I just clicked on my website, amayagayle.com, and read a few of the more recent articles. I haven’t written since April 2016 and I don’t even know what brought me to my web space today. As I read, I was inspired and thrilled but it was as if someone else had written those words, not me. The words were beautiful and put together in a flow that seemed wonderful, knowing and wise, so not like me right now.

There’s a reason I haven’t written. It seems I simply stopped one day, unable to write another word. It all seemed fraudulent. On many levels it wasn’t. The words spoke the truth. They were and still are as accurate a representation of spiritual truth as I can write. That Truth had me. I lived it … mostly. Because of truth’s insistence on that word ‘mostly’ those words felt bogus beyond belief. I had yet to be totally transparent, absolutely honest and willing to let all the chips fall where they may. Something within was still attempting to control the outcome of my life. I hadn’t learned the BIG lesson – hence, the writing stopped.

It’s funny (in hindsight) to watch the scrambling of the separate identity. It will do most anything, including giving itself away to that which appears to be its savings grace – be it another, a dream, a way of life, health and happiness, any of the many desires and wishes, fears and dread humans desperately harbor within. As I let those speak I sacrificed my self on the altar of otherdom and something happened. It felt off but that part of my mind that believed my ego must be annihilated thought, great. This should do it. Of course, it didn’t. It couldn’t. There is no ‘doing it’ to be done. All it did was strengthen the idea of a doer with the power to do, even when the doing was self-annihilation, self surrender, self destruction. It was still an attempt to create a different now, a more benign or happy here. It wasn’t simply this rare and mundane, beautiful and ordinary moment as it is. Failure was written into that story from the beginning.

That’s what I’ve been doing since the music stopped – grabbing for the brass ring on this material plane, and in my deep focus on the ring I let all the spiritual truths drop away. Looking back from where I stand today I am a bit flabbergasted and oh so grateful. Those two don’t seem to go together, do they? But they do.

There’s a part of me that is simply puzzled by these last months and years. Why the heck did I do that? What was that all about? Why did that have to happen? Until it played itself out I didn’t have any answers to those questions. Heck, I didn’t even know to ask those questions while rolled up in the delusion. It simply was.

But now, looking back and feeling the space in which I find myself today, understanding arises. Programs were running that I couldn’t see. Those same programs were keeping me from the transparency, the honesty and willingness to let life undo me, wreck me, and challenge every desire and need. Those programs wouldn’t let me sink deeper into the Truth, so the Truth, as it will, set me free.

Last week I was rear-ended on the freeway. I slowed in traffic and the young man behind me didn’t. He hit me at 60 miles per hour. I am grateful that I hadn’t slowed so much that the impact damaged me as well as the car. Even so, the thoughts came.  “What in the world does this Universe want? What am I doing wrong that this would happen to me?”

I asked the question on facebook and received lots of well-intentioned responses. None of them satisfied but what they did was send me into a place of introspection. I listened and heard what I needed to hear, what I was missing all along.

“Resonating in a higher consciousness does not mean that you get to miss the messy bits of life.”

Like most, I started down the spiritual path hoping for a happier life. That does happen, but not because what manifests is somehow better, more to my liking. Not. At. All. Life simply is. Life happens. A higher consciousness allows for a lack of resistance, a settling in to what is. It allows me to see more clearly, to understand the necessity of its contrasts, its pain and suffering, joy and bliss. It makes it possible to be the flow when what is flowing isn’t mind’s idea of good. Higher consciousness is not for ‘a me.’ It is for the whole and, as I stop, really stop, dead stop, life simply is and since nothing here resists the unfolding now, my experience of it shifts. Does that mean I am always joyous? Laughing here … big belly laugh. No, I am simply more alive, more present, more real and that is what is asked of us, not to be perfect, but to be up to our neck in the messiness of life real.