Tag: spirit

Whatever You Don’t Want

Consider this possibility: Everything you don’t want in your life (pain, loss, difficult relationships, fear) could be there as a catalyst for you on your soul journey in this lifetime. What you resist or reject may be your greatest teacher. We come to Earth to have experiences, the full spectrum, not just the “good stuff.” That’s what being human is all about. And what is “good” anyway? The viewpoints of today can be completely reversed tomorrow. What you grieve over losing may later be shown to be a huge blessing. So what if everything is a blessing, no matter what it looks like?

Over time, I finally began to see the full truth of that bit of wisdom. I realized that the challenges I’ve faced in my life were in fact huge catalysts for me on my soul journey. Many years ago, chronic headaches and neck pain from a muscle injury led me to explore alternative healing (acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, meditation), which in turn led me to spiritual teachings. And my lifelong fear of infinity/eternity pushed me to go even further with those spiritual teachings. A few weeks ago, during an expansive meditation, I was shown an overview of my lifetime in which so many connections were clear. I could see that the pain and fear were actually my soul guides on this life journey. Suddenly, my wise friend Panache Desai’s words made complete sense: “No matter what shows up, it’s there to take you deeper.”

I can’t tell you how much that insight, that overview, has changed how I feel day to day. I no longer get so caught up in complaining and bemoaning the difficulties of life. I am grateful that I was led to spiritual teachers who helped me reframe the fear and to health practices that helped lesson the pain. And along the way, I have been given the gift of greater compassion for others and greater connection to Spirit. I feel empathy for friends and strangers alike in navigating the challenges of being human. I no longer perceive God as distant or unattainable but instead as an integral part of who I am and all that I experience. There is an Infinite Consciousness that I am aware of all the time now. Its very infinity, what has been my greatest fear, is also the source of my most profound and treasured experiences of the “Great Mystery” that is God. Ultimately, you discover that love is at the center of everything, and only that love is real. The rest are just passing signposts.

So before you react with anger or dismay at some aspect of your daily life experience, pause for a moment and consider that something more could be at play than just unfairness and bad luck. What if the luck is in just being alive? In having such a wide spectrum of human experiences? Souls line up in other dimensions to get the chance to come to Earth for this, both the woe and the wonder. Because within that diverse dance of emotions and reactions is a soul’s opportunity to expand and grow and become a brighter light in the cosmos. Did you think the entire universe was an accident? Look carefully at your life as a whole. Every detail is perfectly designed. You are a human angel, sent here to experience everything, see it all as love, and shine that love outward, across all dimensions.

Do You Remember?

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

“God isn’t an attainment.
It’s a memory.”
—Panache Desai

When we yearn for God, we think we have to do or become something in order to find that connection, but that just isn’t true. God, or Spirit, was in the infinite energy that held your essence before you were born and in the emergence of your individual expression in this world. Spirit has never left you because there is no part of you that is not Spirit. No part of the universe is Godless. When you realize that completely, the arbitrary boundaries created to define human existence disappear, and you are at home in a Presence beyond time and space. You remember.

What does it take to open to that awareness? Not effort or searching; trying can in fact push it further away. Instead, remembering God is an experience of letting go and being fully present in your life exactly as it is in each moment. If you practice surrendering to life, that experience can become continuous, unbroken and limitless. And it awaits you everywhere. Spirit is in the sunrise and sunset, in the robin’s morning song and the thrush’s evening trill. In thunderstorms and rainbows, in the expanse of the plains and the height of the mountains. Spirit is present in the eyes of loved ones and strangers alike. Even on a busy city street, you can experience this Presence. Everywhere you look, God is, because divinity lives within you. You were born of Spirit, and Spirit lives through you. So when you remember, in a split second of full awareness, you are seeing the truth of all life everywhere, the multiverse we are part of. You are Presence.

I find that my most profound moments of remembering God occur in Nature. Silence engenders access to Spirit. In the stillness of my soul, the experience of Presence arises. When I wake at dawn and walk outside beneath the cypress trees as the mockingbirds sing and the red-bellied woodpeckers call, I feel a part of something beyond the physical boundaries of my body. In the silence beneath the sounds of Nature, I let go into formless being in which the birds and trees and I are one. Humans are taught to name what they see, but when I consciously drop that mental training, everything opens up. Without labels, the world flows seamlessly, and I flow with it. In the flowing, I remember.

