I feel totally blissed out these days. Bliss is a hard thing to write about. When I really start experiencing these essential states of being, it becomes hard to put words on it. How do you explain unconditional love? Or ecstatic union with God? Words just make it sound hokey and don’t really live up to my inner experience. Could it be that I am actually speechless? Wow. That is a record!
I could just resort to a “Patrick-ism” (Spongebob!) and drool and say “Duuuhhhh.” Which pretty much sums it up for me but doesn’t make for an interesting blog. So I will do my best to wrap some words around the big, happy floaty, I-love-you-man mellow I have going on right now.
Where did I achieve this state of ecstasy? Did I score it from the local candyman? Absolutely not. I got a natural high since we just finished teaching our last weekend in the Energy Medicine Institute.
I have to say I am very proud of myself, my partner, Rhys Thomas and our students. We just graduated our first class! It’s somewhat amazing to me that I made it though those three years! The school is a deeply transformative process that really works on peeling back all the layers of you that aren’t YOU.
Sometimes this process is wonderful and sometimes it’s a little itchy and uncomfortable. Sounds like hemorrhoids. Sometimes the school feels like hemorrhoids! Something is up your butt and you are not quite sure what it is, but it has all your attention! But, man, the results are worth all the effort, hemorrhoids and all!
And that is where the bliss comes in. Bliss is all about me being totally me in every moment. Somehow I managed to get out of my own way long enough to reconnect with the deepest part of me. It’s a bit of a corker on how we get there, but let’s just say that after a whole year of clearing away all the bits of you that aren’t actually you, you feel pretty good!
In the final weekend of the school, we open up the 6th and 7th chakras (the brow and crown chakras) and we work with a few pesky little problems like ILLUSION and ATTACHMENT.
The Buddha always preached that attachment was the cause of all suffering. I truly believe this. I know that when I feel pain in my life it is because I am not accepting WHAT IS.
This happens a lot. My kids are my greatest teachers. (Hey with four of them I’ll be on my way to Buddha by the time they all make it out of teenhood.) I have a lot of attachments and expectations around my kids. My relationships in general teach me that when I can’t accept WHAT IS, then I suffer greatly. And when I do accept WHAT IS, I feel at peace, deep inside me. This kind of peace is really unshakable since it doesn’t depend on anyone else meeting my needs or doing what I want them to do. Cuz that always works so well, doesn’t it?
The small part of me (inner child, ego, personality, lower self, whatever you want to call it) will have a hissy fit because she wants what she wants and she wants it right now. This part of me never feels like I am ENOUGH. I always want more. More love, more money, more time. Inside me, there is a huge black hole that could suck in the universe in trying to fill my not-enoughness. When I am in this part of me, everything hurts. I feel pain in my body, I am anxious. I don’t feel safe in the world. I feel BAD. I lose myself, I can’t feel myself and I don’t know who I am.
From this place all I want is for someone else to fill me up and I will do anything, use all the tricks in my quite formidable repertoire to get someone to fill me. Needless to say, this never works! No one can fill the hungry ghost in me!
No wonder that hurts! Losing yourself is the greatest loss you will ever feel. Every time we create an identity for ourselves we do this. When we think we are something that is outside of us, we get lost! For some people it’s family, pursuit of money or a career. Many people really do this dance with their jobs, careers and ability to make money. I have seen many an identity crash and burn this year due to job loss and career shift. (Shall we thank the recession for helping smash our false identities?)
Relationships are what does it for me. Give me a juicy one (and mine are all juicy) and boom, boom pow! Throw me a lifeline, cuz I am lost in you. Of course it’s so delicious to get lost in a relationship, until the hangover hits you, right?
We lose ourselves when we begin to IDENTIFY with things out side of us. I am a mom. A wife. I am a psychic. I am a good mom, wife and psychic. I am someone who is in relationship to YOU. (And therefore have an immediate stake in your behavior, that all of the sudden I had better control….) Once I get attached to one of those things, I am lost.
And then sometimes the clouds part and suddenly I find myself again. I FEEL myself. This happened to me in a very big way in last week’s pre-workshop melt down.
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know by now that I schedule my meltdowns into my calendar because they are so predictable. I have my pre-workshop melt down. Then there is the Saturday during lunch mid-workshop mini-melt down, and my Monday morning post-workshop meltdown. My therapist, husband, biz partner and friends also schedule my meltdowns into their calendars. It’s just easier that way.
I was feeling totally lost in not-good-enough world, unworthy, unloved all the “uns-“ there are in the book in the worst, raw, nerve no skin on feeling I think I have ever had. Then all of the sudden it stopped. I felt enough. It was like waking up from a bad dream. I was teaching a Reiki class actually, and I could feel myself again. I was like “Hey, wait a minute! I don’t love myself? That is crazy! I am totally lovable!”
