In the seeming void of aloneness is where we start our journey of permission based living. It seems an odd place to start, one most folks feel is sad, depressing, a sign of failure as a human being, or a demonstration of utter depravity. Yet alone is how we come into the world we know in this incarnation and alone is how we go out – seemingly.
What if you allowed yourself a moment or a few moments in that alone state? A place in mind where you recognized you are by yourself. Despite whatever characteristics of a hurly-burly life you have created, at the center point of it all, is you – the actor, director, special effects, camera and make up (thank God!).
Give yourself permission, in mind and heart, to feel alone. Not the meditative variety of alone that adherents to this discipline categorize as a state of mindfulness. The type of alone I mean is – without mom and dad, husband, partner, children, friends, pets, plants, furniture, job, colleagues – all those wonderful, beautiful aspects of life that make it worthwhile. Just for a moment or two we’re putting those to the side to feel what it feels like to be you.
Most will feel a strong sense of pure panic.
This is the ego or that part of us with the mission of projecting and protecting who we are in the world, who we show up as in our part of life’s garden. This exercise can completely freak that aspect of you out. So be ready for it if it happens.
The next thing you may sense after you let the wave of panic wash over you and out, is a great sense of connectedness. If you don’t feel this you can imagine that panic as waves in the ocean – one moves into the shoreline of your soul, and without effort on your part, moves gently back into the great ocean of life, indistinguishable now from the whole. Keep practicing that until you can feel the sense of peace of the whole of life; your connection to it and your right to be, regardless of whatever is going on in the facts of your life.
The aim is to give yourself permission to feel your connectedness to all of life. To feel in a deep and important part of yourself your “rightness” in life’s scheme of things. To know you are connected to all that is, you are a part of it, not separate as that alone feeling can lead you to believe. In the core of yourself, the “battery” if you will, you are forever and always connected to a stream of life energy that carries you through the births and deaths of experience, both little and monumental. There is no place you can go where this connectedness does not support and carry you. No matter what the circumstances of your life might be, however joyful or traumatic, deep within you, past the aloneness of your egoic structure, is the truest aspect of you – your connection to life and your inarguable place in it.
Your connection to life and your inarguable place in it – this is a simple yet profound truth about each and every one of us.
Beyond whatever programming you received as a little one starting out in this experience, this truth is deeper than that programming.
Deeper than any experience or mistake or societal view of you, is your inherent connection to the very fabric of eternity.
Brighter than any accolade, accomplishment or trophy (all of which are great!) is the star of your being – your connection to, and the allowing of, the energy of life to move through you, as you, being you.
This place beyond anything you are experiencing is your haven. It is your place of refuge. It is not a place of religious dogma or cultural expectations. It is pure. It is light. It is a calm pool of peace into which you can dive to feel it’s refreshing waters and experience again and again its balm, one some call a balm of Gilead.
Allow yourself to imagine first, before you can unearth the direct experience, your connectedness to the source of all good, the source of all life. You will have to practice, for like anything unknown, you need to carve out the internal space to have this experience. Remember you are not creating anything. You are unearthing, plowing down into and through other “stuff” to allow that which is at the core of you already to reveal itself. You might imagine the sense of awe you get in the witness of something truly beautiful, something containing a mystical beauty beyond our imagination of its source or reason for being. Dwell on that feeling. That which you focus on will expand, in your awareness and understanding.
Out of this practice of being witness to your connectedness and the feeling tone of that life force will come everything worthwhile and graced for you.
Affirmation
I go within. To the sacred space of my own inner garden. I wield no judgment. I simply allow myself to observe and connect.