Category: Soul journey

No Visible Trace: Vanishing of the Past

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger

I seem to be living through a time in which everything previously experienced in my life is falling away. In the midst of these changes, I find myself standing face to face with a truth that has always existed but is now front and center in my consciousness: There is no past. When we have lived an experience, it disappears from this dimension. It may continue in another dimension, but here, now, in the present, it quite literally no longer exists. In our memories, it shape-shifts and eventually fades as well. We are left with this moment, nothing else.

What has brought me to this seemingly stark conclusion, which is actually quite liberating? Well, in the past month (and after I wrote my last blog, “Resignation or Surrender?”), I experienced the definitive “loss” of two homes that I felt great emotional attachment to: one in Illinois, the other in Massachusetts. The first was my childhood home (on five acres in the country), the second, the house I lived in before recently moving (where I had an extensive flower garden). No actual visits took place; this was a long-distance visual vanishing, via photographs and Google maps. But no less shocking.

The people who bought the house where we rented an apartment in Massachusetts quickly began to renovate the interior last fall. Then, this past spring, our neighbor told us of exterior changes: the new owners had ripped out all my carefully planted and lovingly cared for flowers and replaced them with a rather bare, professionally landscaped lawn and a few meager plantings. The photographs she sent were heartbreaking.

Since our move to Florida last year, I have missed my garden most of all. I had spent eleven years partnering with Mother Earth in creating a diverse mixture of flowers and bushes that bloomed at different times of the year. I knew every plant as if they were my own “children,” and I felt that they knew me. I celebrated each leaf and blossom, each visit by a bee, butterfly, or hummingbird. Sometimes I just stood in silent appreciation and love for the beauty all around me. To see all that destroyed was painful to assimilate. Yet, on another level, I knew it to be another sign that that time in Massachusetts was done. I could not go back to the home I once knew.

Over the next few weeks, I realized that I was being given a deeper understanding of life’s greatest wisdom: impermanence. It allowed me to see the impermanent in all parts of life—and to accept it. My spiritual journey had become about learning to let go in an ongoing way so that I could be fully present in the moment. Then God raised the bar even higher.

For some reason, I decided to Google-search for my Illinois hometown and the country road I had lived on. It has been decades since I have been back there, so it took me a while to find the area where my parents had built their home in the shade of a group of old oak trees. I switched to satellite mode and began to slowly trace the route from the turnoff onto our road, now widened.

Then, unexpectedly, I noticed that there was a very large highway where there had only been farmhouses and cornfields. I zoomed in and saw it was an Illinois tollway with on and off ramps and barren landscapes surrounding it. My heart beating, I backtracked to where I could see some houses and land still intact. I located the houses on either side of our home, but there in the middle was nothing but wild abandoned land. No driveway, nothing visible but underbrush and trees. I zoomed closer, and then I saw a bare space where our house should have been. Closer still, and I was able to make out what appeared to be remnants of a basement. That’s all that remained of my childhood home.

I felt a knot in my stomach and sat staring in stunned silence. It didn’t seem real. My memories of that house and of the trees, flowers, orchards, and vegetable gardens my father and mother had planted were vivid and alive. I lived my entire childhood and adolescence there—with a deep connection to nature and to them. Yet this was the current “reality.” Anything else no longer existed. Of course I knew this, but seeing a visual representation was different.

After my parents’ deaths, I had stopped visiting Illinois but always held it in my heart. Christmas carols evoked visual memories of the holidays I shared with them over the years. And the land itself was in my blood; I had run across the fields and climbed every tree. Years later, when I planted a garden in Massachusetts, I felt most at home there because that connection was born in my childhood. Now, every visible trace of any of those gardens had disappeared. My childhood and my recent past had both vanished.

I sensed my physical body slowly processing this and my soul’s presence rising to the fore. I felt a clearing within to match the clearing without. For the first time, I was fully embodying the present moment with a crystal clear understanding that there really is nothing else. Oddly enough, it felt freeing. It was like decluttering my consciousness: dropping Google and opting for Soul. In truth, I hadn’t lost anything. I had gained greater awareness of the simplicity and power of my lifetime upon this Earth. At the deepest level, my soul (and yours) lives within the Great Mystery of impermanence and eternity, each precious moment experienced and then released with love.

 

Resignation or Surrender?

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger

What’s the difference between resignation and surrender? To me, resignation seems to have a hopeless aspect to it, giving up on possibility. Surrender doesn’t have that flavor. It’s more a letting go of control, so that life can bring possibility to you instead of your clutching at it. Yet, perhaps there is more to resignation than first meets the eye. What if you have to go through resignation to get to surrender? What if in resigning yourself to life not turning out the way you thought it would, you let go at such a deep level that complete surrender is at last possible? In expecting nothing, you open the door to everything.

I recently experienced something like this as I continue to integrate living in a new state after more than 30 years in another part of the country. Massachusetts and Florida could not be more different. In order to make the transition, I had to embrace those differences, which has been very challenging at times. I have surrendered again and again. Yet I still felt stuck in some indefinable way. Basically, I don’t feel at home here, at least in the way I had previously defined it. When I accepted that I may never feel that way, something started to change.

