I have my ear pressed to the ground. I am listening for water, as though my life depended on it. No, not the literal, earthen ground… The ground of my inner-most being. And the water is the pure, nourishing, musical flow of my essential self.
Every day I face the grating realization that my life is not what I want it to be. I want a light, spacious, peaceful hOMe nestled in the glorious embrace of nature. I want spiritually and creatively fulfilling work. I want a husband to wake up with; to share life with. I want a child or two. I want plenty of money.
Instead I’m living with my mom at a spiritual community in the woods. I’m teaching yoga in trade for credit toward more classes here. (Saving up for meditation teacher training!) I’m spiritually married to a man who I can’t be with (in the day to day sense of the words) (Although I s’pose it depends on what you mean by “waking up together”… Grin.). I’m not pregnant. Monetarily, I have the twenty dollars my Ma just shelled out so that I could by sprouted raisin bread at Master’s Market after I finish writing this.
See… there’s a seeming discrepancy between what I want and what I have. And it’s driving me nuts, because I believe I have the power to create what I want in my life… but I feel stuck. It’s a nauseatingly familiar feeling.
So I’ve been relentlessly stalking a SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS. Because Einstein was not just blowing smoke up our asses when he said that you can not solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. Yeah, so I’ve been flushing my mind with youtube recordings of Abraham Hicks, Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson, as well as daily readings from my beloved companion, A Course in Miracles. Striving to spark remembrance of the Infinite Power within me. I want it to be that I am dousing myself with figurative gasoline, so that when God decrees it, that destined match gets lit and tossed like a kiss on the wind, by a smirking Mother of Grace, and in a holy instant, my whole world roars in a blazing pyre of simultaneously spiritual and material success.
It really could happen.
But in the mean time, Abraham is drilling it into my thick scull that happiness does NOT come from external circumstances. No! Happiness is a permanent inner address. Ugh! You’d think that realizing this would be HALLELUJAH news… And really, it IS… but it’s also frustrating… because like, if that is true, and I know it IS, then why am I feeling stuck in “not happiness” so much of the time?
Because I still insist on clinging to ideas of how life SHOULD look, and this idea is forming a gaping Grand Canyon between the life I’m IN, and the life I WISH I was in. And the only way I can ever hope to traverse it, is by sprouting WINGS, and I can only sprout wings by allowing the innate JOY of my divine essence to rise to the surface of my life and consciousness.
It appears that I’m chasing my tail.
But I’m closer than I think. Because I am remembering that joy is not something that I have to GENERATE; go out and by at the store and slather all over the surface of myself and my life. No… joy is the water that I am listening for as I press my ear to the ground of my Being. It will flow to the surface as I invite it, and then allow. Sometimes it bubbles up in a soft wash of glee, after sadhana (spiritual practice). And it’s almost easy to miss… because it’s subtle. Like the identical twin sister of our beloved friend peace. It’s not what I formerly knew joy to be… this manic, over-stimulated feeling that comes from a triple late, or a peak experience. That’s the cheap imitation. Like the difference between eating a blood-red bing cherry at summer’s zenith, or a cherry flavored blow pop.
Meanwhile, I look in the mirror, and I see a wOMan of pure light gazing back at me. I see a clarified, indelible soul beauty, that I have worked so hard to become. Yes. I have worked so hard to get this far. I don’t know if this “working hard” is good or bad, right or wrong… but it’s what I know to be true with a small t. True with a massive T, is that I am always whole, perfect and complete. I am infinite. The Truth of me can never change… But in this relative world, I evolve. I burn down and rise up, burn down and rise up. I shed and molt and remodel and incessantly become.
Even though my life is “not what I want”… I suppose it is what I NEED. Because I am becoming a purified channel for the Light. From the excruciating heat of this alchemy, the possibility of real wisdom and love are whispering from deep within me. No journey is EVER wasted. Even if I am blind and flailing in a mud puddle of my treasured delusions…
The Light will ultimately obliterate all dreams of darkness. Yes, you can take that statement to the BANK! And in the mean time, I keep my ear devotionally-obsessively pressed to this inner ground. Thirsting to learn the hushed, lucid language of Silence.
Athena Graceland 