What Does Awakening Cost? It’s not what the seeker expects. Somewhere along the yellow brick road, the seeker’s path, the path that is supposed to make your life better, take away the discomfort, reveal the inherent abundance and recognize your true identity, it dawns on you that just perhaps, you’d have been better off on …
Tag Archives: pain
Stay and Play, or Run
“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.” ― Wei Wu Wei You want to be happy, to not feel foolish, to feel included and loved. It is only natural to feel that way. What isn’t organic is not feeling what …
Emphasis
Emphasis is divine, as is the entirety of this dance. Often, it seems like all mystics teachers gurus no-it-alls contradict themselves, or at least the ones we are currently paying attention to. It can drive one crazy. They point to the expressionless and leave the expression — you and me, the bloody squirming writhing human …
Does Love Always Win?
It’s a common phrase amongst spiritual folk – Love always wins. Does it? It doesn’t seem like love always wins. It doesn’t even feel like love always wins. So … is it true? Does love win in the long run? If yes, how long a run? In my lifetime? In the lifetime of my children …
Origami Swan
Or so it was for me … Energetically, I had mastered the trick of folding my body in upon itself and wasn’t aware of my mastery. It happens at the energetic level even if it doesn’t manifest in the physical appearance. I folded myself up, tipping the crown chakra energy down towards my little Buddha …
Fully Human
Being fully human is a lot trickier than riding the awakening train. Awakening, ascending as some call it, is the ticket out, the great escape, the demise of attachment and aversion, of judgment and craving. It’s the end of life as we know it, and in that way, when you are in pain, when your …
Rome is Burning
I’ve been feeling into this for a few days now. Well, actually this one’s been around a long time in different forms. I quit asking for answers to it in meditation because I heard the same answer time and time again. Can’t say I liked it. Many of you know I have written about this …
Right Back Here Again
We pack up their lunch, make sure they have their gym clothes and books, and bundle them into the car or out to the bus stop, take a deep breath and begin our day. School’s kind of a free period for parenting, or at least for a lot of parents. Do kids think about yesterday’s …
Fairy Tale Lives
The external appearance of life cannot demonstrate awakening. Life appears in all its shapes and sizes, forms and fascinations. It does its dance, sings its song, appears as all appearances: disasters and blessings, joy and sorrow, illness and health, poverty and wealth, regardless of one’s understanding. The thinking mind, the compare and contrast mechanism, says …
Don’t Look Away
“As you know, I follow the war every day. I’m not going numb… and will do everything I can to stop it. This is not just Ukrainian PR. I’ve seen pics from all over the country of Ukrainian soldiers protecting animals.” Sky Otter. For lifetimes, we have survived by going numb … and in our …
Stuffed Inside
How much anger is stuffed inside? Every time someone hurt me and I didn’t know how to respond … when I didn’t say something and held my tongue while my insides were slashed open … when I let the hurt pass, forcing a laugh at a friend’s joke — a friend’s not a stranger’s or …
Deliverance
“Knowing what something is, is not the same as feeling it.” The Giver What would make you willing to feel all the pain and suffering inside of you? What would make you insatiably hungry to feel all of your life? You close off. It is natural to protect yourself from pain. It is painful to …
What is Heaven?
Lately everything seems unreal. I keep waiting for it all to fall apart into tiny pixels of color and light, myself included. Earth feels unreal; Heaven, or what I conceive as God (the dissolution of self) seems closer, ever closer. I still exist; I haven’t dissolved. Ready. Willing. Still here. And yet, the detachment from …
Celebrate the Suffering
There is an interesting story about a guru who sets up a little shop selling pick axes and shovels to all the seekers who are trying to get to the top of the mountain to find whatever it is they believe is there. (I wish I remembered where I heard this story, but I don’t.) …
Raw Nerve, Part II
Up early again a drive ahead of rush hour needing to be first in line only a two-hour wait the doctor’s worried look a free-falling slide down the muddy hole of the medical system In only 2 days I was back the antibiotics prescribed not working, if anything my cheek getting bigger infection spreading further, …
Amaya Gayle 