It was a book that brought about this perceptual shift: Braiding Sweetgrass by Potawatomi naturalist Robin Wall Kimmerer. In early chapters, she writes of her people losing their traditional home and being forced to walk the “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma. With that background, she also writes of her family’s ties to New York State and how “home” has been defined in her life, usually through a deep connection to Mother Earth. Her stories and descriptions are so vivid that at one point I just sat and cried, feeling all the past homes in my own life and how nature was an integral part of each of them.

I have lived many places, north, south, east, and west, but my childhood home in Illinois and my recent home in Massachusetts tug at my heart most. As I allowed myself the thought that I may never see either of those places again in this lifetime, something in me let go, into grief, into resignation—and then, gradually, a release into a deeper surrender. I had no expectations anymore about anything. I was just present in my life as it was, with no attachments to past or future. The sadness and loss broke my heart, but in the breaking, spirit poured in, as it always does, and left me washed clean.

Life brings us so much, realities arising from possibilities, again and again. Each reality, beginning and ending, is the doorway to another possibility, another reality. Our lives are forever shifting from one dimension into another wider dimension. Right now at this moment, we, as individuals and as a planet, are being asked to let go of everything that came before and move forward in our lives, through resignation to surrender and ultimately to infinite possibility. Our feelings are passing signposts. Where we are going, there are no parameters really.

As I look out my window today, there is only the living presence of Mother Earth in all directions, filling my heart and soul with a greater sense of home than any one particular place. Each of us has a soul window that opens out to that same view. Each of us is finding our way home.

 

Who Would You Be Without Identity?

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger
Can you imagine yourself without a gender, a role, a story, a sense of self that precedes you into the world? No mental concepts that define how you see everything? No language to structure the formless into form and separate you from others? This is how you were born. This is how you entered life on Earth (and how you will leave it), a divine soul without human definitions to shape it. And this is who you still are, deep within. No matter what words were spoken or names were given to you, your soul remains intact. Your soul is always connected to the Source from which it came, regardless of what separation is experienced by your personality or ego in the course of a lifetime.

The question for so many people at this time of awakening on our planet is: How do we get back there? How do we return to the child’s wide-eyed wonder and love of the world? Newborn babies are pure awareness, pure being. No language blocks or distorts that essential life force energy that flows through. As our human minds learn to name and categorize, that energy remains but goes underground. Our souls are disguised by the “personalities” that overlay our essential Self. Gradually we forget our divine connection, and our minds, supported by external social norms, define our daily experience. We don’t realize that our physical bodies are merely costumes that we are wearing for this particular lifetime. Consequently, we lose our sense of oneness with others and with all that is.

It takes ongoing intention and practice (or sometimes an identity-shattering experience) to return to conscious awareness of our soul’s presence. Habit and external distractions can often be impediments in this process, but the strength and power of the spirit within moves us forward even when we feel most lost or disconnected. I believe this because I have experienced it myself. The personality self I learned to navigate the world with carried me through my childhood and young adult life—until one day, at age 18, I met a new friend, a kindred spirit, who opened my eyes to the limitations of that self. I started to seek something greater and embarked on a decades-long journey into awakening and self-awareness. Not unlike many other seekers at this time. Ultimately, we are all meant to take this journey back to soul, back to Self.

As I learned meditation, yoga, and self-exploration, the doors to my inner being gradually opened. I experienced divine connection, or soul presence, through a variety of experiences with many spiritual teachers over many years. All of it led to the present moment, wherein the journey is deepening and in many ways becoming solitary. The final path back to God, to complete awareness and soul embodiment, often has to be walked alone because there really is no intermediary between your soul and its Source. They are actually one and the same, and this is a realization that occurs deep within your consciousness. It cannot be imposed from without.

So, at some point, you and I (and all of us) realize the oneness of all of life. We begin to see clearly how language was just an attempt by the human mind to explain a Mystery that cannot be solved or even translated into words and concepts. Only at the soul level do we “see” the connections and feel the power of Being itself. There are times when, as a writer, I try to express my own soul’s awareness, but I know it is an approximation of something vastly beyond my ability to describe it. It resides at the place beyond language, roles, and all other human designations.

This is the place without identity. It is the place we experience every time we are fully present in our lives. When we take a deep breath and feel the peace at our core, when we open our hearts to unconditional love of self and others. These are the moments when our soul awareness expands, and we know ourselves to be eternal and infinite, a divine presence that came to Earth to experience itself as human, awaken to its own divinity, and then return to the sacred Source from which it arose.

Saying Yes to Life

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger

Our minds have an annoying habit of continually warning us to watch out, be careful, stand back, or say no to any new situation. Perhaps left over from prehistoric times when humans often encountered oversized predatory beasts outside the safety of their caves. Not so helpful today though. Certainly there are things to be concerned or cautious about, but not every choice we make is fraught with danger. Over-cautiousness keeps us frozen in fear and inertia.

