Tag: awareness

Walk Through the Doorway

When I’ve experienced any kind of physical pain or emotional unease in my life, something in me often clinched and shut down as I tried to control it, make it disappear. But what if acceptance and letting go of control is the only way to the other side? Maybe all we’ve been taught about physicality and the human form is upside-down. What if hanging on tightly to how we think it’s supposed to be is opposed to allowing life to unfold? And what if acceptance is the doorway to surrender, and surrender the doorway to feeling less pain as I become aware of my soul’s design?

My inner spirit, or soul, knows my life’s design better than my “I” identity, constructed over the years for survival. Ultimately life is not about surviving; it’s about letting go into something greater than your physical form and individual life. Before you are born and after you die, you know this. In between, your soul guides you to deeper and deeper awareness about the nature of life and your journey within your lifetime, and beyond. Everything that happens is part of your soul design. Nothing is wrong and needs to be erased or eradicated. When I fully accept this, surrendering to it without attachment to any particular outcome, I consciously become part of a flow. Life carries me instead of my trying to force it in a certain direction.

Gradually, in letting go, I relax and allow myself to be one with my soul, accepting what seems hard as part of life, part of oneness. This shift occurs when I see difficulty as a doorway and not prison bars. As long as I try to control (and stop) it, it tightens and hangs on. When I surrender to it as my soul’s path in this lifetime, a subtle shift occurs at the heart level. My experience of it is lighter, easier, and I can sometimes feel the presence of a loving beingness beyond and also encompassing my body. 

A few years ago, I lived through a diagnosis of and treatment for breast cancer. Emotional and physical pain arose, but when I allowed myself to cry and feel the fear, it began to release. I came to realize that this was part of my soul’s journey and I was being given a gift of profound connection to Spirit. That perspective helped me through the whole process, not without occasional discomfort, but with trust, inner peace, and tremendous gratitude for a growing awareness of myself as eternal spirit in a temporary human form. Acceptance had been the doorway to experiencing this.

My soul’s journey continues, and each day I am learning more and more to welcome whatever arises as part of my life’s design. I remind myself that everything is Spirit, and infinite wisdom may be hidden in the smallest details. My heart’s doorway opens wider all the time…until accepting becomes so deep that eventually every door falls away and there is only unbroken peaceful Presence. 

Where You’re Meant to Be

Do you sometimes wonder if you’ve made a mistake in your life, ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time? Many of us believe human beings have complete control over our comings and goings on this planet and deduce that the world is a “mess” because of all the errors that have been made. But what if it’s all divinely orchestrated at the soul level, and you’ve never made a mistake? What if the seeming chaos we see is part of birth pains and evolving consciousness?

Life on Earth today challenges us to remain balanced in the midst of ongoing political conflict and instability. In our daily lives, we may be concerned about affordable health care, housing, and job security. Some people long to move to another country, where life might be safer, more stable. I sometimes find myself wanting to live my life as it once was, when things seemed less frightening, the future more optimistic. But perhaps that view of the past is an illusion and in fact there have always been both crises and gifts in living a human life no matter where or when you live. Besides, you can’t live yesterday; you can only live today, where you are now.

The deeper truth could be that you are exactly where you’re meant to be. With the people you are meant to be with. Doing what you are meant to do. There is an invisible thread of soul guidance woven throughout your life, in both the calamities and celebrations. Your mind thinks it is in control, making decisions, choices, every day. Your soul knows better. It sat down with Spirit before you were born to create the overview of your life. The details arise synchronistically as you live year to year, and your soul eventually emerges from behind the curtain and smiles at you. And you smile back.

When I came to awareness of this divine flow in my life, peace arose. I realized that I didn’t have to worry so much or try so hard to make everything “perfect.” Whatever happened was an integral part of the pre-birth plan. There was nothing occurring that wasn’t designed as a segment of my soul’s magical mystery tour on Planet Earth. No mistakes. The peace that is at my soul’s core guides my entire life. Wow. And my soul is always present within, speaking to me wordlessly, through my own heart and inner consciousness.

