Freedom and fullness involves being willing and able to be with and include all our feelings without judgment.
When we can be open and present with feelings of emptiness and aloneness, they can even then open us to the vastness that we are; as wide as the sky.
Freedom to feel, not freedom from feelings.
When we have a spiritual practice that we return to day after day, year after year, we become strong in our discipline. This in its own time, becomes a connection of freedom.
It’s paradoxical how in following a structure, with having less choices, we can find it easier.
Often part of this is that with structure we gain the opportunity to meet, see and identify the person in us that resists so much, and we can realise we are more than that small person.
The immensity that we are is so much more powerful than any version of conflict that might be happening within us at any time.
The most powerful form of teaching is through embodied, consistent role modelling, demonstrating, practicing and being as a living example.
Who needs belief when it’s what you are 🤍
Healing is real when it intersects with our nervous system.
We need our mind to help us reflect, consider and identify our issues. We need an intellectual framework through which we can find our way. However..
We can have heaps of information around something, we can talk, intellectualise and analyse things as much as we like, but until we become aware of how it is arising in our body and emotions as we are present with it, until we are able to connect in with our breathing as we use our mind, until then we are not connected with whole understanding; with an embodied level of knowing. We are living from the neck up.
Sometimes there are just no answers and all we can do is keep walking and learn to be as present and loving as we can with our experience.
To be free and truly available to joy, we have to look deeply at ourselves, who we think we are, our old conditioned patterns and our ways of being in relationship.
At a certain point, without doing this, nothing truly new can come in otherwise.. Essentially just the same old stuff but with a different face.
To heal, spiritual practice is not enough on its own.
We need to look at our psychological self, traumas and patterns.
We need to learn to stay open and available to and with our humanity; our needs, our past traumas, our emotions, our body’s felt experience, our pain, our yearnings our fears and our joy.
If we do not endeavour to meet ourselves and others on all these levels, then whatever we are trying to transcend through meditation or by being in the ‘flow state’, will keep coming up and we will unknowingly remain trapped in an unconscious loop of resistance and spiritual bypassing.
And we will keep hurting those we love.
“The cure for the pain is in the pain.”
Rumi.
It is not possible to permanently transcend a primal human need.
“No man is an island.”
John Donne.
It is not wisdom to be ‘independent’ past the point of being kind to yourself or being able to let kindness in.
We are interconnected beings.
We need each other, whether we like it or not.
How can we help the healing?
Weeks, months and even years later.. an apology can show that it is possible for others to take responsibility for their part in things.
Saying I’m sorry has the healing power to help someone confirm they do matter and are worthy of acknowledgment.
Closely identify and cast away the story that forms lies and reveal the beauty of truth that was and is there all along… YOU.
Your heart.
Your being.
Your effortlessly and innately worthy of love essential presence.
RATNA DYER 