I will tell a story about awakening in myself and, I think, others who experienced this with me. It is a teaching for me to learn from and ponder over. This experience is not something I did but which came through me–through the openess and willingness I had to let go of all expectation and planning. It’s perhaps one example in just pure being–without contrivance or agenda–and in trust, personal honesty or nakedness. The context is a training of 25 people who came to the Dumas Bay Retreat Center for a weekend training to become facilitators and change agents for the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposium developed by the Pachamama Alliance. I will relate this in the first person to remove, as best I can, any distance between myself and what went on, so that those who read this can “feel” into the actual narrative more clearly.
The Story
I arrive at Dumas Bay Friday evening glad I have only a few pieces to present this weekend with three other facilitators taking more of the role in the training. This gives me an opportunity to observe, take in the collective energy and deepen my own experience of this work with Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposium to which I have dedicated much of my time in the last two years. As is my practice I spend a lo of time in self contemplation….not thinking but more focusing on the spirit energy and the chi sensations in my body, especially around my solar plexus and abdomen.
Through Friday evening I maintain this focus on body sensations and my deeper heart, and by Saturday I am noticing that I feel like I am dropping further, deeper into myself. My voice is beginning to sound deeper to me, coming more from my belly and not just my head or throat. The group is having a good time and I love the singing, movement work and appreciate what the other presenter/leaders are doing and saying.I notice I feel good about them and trust their intention and wisdom. It feels safe and heartful.
Sunday comes around, and I realize I will need to speak to the group about relational presence along the lines explained by Lee Glickstein. Lee’s work certainly has a kernel of truth in it, but there is much more wanting to be experienced. I had been musing during parts of the night on what more wanted to be said and experienced.
Before I am about to speak, I’m hearing the group talk–people are sharing. My consciousness is now deep inside me–perhaps around my heart/belly mind, so their words seem far away, something swimming on the surface of consciousness and not partaking of the deep feeding of soul possible when one gets to greater depths. So I sense a call to take us deeper into the ocean of being by sharing what is going on with me in this present moment. I’ll offer this paraphrase.
” I wonder what we are really doing with the symposium–what the root message and experience is that wants to come through. World healing comes through inner healing–the better world we wall want comes from inside and then flows outward as a coming together of all the disconnections our modern life has created. Like you and me, the people who come to the symposium are drawn at the deepest part of their being because there is a driving thirst for truth, reality, connection, love. They, like us, may not know this conciously, because we go about with this veneer of OK-ness. After all, we’re priveleged, and have so much compared to others who have little. You see, it is a perception of our essential brokeness and suffering that we are awakening to which has brought us to this place, and we can’t really give ourselves, the people who come to symposiums or Pachamama herself what is due unless we are radically honest and surrendered to all the truth regarding ourselves, our times and our deep sense of loss.
I was very, very moved by John Robbins when he says “…there’s a great loneliness of spirit today,” or when Paul Hawken says in that same clip “…people will admit in their most poignant moments that it’s really hard right now.” What we and the people who come to symposiums are wanting, what life itself is wanting is for us to show up in our deep and honest presence to ourselves and our own truth. What is going on with you in this very moment–inside of you? What’s happening in me? Well, you can see I’m in tears right now, and I see many of you holding deep emotion as well. Our sadness, liberated from the constraints of social agreement, looking good, self-protection, just like our spacious joy wants to be free, felt and moved through–so that life, like the Spring, can arise again in our dead souls.
Letting go and giving ourselves over to the truth inside us in the moment–giving of ourselves this way to the participants who come–I think this is the core of our lives right now, and the place from which the better world arises. This is where we start to be real, make deeper connections and from which the grace to realize the things we need to do emanates from.
So when we move through our daily lives, are with our kids, friends, co-workers and also when we get up in front of others doing a symposium, we bring bring this deep transparency, this child-like openness with us always. This is an undefended, undefined, unrehearsed space of possibility, where what want wants to happen is not under your control and does not belong to you or me. If you look at your arm, leg, torso, face and say to yourself “This arm, this leg, this body does not belong to me, but to life itself.” Or you might substitute for “life” words like Christ, Buddha, the universe, the great Spirit–then you are moving closer to the realization that your life, our lives are not our own, but belong to, are part of and serve the whole. And being free of “me”, “Mine,” “I,” in this way is such a liberating and new feeling, like shucking off a pair of ill-fitting shoes or pants, and then afterwards wondering why it took so long to let go of what never really did fit in the first place. Only that we were too ignorant to know that until we were free, looked back and laughed at our prior folly.
Filed under: Personal Sharing, The Great Awakening, Waking Up Moments | 1 Comment »