One Prayer at a time...
Long ago I stood at the stairs of this temple... as I look back on that memory I am faced with a ghost, a teacher from my past.
I was so self-absorbed when I met her I only saw a hungry woman who kept asking for food. She was my teacher and I missed it then...in my vain search to create the picture-perfect image of myself in a pretty yoga pose inside a temple.
In retrospect, I can see she is me....
She is the part of me that is hungry, and that suffers. At the time I wanted to push away the pain she reminded me of, the suffering she represented. Now I must speak for her. I must give her now what I could not then...
I must stare her in the eyes and bear witness to her soul..
If we want to change something we have to learn how to be with it. By avoiding certain tendencies in our soul we only charge them, furthering their hold on our consciousness.
In the quest to appear spiritual, how many times have you edited out the ugly truth?
I think it's time for us to face ourselves, all of ourselves. We can't do this without facing the suffering of our shared humanity.
What do you think happens to all those pieces of you that you have edited out?
They live in the shadows of our subconsciousness breading blind spots and insecurities.
We all suffer. Avoiding this, is leading to greater and greater suffering and ultimately our own possible destruction.
You don't need more, all this wanting is leading us down a dangerous road. If you want to be spiritual choose something that needs your attention and give your self to it.
There is suffering in this world there are many people around the globe in any given moment living in unspeakable conditions. When we create a spiritual movement where we say you are responsible for your happiness and your suffering we are casting out so many humans living in insane circumstances every day. There is a certain point of shared responsibility we must come to in order to change the trajectory of our future and actualize the shift in the collective consciousness.
That which we fear to acknowledge secretly grows powerful. All the positive thinking in the world can not cure it alone, it is only with an honest heart that we can begin to truly heal.
If we push away our suffering the duality creates fractures inside us. We seek to become whole but we can not do this as long as we deem certain aspects of ourselves as good and acceptable and others as negative and unacceptable. In this way, we learn only how to hopefully avoid what hurts and seek what pleases us, but we already knew how to do that, that's what we have been doing all along. This is what I am learning is Samsara and creates Karma, attracting the very thing we try to push away because it is our teacher.
Many of us want to change the world but we still view it as this thing we do out there. It's an inside job. There are many steps in this process and yes one of the first steps is to understand the nature of probability and the power of our thoughts, but it doesn't end there. Positive thinking alone cannot negate suffering, you can learn to use certain words and avoid using others but this is only acrobatics of the mind, more masks...
The only way out is through.... this is how concepts of the mind take root in the emotional body and eventually with grace transcend through to the spirit and into the collective.
Our culture is caught in a dangerous place as we are learning to edit our reality according to that which we want to see and that which we want to avoid. Due to our privilege, we can get away with this for some time... but for how long will this work?
Written by: Alicia