The Adventure of our Lives
The moments when we feel our lives spin into the unknown can feel very uncomfortable compared to the placid plodding-along that we might do when our lives appear to be stable and unchanging. Perhaps we went to the doctor's office for a regular checkup and were given some kind of a shocking diagnosis that puts our life into question. Or maybe the marriage that we assumed would be with us the rest of our life, suddenly doesn't feel like we can count on it in that same way. Maybe our partner will be with us and maybe they won't, we don't know anymore. Or perhaps our job suddenly ends and we don't know what is next. If we look closely at our moments of free-falling into the unknown and put them next to our moments of plodding-along, which of those scenarios are reflecting most closely the reality of how life is? Is life really always an adventurous journey in the unknown, and we just pretend otherwise here and there? If so, then these moments of facing the unknown are life helpfully revealing its true nature to us!
When we go to cross the street in traffic, do we ever really know that we will safely reach the other side? Although our minds can measure the probabilities and tell us that it is not likely that we will be run over before reaching the other side, that still doesn't entirely close the gap of the unknown for us. Probabilities can seem to manage it, but life has an uncanny ability to surprise us both pleasantly and unpleasantly. Circumstances may appear to be one way and turn out to be quite another. Symptoms that appeared to threaten our life one day can the next day be benign. Faithful spouses can suddenly become unfaithful, and long-time lonely hearts can suddenly find their perfect match. Children become adults that we couldn't have planned or created. Jobs come and go.
There is just no two ways about it -- life is an adventure, even if we try really hard to tone it down and make it not be. However much we try to make it predictable, even if we succeed to some extent, life just doesn't let itself be totally confined within our plans or our expectations. Even if we succeed in making our whole lives go the way that we want them to go, still our final adventure is met at the end of our lives, where we don't know what will happen, and we go anyway, in spite of ourselves. What if we just opened up our hearts and minds to life's fullness right now, before the end? Would we have to stop planning? No, not at all! We plan as we enjoy planning and we enjoy the fruits of good planning in the same way that we always did. But if life intervenes in our plans we can relax our thinking about blame and fault. It is not our personal inadequacy that makes it so that life doesn't conform to our plans. It is the wild vitality of life itself that is perhaps too big for our plans. We often try to confine life into too small a container when we plan our lives. Life is supporting and encouraging us to break this container when it sabotages our best-laid plans for ourselves. Our plans can so often be developed out of a very limited view of who we are and what our capabilities are. Life may often need to let us know that this is too narrow a view. Life may want us to open up our range of possibilities beyond these confines, and break through the wound-based emotion and conditioned thinking that emprison us. The situations that life brings us that feel uncomfortable and cause us to face the unknown are actually the most perfect situations that it could possibly design to show us the dark places of our conditioning and wounding, so that they can find resolution within us. These may be things that we have swept under our proverbial rug all our lives: things that are asking to be brought back into the fullness of who we are. Meeting life as an adventure into the unknown includes willingness to embrace and include all of the conditioning and wounding that we have buried within us. This is no less of an adventure as climbing Mount Everest or penetrating the Amazon. The difference is only that it is done on an internal landscape rather than an external one.
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News from
the Trenches
Trenches?
Are we back in World War Two?
Not a chance. These trenches are the ones that are keeping me at my computer writing and re-writing day after day. For those of you who are asking for the book I can give you a definitive "I don't know" as to its completion. I am not yet able to even understand how one gets to the point of knowing a book is done. I laughingly think that maybe I should put a freeze on my life so that the book might at some point feel finished. My life is moving so fast that the book cannot represent its newest directions. Anybody know how to get to the feeling of "finished"? Let me know. The April mentoring group startup didn't happen because not enough people were interested in that kind of online contact with others. I was surprised but that was fine too because of trying to focus my energies on getting the book finished. The online meeting-place site is up at Google Groups (by invitation only)for the future in case people decide that the mentoring group idea is a good one and want to contact each other. Something new has come to my attention this month and I have embarked on an exciting new process called "Emotional Body Enlightenment" which is a methodolgy put together by a man named Daniel Barron. This is the adventuresome edge in my life at the moment. EBE explains in a way that resonates with me how this core disconnect/unworthiness in pre-verbal babyhood creates a wound that we then flee from throughout our lives. It then offers a methodology for working with it and clearing it up. For whatever reason, I have never felt open to doing psychotherapy, and it has taken the spiritually based paradigm behind EBE to catch my interest. I have had to notice that awakening has not cleaned up some core emotional content in me -- and this matereial feels like it is the starting place for all the mental patterns behind the separate self and its antics. It feels like without cleaning up this core, that more mental patterns of conditioning could easily keep being generated from it and the clean-up process then could go on forever. Seeing how this core emotional wound has not disappeared through my own awakening has not been an easy thing for me to feel or admit. The larger implications for all of us in realizing this are still opening up. The work of allowing the awakening down into everyday life has led directly to this realization of what has not yet been awakened in me and then directily to this way of moving forward with that,so it is being trusted and acted on. If anyone is interested to hear more about EBE, Daniel Barron has several books available at Amazon.com where you can read excerpts. EBE is not for the faint of heart though, I have to warn you with a grin. You will see what I mean if you look into it. The above photo is of the Redbud blooming along the Merced River here in California in early April. The hillside behind, although you can barely see it in the photograph, is absolutely covered with California poppies and other wildflowers. The Merced River is the one that flows out of Yosemite Valley. The photo at the top you perhaps recognized: it is Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite Valley in the sunset light of an April evening.
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