I’ve been in India. It was supposed to be the fulfilment of
a desire that seeded some 30 years ago, a marker in my life that meant I was
walking my path and had made progress. I was really into it as a spiritual
trip, maybe even a reward if I’m honest. Now I cannot even remotely remember
what the hell I was thinking, even though I articulated it all easily just
three weeks ago. My how changing our gridding shakes up our stuff!
I have spent more than 30 years absolutely committed to my
spiritual expansion. I surrendered the notion that it would provide me with the
perfect ego life a long time ago. You learn pretty quickly that life is a
constant flow between light and shadow and so realise you have to give up trying to make it only ‘love
and light’ or be perpetually disenchanted. Instead I cultivated courage and resilience to lean into my shadows, surrender
control, release, forgive and allow. I’ve let go of things I hated and of things
I loved - both can be equally addictive. I’ve lost security, money, health, possessions
and relationships that meant the world to me. I've felt utterly bereft and spent at times, high and expanded at others, but
somehow have always found my way back to my open heart where faith is renewed from
each experience. However the terrible events of 2015 and the issues I faced around
my health had brought me to a realisation that frankly, I was done with the perpetual
initiation. India was supposed to be the line in the sand, a rebirth that
opened me to embody all the learning from 30 years of constant soul searching and
that would herald a new way forward. It did provide this, but not in the way I
expected! Instead of a gentle opening of the heart I got an upper-cut to the
breadbasket that has left me reeling.
When you sustain an overwhelming desire to reach for spiritual
awareness as I do, all other ego driven desires, while still powerful, are
measured against it and fall in behind it. While I have, of course, as many
desires as the next person, I have tried to avoid acting in a way that
contradicted my deeper desire to embody a spiritual presence. For instance, like
most I want to love and be loved. Yet, I would not lie, actually or by omission,
to hold love or betray another to attract it to me. While I desire a level of financial
security, I would not cheat another or steal to achieve it and so on. It is not
about morality; in fact I’ve never even looked upon it as ‘right’ action. Instead
I was responding from an understanding that what you do to another, you end up
doing to yourself – so it was an act of self-preservation I suppose. This is fired
by the intent to clear, instead of layer karma; an enigma which is not only the
source of our troubles, but also contains their remedy.
So my ego desire body has been pretty much kept in check for
the past 30 years by the blanket ideals around spirituality and the never
ending attempt to ‘get clear’. I have been able to release destructive
patterning, toxic relationships, career, friends, support and so on not because
I am particularly evolved (I knew this) but because I was clinging to something
deeper and every choice was about feeding it (I did not know this) – that is, my
desire to ‘get there’ spiritually. