Tag: love

Opening to Love

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger

Sometimes a seeming crisis, like my recent eye diagnosis, can be an unanticipated catalyst for profound inner change and deeper awareness. In the last few weeks, I have written about losing my self and emptying out the past. In the process, nothing was really lost. It was more like opening to Spirit, or the Divine—to my soul’s source within universal consciousness, which is love itself. When people speak of these things, it can sound vague and inaccessible. That does not have to be the case. In fact, I believe it is not only accessible to everyone, it is our human destiny to live in conscious awareness of our spiritual connection. It’s why we’re here, at this time, on this planet. No accident. And we are walking in the footsteps of those spiritual masters before us who are showing us the way.

I found that the more I emptied out, the greater the feeling of expansive inner openness. And within that vast space a question spontaneously emerged: “How may I be of service to others in the world, how may I live love in each moment?” I was asking to live for something beyond my own personal gratification or fulfillment. Or, as St. Francis expressed it, “Make me an instrument of peace.” I knew that on the deepest level I was inviting the Divine into my heart and soul. And when you do this, the Divine shows you that it has always been there. The heart of the Divine is my heart, your heart. The soul of the Divine is the universal soul of humankind.

I felt this divine connection sweep over me in waves, igniting my entire physical body. I walked to my computer, sat down, and began to write. The words came faster than my fingers could type them. I wrote nonstop for hours, from my heart and soul, connected to the energy of love, which was orchestrating everything. This was the answer to my question, at least in part: writing what came through me to be shared. I had sensed that before, but now I knew it at a deeper level of soul purpose. Each of us has such a purpose in our lives, a unique way to share our heart’s love with others. One by one, we are being guided to that knowledge.

What I discovered was that when I surrender the illusion of control, my life begins to live itself in perfect alignment with my soul’s purpose for being on this Earth. When I ask for guidance, it arises magically from within me and around me. I live what appears before me to live in each moment, arising seamlessly from connection to Spirit. I let go in the deepest part of my being, knowing that I am here to live not for me as a single personality or ego, but for me as one soul among millions, one thread within a universal living tapestry of light.

This is the shift in consciousness that humans are experiencing at this time. We are gradually becoming attuned to something greater inside us, beyond definition or explanation. Every day now, I ask to be emptied and filled, again and again: “May love and compassion flow through me.” In aligning with that Presence that is the source of everything in this world, I know I am not alone; I am many: the “I” that is “you,” that is “we,” that is all of us, individually and collectively. As each of us clears out the old stories and opens to the dynamic energy of soul connection, our hearts will overflow with joy, gratitude, and a limitless love that will radiate outward to all hearts everywhere.

 

Beyond the Threshold

Photograph © 2011 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2011 Peggy Kornegger
I have ridden a roller coaster of emotion in the last two months as I experienced the physical reality of an eye condition and the spiritual reality of its deeper alchemical meaning in my life. Panache Desai calls these dramatic moments “thresholds,” which bring us the opportunity to move more deeply into alignment with who we are at the soul level. Everything old that no longer fits with our authentic soul identity begins to dissolve or fall away. And that falling away can be so powerful that it sweeps you clean.

In essence, as I lived through these months, I have been losing the last residues of a past self. The protective self, who relied on hesitation, holding back, and escape routes to keep from being swallowed whole by the world. The self who wanted to be on perpetual retreat, far away from the madness, noise, and violence of a planet split by polarity and separation. Even though one part of me embraced life whole-heartedly, another part of me was frightened of seeing too much, feeling too much, and being overwhelmed by grief. This self arises from the planetary collective consciousness dominated by human suffering. We all have that self, and we all struggle to live with it somehow. I found that it was possible to let go into something beyond that.

As I faced fear, pain, and sadness and released a lifetime of holding back tears (in spite of being an active crier), I at last began to feel empty. My grief, both personal and empathically picked up from others, had moved through me. The self I had created to survive in the world had dissolved. It was as if nothing was left inside me but pure life energy. I was emptied of everything except soul, except spirit. What I was born as. What we are all born as. The abundance, love, and joy that is at the heart of all creation. This is what I felt coursing through my being. This is what I felt connected to all around me. It was everywhere and always had been.

My life has brought me to this point—my entire life, just as it was/is. Yes, the sadness and pain, but also the love and deep human connection; the diverse and wondrous experiences. Yet now it is time to shed the skin of the past and live fully in the new present that is evolving on this planet. I am setting aside whatever I have lived before with gratitude, and I am stepping into the lightness of being both one and One. In our unique individual one-ness, we are also connected to a greater Oneness that encompasses us all. I am we. I am universal consciousness expressing as Peggy. We are universal consciousness expressing as planet Earth. And it is all One. Universal consciousness expressing as universal consciousness everywhere simultaneously.

Moving forward, I am more and more aware of this greater consciousness of which I am a part. At the same time, I am very profoundly here. I am grounded in my life, but I am more than my life, as are we all. On this radically shifting planet of ours, we are each stepping over the threshold of our individual lives, our past realities, and embracing something so much bigger than we ever dreamed possible. In truth—divine universal truth—you are greater than the smallness you have always been told you are. You didn’t come to Earth to be oppressed or hated or made to suffer. We all came here to be magnificent and to celebrate one another’s magnificence. We were “born that way”—magnificent—and we are claiming our birthright. Now. It is time to live our souls full out…and never look back.

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?

 

The Unexpected

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Crises or challenges enter our lives unannounced, sometimes in the midst of great happiness or peaceful contentment. A relative dies, a life partner loses a job, or you yourself receive a frightening health diagnosis. The latter happened to me a few weeks ago, and I am still regaining my equilibrium after the impact of it. In each of these scenarios, we are facing the unknown—life without a loved one, life without income, life without optimal health. In my case, the diagnosis was about my vision (inflammatory eye condition), which was shattering to me because I love the world through my eyes. I celebrate its beauty and wonder, its miracles. I am also a writer and a lifelong avid reader. What would I do if I lost my full range of vision, this deep connection to the world around me?

