Tag: awareness

Neutrality and Inner Peace

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
The word neutral can be used in many contexts. Beige is a neutral color. A car in neutral is not moving. Switzerland was a neutral country during two world wars. In the dictionary, the first definition of neutral is “impartial.” If we give the word a spiritual application, we could say that the soul is neutral. In other words, it is impartial. It is just quietly witnessing life as it unfolds. While the personality or ego may react strongly to people or situations, the soul just observes it all without attachment to any particular outcome. The soul experiences life through us, but it does not have opinions about anything that transpires.

The soul abides in neutrality. It is not at war with our experiences. If you allow your soul to move to the forefront of your being, you can be at peace with everything within and around you. You can accept all emotions and events with equal receptivity. You will not be thrown by circumstance, and you will refrain from labeling things as positive or negative. Inner peace arises from neutrality, impartiality—from soul connection.

Which doesn’t mean that your humanness is permanently disabled or on hold. It just means you have cultivated a connection to your soul that creates awareness. That greater awareness gives us pause, literally. You may be upset by something, then immediately become aware of your reaction, and take a moment to breathe and center yourself in acceptance, neutrality. Accepting your feelings too. It may take longer than that for awareness to resurface, but the more we connect with our souls on a regular basis, the more we become immersed in inner peace, no matter what else is going on.

Connecting regularly to the soul is a practice. It can be meditation or walking in nature or just becoming aware of your breath during the day. The soul, the spirit in all things, is always patiently waiting for us to connect. A quiet moment, a deep breath, a stunning sunset, and you are connected—soul-centered and aware. Calm, receptive, neutral. At least that is my own experience. I find that the more frequently and consistently I do one or all of these things, the more aware I am—and the more peaceful.

In recent weeks, as I’ve dealt with ongoing uncertainty about an eye diagnosis, I have repeatedly been drawn to silence and inner reflection, which allows my soul to surface and soothe my humanity with its expansive awareness. Life is constantly changing, never just one thing—simple or complicated, easy or difficult, comic or tragic. It is all of these, and in embracing all of them, we can flow with whatever arises, day by day, moment to moment.

When I see my life as part of something much larger, a soul within infinite beingness, always evolving and expanding, then I am better able to relax into neutrality. Human concerns are real but they are also illusory within a greater context. We are infinitesimal cells of a living consciousness that spans universes. There is a Great Mystery before which we will always remain unknowing. If we open ourselves to soul awareness, that unknowing will not faze us, for we will be grounded in an inner peace that transcends understanding. God too abides in peaceful neutrality.

Tears as Blessings

Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
Adults often reprimand children when they cry (especially boys), believing that tears make them weak or too vulnerable. Children carry that judgment into their adult lives, but it is just not true. On the contrary, vulnerability is one of our greatest human assets. It connects us to others through the heart, and crying opens everyone’s heart, including our own. It is truly a blessing. The time has come for all of us—adults, children; men, women—to recognize this and give one another support and encouragement for showing our emotions openly through our tears.

Tears can express not only sadness or grief but also a profound emotional response to music, poetry, or an inspiring speaker. We can be moved by spring flowers and birdsong or the memory of a shared experience with a loved one. Almost anything can bring tears to our eyes, including empathy with someone else’s pain, sorrow, or good fortune. And that is where our humanity serves us best, in showing compassion for and connection with others’ life journeys. We can only do that if we have allowed ourselves to fully experience our emotions about whatever shows up in our own lives. If I can feel everything to the fullest extent in my life, including both pain and joy, then my heart can openly recognize your experience as not unlike my own. I becomes we. That is oneness.

When I was given a rather scary eye diagnosis recently, it was the compassion and caring of friends and family that made all the difference. So many people reached out to me to show me that I was not alone, that they too knew what I was going through, whether or not they had experienced the exact same thing or not. Because of these loving connections, I was able to open to my own sorrow and fear and then find some equilibrium in the midst of all the ups and downs of different diagnoses and future unknowns. As this particular journey continues, I am still held in that space of sweet empathy and friendship, and I continue to learn at deeper and deeper levels about how key crying is in my life.

Just in the past couple of weeks, I have come to realize how much we hold back our tears, not only because of the social prohibition against crying but also because of the magnitude of the grief we carry within us for all of humanity’s suffering. A friend shared with me her own experience of noticing tension behind her eyes when she attempts to hold back her tears and not feel something. As we talked, we both came to better understand how profoundly we had been affected by trying to live love in a world that does not value love and in fact acts in opposition to it. I was suddenly aware of the dramatic connection between my eye situation and an unconscious effort to hold back tears arising from a deep level of sadness within.

