Category: Spiritual

Surrender, Dorothy!

In The Wizard of Oz, there is a classic moment when the Wicked Witch of the West sky-writes a warning to the little girl from Kansas: Surrender, Dorothy! Most of us have always thought of that as an ominous threat. What if we look at it instead as wise and magical advice: surrender. Dorothy doesn’t surrender to the witch, but she does surrender to the power of her own journey, which finally brings her back home. Don’t all of us who are on life journeys come up against that ultimate challenge—letting go and trusting in something greater than our own individual lives? A surrender that will bring us “home,” to ourselves and to the heart of the universe.

“Dorothy and Alice” © 1995 Anne S. Katzeff / Artist

In the past year, I have faced this in my own life. Never having been raised in a religious tradition of any kind, surrender was a foreign concept to me. Yet, the deeper I went within my own uniquely eclectic spiritual journey, the more I found surrender to be the key to opening the door to a greater expansiveness in myself and a profound connection to the cosmos. Not to mention, the key to a greater ease in living life.

Synchronistically, messages to that effect began to appear everywhere in my life. On an Oprah show that I tuned in to, Shirley MacLaine offered one piece of advice: “Surrender to a highly sophisticated Divinity.” A friend of mine described a comic strip with the punch line: “Resign as general manager of the universe.” It was Panache Desai’s ideas about “allowing and receiving,” however, that really struck a chord within me: in essence, flowing with everything that comes into your experience.

I’ve discovered that for me surrender isn’t a mental decision or a set of prescribed steps. It’s an ongoing process of emotionally letting go and embracing all of life, over and over. Part of me wants to hold on, wants to be in control, and it gets scared if I consider releasing that tight grip. Gradually, though, I’ve learned to relax and open to a wider vision of my life and my place on Earth. Like Alice, who discovers another world “through the looking glass,” I too have found that this physical reality is only one piece of the multilayered dream we call life. And it’s nothing I have to “control.” It involves trusting that my life as it is unfolding is exactly what I need in order to grow/evolve and that all that I perceive is part of an intricate tapestry of universal meaning and infinite love. As I have more and more experiences (within the physical realm and beyond) of the web of connection that we are all a part of, my trust grows, and I allow my life to flow with greater ease.

Surrender, then, is ultimately an opening of the heart: surrender in joy, surrender with tears and laughter. Fall in love with the world! Surrender to the dance of life. Step through the looking glass, put on those outrageous, sparkling ruby slippers, and click your heels together! You’ll be home in no time.

 

Growing Up Godless

I grew up outside of organized religion. In a small Midwestern town, this was unheard of. I knew no one else like me; all my friends dutifully went to church every Sunday. My parents didn’t want to impose any one set of religious beliefs on me, so they basically left the door open. They told me that God might exist or might not; it was not provable, all based on belief—the agnostic’s view. So I was left with a question mark and a feeling of “differentness” among my peers. I can remember feeling very uncomfortable whenever the topic of church or God came up at school, fearful that I would be “found out.”

When I was about 9 years old, my parents took me to a Unitarian church service in a nearby town, after which I commented, “I’m glad that’s over!” Clearly I wasn’t longing to go to church as much as I was longing not to be different. When I reached college age, all my new friends were rejecting their religious upbringing, and I found myself ahead of the game since I didn’t have a religion to reject. But still I was searching for something, as were so many others of my generation. The meaning of life perhaps, or the secrets of the cosmos. At any rate, I gradually began to look for answers in diverse spiritual books and teachers, not really wanting a guru or one answer, but rather a tapestry of truths that resonated with me.

My search for meaning was partially driven by a deep-seated fear of eternity/infinity, which I had carried within me since childhood, possibly because I had no superimposed God image to block the fear. The void, or an endless universe in which “the world went on forever and ever,” was very real to me. Eternal life and eternal death seemed equally frightening. Still, in spite of this, I was a happy child for the most part, nurtured and supported both by my parents’ unconditional love and by the natural world outside our rural home. It was only at night that my fears about the infinite universe arose.