I knew God fully before birth, floating in my mother’s womb, because words hadn’t defined and separated my world into parts yet. Once I entered life and language filtered my experiences, I was introduced to fragmented time and conditioned perception. Western culture doesn’t show us that we are one with all we see and that Spirit is the source of that oneness. God in some religions is viewed as an entity that lives outside us and subjects us to rigid rules, judgments, and constraints. The deeper truth is that God is a loving Presence in our souls, which we can access through present-moment awareness. Not through achievement or striving, but in letting go and surrendering. In each moment, the memory of God spans our consciousness and fills our hearts. A timeless memory within; eternal Presence. This is God.

 

When Opportunity Knocks

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

One of my favorite board games when I was growing up was called Careers. It came with a small set of Opportunity cards, which you chose every time you landed on an “Opportunity Knocks” square on the board. Each card directed you to a different career adventure. For some reason, I remembered this game the other day and thought how we all could probably use Opportunity reminders in our lives. The deeper I dive into the wisdom of accepting all life events as part of my soul’s journey, the more I realize that each event is an opportunity to surrender.

Within that framework, even the most painful and challenging experience (such as living through a global pandemic) is a doorway to greater expansion and growth. When I look back at my life, I can see the flowering into something new that occurred on the other side of what seemed like disaster or tragedy. Life is always presenting us with these opportunities to remain open to change and rebirth, often accompanied by fear or discomfort. If we can remember that that uncomfortable feeling is the precursor to possibility, then we can answer the door with peace in our hearts when opportunity knocks. Birth is always uncomfortable, but untold miracles await us if we relax into the process. The emergence of a new consciousness, a new Earth, is part of that.

So my latest self-reminder is to see each experience, each event, each moment, as an opportunity to surrender ever more deeply into the flow of life. Life as it is unfolding on one planet in one dimension in the multiverse. I am part of something so much grander than my own limited perception of it, an infinite tapestry of beingness that spans all time and space. That thought can be either terrifying or inspiring depending on how open I can remain within my heart and mind. And how deeply connected I am to my soul. Because the surrender I am talking about is ultimately to my soul, to the Spirit within.

My soul knows the design of my life. It was in on the pre-birth planning with God (or Goddess, Source, Spirit). The cosmos is not an accident. Your life is not an accident. There is a greater design beyond the human mind’s ability to understand or explain. At a certain point, we have to let go of figuring things out and just experience the Mystery that is life. To witness it with awe and wonder, as our soul does. That is the sacred gift of life: just to be here, to be present within this extraordinary experience of life on Earth and fully appreciate it. Fully receive it.

I spent so many years trying, instead of just receiving. We are taught that. To try to achieve, to accomplish, to create a life that is perfect. The personality-self, or ego, thinks that in striving and trying we are actually controlling outcomes, forgetting that there is a greater divine orchestration going on that our souls are part of. The universe is very generous and loving. When we try so hard to control events, we are actually slowing down the natural process of giving and receiving that life is based on. When we remain open and surrender to each moment, life can flow through us with ease. The ego tries to control; the soul just receives.

So when you hear unexpected change knocking at your door, think of it as a meditation bell reminding you of another opportunity to let go and receive life at the deepest level. This is why we’re here in human bodies, to learn to soften into oneness, into loving-awareness, into a Presence that includes everything. We think life is a board game, but it’s really divine grace unfolding….

 

The Last Attachment

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger
In the course of our lives, human beings form attachments to events, people, memories, feelings, beliefs, experiences, physical objects, and much more. If we choose at some point to follow a spiritual path, we learn, sometimes quite painfully, to see the impermanence of everything and to let go of many of those attachments. One of our strongest attachments is to the personality we have constructed over the years and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Lives that are in reality ephemeral and transitory—a truth never more poignantly visible than in the past few months as humanity confronts death on a daily basis because of the coronavirus. We are taking a collective crash course in letting go—of everything.

The very last attachment in life is to our physical form. It keeps us tethered to Earth and if held onto too tightly may prevent us from experiencing the seamless connection between the physical and the spiritual. Between humanity and divinity. However, when you step into the free formlessness of the soul, of living with and within God, you begin to flow with life and eventually let go of hanging on so desperately to your physicality. This may happen fully only at your death, but if you are fortunate, you may experience it in life as you open to the greater wisdom of nonattachment.

