Being with our lives just as they are offers its own kind of healing
Well, there is no sugar coating on that title, is there? Sometimes life sucks! I personally think it feels great to say that when it’s true.
It’s so much better to meet ourselves right where we are rather than try and change it.
It takes less energy to be honest with the truth of our experience no matter what the experience is. Even though it may feel more intense, it offers the way to real resolution.
It seems as though the spiritual path has become its own form of idolatry, worship, and separation. Even in this movement there is a perceived right and wrong way to become enlightened beings.
The pseudo, spiritual dogma is of no value to the mother and father who lose a child. They can’t meditate or visualize that kind of grief away. There is no law of attraction that is going to help them. The only value is for them to have the courage to keep breathing and be with the reality of what is.
What other choice do they have? They are up against a grief that they can’t get away from. It is a level of loss that is almost unspeakable.
Those kinds of experiences are major game-changers. Our lives are never the same. If we can walk through the ruble and sheer destruction of our lives with humbleness, we will rise. But it won’t be because we did it “the spiritual way or the right way”. We will rise because we were honest and we placed our trust in the unknown.
Rosa Parks is an incredible teacher. She is quoted saying, “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Here is a woman, because of her skin color, who was not able to share in the same civil rights as everyone else. We all know the story. She, as all African Americans, was constantly ordered to the back of a public city bus … because of her skin color.
She could not meditate that away, visualize her skin color to be different, or affirm that she was other than who she was. There wasn’t a religion, spiritual path, or some guru teacher sitting up in the mountains that could help change her skin color or her plight. She was completely up against herself and it sucked for her.
But everything changed on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama on a city bus going home from a long day at work when Miss Rosa Parks said, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” And she didn’t.
To this day, the United States Congress calls her “the first lady of civil rights and the mother of the freedom movement.”
Now, let’s really get our hearts and minds wrapped around this.
The moment she spoke up was filled with both a lifetime of segregation and the longing to be set free. It was a moment when she claimed her truth, her place, and her right. And there was no guarantee that a fateful day on a city bus was going to end well. In fact, she was arrested and later posted bond.
Her being tired of giving in birthed in her a courage so extraordinary that she wasn’t afraid to look inside and go past a lifetime of injustice, shame, and humiliation.
Truth really does set us free.
And thank goodness that it does even on our worst days. It doesn’t matter if we have suffered the loss of someone we love so much, our beloved pet(s), a marriage, our health, our rights, an opportunity we so desperately wanted, within all of those losses lie the seeds of unprecedented change.
They have the ability to blow the lid off of our intuition, allowing us to have a much more expanded and enlightened experience.
We don’t have to be known worldwide to make a difference. Having a “worldwide” experience within ourselves can yield magnificent shifts in our mind sets and consciousness. From that place, the difference is made.
It seems to me the greater the trial or deeper the loss, to that extent also contains equal potential for new life, hope and transformation. Rosa Parks is just one example that points to that truth.
If you and I are courageous enough to allow our deepest pain to be transformed by honesty and willingness to trust the new path that emerges, I feel certain that we’ll have an experience much like Rosa Parks.
It won’t look like hers. It will look like ours, in whatever unique way that will be. But it won’t really matter what it looks like. What will matter is how we feel when we allow “life sucks” to yield to the process of transcendence within us.