TO COME HOME TO YOURSELF
May all that is unforgiven in you,
Be released.
May your fears yield
Their deepest tranquilities.
May all that is unlived in you,
Blossom into a future,
Graced with love.
John O’Donohue
BENEDICTUS (Europe) / TO BLESS THE SPACE BETWEEN US (US)
Ballyvaughan / Co. Clare, Ireland – 2017
Falling apart, holding it all together. Then falling apart, then holding it all together again. Cycles of integration and disintegration. Chaos and ground. Stillness and activity. Sanity and confusion. Hopelessness and hope. As flows the natural world, the unfolding of the heart is alive and of the unknown.
In ways the mind may never resolve, guidance is pouring through you, washing away that which is less than whole, preparing you for what is next. But what is next is always of the nameless and will never be approached ahead of time by means of the conceptual. Stay close in the liminal, and attune to the creativity as it emerges out of the here and now.
While the narrative that you are “falling apart” is rich and multi-layered, look carefully and see if you were ever “together” to begin with. You are the vast space in which “together” and “apart” dance in union, and you will never be limited to either of these narratives. Rest for a moment and honor the unprecedented nature of what is moving within you.
If you remain too identified with “falling apart,” you cut into the natural aliveness that is the essence of pure, immediate experience. You lose contact with the luminous within, and become misattuned to the wisdom of your unfolding experience, exactly as it is. You disconnect with the radiance of embodied presence, with the intelligence of the earth, and with the high-voltage realization that nothing has ever been wrong with you. You forget that the darkness, when provided sanctuary, is brighter than a thousand suns.
But if you remain too identified with “holding it all together,” you disconnect from your natural vulnerability and the spontaneous mystery as it appears, turning from the surging reality that your heart could break at any moment. It is true that raw, tender sadness or deflation could approach at any time, requesting safe passage inside you. But it is through this broken aliveness that the poetry of your life will flow.
Right in the middle of “falling apart” and “holding it together” is the secret essence. Stay there. It is here where the light and the dark are in union, where integration and disintegration emerge as one in love, and where lunar and solar are weaving the substance of the sacred world.
— Matt Licata
Today’s questions to my self: what is wanting to be expressed through me? what gift is trying to emerge through me? What power is wanting to be conscious of it self as me?
She danced on the loamy earth, wild beneath her feet. She felt the rhythm rise through her legs from the peat. Like ocean waves and sunsets she created a new space….full of beauty, truth and honor of her own embodied grace.
— Clare Bright Light
If you choose freedom, life will become magical. The life you’ll step into is one in which the Self is in hidden agreement with your humanness. The Self begins to harmonize with your life, and it may proceed in a way that you could never have predicted. The magical part is that the more you let go, the better it feels. The more you step into insecurity, the more you notice how secure and safe it is. Where you just stepped out of was unsafe. Everyone is so miserable because they seek security in things that are limited and always moving and changing unpredictably.
~ Adyashanti
I am the moon, a moving lake of nectar in the sky. With moonbeams pouring down in limitless streams, I nourish all vegetation. In this way, crops of all kinds are produced that give food to every living creature. I am the moon, a moving lake of nectar in the sky.
— Jnaneshwar Maharaj, commenting on a verse of the Bhagavad Gita
NOTHING IS LOST
All through your life, the most precious experiences seem to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost. This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us. If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret.
John O’Donohue
Excerpt from BEAUTY
Co. Clare / Ireland – 2007