Tag: presence

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.

You Can’t GPS God

Photograph © 2019 Peggy Kornegger
If you held a compass in your hand with the intention of locating God, you would see the needle spin in all directions. The GPS in your car could not come up with an exact position for God in its system either. That’s because (of course) God is everywhere at the same time. Its physical form in this dimension is us, our human bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, trees, birds, insects, fish, seashells, stones, etc.

From the nonphysical perspective, God is an experience not a visible object. On Earth, the experience of God is love. And love has no form, no language, no location. If you deepen your awareness of divine connection, you come to realize that you are always held in a love beyond any words to describe it. Peace fills your being and Presence fills your consciousness. I have been there. It’s a place to which I am always longing to return. But there is no compass or GPS to guide you to God. Only in the process of living and letting go do you suddenly turn up in that spaceless space that defies description.

Surrender, the message always reappears. As long as you hold on and try to make something happen and try with all your might to understand, you will spin in circles, like a malfunctioning compass. Control is an illusion that catches us all in its tangled web as we live our lives. Only when we open our hands and hearts completely, does the web disappear as if by magic. You and I have always been free. Our souls have always known the way back to God. The truth is that the soul is God, a living reminder from whence we came. So when we remember to align with it, we are already home.

Each morning, as soon as I get up, I take a 2-mile walk on a nearby nature trail. Some mornings I am immediately aware of God’s presence. A mockingbird singing its delightful medley of birdsongs. A snowy egret fishing along the edge of the lake. Red hibiscus flowers blooming. Love fills my heart. Other mornings, I am not fully awake—literally. I begin walking, only half-aware. Suddenly, beams of light radiate from the rising sun across my path. I am washed in a sea of golden light, and all my senses are wide-awake and smiling (if senses can smile, then mine definitely are!). I stop and stand in the sunlight, eyes closed, and the stillness at my core fills me. I am completely at peace, one with my soul.

Divine immersion. It can come upon you at any time. It can fill you for a moment, for an hour, for days, or for a lifetime. The secret, of course, is that it is always there, within you. When you surrender to the experience right in front of you, your awareness expands to include your soul’s presence. Sunlight or birdsong can open the door to this expansion. Consciously breathing and focusing on the peace that lives within you also opens the door. I find that if I pause, take a deep breath, and center myself in the inner stillness, everything around me becomes part of it. Even sound itself is one with that stillness. And therein is the experience of God, or the Divine. No “global position,” no form—just being itself.

 

What Is Here

Photograph ©2019 Peggy Kornegger
One of the key wisdoms I’ve come to know in my life is to always appreciate what is here, rather than search for (and lament) what is not. If you hold the latter focus, you will always find something missing. If you hold the former, the world will open up around you in miraculous ways. Some people call this a gratitude practice, and that’s a good name for it. Life on Earth is so rich with experiential treasures, so much to be grateful for.

In every moment, there is a surplus of wonder in your life. The air you breathe, the sky above you, your friends and family, all of them precious beyond words. Yet, not every person, event, experience, or detail in life is always within your perceptual field. You can have one particular experience today and an entirely different one tomorrow, each of them seemingly separate. If you expand your awareness, however, both experiences are connected.

We live on a planet of polarities, and we are learning to navigate it, to find balance and harmony within that world. The middle path is one that is inclusive of everything within each moment. You don’t get lost in opposites, which can lend itself to only experiencing loss. Instead, you see everything around you as part of a greater network of meaning and connection in the universe. There is no absence, only presence.

I find when I live my life this way, within that presence, then I am always full of appreciation for what is instead of feeling regretful about what is not. It is definitely a practice though—gratitude, appreciation, inclusiveness, whatever you want to name it. The field of polarity that surrounds us can pull us into the opposite of appreciation—into sadness over the past or fear about the future. When I remember to re-center myself and look at the world from present-moment awareness, I see a surplus of wonder, not a deficit.

So I practice, each day I practice. On my morning walks, I remind myself: “____ is here” or “I am grateful for ____.” With each new addition to those sentences, my heart opens more. It is amazing how a few minutes of doing that can shift my consciousness into a much more expansive and inclusive state. Presence fills, and absence drains, us.

If we want to find balance and equilibrium in our lives, then I can think of no better way than to love what is here, not long for what is missing. It’s all a mental construct really, a trick of human perception that tells us that everything is separate from us (including God), and that we can’t know the world as a whole in each moment within our consciousness. If the entire universe (uni- means “one”) is of a piece, constantly evolving energy and light, then in truth we are never separate from anything, throughout eternity. So “here” cancels out “not here,” and there is only Presence, which is another name for God or Source.

You hold the universe within you. You hold all seeming opposites within you. You hold God within you. You are Presence itself. When you remember that, then you are always “here,” and so is everything else. And all you can feel is thankfulness and love for the miracle of life you are living.

 

The Universal Heart

Photograph © 2019 by Peggy Kornegger
The heart of the universe extends outward energetically through every dimension of Being in the cosmos. That heartbeat is the vibrational source of the manifest world. Every star, every birdsong, every blade of grass, every human emotion vibrates with a universal pulse of life energy, the expression of absolute love many call God. Our own human heartbeat mirrors this divine process. With every rhythmic beat, our hearts pulse the love at our core into the world around us. That pulse connects human hearts around the globe, whether we recognize it or not. The time has come to recognize it.

Each goosebump, teardrop, deep breath, note of music, cat’s purr, and firefly’s light embodies God’s essence. You couldn’t escape that immanent presence even if you tried. You can, however, live your life unconscious of it. Our life purpose, we humans on planet Earth at this transformational time, is to become fully aware of the sacred source energy within us and all around us. To know with every part of us that there is nothing and no one that is not God. This deeply spiritual (and deeply human) process encompasses every facet of life.

Huge leaps in consciousness are being asked of us. This is a time unlike any other that has come before. We are starseeds standing at the edge of the cosmos reaching into infinity. We are lifting curtains and clearing out past histories so that we can fully and consciously embody spirit in our human forms, something that has historically been achieved only by enlightened spiritual masters. Now we are all becoming masters and avatars and recognizing one another as such. The deeper we look into each other’s eyes, the more we see the entire cosmos reflected back to us in all its shining splendor.

So what does this mean in our frequently distracted daily lives? It means that we will increasingly have experiences of seeing whomever we are interacting with as an essential part of the human family, not unlike ourselves. In shared moments of great sorrow or great joy, we recognize our commonality. We see the gossamer thread of spirit that connects us at the soul level and the love that joins our hearts. In those moments, separation, division, and judgment fall away, and we relax into peaceful presence. Thus is peace on Earth initiated, one individual soul at a time. When we softly breathe into our similarities instead of tightly hanging onto our differences, the entire planet shifts. God recognizing God.

The universal heartbeat animates life on Earth and throughout the cosmos. That living pulse permeates every aspect of our lives. Our cells are made of the same stuff as the stars we gaze at in the night skies. The light of the sun is the light in our own eyes. We are all connected, in every possible way, because the entire universe is of a piece: a divine creation that allows spirit, or God, to experience itself in form. We are that form. As Joni Mitchell once wrote, “We are stardust, we are golden.” In moments of inspired connection, we can see this with such clarity that our awareness expands to include the farthest stretches of the universe, and we know it as ourselves. We see the One that became Many which is now recognizing itself as One. What a miraculous time to be alive.