the same with that which we do not want and think of as unpleasant. What we think we pushed away, was never pushed away. When we attempt to push away something we are using all our attention and effort to hold back a vibration that was never meant to be held back. Doing so makes us hold onto it instead of getting rid of it. What we resists persists, right?
All this stuffed stuff then becomes the foundation for our self-concept. We build a sense of "me"...what I like and what I don't like...on this very shifty sand of past experience (or should I say past "judgement"). We have within us, now, seeds of things we like and things we don't .We spend the rest of our time then...trying to hold certain unpleasant seeds down, push others away or to grab and cling to things out there that we erroneously believe will cause the pleasant things within us to grow and to to fix our insides.
Beneath the shifty sand of our samskaras is an energy that is meant to flow up. Whether we like it or not, it will flow up! But when we are constantly pushing stuff down on top of our blockages, we keep pushing that energy down, delaying its flow. Samskaras, old stuffed junk, is blocking the energy.
The trick is not to dig down to the root of each samskara, Singer says in the below video, but to just stop adding new things to push down. If we stop reacting to what is going on out there now, judging, resisting grabbing at the pleasant and pushing away the unpleasant...be the experience related to something like having a slow driver in front of us or a dying loved one... then the force of the energy below the samskaras ( those deep dark and painful memories or those unwholesome tendencies that have been stored in us for so long)...will have enough power to push these samskaras up and out of the way. It will naturally release them for us, in its natural desire to flow freely. Our job, then, is to simply stop adding new stuffed material to our blockages, to stop doing what we are doing to protect these samskaras from getting triggered and therefore protecting and defending this concept of "me". Our job is to sit back, relax into what is and let Shakti do its thing.
How do we do that?
We learn to relax and then we relax and release into what is, into whatever is. We allow it all to come in no matter how it feels. We can do that much easier if we stop judging experience as good, bad, or ugly. Without judging there would be no need to grasp or push away. We won't face the day like we are going to fight or cling to whatever unfolds in front of us...we simple lay back into it, participate in whatever Life has to offer, experience it, learn from it and let it all just pass through us. No matter what it feels like! We stop judging what we have come to see as bad, wrong or shouldn't be and see the value in all of it.
Example
We see fear and anything that triggers fear within us as bad, wrong or shouldn't be, don't we? Fear sucks, doesn't it? The feeling can be so uncomfortable most of us will spend all our days running from it, won't we? We will do whatever we can to avoid old fear ridden samskaras from getting bumped. We will put great effort into manipulating the outside world so it doesn't interfere with this buried pain, We will build up our defenses. We will avoid, suppress, repress and deny to no end. We will keep laying layer after layer of repression concrete over these fear samskaras, those past experiences that led you to judge fear as bad, so they don't come up. But the energy below them is so strong, so powerful and so determined to flow, it will break through eventually and when it does it will push every samskara up and into our conscious awareness. This fear will rise up into your awareness again and again and again. Ouch! That is going to hurt.
We watched the Netflix movie, True Spirit, yesterday about 16 year old Jessica Watson's solo voyage around the globe. She admitted to being terrified many, many times but she didn't run from that fear, she didn't suppress or repress it...she simply allowed it. And when those sixty foot waves took her down...triggering every samskara that might have been in her, she handled it...even though the fear was there. Her adventure was not about suppressing or repressing, nor was it about "facing the day". It was about participating fully in it and whatever unfolded. She danced with God. Sure she felt at times, after being on a boat alone for 7 months, she was going crazy. ..
If your mind is driving you crazy, it is becasue the energy is trying to push the crazy out of the mind.Singer
...but she allowed it all and succeeded in ways that went way beyond the obvious.
Pulling Out Samskaras?
We may decide that we have to dig down to those roots of fear and whatever else we are holding onto and expose all the junk before the damn breaks...to be the ones in charge of this excavation project, but really, we do not have to do anything but stop putting more stuff on top of that which will naturally come up on its own. When we take our hands off it...it will come up in a way that will not overwhelm us. Source knows what we can handle and though it is certainly going to hurt ( what was stuffed with pain , will be released with pain), it will release as gently as it can. We will be able to manage it if it comes up naturally.
But we have to stop reacting to what is going on in us and around us now...in order for that to happen. We have to stop grasping and clinging to the events going on now. We need to let these present moment things that unfold in front of us and in us ...pass through. We need to get out of the way and leave the big stuff to the Shakti to take care of.
If we want to dance with God, we need to relax and release into what is.
All is well!
Michael A. Singer/ Temple of the Universe( Feb 2, 2023) The Answer Lies Within You. https://tou.org/talks/
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