Today is a strange day indeed! The sky is heavy with grey
clouds, the temperature cool, the house silent (which is rare) and my care
factor is zero! (Though I did manage a shower - go me).
I am coming down from a month of intense spiritual work. It began
with a ruthless edit of our book Your
Beautiful Life www.yourbeautifullife.com.au where no chapter was spared scrutiny. Then I co-wrote a new
one day workshop just in time to fly to Melbourne and spend 10 days jointly
running various events. I came home to more tweaking of the book in conjunction
with Susie as we scrambled to meet our publisher’s deadline of 29th
Oct. Much to our delight we made it with mere hours to spare. We are both
ecstatic with the finished work but perhaps most excited by the beauty of our brand
new cover. It’s been a massive project for all involved and I should be able to relax into a
sense of completion and satisfaction, but instead I am restless and broody- so
I write in search of clarity.
I began my spiritual exploration when I was barely out of my
teens and was very troubled. In truth I wasn’t looking for the meaning of life
nearly as much as an escape from my distress. I was captivated by notions of
Universal love and support and fell in love with all of my teachers who embodied
them so beautifully. Despite this, I was usually deeply uncomfortable in their presence.
I now recognise that I simply couldn’t reconcile the contradiction of my inner self-loathing
with the experience of their unconditional love. You can’t hold love if there
is no space within for it to rest and take root and back then I was over-flowing with
feelings of loss and abandonment.
So despite all the beauty that spirituality promised, the pathway
for me has always been characterised by a sense of longing for an inner truth
that has remained just out of reach. The more I opened to spiritual truth, the
more work there was for me to do. In the humble delight of each small harvest,
there were a thousand more fields to be planted. It was a relentless process
that often seemed more like torment than evolution. For more than half my life I
have been involved in a relationship of unrequited love with spirit that at
times has nearly broken me but from which I could not extricate myself. But today
that has changed and I am seriously freaking out!
There are a great many personal reasons why I haven’t given up
the spiritual path, but there has been only one physical concern that has kept me planted in
the journey, at least for the past 15 years, and that is undoubtedly our book Your
Beautiful Life. Today though it is
finished; I mean really finished. What began in humble circumstances with only four
of us has finally reached maturity nurtured by the energy of all those who have
so far been drawn to it. When you join the YBL tribe you contribute to a
collective imprint that connects our souls and opens the way for others to
follow. None of us can know the heart of another, for it can only be revealed
willingly, not usurped. For this reason we cherish each heart that offered us
their truth, their pain and their beauty and so expanded our work to fruition.
We love you all.
So all this sounds so great, why on Earth then, am I
freaking out? Well, I had no idea the pathway would take the turns it has which
is lucky because I probably wouldn’t have stepped onto it in the first place,
but here I am. My spiritual life has always been more than a hobby and while I
have been accused of pretending to be
‘spiritual and fair’, (but not by anyone who has actually met me) those closest
to me would attest to my dedication that sometimes resembles obsession. However
I have never navigated my spiritual life without the notions of wanting, yearning or needing at its foundation. With the book finished, that foundation has simply vanished.
I am seriously groundless without my familiar sense of ‘have to’ to keep me on track. I know I
have achieved more than a book. I have completed my soul’s plan and purpose and
I now realise that I never truly believed I would consciously achieve that, let alone recognise
it in the moment. Further, I reckon I made it just in time and
the race to the publisher’s deadline was an outer reflection of that truth. I have to wonder how
I will now continue to expand my spiritual path without a burning sense of loss
or lack to fuel my fire? I am cautiously excited to find out!
Only a few months ago I had decided to take the words “I
want” out of my vocabulary, and now it seems that I am required to embody that intent. I
know how I would like my life to be as a state of inner presence in feeling and I have to say I am still a fair way from that truth - but at least I can sense it. I am resisting the urge to contemplate how
it all should look, for at the end of the day, that would be just another thing to have to let go of.
Tomorrow is a new day for me and I need to open to a new way of
being in my life. I am relying on nothing more than my intent to be fully
present in the moment and open to loving awareness. There is no plan, no
checklist and nothing to measure and so nothing to pass or fail at. I believe that the completion of our YBL work
is an indication that I have finally transcended the disempowering aspects of
my core belief and now have the opportunity to embody its polarity of
empowerment. It is new territory for me to be truly free to choose between old
conditioning and the groundlessness of the moment. The responsibility inherent
in the freedom to choose is daunting. For the first time I understand the concept
of clinging to our pain; it is at least familiar and so gives us a sense of
permanence in an otherwise impermanent world - but I'm done with it. Maybe you are too.
I’ll keep you posted and as always love hearing from you all.
Namaste
Sally
