Standing Strong

A little over a year ago, when I was in the process of leaving my job and home and embarking on the journey that brought me to living in intentional spiritual community, I attended a circling event with a small group of leaders from Authentic Portland.  Just about anything can happen in a circle of six people committed to more deeply connecting in the present moment, and on that particular evening, someone felt inspired to play with getting angry.  Really angry.  In someone else’s face.  It started as a cheerful invitation for a friend to join her in the middle of the circle and fully embody how anger felt to them.  As they bellowed at each other, faces contorted with intensity, those of us watching felt tense with electricity, until we all collapsed in fits of cathartic laughter.  One by one, we each took our turns pairing off in the middle of the circle, letting anger fully inhabit us in the way that felt uniquely, powerfully ours.

I was just weeks away from a decision to leave a job that was increasingly toxic to my spirit and accept that I had been unable to change myself or my organization enough to keep us together, so this exercise was especially pertinent to me.  And terrifying.  Anger is not something that was ever modeled to me as a child in a life-affirming way.  It was stifled and festered at home, and used aggressively in the outside world.  I did not know if I had it in me.  And if I did, I did not want to fully feel it.  I was afraid of the power, of being out of control, of what it might unlock, but the courage of my friends inspired me and I took my turn.  What I felt move through me, up through the ground, wasn’t destructive or aggressive, but it was powerful beyond anything I remember feeling before.  My fingers became claws, my legs crouched slightly, and my arms stretched out around my sides as if I were a giant bird preparing to leap into flight.  My brow furrowed, eyes blazed, and center dropped into my womb.  And I growled, deep and menacing, electricity infusing and prickling off every inch of my being.  Afterwards a friend told me it was the most frightening display he had seen all evening, precisely because it had been so contained, and I laughed with surprise.  At no moment did the possibility of hurting or even attacking the person in front of me even enter my mind.  I knew I didn’t have to.  It was completely inconceivable that I would move from that square foot of ground on which I stood.  Anything could happen in the world around me, but that spot was fully and incontrovertibly mine.

Living in community is a daily challenge in terms of defining who I am amidst a throng of emotions, opinions, energies, and values.  Being someone who longs to create harmony in systems and relationships, I have historically often found myself fighting for the underdog, advocating for organizational change, comforting the wounded spirit, or sacrificing any number of my needs to keep the peace.  But this time, something feels different.  I hear the frustration of those working alongside me, I add their perspective to my own, and I take small actions based on what brings me joy and what I believe will be accepted by my community as I perceive it.  I sit and hold someone who is crying, share bits of my story and my love for their courage and wholeness, and then I release them back to themselves.  I finally admit to someone after months of silent longing how much I want to touch him, and then I do, when it feels right, with no sense of obligation.  I speak my truth when it burns in my belly, and then I release all expectation that anything change because of it.

How have I come to this place?  Is it because I feel so securely accepted by the community here?  Is it the consistency of my meditation?  Is it the endlessly nourishing nature all around me?  Is it my opening to the guru’s involvement in my life?  What keeps coming back to me is a session I had with our resident healer a few weeks ago.  I caught the flu that was going around during a particularly busy retreat, and she told me that we never get sick when we are in our joy.   “Are you in joy?” she asked, already knowing the answer.  I shook my head, and a single tear fell.  I told her of the ways I have been tormented for a lifetime by romantic attraction, especially to guys who will not be good long-term partners for me, and of my irrational unwillingness to let this habit go.  I asked her to help understand and free me from it.  She began muscle-testing me for early trauma, starting with past lives and moving forward in age a few months at a time.   Then she paused.

“It’s not bad,” she said, quietly.  “It’s in this life, when you were 3 ½.  Do you want to know?”  I nodded, both hesitant and longing for the truth.  “Someone, a man you didn’t know well, held onto you when you didn’t want to be held.”  I started gently hyperventilating and struggled to calm my breathing, a few tears falling as I called out to no one in particular why no one protected that little girl.  “You were small and you experienced his energy as over-powering.  You took it on and have been carrying it.  This badness you describe being ashamed of in yourself.  I don’t see it in you.  I think it may have been his.  Do you want to be rid of it?”

I lay back on the table, placing my hands as she instructed me, on my first and second chakras, then on my first and third, and then on each pair in turn until I felt the pulse in each of my hands align.  I could see that man, smell him, feel the prickle of his beard stubble, feel the struggle in me, feel the struggle in me so many times since in being pulled towards men who I wanted to escape from.  Gradually, my body calmed and the images softened.  When I finished and opened my eyes, she said, “While you were doing that, I was pulling his energy off of you.  It was very thin, like the translucent inner skin of an onion.  You can do this practice anytime you want to release something that has you out of balance.”

In the days that followed, I realized I was beginning to feel what devotees who practice Kriya Yoga describe as “being in your spine.”  Even though I am months if not years away from initiation, I have received a technique that is enabling me to manage the powerful flow of energy in my body, which I have unearthed through stillness, awareness, and stead-fast practice of our hong sau meditation and energization exercises.  I have increasingly begun to feel an electric flow of light moving up my entire body, flooding me with joy and energy that sometimes becomes powerful enough to eradicate anything I am thinking or feeling that constricts me.   I have found myself standing taller, being less influenced by the atmosphere around me, feeling less anxious about what might come next, and sensing my vital energy moving freely through my body in a grounding and invigorating way.

Instead of seeing the Ananda teachings and the preferences of the devotees around me as strict mandates, I began to feel bolder about living more fully in the experiment of my own life.  I allowed the impulses I had been holding back to flow through me so that they could be freed from a realm of oppressive theory into my own lived knowledge of how my choices affect my energy, awareness, and sense of well-being.  Some of those experiments were brilliantly freeing, and some of them were painful dead ends, but all of them deepened my courage and faith in my own intuition, my guru’s guidance, and this community’s ability to support my authentic development.

Most importantly, I am increasingly moving through the world in the way I felt in that Authentic circle.  This is my space.  This is my spine.  These are my needs.  We live in a crazy world, and this community is no exception.  Unfairness happens.  People can be mean and manipulative.  They don’t listen.  They disagree.  They demand things from the world and each other that they will never receive.  I see it all.  Some of them I simply feel a need to sit next to, to touch, to cry with, to comfort.  Some of them, I give a wide berth.  I don’t care why anymore.  I just do it.  And in so doing, I feel the joy of life moving through me and I am fulfilled in performing my life’s purpose in this time and place.  Whether or not they notice or change or appreciate me.

Some of what I am doing seems to contradict the teachings here and the preferences of this community.  I do not know if it is what the guru I have been writing to would recommend for me.  But I feel the light expansiveness, energy, groundedness, and spirit of giving that these teachings say is a sign of god’s power moving in us.  People increasingly recognize it in me.  And that, to me, is permission enough to continue.  It is only through continuing my own sincere process of experimentation, and boldly accepting all consequences that come to me, that I will come closer to embodying the love, freedom, and inner strength that I have always longed for.

Nancy

“Whatever comes of itself, let it come, but I am ever content in my inner heart.” – Ananda affirmation