I believe this is true for everyone, no matter what dramas are taking place, inside and outside. What if the entire planet is evolving to eventual collective peace, compassion, and kindness? What if we are all playing our assigned soul parts perfectly? Poetry and music come to life within upheaval and confusion. Individual colored lights moving in synchronicity to create a kaleidoscope of loving awareness in the cosmos. Together, we are living Presence, embodied Spirit—exactly where we’re meant to be. 

On the Other Side of Identity

After I completed treatment for breast cancer three years ago, I went through several months of transitioning back to daily life without doctors’ appointments, tests, or procedures. Relief and gratitude came first, along with deepening trust in my soul’s journey as it unfolded. But then, unexpectedly I also felt a wave of sadness and apprehension about “what’s next?” I was a survivor (yay!), but I wasn’t even certain what that meant. As the days and months passed, I experienced an odd mixture of profound appreciation for life along with wondering if I had lost some of my life-force energy. I found myself not as interested in many familiar, but busy, activities. The one thing that continued to deeply engage my heart and soul was Nature. Walking among the trees, bird-watching, gazing up at the ever-changing colors of the sky and clouds. I guess I would say I was most drawn to being rather than doing. 

In some ways, it was not that different from how I had lived life previously; yet there was a certain “emptiness” to it that made me wonder: Had my core essence died with the cancer cells during chemo and radiation? I puzzled over this off and on for some time. Then I remembered a moment of spiritual transformation that occurred during my treatment process: the loss of identity! My identity—eclectic pieces collected over a lifetime (flower child, feminist, spiritual seeker, etc.)—fell away with the hair on my head and the physical appearance I was used to. When I looked at my body, I saw a temporary home for my spirit, or soul, which is in fact eternal. And the soul peacefully observed my life and identity with neutrality.*

Looking back at those life-changing moments of complete soul awareness, I realized that I was now living my life in an entirely different way. My identity was no longer filtering everything; it had faded to the background. What I thought was emptiness or loss was the vast beingness of spirit resting in my heart and soul. I was the observer, or witness, so often referred to in meditation teachings. An almost indescribable feeling: To be in a form but to feel formless, unattached, much of the time.

Our human minds tell us this world is real; our souls see it as a passing illusion, one we come here to experience and then finally break free of when we die—or sometimes beforehand, so that we can live freely, peacefully, as soul while still “alive.” The identity is the costume you wear on Earth; it dissolves at death or perhaps, unexpectedly, during a health crisis or other life-shattering experience. It may take time for you to feel fully at home with just a shadow of identity left; that was true for me. Patience and acceptance are part of the process.

When the identity falls to the wayside, your consciousness enters a different dimension. You realize that human inventions, personalities, and events come and go in the material world. Beyond all those transient illusions is something greater: a Light of Awareness that births all of life. This light is experienced most clearly in Nature, and that is why individuals often feel deeply connected and aware when they walk among the trees and flowers, listening to birdsong. In truth, it is everywhere.

When you look up at the stars sparkling in the infinite cosmos, there may come a moment when you feel one with all you see. If you have lost a loved one or your own sense of “self,” the vastness of the universe still holds you in its loving awareness. More and more now, I understand that that awareness is my soul’s home—on the other side of identity. 
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*See also the chapters “Shedding” and “Body and Soul” in my book Breast Cancer and Beyond: An Unexpected Soul Path: https://amzn.to/4aka0eu.

The Eyes of Infinity

On a few occasions in my life, I have experienced a shift in vision that allowed me to view the entire universe moving as one, every single detail connected to the whole in a symphony of synchronicity. The clouds, the cars, the leaves, the birds, the people walking by, all danced together, and I too was a part of the dance. It was extraordinary, breath-taking, life-changing. And that infinite vision has remained inside me ever since. Sometimes I wish I could evoke it consciously in my outer experience. Lately it has occurred to me that perhaps those moments arise from open-hearted soul awareness.