These night fears continued throughout adulthood, even after I came to believe in Spirit, or a greater sacred presence in the universe. After many years of spiritual exploration and growth, it was in an individual session with Panache Desai that I had my first tangible experience of infinity as an expanse that was both peaceful and comforting (see previous blog post “Infinity). Months later, during Panache’s webcast series “Mother, Father, God,” I faced my long-ago religionless past. As he instructed listeners to embrace the image of God they had grown up with, until it disappeared and became one with them, I felt disconnected, alone, different, stuck in my Godless childhood. But when he said, “The Divine in essence is formless and nameless and is in fact love,” I suddenly realized that I was already at “disappeared,” and God/Spirit had always been a part of my life, as love. I felt old fears dissolving as I also realized that I had never really been alone. God, or the Divine, was always there, at my very core.

Looking back, I see how what seemed my greatest challenge as a child was in fact my greatest blessing. What I experienced then, through my parents, through nature, and within my own heart, was Divine love in its purest form, undiluted by human concepts of an external God. Now, in my present life, as I continue to have extraordinary experiences of Spirit and infinity, I am so very grateful for my parents’ openhearted love and wisdom which allowed me to follow my own path when it came to matters of the spirit.

“Look in your heart for God, for truth, for the answer. Feel that heart space—that is where you and infinity can meet, because your heart is not limited, but ever expansive.”—Panache Desai

 

It Had to Be You

A major realization for me in recent months is that no one else could have been me, and my life could have been no other way. Everything has brought me to where I stand and who I am today: a unique human be-ing and a member of a global family upon this Earth. Each of us alive at this time on the planet came here for a specific reason—we chose to be present at a Great Shift in human consciousness and to play our part. And that part is not to try to copy or pattern ourselves after someone else, some courageous or visionary person whom we might admire. We came here to be ourselves, our extraordinary, unrepeatable selves. Therein lies the miracle.

Just like snowflakes, no two of us are alike, and together we form a whole that embodies the light of each single individual. Through living fully in self-love and a deep sense of oneness with all beings, we shine radiance throughout the universe. Each of our lives is a work of art, co-created with Spirit and infused with infinite expansive energy and possibility. Together, individual by individual, we are helping to birth a new way of being on Planet Earth, one centered in love and compassion. It is through loving and embracing our own inner soul-self that this universal love grows and expands.

In truth, we can’t be anyone else but ourselves. We are different in gender, sexual identity, age, race, ethnicity, physical appearance, cultural heritage, etc., and it doesn’t work to copy someone else’s idea of who you are or should be. We were created differently for a reason; no one else can be or do what we came here to be and do. It may be a line from an old romantic love song, but it also applies in this case: “It had to be you.” Without you, the world would have been different, just as George discovers in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life. Every word you or I speak, every action you or I take or don’t take, ripples out from our lives to affect everyone we know, and by continuing vibration, everyone they know as well. The world is a web of vibrational interconnections, and the wonder of that is that by living our lives fully and lovingly, we help to create an entire planet of love and lightness of being. This is what the Great Shift means. Be your true self, and the world shifts into its true self.

 

Second Chances

During my individual session with Panache Desai in July (see blog post “Rainbow Child”), he played music by Deva Premal and Miten that really helped me flow with my inner journey. One song that had particular meaning for me was “Second Chance.” Because I was integrating all parts of my life—the young, outspoken radical lesbian-feminist as well as the older, softer, eclectically-spiritual woman—I found the idea of a second chance extremely appealing. It was a second chance to be fully human, standing in the infinite expansiveness of who I am and loving every bit of it.

It occurs to me now as I think of it that this is where we all are headed during this time of planetary transformation—toward the realization that we are everyone and everything, as well as our unique individual selves. Oneness means that there is no “other.” And this is our “second chance” on Planet Earth to understand that cosmic truth. Legend has it that ancient Atlantis came to an untimely end because the people failed to uphold the higher spiritual laws of oneness. We are at a similar choice point now. That second chance is fully here in our lives every moment of every day, in every breath that we take. Are you looking at your neighbor and seeing your own reflection? Are you looking in the mirror and loving yourself? Is your heart embracing all that you see as part of you? That is unity consciousness. That is why we all incarnated at this time: to look in one another’s eyes and love all that we see, similarities and differences.

Global peace, universal compassion, and loving-kindness are not just pipe dreams articulated by a few Buddhists, shamans, and latter-day flower children. Every human being has the opportunity to live out the potential of this magnificent blue planet full of infinite variations in consciousness. And those moments of living awareness of oneness are available to all of us. The media likes to report violence and catastrophe, entrapping us in fear. Don’t allow yourself to live in that place. Yes, terrible, painful events occur, but other more hopeful realities exist too; they just aren’t reported in the mainstream.