In his book The Surrender Experiment, Michael Singer writes about his decision to ignore his mind’s constant badgering and instead say yes to whatever life presented him with every day. Refusing to pay attention to negative mental opinions and fears took him on an incredible adventure of openhearted, expansive living. Perhaps this is exactly what we are all being called to do at this time on the planet: say yes to life instead of no. That is the next stage in our evolution.

When I read Michael’s book again recently, I was confronted with my own mental no’s, the closed doors in my mind that were locked with negative thoughts. In particular, about where I had moved a year ago, Florida. After a dear friend moved away last January, I felt so sad that I began to be hypercritical of aspects of life here: the car culture, strip malls, gun shows, red tide. The list got longer each day. What I initially viewed as an incredibly beautiful paradise I now found never-ending fault with. Until The Surrender Experiment jolted me into the realization of my own negativity. How could anything positive be experienced in my life if I spent every moment focused on what was wrong?

It was a wake-up call to remember who I am at the soul level (love) and why I am here. I didn’t come to this Earth to complain and criticize. I want to live my life saying yes, not no. In truth, life is how you frame it. Our lives our filled with challenges as well as celebrations. When you pause, take a deep breath, and remember to be grateful for everything in your life, it can shift you energetically. Gratitude (an inner Yes!) raises your vibration—and the vibration of whomever you come in contact with. Together you see possibilities instead of obstacles.

That energy will positively affect everyone in your life. A heartfelt smile and kind word can be the greatest gift of all for someone who is having a hard day. When you wake each morning and allow your heart, not your head, to lead the way, then you experience life’s wonders. If you let your mind constantly repeat warnings and tell you what is wrong with the world, then you are living in a prison and perpetuating negativity. Instead, break the lock. You can be free of your inner no’s by seeing them for what they are—the mind’s way of trying to protect you and control every unknown situation.

As soon as you recognize that and choose another way of seeing life, those thoughts will lose their power. They will just be passing blips in consciousness that you don’t have to pay attention to or impose on others (unless, of course, there is a large beast outside your door!). Instead, you can choose to say yes to the mystery and magic of each moment. Nothing is certain, but that is okay. I’ve found that the greatest surprises, joys, and connections await on the other side of the mind’s chattering.

Are Your Opinions Holding You Back?

Photograph ©2019 Peggy Kornegger
Do you consider your beliefs sacrosanct? Do you hang onto them at all costs, even at the loss of friendships or family ties? Historically, beliefs and opinions have split entire countries and started wars on this planet. People cling to them as if to a life raft in a sea of uncertainty and tumultuous change. We often are so identified with our beliefs that we can’t imagine life without them, exactly as they were first formed. Yet our minds are always in flux, whether we’re fully aware of it or not. Life on Earth is never just one thing, one set of rules for being human. And never more so than at this time of planetary transformation and human evolution.

If we step back from identification with our physical forms, it’s possible to see them as merely costumes we wear for this lifetime. Our thoughts and opinions are part of that costume. If we totally identify with our physicality and thoughts, we are frequently stopped from moving forward in our lives by how our minds view change. On the other hand, if we come to realize we are part of something much greater—universal consciousness—this awareness gives a wider perspective and ultimately greater freedom in our lives.

Opinions and beliefs, if held too tightly, can define the parameters of your life experience. On the other side of rigid and inflexible thought forms is the natural flow of life and of infinite possibility. This is wisdom I learn again and again, most recently when I was trying to decide whether to attend an annual event that I have been part of for years. This year, however, both the structure and content had changed radically, and I no longer felt aligned with the energy. Yet there were still parts of it that I loved and felt drawn to. What to do? Initially, I stood firmly in “no,” believing it would violate my principles if I went. Then I remembered an experience I had 14 years ago and what it taught me about having an open mind and heart.

In 2005, I had just met two Maya elders from Guatemala, Mercedes and Gerardo, who were sharing their traditional teachings at Rowe Center in Massachusetts. After a weekend of intense teaching including a 3-hour fire ceremony, they invited a few of us to travel to Guatemala with them to take part in ceremonies at sacred sites there. It was an opportunity of a lifetime. In their tradition, however, women always wear long skirts in the ceremonies, and I had not worn a skirt for 20 or 30 years (a symbol of women’s oppression, you know).

I had to decide whether to say yes and honor their traditions or say no and hang onto my own beliefs. The answer was very clear. In deciding to go (and wear a skirt), I let go of everything that had made up my Peggyness before and went to Guatemala “naked” and open. I thus stepped into an extraordinary spiritual expansiveness, which continued in subsequent trips to Guatemala with them and in countless other experiences, up to the present.

Now, in facing a similar dilemma, I once again chose not to be held back by my mind’s ideas about what I should or shouldn’t do. In stepping aside from my own opinions and allowing another choice, I was opening the door to a new possibility: re-envisioning my life without filters or frames. It seemed freer and much more spacious. I felt as if I were flowing with the current of life instead of trying to force the current to go my way.

So this is the new paradigm we are living into: recognizing our mental costumes for what they are and moving into something greater. If you can keep the doors in your mind completely open (and that is entirely possible if your decisions are heart-centered), then you are walking a path on which each step is new and undefined by previous beliefs or opinions. You are dreaming your life anew with each breath you take. And nothing can hold you back.