Tag: presence

Body and Soul

The body sometimes assists the soul’s journey with quite dramatic insistence. After I completed a third chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer, my body let my doctors know very clearly that it had reached its limit. I had allergic reactions in the form of an inflamed rash/bumps all over my body, edema (fluid retention), and breakthrough bleeding beneath the skin (to name just a few). Treatment 4 was cancelled. This particular segment of my spiritual “firewalk” was complete.  My body is now being given time to reestablish equilibrium and prepare for radiation in a few weeks.

Sometimes life’s “medicine” (in the sacred sense) takes an unusual course, and I am called to align with it. In doing so, I open myself to further spiritual growth and expansion. These chemo treatments have been an integral part of a process of completely dropping any identification with my physical form. Losing the hair on my head was one dramatic marker. Next came severe allergies. When you look down, and your own body is unrecognizable, something shifts in your awareness. You realize that what you are seeing is a temporary vessel, and what is seeing this vessel is not. You recognize the presence of a greater consciousness beyond the physical: your own spirit or soul, which is eternal.

As I have moved forward with the cancer treatments, I’ve shed various life identities. The more that fell away, the freer I felt at the soul level. Now, the power of these latest reactions has further amplified the dropping away. At this point, there is little left. I can feel that when I meditate. Almost immediately, as I close my eyes and open to inner stillness, “I” begin to dissolve. A spaciousness opens up within which I disappear from my own perception. What remains is pure beingness. No I or not I. I am empty while at the same time filled with spirit. This seeming dichotomy is the gateway to infinite consciousness. When the body fades to emptiness, the soul takes over completely. Spirit flows without interruption. The mind, emotions, and physical reactions are in neutral, and the soul fully lives its perfect design, unimpeded.

On another level, I have begun to experience a different response to the exterior world. At times, I feel as if I am watching a distant newsreel of this reality from another dimension entirely. I am untethered from the polarities and separations, the clashing opinions. My heart aches at the terrible suffering I see, but I trust there is a cosmic design within which the Earth is evolving. My role, as part of that design, is to give all those who cross my path love and empathy. I am not here to convince or convert people. I am here to live love, period. That’s is why we are all here, ultimately.

From my soul’s view, my responsibility as a human being passing through this planet is to live a life based in loving-kindness, not dissension or argument. To meet others on the common ground of caring, compassion. So much of the world is wrapped up in prickly debates over one thing or another, down to the smallest details. To hold peace in my heart and in my daily interactions seems to me the best way to live in this world, body and soul. Within that, the rigidity of individual identities fades, and the spaciousness of collective spirit flowers.

The Secret of Life

Every time you inhale and exhale, you are breathing the spirit of life, which is God. That’s the secret: The breath is God. In many languages, the word for spirit is the same as for breath. We hold this wisdom within the depths of our souls because it is what we are made of. Yes, we are human, but our humanity is composed of divine spirit. Your physical form is a sacred temple within which God experiences life on Earth. When you breathe, God is breathing. When you look through your eyes, God is seeing. When you look in another’s eyes, you are both gazing into pools of divinity. The only problem is that we have forgotten. We think that breathing is merely a physical phenomenon that arrives and departs with birth and death.

The breath is so much more. It is eternal, infinite. It is everything in all of creation condensed into something that seems very simple: air moving in and out of your lungs. But it is divine spirit that is the source of that rhythmic motion. Spirit that has no beginning or end. When you take your first breath, spirit enters your body as your unique essence, a piece of God. When you take your last breath, your essence, or soul, returns to the wholeness of God. In continuous motion, spirit flows from formless to form and back again. The entire universe moves in this manner—an infinite number of forms arising, flowering, and then falling back into formlessness. Your soul is part of this dance within divinity. Your soul, in human form, breathes spirit into the world.

What animates spirit in the first place? What is the primal cause behind every effect? Love. The infinite love of a creator for its creation. God is the eternal parent loving you, child of the universe, with the breath of life. It is love in its purest form. Divine love animates your life on Earth. With every breath, you are a conduit for that love. You touch everything around you with the divine love that pours from you just by breathing. When you become fully aware of this, you step into your greatest potential as a human/divine being on this Earth. You realize your oneness with God.