Ultimately, it is love that will energetically shift everything: people reaching out and caring for one another in spite of the dominant social matrix based on separation. And that caring is occurring now, more and more, all around the globe. Individuals of different races, ethnicities, ages, and sexual identities are finding common ground and choosing kindness instead of fear. The new generations are of such mixed heritage and cultural background that they often don’t identify with any one thread but instead embrace it all. Many think in terms of both/and instead of either/or—straight, gay; feminine, masculine; spiritual, political; thinking, feeling—they sense an inclusive world beyond polarity. Look into their eyes and see the future. They are living I AM consciousness, oneness that encompasses all. When we finally realize with every fiber of our beings that we each embody all parts of humanity, prejudice and hatred will cease to exist, and love will be the planet’s guiding force.

 

Rainbow Child

In my last blog post, I wrote about reliving my physical birth during a meditation in Panache Desai’s “Awakening Your Authentic Soul Signature” at Omega. My other “birth” that week occurred during an individual breakthrough session, separate from the rest of the program. At least I thought it was separate, but with Panache, all separation has a tendency to dissolve. This was my second breakthrough session with him (see previous blog post “Infinity” for a description of my first session in Costa Rica). I felt that I still had some blocks that I wanted help with releasing. Well, my mind’s idea of why I was there didn’t align with Panache’s perception of why I was there.

First, I should say that Panache sees people energetically. He sees their infinite potential and sees where there are blocks to that potential. And he pulls no punches in telling you what he sees. After a few minutes of addressing the issue I presented to him, he said, “When are you going to come out to yourself?” My background, which he knows, is that I have been out in the world as a lesbian for many years (35) and have been with my partner for 29 years. I came out within the feminist movement of the 1970s and have marched in the streets for women’s and gay rights in the years since then. So I wasn’t buying this comment from him; I thought, “What does he know about being a lesbian? He’s a straight man.” Still, I remembered that he had more than once said that lesbians and gay men are some of the most courageous people on the planet because they are living their truth. So, my resistance gradually faded, and our hour together became a mutually expansive dialogue and an extraordinary emotional inner journey for me. His perception was that I had come out to the world, but part of me had not integrated it on an emotional level (this is what he saw energetically).

And damn if he wasn’t right. Looking back, I realized that my decision to come out in the 1970s had been a political one (deliberately choosing equal relationships without male/female roles). I chose with my head, and only partially my heart. In the course of the hour, I moved through memories of coming out (the disapproval and hatred as well as the acceptance and love) and also came face to face with my own judgments about bisexuality and heterosexuality (betrayal of your sisters), which I had formed at that time in my life. I thought I had moved to a more accepting, inclusive mindset, but surprisingly, I had old opinions stuck inside me. Through tears, laughter, and vibrational transformation (I was shaking all over), I released old judgments and separations and stepped into my own soul signature truth: “I am all of the labels, and I am none of the labels. I am a whole energy-being of light. I am divine consciousness expressing itself as a lesbian.” And Panache was right there, experiencing it with me (crying too). He was instigator and participant (getting in touch with his “inner lesbian”), as well as trusted friend. A completely integrated rainbow lesbian birth after all these years—who knew?!

The other part of the story is that I decided to share my breakthrough experience in the larger group of more than 60 people, and other individuals also spoke of separations/fears/judgments about sexual identity and roles that they carried within them. It became an ongoing part of our evolution during the week. On the last morning of the program, Panache had us all, as one soul family (himself included), repeat out loud together, over and over: “I am a lesbian. I am gay. I am bisexual. I am straight.” Very powerful and very healing. Our soul selves are indeed all of those labels and none of them—that’s oneness. Some of us have come into this life to stand in the truth of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender—identities that expand the wider experience of what it means to be human on Planet Earth. Sometimes that’s terribly challenging or frightening. Other times, as we all evolve into a greater love, it feels like the greatest blessing in the world.

“That which you’ve gone through in your life has served to bring you into the fullness of who you are here to be for yourself, for your friends, for your families, and for an entire planet.”—Panache Desai