In the past, it felt like divine intervention, a magic wand waved—yet if God is everywhere and everything, then s/he is within my own consciousness, my own soul, continuously waving wands. The more consciously aware I am of this, the more I experience the world around me as magic, as wonder. When I remind myself that the sounds of noisy leaf-blowers and melodious crickets arise from the same Source and the golden sunrise and the evening shadows are reflections of one another, then I too become one with what I see and hear.

I was born with the Eyes of Infinity. You were too. This ever-changing and ever-constant vision includes the living breathing Earth and the cosmos that cradles it. What I see and what I don’t. No separation. When my heart opens wide enough to allow this ultimate oneness, then the music of the spheres takes physical form and dances all around me. The entire universe waltzes and rocks and break-dances. I feel the movement inside me and as far as my eyes can see and my ears can hear.

That happened to me before when fear about a health diagnosis cracked my habitual ways of experiencing life wide open, and I saw God dancing in the world before me. Today I felt all of it again as I looked skyward and consciously opened to that vision. You don’t have to wait for miracles. Actually, there are nothing but miracles all around you if you look and listen with the Eyes and Ears of Infinity. You are always in conversation with God!

This is what I’m learning, what I am being shown every day now as I lovingly choose the awareness arising from my soul. Beyond inner and outer, future and past, life and death; beyond every polarity ever invented to explain this world. When you and I open our eyes and hearts simultaneously, when we center ourselves in soul awareness, this is what we experience—infinitely.

My Parents’ Voices

Spirit lives everywhere, beyond time and space, life and death. It lives in present-moment awareness and in memory. It lives in the voices of loved ones who may no longer be living, reaching out and touching our hearts across the years. Every time it snows, for instance, I hear my mother reciting the first lines of James Russell Lowell’s poem, “The First Snowfall,” as she did at every new snowfall throughout my childhood: “The snow had begun in the gloaming,/And busily all the night/Had been heaping field and highway/With a silence deep and white.”

She was with me early yesterday morning as the snow fell in its silent beauty. With such simplicity, she taught me to love both Nature and poetry. And an added surprising gift: when I looked up James Russell Lowell online, I found that he is buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, my favorite spiritual/nature sanctuary in nearby Cambridge. The threads of Spirit were woven from my Illinois childhood to the magical hours I have spent walking through Mt. Auburn in quiet wonder among the trees, listening to birdsong.

I also have a vivid memory of my dad in later years sitting in his armchair and reciting these lines from William Blake, his voice breaking with emotion: “To see the World in a grain of sand,/And a Heaven in a wildflower,/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/And Eternity in an hour.” Those few deeply poignant lines embody for me all of life. And it was my father who first shared them with me, moved to tears by their beauty (as I am now). My parents are both with me, vivid and alive in these treasured poems and the accompanying memories of their voices and their presence.

Thus are we moved through our lives, touched by moments of connection with those we love and who love us. Touched by the natural world around us in all its magnificence. And spirit lives within each of those moments. It carries us forward through loss and pain, even when we feel most lost and alone. Suddenly the sun falls on your face as you walk in shadow, or a friend makes you smile in spite of sadness. Life is all of this. Spirit lives in your tears and your laughter. In each moment we hold it all within us, the memory and the vision before us now.

When we remind ourselves to keep our hearts open, it all flows seamlessly as one beautiful unfolding. I have not lost anything or anyone; it all lives in the spirit of life of which I am a part. A remembered voice or shared moment is a tap on the shoulder by Spirit so that we do not lose our way, and we realize fully how much a part of the universal intricately woven tapestry we are. Nothing and no one is lost. We live in the eternal “I Am.” Infinite consciousness forever expanding and filling our lives with spirit.