A Starry Night

Last week I shared with you my journey with plantar fasciitis, inviting you into a passionate and compassionate engagement with whatever life is bringing you. True awakening comes when you learn how to show up for your life as it is.

Take a moment and really notice your life right now – where you are sitting, the quality of the light, the rising and falling of your breath – and realize how little we all do this, how little we are completely open to life right here, right now.

The tricky thing is that opening to life isn’t just about opening to the joy and wonder of life. It also includes opening to traffic tickets, headaches, challenging communications with other people, sleepless nights, and so on. Life is inviting you to connect with it exactly as it is, so you can slowly and surely dissolve your reactive mind that just wants awakening to be joyous and delightful. It is this reactive mind that constantly puts a veil between you and the living experience of life.

The good news is that the reactive mind will dissolve as you become more present for life and use your compassionate, attentive mind to see and let go of the stories in your head that keep you disconnected from life.

A woman with whom I have been working with most graciously allowed me to share this story.  She was with her family over the holidays, and one night she was completely caught in the reactive mind. She took herself out for a walk and for a while was so caught in her head that she didn’t even notice what was going on around her.

As her mind started to quiet down, she began to open – first to the snowy night and the stillness all around her. Then she noticed the night sky, which had been completely absent for her when she was caught in her mind. The stars were brilliant, and the moon was full with an angelic halo around it. At the edge of the halo was a brilliant star, and as she gazed at it, our work together came flooding back into her awareness, and her contracted, reactive mind completely faded away. For that moment, she was deeply and truly awake to life. And when she went back into the house, she said she was far less reactive.

Of course, at some level, the reactive mind will show again but that is the rhythm of awakening  – remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting, until remembering becomes our home.

That evening she had what I call a template experience. In a matter of minutes, she went from the closed, unconscious, reactive mind to the open, spacious, and connected heart. She will now have this experience to draw upon to remind her what her whole life is about now – seeing, loving, and letting go of the reactive mind so that she can be here for life.

On this journey of awakening, in the beginning, this will probably only happen for a moment here, a moment there, and the mind may say, “So I opened to life for a few moments – big deal.”  But these few moments of being fully here are much more powerful than a million moments of unconsciousness. And just like drops of water dripping into a bucket, one day, without even noticing it, the bucket of your awake consciousness will be overflowing.

So lift your eyes from this blog and look around you. Realize this is no ordinary moment. All the millions of moments of your life have brought you to this moment. For just a few seconds see it, feel it, smell it. In these moments you are coming home!