There are moments when something softens or cracks us open enough that a wisdom deeper than anything we could produce on our own comes through.
It was one of those times in a meditation during my training in Integrative Energy Medicine when I heard the words: “Out of Nothing, you could have been Anything.. and you are you.”
I would be lying if I said I’m not still unpacking the full depth and meaning of these words. But I remember this sense of the vast space of creative potential… the cosmos. And then this sense of me: a bundle of contradictory perfections… of hopes, joys, and fears… of heart break and of the deepest and most sacred love. And I felt the completion of these seeming contradictions within each other.
I would be lying if I said that like that, out of the blue, wisdom entered and my whole life shifted and everything settled into perfection…. and yet, I wouldn’t.
Because in that moment, while my life didn’t shift, my perspective did. It widened out and put my whole life and all that I am into a context so expansive that self-acceptance, self-love, and compassion were inevitable. My definition of perfect cracked open like a seed and blossomed into possibility and not because I was different, but because I saw differently.
Several years later, I am still practicing this new way of seeing, both on my yoga mat and through energy work. As someone who has believed for many years (as all of us do in some way) that I was only worthy through the things I did and achieved, that I had to constantly strive to be better or do better because there was something fundamentally wrong or broken about me… the idea that I could’ve been ANYTHING and came into this world AS ME and that that act itself is THE ONLY service I actually need to offer to life in order to fulfill my destiny… is radical and, at times, extremely difficult to continue to trust. And so I practice, and I learn, and I question, and I live, and I surrender, and I grow.
Sacred, pure Love is so different from how we humans love when we learn to love as an equation, as a give and take. We come into this world as and knowing only the sacred and pure Love. But this world does not (yet) operate on that frequency. And so we learn that there are people who fear our purity, who do not yet own their own. In order to fit in and survive, we send parts of ourselves to live outside us, to be dimmed down, we come to inhabit these human parts of our experience willingly, imperfectly, and in fragments.
And so our journey is not one of fixing, or becoming anything new… it is actually one of reclaiming all those pieces of ourselves. Instead of remaining a colander, we gently invite our fragments home to plug the holes and we seal the cracks with a deeper love for ourselves, and we become a container… something much more capable of holding the innocent Spirit that is each one of us. In so doing, we take sacred, pure Love to new depths with us because now it has been tested, and its weak spots have fractured, and when it gets built again… it will be even stronger for knowing its own weakness. Turns out, Life is just a stress test for Love… so that it continues to evolve, stronger and purer with each test.
What a precious gift then YOU are to the Divine. It is only through your struggles and challenges and joys and love that it comes to know itself. Nothing cannot know itself. You, however - as Something - can be its mirror. And so our ego’s mission impossible, should it soften enough to allow our heart to accept it, is nothing more or less than to live courageously, fully, freely, expressively, creatively, and in full embrace of all the colors and textures of our unique and collective humanity… and to offer all that beauty and messiness as a prayer to a Love so deep, it can feel as overwhelming and frightening as an ocean.
What a wild, sacred journey we are on.
**This post was written as a guest blog found at: http://thepoweryogatribe.com/wild-sacred-journey-kate-powell/ **