The Indescribable Joy of Flowing with Life

Everything flows in nature. Water flows from the mountains to the ocean, light waves dance all around us and within us, sound waves flow everywhere, some as quiet as the movement of a grain of sand and others as loud as a roaring hurricane, day flows into night, winter into spring. Blood flows throughout our body, sap flows up and down trees, and the Earth flows 65,000 miles an hour around the sun.

The only thing that doesn’t flow is most human minds. Because our minds are dualistic in nature, they see things through the lens of good/bad, right/wrong. They set up what they like against what they don’t like. Because of this, they are usually caught in a world of struggle trying to control life rather than open to its intelligent flow.

How do we open to the flow again? The first is to recognize that our mind is an amazing gift we have been given and is necessary for maneuvering through life. But it is not reality. It is just thoughts about reality. As the great Zen philosopher Alan Watts once said, “No matter how many times you say the word water it will never be wet.” When our attention is caught in the world of thought, it cuts us off from being present for this astounding and miraculous thing called life.

The second thing that helps us be open to the flow of life is to begin to comprehend that our dualistic minds think pleasant is good and unpleasant is bad. Easy is good and difficult is bad. Light is good and dark is bad. But every single atom that makes up every single thing in the universe has a positive and negative charge. Some very wise person, many eons ago, understood this and created the yin and Yang symbol. In this symbol, dark and light are not on opposite sides of the line. In fact, they are nestled together. And in the light is a point of dark. And in the dark is a point of light.

You, like everybody else, are a mixture of dark and light. Your life, like everybody else’s, is a mixture of easy and difficult, joyous and sorrowful.  And you, like everybody else, took on misperceptions about yourself and life when you were very young. You got lost in struggle and had moments where you wondered what all of this was about.  But what would happen if rather than seeing your so-called dark, as a mistake or something wrong with you, you see it as fuel for your awakening?

I want to share with you that occasionally I think whatever created this life must have been having a bad day. Why do we have to take on all this darkness? I have no idea if the answer I am going to share with you is the truth, but it helps me to settle into my dance of dark and light, not trying to hold onto the good stuff and not trying to push away the so-called bad.

The answer is we live in a dualistic world and things are recognized in their relationship to their opposite. If there was no such thing as night, we wouldn’t recognize day. Day would be invisible because we can only see it in relationship with night. So, it makes sense to me that each one of us has to forget who we really are and take on all these struggles – getting lost in them so when we begin to come out of the clouds of our mind, we can then recognize the huge difference between thinking about life and being present for it. We can see that rather than fighting with what is, magic happens as we allow whatever is to be here, giving it our loving attention so it can let go. We can then see the spaciousness we truly are, and that struggle is not our home.

Is this easy? No. We are so conditioned to try to get to the good stuff and get rid of the so-called bad.  But look at history and you will see this doesn’t bring forth the lasting peace we long for. Look at your own history and you will see the same. So, in as many ways as I can, I will say to the world, show up for what is showing up, even the really difficult, and this will bring you home.

I want to end by sharing a wonderful poem by Jan Richardson called Jacob’s Blessing, which speaks directly to what we are exploring here.

If this blessing were easy,
anyone could claim it.
As it is,
I am here to tell you
that it will take some work.
This is the blessing
that visits you
in the struggling,
in the wrestling,
in the striving.
This is the blessing
that comes
after you have left
everything behind,
after you have stepped out,
after you have crossed
into that realm
beyond every landmark
you have known.
This is the blessing
that takes all night
to find.
It’s not that this blessing
is so difficult,
as if it were not filled
with grace
or with the love
that lives
in every line.
It’s simply that
it requires you
to want it,
to ask for it,
to place yourself
in its path.
It demands that you
stand to meet it
when it arrives,
that you stretch yourself
in ways you didn’t know
you could move,
that you agree
to not give up.
So when this blessing comes,
borne in the hands
of the difficult angel
who has chosen you,
do not let go.
Give yourself
into its grip.
It will wound you,
but I tell you
there will come a day
when what felt to you
like limping
was something more
like dancing
as you moved into
the cadence
of your new
and blessed name.

Wow

So when this blessing comes,
borne in the hands
of the difficult angel
who has chosen you,
do not let go.
Give yourself
into its grip.
It will wound you,
but I tell you
there will come a day
when what felt to you
like limping
was something more
like dancing
as you moved into
the cadence
of your new
and blessed name.

What would your life look like when you begin to trust it will always be a dance of dark and light, easy and difficult, of joyous and sorrowful? What happens if there’s nobody to blame including yourself for all of the challenges you took on? You will begin to understand that every single challenging experience is here not because you have done something wrong, or they have done something wrong. It is here with gifts embedded in it.

Offerings:

I explore this topic in more depth in my new radio show with the same namesake: The Indescribable Joy of Flowing with Life. If this topic resonates with you and you’d like to go deeper, I encourage you to listen to it on Thursday 14th at 5am or 5pm HERE. Or, after the 14th, it will be available on demand along with every other topic I’ve covered. Please feel free to explore the archive HERE.

TOMORROW: The Magic of Acceptance on March 12th at 5:30pm PDT. If this topic resonated with you and you haven’t already, I invite you to register for this Free Live Call event. We will be talking more in-depth about acceptance, including the darker parts of life and ourselves. Here is the summary: We have all bought into the belief that if something is not the way we want it to be, we must fix it, ignore it, get rid of it, or rise above it, not realizing this is an endless game of struggle. Join Mary in exploring the art of acceptance and how to bring its magic into your life. The event will last about an hour. I hope to see you there! (Can’t make it? You can still participate. Click the link to learn how) Learn more and Register Here