We take so much for granted in life. Our ability to walk, to hear, to see, to touch and taste—all such incredible blessings. If we lose any one of them, even temporarily or partially, it is shocking. We feel vulnerable, uncertain, fearful. And unfairly robbed of something so integral to human life—seemingly. Yet, so many individuals live without complete access to one or more of these abilities, and they live full rich lives grounded in gratitude. Yes, you may say, but I don’t want to face that kind of challenge. That is the kicker. We want, and expect, life to be a certain way, and we are devastated when it is not. We learn over time—if we are wise, if we are open—to accept “what is” as life unfolds before us, moment to moment, completely outside of our control. Because if we do not, we suffer, and we hang on to our suffering.

Loss is part of each of our lives here on Earth. We don’t escape a lifetime without being touched by some kind of sadness or pain. But extended suffering is optional. We can grieve without holding onto the sorrow tightly and tormenting ourselves with “what ifs.” We can allow the tears to flow through us and cleanse us of our grief. Every emotion we have, if experienced fully, can free us of suffering. If I can let life be whatever it is, my suffering softens and eventually dissolves. If I sit quietly in stillness, I get in touch with the calm peace that resides at my core. I often find this to be true yet learn it anew with each challenge that arises. In this case, my eyesight. The situation continues to be filled with unknowns, and each new doctor’s appointment brings more shifting realities—and more waiting (to see if any change occurs). I find I have to repeatedly dig deep for patience and acceptance. I move forward one step at a time, reminding myself to feel everything and still remain open.

Dear friends and family, and one particularly kind doctor, have also helped me tremendously.* Again and again, the empathy of friends and strangers alike brings me back to some sense of balance and relationship to everything. Because not all of life is loss or fear of loss. Life is also connection. There is so much beauty and love in the world everywhere, visible and invisible. Other people reached out with kindness and caring when I most needed it. Love guides us out of solitary sadness and isolation and shows us our commonality with all of humankind. The sweet tenderness of shared experience, of heartfelt understanding and compassion, makes life worth living. That is why we came into this lifetime—to feel that essential oneness in the midst of our separate life challenges, our fears and our sorrows. We are here to love one another into wholeness—one whole human family, living unpredictable, uncontrollable, but always deeply connected lives.

*My heart’s deepest gratitude especially to Panache, James, and my partner Anne for their love and support.

Jump!

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Leap frog. Hopscotch. Jump rope. Relay races. Tree-climbing. Gymnastics. Children’s games are full of jumping, leaping, running, climbing. Stretching to the edge of risk–and laughing all the way. Somehow, as children, we trusted the momentum of the play we engaged in, so that even if we fell, we got right up again and continued on with scraped knees and elbows. For the most part, we weren’t held back by hesitation or fear, but instead were drawn forward by curiosity, wonder, and the urge to explore/experience everything. A good game was an adventure, and nothing else mattered in the timeless magic of childhood.

Somewhere along the way to adulthood, we were introduced to caution, the handmaiden of fear. Many of us became less willing to take risks, to totter wildly at the edge of uncertainty and then jump. Once we became adults, even if we did choose risk or risk chose us, we still held onto a desire for some kind of control in the midst of it. Over time, the Jump impulse atrophied inside of us.

Fear of great loss at any level, physical or emotional, can keep us frozen within our lives. Yet it is in walking through that fear (or jumping into the middle of it) that we find freedom and liberation from the wish to control. The walking or jumping is an act of courage, but it also is an act of complete surrender. When we let go of everything and turn our trust over to something greater, that something greater (call it God, Spirit, Source, whatever) lifts us into the flow of life’s currents, and we are carried to exactly where we were always meant to be.

I recently returned from a weeklong program called “Dynamic Peace” in Santa Barbara, California, which was essentially a deepening into greater soul emergence/evolution in the world. In going, I knew I was taking a leap of faith on multiple levels, especially budget-wise. I broke through many mental constraints in choosing to go, knowing in my heart that I had to keep stretching myself further and further—to jump yet again. To be honest, I couldn’t NOT go. My soul was loudly and insistently whispering in my ear that I had to be there. So I stepped into the flow of life and flew westward to California to embrace risk and expansion into the unknown. As I walked by the Pacific Ocean every day, I could feel its power and deep peace fill me. I knew that it was that very blend of power and peace that would always sustain me in my life, wherever I was. Looking down at the crashing waves from a sandy cliff, I understood that it was not one jump before me but many–a kind of sustained, endless free fall. Let go and let life, the eternal lesson.

You can’t think your way to letting go nor can you force yourself into it. When you stand alone on the edge of a precipice and consciously choose to let go completely, that letting go creates the jump that brings you over the edge into infinite possibility. It is a sweet fusion of action and surrender that creates the dynamic of full engagement with life. And that is exactly where we find ourselves now on this planet that is undergoing a major shift in consciousness. As the world rapidly changes all around us, we are being asked, as fully conscious human souls, to release the past, trust in the present, and act from a place of love and connection with all beings. Our heart-informed actions are the “jumps” that will lead us into more fully integrated and holistic lives. Lives that are intertwined with each other in the most loving expression of oneness yet lived out on our planet.

Ultimately, we are not here on Earth to be cautious or hold back. We are here to live our soul-selves full out and jump with open hearts into an expansive future that is unlike any that has come before. So what are you waiting for? Take a risk. Take a deep breath: Jump! And then jump again….