Two nights ago, I read this narrative at an event I’m part of every year called “Illuminate the Night.” It is a musical, poetic, dance-filled celebration of the the Solstice and the return of the light- and it is one of my favorite events of the year. In my great fortune to be fostered by my friends to craft a narrative to read at each performance, I have found that each year, these narratives crystallize some deep aspect of myself and the collective that feels deeply salient to current events. This year, I found myself wanting to shout from the rooftops something something I learned from very intentional meditations around the core lessons of challenging times. My work as a counselor has constantly led me to an awe-filled witnessing of a healthy, divine essence — a goodness– that comes through folks when they are held with non-judgment and compassion. If this were the assumption that connected us, I think our world would be very different. Here is my soapbox:
Love yourself. You are love. Love conquers all. All you need is love. Let your love light shine.
Sky above and earth below, I am the Buddha and Buddha nature is in all beings. The Kingdom of God is within, and the Tao is always present within you, use it any way you want.
Heal yourself, heal the world.
Such aspirations! All this warm, fuzzy talk indicates we should exist in the blissful floatation of love at all times if we are truly spiritual beings.
I have a confession– I did not know, truly know in my cells —
what those statements meant for many years that I proclaimed them. Love myself? Heal myself, heal the world? I just wanted to wear tye dye at a Dead show. Was everyone else faking it like me?
Faking it because, somehow, at the very basis of my unconscious, I had learned I was born stained. My nervous system had evolved alongside chaos. Shoot, I died twice by the time I was 4-years-old, and I don’t think the adolescents raising me knew how bring all of me back from the beyond the veil. If anything, I grew up self-protecting and longing so badly to be a good person, to be connected to God, to feel holy mercy in the form of safety. But I’d also learned stained people don’t have access behind the red rope, and it was from this desperate desire for connection, and adjacent deep suspicion, that my spirit took the wheel and drove my human self, screaming down life’s highway at 110 miles per hour on the journey to answer questions I didn’t know I had.
You, know, Our brains complete the first maps of our worlds and our worth by the time we are three years old. Before we even have pictures in our memories, our bodies have sussed out the environment, and have wired up a nervous system that can respond to what and who it expects to surround it. We come into the world ready to connect, built to thrive and to love. We need connection to live. What we become is a texture of people, places and genes. Everything is felt for the first time in a tiny, soft body. All is carefully coded and logged as “the way it is.”
Unfortunately, if those who care for us block or divert the flow of love, not only will we likely build a dam against love ourselves, but we will decide it is our faults that we cannot be good, worthy, perfect, or right enough to deserve that golden flow of affection that runs whether or not there is a dam. We cannot imagine that others could have their own hurts preventing them from smiling back.
In a way, we are built to go into the darkness of illusion, of shaken self worth, But we are equally built to triumph, to pump enzymatic essence back into our shade, and to digest hurt and pain into nutrient dense wisdom.
I am a spirit, and I have a human.
And my human is saying,: One of the first things I learned was obliteration. So how could I not expect to die? Who could safely keep me? Who would? And When you told me to stop crying and to not be so sensitive, because I think that is what you learned, I cursed my body for not being able to stop feeling.
We usually blame ourselves. They did, too.
Original sin is an incomplete concept- It only takes into account what our minds remember, not our bodies nor our spirit’s. The whole zeitgeist hungers for it’s natural complement: compassion and reflection bathed in unconditional positive regard to help it remember that all is owned by the Divine.
We are not born bad. Laughable! Light must shine, and if it cannot, the light will fight, act out, and call for attention from ground zero. The sooner we remove the debris and apply the balm of understanding, the less damage done. But solidifying sin as our nature ties a tournequate between us and God. It leads us to doubt every glimmer of our own divine essence, and casts it as the villain in this divine play. Thou wants too much attention! Only victims feel emotions! Who. Do. You. Think. You. Are?
Deep inside, you know the answer- You are an expression of the divine!
Friends, at our core, We Are Good.
I have tested this in the lab. I told you before I was a skeptic. I went deep undercover on a roller coaster called “higher education,” investigating the fertile interfaces between mind, body and spirit. I was a stained imposter in a community of embodied warriors who stood for loving kindness, unconditional positive regard, and compassion. They understood life contains suffering, and that suffering is not failure, but a commonality. They held strong in their equanimity while allowing me to pitch and throw myself at the walls of my own negative beliefs until those beliefs disintegrated around a real need to feel loved. They didn’t mind that I was an imposter. They only saw a soul worth the dignity to learn self kindness at my own rate, and worthy of a safe inner ground where I could let my guard down. I began to learn the process of befriending myself through every moment. It is profound how community can heal us.***
My teachers awarded me a degree, called me a counselor, and reminded me to never stop learning.
Since then, My clients have been SACRED test subjects and revealers of spiraling, galactic luminescence.
Look, people can teach you to look through a telescope and mathematically plot stars and clean the lens. But nobody can prepare you for the unfolding of etherial stellar worlds, rainbow nebulae and singing comets that you actually witness when you finally focus your eyes. Nature takes a course of beauty and efficiency that is unparallelled by any singular species’ effort. No straight lines, only spirals and branches and waves.
When humans unfold and re-ignite their lights, untwist and reorganize in front of me, I see, over and over, new universes being built as pure essence digests the programming of trauma and hurt to an ineffable wisdom and alignment that rivals any astronaut’s view when rocketing between the earth, the moon and the sun.
Nature will find a balance if given the right conditions
Our natures are granted the seeds at birth to transform life’s compost to blooms of wisdom.. Mind, body and spirit will hatch these seeds with the sunlight of kindness. After a stormy dehiscence of review and release, out bursts fresh shoots of peace, of joy. Of making sense of what’s happened, and feeling certain the past is the past. There’s tolerance and space, forgiveness and boundary at the same time. Deep, flowering intelligence. There’s release of that which no longer serves. A sense of, “Oh, this is who I am.” Because that is who we are when we are no longer scared of ourselves. Learning to trust you can get there- that’s maturity..
Here is how real this is: Many modes of healing, peer reviewed and tested, rely on the natural human response to return to harmony in the safety of kindness. Yes there are those human outliers who need more lifetimes and boundaries to crash against. But overall? People heal long-held trauma and pain, and unleash their divine essences every day. How it cannot reported in the daily news as an ongoing miracle, as certainty of something bigger and benevolent? I don’t know. Want proof of something divine? Something ignites a great return in humans every day. That essence, that inner bolt of light, it can never leave us.
We have a choice for the collective we create: Commit to the spirit of benevolence within, and allow it to guide the interconnected evolution of all our souls, or believe in certain inner anarchy that requires strict rules guarded by the thought police. Feel expansion within and fiercely advocate for the dignity of light within everyone, or limit love, and promote envy when somebody seems to have it easier than you let yourself. After all, if we whip our most vulnerable selves, we will whip anyone that looks like them. Can spirits bloom in such jealousy?
One by one, we are alighting.
We are mindfully observing the mirror and reflecting at higher rates than have ever existed on the planet– a spiritual vote for the benefit of all beings. When one candle sparks, it lights many others. When I know how to let friendship bloom for myself, I encourage it in my siblings. We rewrite our personal stories, relieving the child within, and relaxing into maturity. What is the new story?
Love yourself. You are love. Love conquers all. All you need is love. Let your love light shine.
Sky above and earth below, I am the Buddha and Buddha nature is in all beings. The Kingdom of God is within, and the Tao is in all things.
Heal yourself, heal the world.
Now I get it.
