Fading Inward

There is something moving within me beneath thought; something I sense only as a subtle vibration in the earth, the quiver in a blade of grass, the gentle crack and rise of soil that once lay compact.  It is not something I can wrap my fingers around or feel warmly on my skin.  It is something timid, something that, if I regard it directly, slips back away underneath.  It is easily frightened away by noise, busyness, coarseness, and bravado.  It retreats willingly when ignored or contradicted.  It comes only when invited with gentleness, with patience, with stillness.  It climbs inside and curls up in my heart, melting all the layers that cushion me from lasting clarity, peace, and strength.

Ananda Laurelwood is beginning to feel simultaneously like a dream, where everything is a metaphor for something universal, and more real than anywhere else I have ever been. Life has increasingly adopted a subtlety I have held for only moments in my adult life, but once inhabited almost entirely as a child.  I am transfixed by the leaves outside my window shimmering crisply.  As the sun melts across the horizon, I feel the earth roll gently beneath me, nudging me forward.  I sense the movement of those around me absorbed in their tasks, surrendering in prayer, bubbling up in laughter, entwined in their own momentum, and my own breath and voice and will dissolve into a chorus of imperfect aspiration for what endures beneath our collective longing.  My own heart swells and breaks at each bright face, at each display of courage, at each act of vulnerability and sacrifice for each other and for our own personal transformation.

I begin to imagine how it feels to be a flying fish, wriggling effortfully through a viscous world of color and movement delighting and threatening me above, below, and all around, and then suddenly soaring weightless through an empty expanse of sparkling light.  There is always the moment of colliding again with that familiar world I now experience as dulled and confining, but that impression of lightness consumes my imagination until I can once again muster the momentum to break the surface and soar as long as I can beyond breath, beyond hunger, beyond fear.

Where does the sea end and the sky begin?  How does a fish come to first experience the sensation of air on its scales?  What force propels it upward, from all it has known, to burst and crash between worlds again and again?  There is nothing in my worldly life that has prepared me for what I am now allowing to move through me.  Despite being a writer, I cannot piece together a coherent story or map that can lead me or anyone else back to this understanding.  Despite being intellectually bright, any attempt to describe it slips into poetry.  And despite being able to bring my past visions to reality, I am not in control here.  Any whisper of my own agenda dilutes my experience of the moment.  Any desire I pursue overwhelms the movement of energy in my body and the subtle thrill in my heart.  When I focus on the eternity beyond the limitations of this and that, I feel a flicker of clarity and relief move through me for a moment.  But when I pray with my guru’s words, when I imprint his face into my mind, when I reach out to him with gratitude and willingness, the response is immediate.  I feel an expansive lightness broader than whatever trial I face, unconditioned by anything I receive or experience outwardly.  I feel joyfully willing during hours of service.  I feel my silence deepen and my intuition sharpen.  My life is now being lived in an extended chain of moments of partnership.  I bring my awareness and the will to choose based on what I am being shown is true, and something from the other side is sculpting, instructing, cleansing, and nourishing me.

The shame – over being an ambivalent devotee, over being unwilling to renounce my sensuality, and over being so easily distracted from a sense of enduring completeness by my own fantasies – is slowly leaving me.  I can always feel purer devotion, more unconditional surrender, more focused determination, but there is no use in expecting to soar over oceans when my flight feathers are just breaking through.  There is also no need to doubt my direction because everything I have ever done was an attempt to reach towards what I have begun to call the Beloved Mystery.  The nights I stole out with bare feet into the chill of the street to gaze upward and try to feel how vast and ancient the stars were.  The voyages I took alone out into the world in bold determination to feel myself held in my helpless surrender by something grand and powerful.  The many hours locked in intellectual debate on history, philosophy, and religion.  The bouts of intoxication and love-making intended to shed my separate skin and dance free.  The shamanic journeying, the Buddhist meditations, and the disciplined esoteric practices to awaken my consciousness on the astral plane.  Allowing myself to merge with the grief and wounding and longing in myself and this world, and the commitment to creating places where people can feel and pursue their deeper calling.

I am beginning to understand that if I take on my ego directly, with its limiting but convincing sense of myself and my place in the world, it will win, every time.  It needs to finish growing up before it will be willing to surrender itself more fully.  Wisdom and willingness are already emerging in some of the most reluctant and hardened parts of me as they begin to integrate the understanding that what they are doing is sabotaging my quest to feel more whole.  Living in this community magnifies my experience of both spiritual and worldly energies, and as I stretch to hold both realities simultaneously, I feel my consciousness shifting.  As a friend recently told me, “Any feeling fully felt leads to love” and my life has been and continues to be a quest to embrace eternity in exactly that way, no matter how roundabout.  Fantasies of escape and longing have both become equally absurd.  I can only reach inward and through, enduring until the tension and illusion dissolve around me into light, and I understand even more deeply than before how to give and receive love.

Am I experiencing god?  There is no being appearing to me, no voices speaking to me, no prophetic dreams.  There are no mandates etched in stone, and no lasting transcendence.  But there are miracles I cannot explain; intimate, personal miracles that may seem insignificant to others.  I have never felt such moments of joy, connection, and faith in living a life of simple service and friendship without compulsion to bolster my value or identity.  And even when I am pushed past what I believe I am able to endure, if I plead to be shown truth and taught how to love, I feel unprecedented nourishment and strength.

At Ananda, they say to put god first and all else will be provided.  I am beginning to understand this doesn’t mean shunning everything that doesn’t involve spiritual readings, practices, or lofty thoughts.  It means recognizing that in order for anything I do and any person I love to feel fulfilling, it must heighten my awareness of what is infinite.  Love is all around and inside me all the time, whether or not it is coming to me through the person in front of me.  Space is infinite even when I have 15 minutes to get the salad bar set up and pans scrubbed.  My body is constantly vibrant with energy even when I am sore and exhausted and sad.  And I know that something beyond my senses is eager to help me remember and deepen this reality whenever I ask.  What else in the world could I possibly desire but this?  It is the only thing that endures, and only when it radiates through me do I feel fully alive and in service to this world.

Nancy

“Listen.  Listen.   Whispering within your soul: hints of laughter; hints of joy; sweet songs of sadness, of quenchless yearning for the light, for my love – your true home.  Long your heart has played the dancer, long you’ve toyed with merest shadows of the treasures left behind you, deep in your soul.  Long you’ve plumbed the dark for answers, long you’ve begged from beggar’s empty hands gifts of light they too were seeking – gifts none could share.  Friend, how long will you wander?  Friend, as long as you seek your home in a land where all are strangers, love locks her door.  Leave to the weak his craven life, to the coward leave his dreaming.  Oh, my saint, wake up!  Reclaim the light!  Seek the truth behind all seeming.  Turn, turn, turn within.  In silence of soul, in cave of love, find my abode.” – “God’s Call Within” by Swami Kriyananda