Over the past year, I have faced the unexpected early deaths of several good friends. Such losses seem to increase as the years pass, and we look at our selves and our lives with a new awareness of the fleeting nature of time. In childhood, we have a whole life of endless days and nights ahead of us. As we grow older, the days appear to shorten and the years pass more quickly. In counterpoint, our bodies slow down, and we realize there is no reason to rush through the days and years. This is precious wisdom, moving us gradually to releasing attachment to time and physicality. But now that process has been accelerated for everyone. When people are dying by the thousands everywhere on the planet, there is no time for gradual acceptance. The last attachment is front and center all the time.

How do you navigate that awareness so that it infuses your life with wisdom and not suffering? How do you come to accept the deaths of loved ones and/or your own eventual death? Perhaps this global acceleration has been given to humanity to help us to face all of life’s beginnings and endings with peace instead of panic. To fully realize the preciousness of each moment and live from love and acceptance rather than judgment and attempts at control. We are here on Earth in physical form for a split second in time. Yet our nonphysical souls live forever in eternity. If you open to connecting to that soulful presence within (through whatever spiritual practices resonate with you), you access a timeless inner peace that is not attached to your body. That experience can sustain you through life’s most challenging moments.

When you begin to see everything from your soul’s perspective, moments of peaceful connection can multiply and become continuous. Much of the suffering that arises from attachment to a fixed predictable “reality” will gradually dissolve, and you can be more allowing of life, even in times of crisis. Maybe the entire world is now learning to accept the process of living and dying as part of a greater spiritual unfolding in the universe. Our physical form is just a temporary costume. In truth, life at its very core, you at your very core, are Spirit, which is eternal. When you are no longer so “attached” to external physicality, you begin to experience that inner loving connection as a constant companion.

 

Where Is Your Home?

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger
The coronavirus mandate to “stay at home” has meant different things to different people. For some, it has meant freedom from external-world busyness and distractions and a return to inner peace and quiet. To others, it has felt like unwanted confinement and loss of in-person social contact. Some have lost their jobs and incomes; others, like healthcare workers, have had no choice but to leave the “safety” of home to provide critical services, despite the risks. All of us are suddenly facing issues of life and death. Our entire world, inside and out, has changed radically and continues to do so. In the midst of these huge ongoing changes, what does home mean?

Is home a place, or is it other people? Is it simply “shelter” or something much deeper, within you? Many of us have found ourselves considering such questions. When death appears at your doorstep, it is hard to ignore. Losing a loved one or facing the possibility of your own death is traumatic. You long desperately for solace and comfort, something that “home” has traditionally provided. But what if you are homeless, or you live in fear of losing your rented apartment because you no longer can pay for it? What if, even inside your seemingly secure home, you feel insecure and lost? How do we handle such painful, often isolating experiences?

Perhaps it’s possible, going forward, to feel at home within ourselves, whatever the situation, through the power of connection. Connection to other people, near or distant, gives us shared experiences and shared support, both individual and community. Connection to Nature takes us out of our own worries and fears and opens our hearts to the living world around us that we may have ignored or taken for granted. A peaceful walk in a park seems like a tremendous blessing right now. As does time spent with family, friends, and neighbors. These two are inseparable connections, and they can assist us in finding a sense of “home” and inner peace in the midst of uncertainty. As we navigate the future, we will be sustained by the ways we work together to make the world more livable for everyone as well as by the way we honor Mother Earth.

Equally important is a connection to something greater, beyond this lifetime, beyond all lifetimes. Whether you call it God or Goddess, Source or Mystery (or have no name at all for it), there is a loving Presence that permeates our material world and holds us all in its awareness. We carry that Presence within us; it is in our hearts and souls. It is in the love we share with others and the appreciation we feel for the Earth’s beauty. This is the Home that is infinite and eternal. It is who we are, we human spirits in physical form. During times of great crisis, people often begin to explore this aspect of themselves, the part that can never die or be lost. Here is the comfort we seek when everything else seems so tenuous and uncertain.

We can find courage and sustenance in connecting to our souls. We can also be more at peace with the unknown if we feel that connection. Yes, we have been facing fear and aloneness. Yet something else has been awakening: a soulful energy that emerges when we live our fullest, most loving expression in the world. When we sing in the night to our neighbors or care for the sick and helpless or share our deepest thoughts about life with a friend, the heart of the world is healed. Each of the ways we live love moment to moment is a unique, unrepeatable contribution. This global crisis could be a catalyst to help us remember the home of Spirit within ourselves, which connects us to all of life.