Tag: soul self

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?

 

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….

Ask Yourself…

Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
Growing up in a top-down society like ours, we learn very early to look to others for answers. Parents, teachers, bosses, presidents, religious leaders—we are taught that they have the answers, and we should follow their direction. God too is often presented to us as an external figure, a man sitting up in the sky somewhere who knows everything and whose commandments we should follow. Yet, so many of those directives and rules are man-made, created to keep people in line, keep them from questioning authority of any kind, so that the top-heavy status quo remains in place. But what if there is no authority higher than you? What if God, or infinite divine wisdom, lives inside you, inside all of us?

Gradually, cracks in the old infrastructure are appearing. As humans begin to awaken, they are realizing that they don’t want to be told what to do in every part of their lives. They want a responsive and interactive social structure. They want freedom and equality, not just lip service to it. In truth, genuine freedom and equality come into being when each person lives a life centered in authenticity, inner soul wisdom, and deep regard for and love of others. This is the world we are stepping into. These are the shifts in collective consciousness that are occurring on our planet. We are learning to look within for answers, share our insights with one another, and then create together a society that is based on egalitarian values and open-hearted kindness: each individual in balance with the whole, no one person more important or powerful than another.

How do we begin to live this day-to-day? How do we unlearn dependency on everything outside of us? I would suggest that it starts with a regular practice of looking inside ourselves for guidance. You probably have heard of the “higher self,” that entity that is connected to Source or Spirit. The higher self—or soul self, as I call it—is not just a new age concept. It is the part of you that is eternal, and more open and wise than the ego/mind, which tries so hard to figure everything out logically. The rational mind likes to organize, label, follow the rules; the soul exists in a place of pure being and divine connection. When we look to our soul selves—and in conjunction, our hearts—we are guided to the most expansive and loving responses to life and living.

In my own life, I am finding that soul guidance and heart wisdom are ever-present touchstones for living with integrity, joy, and deep regard for others and our beautiful planet. Lately, when challenges or conflicts arise in my internal or external life, I sometimes ask myself two key questions:

  • Do you want to live in fear or do you want to live in love?
  • Do you want to live in judgment or do you want to live in gratitude?

My soul’s answers to these questions are always quite clear and unequivocal. There is no doubt that the part of me that is infinite, eternal, and connected to All That Is wants to live from a place of love and gratitude. That doesn’t mean that I never experience fear or judgment; it just means they don’t predominate and crowd everything else out. When I remember to ask these questions (and it is a practice), I re-center myself in what is really important in life, in that which brings us all together rather than separates us. From the perspective of the heart and soul, there is nothing but oneness always; it is just our perceptions, our mental machinations, that tell us otherwise.

So, if you find yourself mentally spinning or emotionally off-kilter, at odds with life, take a deep breath and ask yourself, your soul self, for the answers. Come home to the deepest part of you. Whatever arises from that place is your own inner wisdom. It is uniquely yours, connected to the greater spirit of all things, and it will guide you perfectly throughout your life.

Trust

Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to experience it all—everything. Live in different places, travel to different countries, work in different jobs, expand into different identities. I did not want to be stuck in any one location or persona all my life. For the most part, I’ve lived that. My life has been full of change and exploration: shifting experiences that have opened me to a continuously growing beingness in the world. Only recently, however, have I come to know the shadow side to that inner desire: regret, fear of missing something. This too is a part of the human quest for a fully lived life.

This past August my high school graduating class held a large reunion celebration in Lockport, Illinois, where I grew up. For various reasons (travel logistics, other events scheduled that same month), I did not attend. A few days afterward, when individuals began to post photographs of the weekend, I began to feel a deep sadness that I had missed out on something very special: the opportunity to see again friends I hadn’t seen in decades, some whom I had known since first grade. I couldn’t shake it for days, and a week later, I experienced similar pain at not being able to attend a six-day intensive spiritual immersion. It was Panache Desai who pointed out to me the unconscious pattern of regret that I had been carrying inside me, a fear that I would miss out on something extraordinary that everyone else was experiencing. Bringing it into my conscious awareness helped me see it pop up in other ways in my life.

Even in my spiritual practice, I found it intertwined with my deepest desire for divine connection. There it was: Fear that I would be somewhere else when everyone else got “enlightened.” Fear that I would miss hearing the key words of wisdom that would open the door to samadhi, awakened oneness. Fear that I would never experience again the expanded consciousness that embraced infinity and God as part of me, as part of everything. Within my most profound spiritual experiences and connection to something greater lay a fear that I might be missing something or I might lose what I had found. And at the heart of that fear was the issue of trust, surrender.

The more I surrender in my life, the more I see that needs to be surrendered to. I thought I had reached the deepest possible acceptance of “all that is.” I had recognized and embraced the divine orchestration of everything in life. Yet, there I was, feeling that I had somehow made a mistake in not attending a high school reunion or a spiritual retreat. Inside me was a kernel of apprehension that I might miss something KEY to my own evolution as a human being, as awakened spirit. The next step, of course, was to surrender to that too. Accepting the fear itself as part of being human opened the door to a deeper letting go.

With that surrender came another level of realization: that there are no mistakes. I’m always where I’m supposed to be for my soul’s experience and growth on Earth. Spirit has the road map for my human journey, and there is never a wrong turn. Wherever I am, all is in divine order, always. It’s about trust. Trust in something greater and wiser than my own mind’s idea of what I should be doing or experiencing. More and more, I am letting go into infinite unquestioning. I still want to experience everything, but I also have faith that wherever I am and whatever I’m doing is perfect beyond my human understanding. Ultimately, I am surrendering to trust itself. As Panache often says: “Your soul has already chosen. You’re just along for the ride.”