I am someone who cries easily (thanks to my parents’ loving emotional openness), yet there were still unshed tears inside me, which I finally traced back to my 6-year-old child self: a sensitive, shy little girl afraid to go to school in the daytime, afraid of eternity at night, and recurrently sick with asthma, flu, and various childhood ailments. When I let go into crying for/as this child, it opened the door to a more universal grief that I believe applies to every child on the planet: that of not being able to fully live the open loving soul selves we are born as. From Day 1, we are presented with a world full of pain and suffering within which we are supposed to function in prescribed ways. In addition, we are expected to accept certain global insanities such as war and hatred as inevitable and not react to them. Enough to drive any child’s tears deep underground!

As a young woman, I experienced several years of serious depression about the state of the world. In engaging with various social/political causes and, later, through expansive spiritual connection, I found a way to cope with it all. Yet, here I stand now, at a crossroads of awareness, knowing that this eye crisis is providing me with the opportunity to integrate everything at a new level and courageously move forward as the authentic soul self I was born to be. My friend and teacher Panache Desai has told me to let it “work its alchemy,” and I am doing so. I know with everything in me that, in all our vastly divergent individual lives, this is where we all are. We are here to cry the tears that allow our past long-suffering “adjusted” selves to dissolve and our true soul selves to emerge clear and clean as the day we were born. And is that not the blessing of a lifetime?

 

This Moment

Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger

Life experiences involving loss, pain, or fear, which we all encounter at one time or another, may throw us off kilter at first. We are often so attached to a particular static version of reality that we cannot accept change of any kind. But if we remain open to the totality of what is before us, we can access a greater wisdom: Life is both fleeting and eternal. We can see this seeming dichotomy with more clarity in times of difficulty or challenge. The tenuousness of life hits us full force. We realize that all we ever really have is this moment, but it contains all of eternity within it. With that awareness, we can appreciate every single second as if it were our first or our last. We can “hold Infinity in the palm of [our] hand, and Eternity in an hour,” as William Blake has so eloquently written.

The uncertain health diagnosis about my eyes that I’ve been living with over the last weeks has placed this wisdom front and center in my life. If I race forward in my mind with what-if scenarios or retreat backward into fear and regret, I have lost the moment that is right in front of me now. No matter what events are transpiring, this moment before me contains all of life. All of it, both extraordinary beauty and acute loss. When I can hold both of those parts within me in a complete embrace of acceptance, I am at peace. If I can witness my life as it unfolds, without judgment or expectation, fully grounded in the present moment, I am free.

It is not always easy, and I am not always calm and centered, but an ongoing practice in stillness and conscious awareness has helped me tremendously. As I sit in silence, breathing slowly and deeply, I open to an expansive awareness that is observing and experiencing the world through me. This awareness at the soul level is completely neutral, peaceful, and unlimited. It is pure spirit, pure love, in the largest sense of those words. Within that space, there is no struggle. Everything is just as it is, in perfectly orchestrated symmetry. Peace of mind, peace of heart and soul.

As I have faced the fragility of my own body and my own life, I have come to an ever-greater appreciation of each moment. I have surrendered again and again to uncertainty and shifting sands. It’s truly a never-ending practice, letting go into not knowing anything, into living each moment fresh and innocent of opinion. Adyashanti calls this “falling into grace.” And grace can be gentle or cutting; it will open your heart in whatever way it can. For with an open heart, we live in gratitude. We live in love, not fear. And that is why we are here on this beautiful blue planet, in this infinite universe.

My journey is not complete, nor will it be complete, ever. I continue to open my heart (and have it opened for me) in gratitude, embracing more with each breath, with every experience. In this moment—the fleeting and eternal now—I am grateful for all the blessings that fill my days: Light and darkness, sadness and joy, silence and sound, movement and rest. The flow of giving and receiving all that life so generously offers us. When I allow myself to stand naked and awestruck, freed of assumptions, before the vast universe, realizing my cells are intermingled with the stardust from distant galaxies, I clearly see and feel the oneness of which we are all a part. A oneness encapsulated in every single grace-filled moment.

 

Surrender the Outcome

Photography © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photography © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
In the last month or so, I’ve been coming face to face with issues related to my physical body–specifically an eye diagnosis and more frequent migraine headaches. Since I am simultaneously participating in a yearlong accelerated program with Panache Desai, I’ve learned to look closely at everything I experience as part of that acceleration: What part of my soul’s journey is now being highlighted? I sometimes ask “Why?” too, but that question can be a distraction if it arises from fear or a sense of unfairness. What’s happening is happening; if I can accept and embrace it, the experience becomes fully integrated into my life.

So what about uncertain health diagnoses or physical pain? That is what is before me now. As humans, we resist this experience. I certainly have. So perhaps that is why it’s accelerating. Until I can fully accept all aspects of my physicality as part of my life experience, I will continue to suffer on some level. My human mind wants perfect health with no pain, so every time I am faced with something short of that mental construct, I resist what I am experiencing. The outcome that I hold tightly to is preventing me from flowing with my actual experience. The more I resist, the stronger the pain or unease.