How do you become fully aware? Through a gradual deepening of conscious connection to the breath as living spirit. So many meditation practices focus on the breath because they are teaching oneness with God, with all of life. If you want to know firsthand the secret of life, look to your breath. Every time you inhale and exhale, you are one with God. In truth, there is never a moment when you are not one with God. The key is to remember it. To remember where we all came from (infinite consciousness) and how we are always connected to that greater loving Presence. The breath holds the key to everything. When you remember, your very being expands into harmonic resonance, and you are able to love limitlessly. This is what you were born for, to transmit oneness, love, peace, and unity through every conscious breath.

Infinity Vision

Several years ago, after a somewhat worrisome eye diagnosis, I had the extraordinary experience of looking out my window and seeing the external world moving in perfect synchronicity to the Andrea Bocelli music I was listening to. Every detail—people walking, cars passing, tree leaves in the wind—was part of a divinely choreographed dance of deeply connected oneness. And I too was part of it. There was nothing in the universe that sat alone on the sidelines within God’s creation. And I could see this so clearly that the power and beauty of it moved me to tears. Infinity vision, beyond an eye diagnosis.

Last week something similar occurred. I was taking a late-afternoon walk through our neighborhood when I heard a voice inside me: “Don’t just walk. Look. See!” I stopped in my tracks and looked up at the sky. The brilliant blue was streaked with white clouds like an impressionistic painting. The quality of the sun’s light made everything iridescent, heavenly. When I turned my gaze to the street before me, I saw a man with his dog, a car driving past, and autumn leaves falling from trees all moving together as one. I continued to walk, and everything I saw joined the dance of beingness. A cosmic tapestry so intricately interwoven that each thread was perfectly aligned with every other, and the motion of its living presence filled the universe, and me, with vibration and light. Infinity vision once again.

These are gifts from God, available to us all. Often it is a life crisis or a health diagnosis (like my recent breast cancer) that shatters everything and allows us to see the true nature of the multiverse we inhabit. I have sometimes heard from those who are experiencing it that cancer brings with it both challenge and expanded awareness. I understand that now. I believed I was deeply spiritually connected, aware, but cancer showed me an expansiveness and complexity beyond anything I had previously experienced. It cracked me open and let the full light of infinite awareness in. When disease or illness pries away your attachment to your physical form, magic is revealed. On my walk, I stood speechless before the wonder of everything I saw. Tears of love and gratitude streamed down my face.

If you have been reading my writing over the years, you may have noticed that I have had similar experiences before. Nature is always my profound connector to Spirit and the doorway to something greater. Yet now it is somehow different. The connection is even deeper and more expansive. That is the nature of infinity. You never reach the end of its ever-increasing power and beauty. Birth and death seem like finite experiences, but they are both contained within infinity. There is no end to beingness, ever. And this is the eternal truth that sits quietly at the center of our lives. Each of us is destined to discover it at the perfect time.

Whenever it appears, by whatever vehicle, celebrate its arrival as the greatest gift you will ever receive. The cracks in your life—illness, loss, pain, fear—can be the gateways to seeing with infinity vision. Only then will you understand the true nature of your “one precious life” and all life. Each and every one of us is part of a celestial symphony. The music of the spheres accompanies us everywhere. When you are able to see beyond what your eyes habitually perceive, your vision expands, and you begin to walk on air, immersed in the beauty of infinity, loving everyone and everything around you.

A Camino: Firewalk and Life Streaming

When I first heard the diagnosis “breast cancer,” I was lost in shock and fear. How could this happen in my life? To me?! After a few days, I gradually was able to re-center in the peace within me, to remember that everything that happens in my life is part of a soul plan that I was part of designing before my birth. Nothing is a coincidence, and everything is connected to everything else. I am one soul in one lifetime on one planet. Yet I am also part of the entire fabric of being in the universe. Sometimes it takes loss or crisis in our lives to fully realize this. When things fall away or apart, the long view becomes more visible.

Illness or disease can stop you short in your tracks and remind you of your own mortality. Even if you think you are unattached to outcome or completely surrendered to however events unfold. Even if you feel connected to a greater consciousness beyond life and death. There is always more surrender available, deeper all the time. And there is always more letting go of attachment—until there’s nothing left but soul. The physical body holds within it the last attachment. You definitively let go of that attachment at death. But you can also let go of it as part of life. This is what is meant by “dying unto yourself.” You release attachment not only to your identity but to your physical form. You live your life as your soul, immersed in peaceful Presence. The same immersion in Presence that occurs at death. Only you are radiantly alive and aware.

