CLEARING UP MY STUFF

My commitment, at this time of my life,

Is to have done with dying

Before I die,

So that I can live

Before I die.

But sometimes it feels like I'm nowhere near there.

Each and every one of us has hyper-soft spots --
Areas of immaturity
Where we protectively recoil, whether consciously or not,
From some threatening aspect of living.
We hive off into our caves to avoid
The very experiences we've been presented with
For our growth.

The never-ending challenge
Of identifying, facing and engaging with these periods of contraction
Is an essential part
Of exploring higher levels of awareness.
Transformation is an open-air activity;
It will never happen in hiding.

Don't hear "should" in what I'm saying.
If you insist, you can spend the rest of your life
With one foot on the Escape Hatch.
There's no demand from existence (that I'm aware of)
That we have to be cured from anything,
Or that our stuff has to be cleaned up once and for all time --
(I'm beginning to wonder if that's actually at all possible.)
But with one foot firmly planted in the grave,
We aren't going to get far.
If we're going to venture to higher levels of awakening
We have to get out of the womb,
And be re-born,
As uncomfortable as that might be.
We absolutely have to acknowledge and own ALL that we already are,
Incorporate everything new that shows up in our face,
And allow all of it to be -- yes --
"In me, as it is on earth, so it is in heaven.".
This is one face of what Healing is --
Committing matrimony between "Not-Me" and "Me".

To attempt to assist others with their healing
Without incorporating one's own healing (whole-ing) as an overarching priority in the pocess
Is foolhardy, doomed to failure and, frankly,
The height of arrogant conceit.
(Physician, heal thyself.)

I've found it comforting to know
That when stuff comes up for each of us
It is because sufficient love and energy has been generated
To allow this stuff to come forward.
If it's in your face, it is time.
And I'm often somewhat awed at how life waits with the lessons
Until you have the resources (inner and outer) to handle them.
I've found that we can trust that absolutely.
When the student is ready,
The circumstances and the teachers appear.

No Strain

When "stuff" is activated, and does not resolve easily,
Slow down.
Don't push it --
(Shit at your own speed, or you'll get haemorrhoids).
Whenever you detect a dynamic of recoil,
Don't try to push deeper until that resistance is resolved.
Get help if you need it.

I'm going through multiple physical and emotional challenges at the moment
Following major surgery,
A new, fairly heavy medication to assist my heart,
And a major lifestyle change.
I'm now under considerable constraint from my body /mind
To curb my natural and habitual impatience with myself
And what I see to be a slow rate of "progress",
And be much kinder to myself than hitherto.
My system has now become so sensitive
That I can feel every contraction and resistance focusing me narrowly on the immediate crisis.
I stress out very quickly
And temporarily lose some peripheral vision of the wider reality
And my sense of that detached, unconditional Witness Point.
I lose sight of that and get embroiled in my stuff.

I need time to mature further,
And the internal forbearance to allow however long that takes
To be irrelevant.

I also need patience with well-meaning acquaintances
Who see only the downside discomforts of what I'm going through.
Who ignore my pleas that "I'm OK -- really! I want to do this!"
And try to interfere
And "fix" me.
(These are, of course, people who won't face their own stuff.)

Our "stuff", when engaged, becomes life-changing.
It becomes our "Get-Out-of-Gaol" card.
Nothing in my life now is remotely the same as it was 3 months ago.
Thank God!!
And I'm spinning out --
Literally and figuratively.
And, as uncomfortable and even distressing as it may feel at times,
I'm deeply happy about that!!
This place, this edge of chaos
Is where transformation happens.
This nibbling and gnawing away at all the old realities
Is transformation -- happening.
Anything less is just (small) change.

Let me challenge you --
If you are not entering and engaging openly
With a sense of chaos and un-doing,
You're just changing skins.
And if you find yourself wanting to save someone
Who is willingly having an experience you wouldn't be seen dead in --
Mind your own business.

So this is healing,
But healing doesn't feel like I thought it would:
I feel, at the same time, so ill and so alive!!
This heightened presence in this here/now
And the fact that I have, at times, to consciously create my next moment
(Otherwise it isn't going to happen)
Is the essential experience of resolving "stuff".
In the privacy of my bunker I've lately been doing a fair amount of expressing, catharting, denying and repressing,
All of which effectively quarantine and preserve (i.e. avoid transmuting) these unwanted feelings that I've been avoiding all my life.
Every bout of resistance costs me a simoultaneous loss of connection with Being-ness.

But underneath these lapses, I remain committed to go through whatever comes up,
At whatever level it comes up.
I treat the lapses as part of the lesson.
My Spirituality is the only constant that I have, or need, to hang on to
Because that goes with me, hand-in-hand, wherever I go in consciousness.
But I've now discovered that the old spiritual practices and disciplines
Now get in the way of spirit-being.
"Doing" spirituality has in the past been a holy haven,
A look-good way of shielding myself
From genuine engagement with fully living the human life
And shielding me from the rawness of transformation.

So -- spirituality is a state of awareness-being, not of doing.
Spirituality it is not a cure-all for anything,
It is what we are, whether ill or well, connected or separated, happy or pissed off.
Outside of the death of the body/mind,
There is no cure for being human;
Nor any need for it.
There's nothing to be fixed -- just lived as totally as we can.

OK.
Let's see where this leads...............