It’s about surrender again, at a deeper level. I am being guided to release attachment to any outcome whatsoever. Perhaps even to reality itself. I’ve watched my eye diagnosis shape-shift over the past month or so, depending on which doctors I saw and which test they were looking at. Perhaps this particular health scenario is an encapsulated version of all of life. What we view as reality is always changing. Ultimately, everything is a continuously shifting illusion that we create in our minds (individually and collectively) to experience life as it passes before us. More simply: life happens; we then assign meaning to it, spinning the illusion of reality out of thin air. If we assign negative meaning, we are unhappy. If we assign positive meaning, we are pleased. But if we just observe life from a place of spacious awareness, allowing it to be a divinely orchestrated mystery, then we experience inner liberation.

There is a profound freedom in no longer being tied to specific outcomes or ways of seeing the world. In doing so, we are entering the realm of the soul, the god consciousness that lives within. Our souls have no opinions or agenda. They are just witnessing life peacefully, here solely for the experience of it and their own evolution. When I open to my soul’s full emergence, my mind steps into the background and releases the reins of control. I am no longer mentally committed to any particular version of reality; I’m just “along for the ride.” I begin to flow with life.

Not the easiest path to access, especially when facing health issues, as I am. The external world continually pulls me in the opposite direction. Still, when I take time to connect to my own inner peace, I am less tightly tied to outcome. I feel lighter, freer, more open to all possibilities. Many of us are facing crossroads like this in life. I believe that is one reason we are here on this planet at this particular time: to finally let go of the mind’s centuries-long control and allow the soul to be the divining rod of our earthly lives. To release the illusion of certainty and embrace an ever-evolving mystery. May we all find our way home to that very wise, soulful part of ourselves.

 

We Are Infinity

Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
“You are here to demonstrate what infinity looks like.”—Panache Desai

I have carried a fear of infinity within me my entire life. Fear isn’t even the most accurate description. It was mind-freezing terror that kept me awake at night as a five-year-old child, imagining a universe that went on “forever and ever.” Religion can sometimes provide comfort to those fearing death, but I was not raised within that structure, and actually, death was not exactly the issue. As I grew up, the “answers” of traditional religion (eternal life) and atheism (eternal nonbeing) were equally frightening to me because they were both eternal. Yes, of course, death was scary, but it was what came after death that was terrifying to me. Eternity. Infinity.

I learned to distract myself from the fear as I grew older, but it never really disappeared. It just lurked in the background, making an appearance at unpredictable times, like when I took an astronomy class in college (which gave me actual visuals of infinity!). Sometime prehistory could set it off too. No one I knew quite understood what I was talking about, so I felt very alone with this extreme awareness of eternity and the accompanying extreme fear. I carried it inside me like an unwelcome guest. Many years later, when I was in my 40s and embarking on a spiritual path, I would ask various teachers about it but never received guidance that was particularly helpful. They too looked at me with lack of understanding. That is, until I met Panache Desai.

Panache, who has been my teacher and friend for several years now, has the uncanny ability to feel what others are feeling, from the inside. He never questioned my fear or its hold on me. In my first individual session with him, he just took me to infinity—a place of utter peace and divine tranquility. Thus began a timeless journey to embrace something I had held at bay all my life. It has been a gradual process: a letting go or surrender to a power much greater than the mental fear in which I had been trapped.

My first epiphany, after turning around to face what I had run from for so long, was that it was my mind that was terrified. My soul has no fear of infinity, because it is infinity. What a realization that was! Actually, it was Panache’s teachings about infinity and divinity as one and the same that helped me realize this. Through my work with him as well as my own experiences, I came to see the Infinite and the Divine in all things everywhere, in the world as well as within myself—my core essence or soul. My conscious awareness that “everything is God” has deepened and expanded, especially this past year when I took part in a yearlong acceleration program with him. That program culminated in a transformative weekend event, Global Gathering 2015 (see my last blog article, “Soul Reunion”).

At GG15, any remaining distinction between infinity and divinity that my brain held onto was washed away in a wave of divine energy that carried the codes for awakening and embodiment of spirit within it. As the energy coursed through my physical body (transmitted vibrationally via Panache in sessions), every separation fell away, every fear fell away. All that existed was beingness, oneness. I was simultaneously empty and filled. The transmission was so powerful that there was a paradigm shift within me: my soul took the lead, and my mind stepped into a support role. What I had been moving toward for years came into full presence in a nanosecond. Afterward, I could barely speak coherently, let alone write, but gradually I was able to articulate the essence of what I had experienced: I am infinite. I am divine. Infinity is divinity. On this rapidly evolving planet of ours, we are now beginning to fully and fearlessly live the truth of that. We are human beings with infinite souls. We are infinity.