And I knew I was. I could FEEL love everywhere! My family loves me. I love me. My students love me. The Reiki I was teaching loved me (that made perfect sense since Reiki IS unconditional love…) And the walls, the floor, the stars and the moon love me. In fact, the whole world is MADE OUT OF LOVE and it all loves me! And I love it too!
Bliss.
How could I have forgotten this???
I held onto for a few days and then it slipped away. So easily. I had a thought. Or a feeling maybe. Nothing actually changed in the real world, but I had a thought. “Maybe this person doesn’t really love me. Maybe I really am not good enough….” And BAM the darkness closed in on me and I lost myself. Again.
It’s the weirdest feeling. Horrible, actually. It feels like a big lead blanket that comes down over your energy field and stifles you. I could barely breath. I flipped out. (See why the meltdown schedule?) And then I did everything I could think of, everything that we teach in the school to feel myself again and to know it my heart that everything is made of love and I am good enough. I meditated, watered the garden, exercised, journaled, breathed, toned, om-ed, chanted, did energy work, yoga, and something switched and BOOM, BOOM POW, there I was again.
I went through a day or two where I waged this war. It felt like about every five minutes I would fall off the wagon and lose myself and have to work my butt off to get that feeling back. I got to the point where I couldn’t stand the feeling of not feeling myself and not feeling enough and forgetting that everything is made out of love. It was the worst agony I have every felt.
And then in the middle of teaching this weekend, the Love came in and it hasn’t left yet. I am holding it for longer and longer periods of time. I am seeing my whole bag of tricks about why I think I am not enough and all the thoughts, fears and beliefs that I am attached to, all the illusions I believe that keep me away from that love. I see it, but I am not buying it any more.
We do this great meditation on Sunday morning on the last weekend of class. It’s called the Temple of Light and it’s one of my favorite things to do maybe ever. Rhys and I set the space and do our Priest and Priestess thing and call in some really high energy into the room. It takes quite a while to set the whole thing up. Then the students come in and we do a silent meditation.
The Love came in so strongly that time that I had tears running down my face. I felt my heart more open then it’s ever been, I felt ecstasy through love, connected to everything in the room and at one with everything. It was like every cell of my body was filled with light and that light was radiating out from each cell, loving everyone and everything.
The Love told me that I am the heart of the school and my job is to love everyone, starting with me. The Love talked to me for a long time, reminding me what my mission is here, telling me about my contracts with the key players in my life. The Love said my job was to hold that love as much as I can for as long as I can and when I fall out of Love, to find it again as soon as possible. This is my life’s work.
I could feel the hearts of everyone in the room and how we are all connected to each other through our hearts and something really shifted in me. And it hasn’t shifted back. Still feeling the love, still accepting WHAT IS, still feeling enough.
Bliss!
What does this feel like you ask? It feels like deep contentment, like being open hearted, I feel very peaceful and calm. And I really have a hard time saying anything. I feel like I could go without speaking for quite some time. I am also really enjoying my own company. It’s pretty amusing to notice how much my conversations with my friends all focus on talking about what is wrong with my life. When I am feeling this way, nothing feels wrong so I kinda have nothing to say!
I have been spending a lot of time on my mountain bike in the woods. I ride hard and fast for a long time and I love listening to my music while I am riding. Something about the hard exercise is helping me ground this new current of energy through me. I love every minute of my time on the bike and can’t wait to get out there again. After I ride for a while, I sit by the lake and meditate. I meditate open eyed and just look at stuff. I look at the clouds, the fish in the water and the sky. Today there were no thoughts at all in my head. None. I think I sat there for 45 minutes actually thinking nothing.
This is amazing considering how neurotic my thinking usually is. My mind has been like a lake, flat and calm. And the Love was there with me, in me, in everything.
Bliss!
I still feel challenged by my life. And I have no idea how long this state will last. I don’t even mind knowing it that will leave me since I know that my work is to fall off the wagon and then get back on over and over again. I know there will always been some new bump in the road, some edge in me that I haven’t worked yet, some wonderful new teacher designed by God specifically to push all my buttons (hmmm, my kids?). But that is all ok. Even though I am still a work in progress and always will be, that is enough. I am enough.
Everything is made out of love. And I feel bliss!
(For those of you who don’t know what I do, I am the co-founder and co-teacher in this crazy three year healer training program where we take innocent people and transform them into Energy Medicine healers. Yowza. Check it out. http://www.rhysresources.com/institute)
“O my God, what must a soul be like when it is in this state! It longs to be all one tongue with which to praise the Lord. It utters a thousand pious follies, in a continuous endeavor to please Him who thus possesses it.” Teresa of Avila, St.