I have experienced times of surrender and Presence on my spiritual journey, but when breast cancer came into my life, I stepped onto an accelerated path: my own Camino.* The more I trusted that I was being divinely guided on this path, the more everything flowed. During and after surgery, I felt surrounded by angelic healers, floating in profound Oneness. My physical form seemed almost nonexistent. I returned home to heal and rest quietly. A week later, the pathology report showed wide clear margins—excellent! Then my surgeon told me that new test results indicated I should probably include chemotherapy in my treatment plan along with radiation. I had already accepted the latter, but the combo frightened me. Attachment to my body as it currently looked and felt was front and center. I was being asked to dive even deeper into acceptance and surrender.

My breast-cancer-survivor friends helped me with this acceptance (as did my very knowledgeable and kind doctors), but then my own inner genie handed me a vision that changed the way I saw everything. During a powerful meditation one morning, I suddenly understood what breast cancer represented in my life. In my mind’s eye, I saw an image of burning coals, like those used in the traditional firewalk, practiced by many cultures for thousands of years as a rite of faith, healing, or initiation. Immediately, I knew that for me radiation and chemo were the “burning coals,” and that I would safely “walk” through them as I surrendered attachment to my body and trusted my soul’s journey. My Camino walk is a fire of initiation, transmutation, and expansion beyond the physical. I envisioned myself afterward as pure soul light. No attachments, just life streaming through eternity in timeless splendor.

This is our collective destiny: to walk through humanity’s fires and emerge as light, each in our own way. Every person’s journey is unique. Each soul path divinely orchestrated. On the other side of our firewalks is a Presence that permeates the universe in life and in death. In truth, they are one: infinite beingness. When we realize that, all fear falls away, and we can live our lives with peaceful, open hearts and souls.
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*The Camino is a well-known path of spiritual pilgrimage across northern Spain.

You Are Here

Do you recall the maps in public places that help you find your way? There is usually a circle or an X with the notation: “You are here.” X marks the spot where you are in the “real world.” From there, you navigate the path to your destination. In life, without maps to guide us from birth to death, our course is less certain. We tend to wander at first, gradually gaining momentum and direction, then perhaps pausing at some point to contemplate the big picture. Our minds often wish we had something as simple as a map to direct us on the perfect life journey. We sometimes question where we are going and if we have made a wrong turn, a fatal error in judgment. What we don’t realize is that there are no errors.

You are always being moved by life force energy, a physical conduit for soul presence in the world. And that soul presence knows exactly where you are going and what your life purpose is. In the realm of spirit, before you were born, you chose the path for this lifetime, and your soul is the inner reminder of that choice. Whenever you feel as if something inside is moving you toward a certain decision or destination, that is your soul. The map you have been looking for outside yourself is within. And your soul’s guiding voice speaks to you through your intuition and through synchronicities. Sometimes in the words of a friend or even a stranger at just the right moment. If you listen and look, the clues are everywhere.

And the good part is that you can’t make a mistake. Wherever you are meant to be is where you are right now. Isn’t that a surprise? Even if you don’t really like where you are, it’s where you are supposed to be for the purposes of your soul’s journey. So, instead of complaining or resisting, try accepting and surrendering to what is actually a divinely orchestrated life course. Look around. What wisdom is hiding within the shadows of your own perception? Imagine that this very moment holds the secrets of the universe—switch on the light of your awareness and receive them. Take a deep breath and see the world with the eyes of your soul. If nothing is a mistake, then what am I being given now, here?

In each breath is all of life. Each moment holds the infinite Now. You are not in this lifetime to be forever lost and confused. You are here to awaken and fully live with spirit. That is the collective purpose of all our lives on this planet. The truth is that there is no path. There is only here. Your consciousness contains the universe within it, and that is what you are experiencing. Beyond time and space. When you fall fully into that realization, you align with your soul and with God in completely synchronized loving awareness. Some call this God realization or enlightenment. Something that has always existed within you, within all of us.

So you can stop wondering why you happen to be in this particular place with these particular people at this particular time. You are all here to shine your lights and to see more clearly because of it. You are each a catalyst for one another’s unfolding and evolution. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, it is perfect. Inside the simplicity of “You are here” is the recognition of eternal Presence and divine design.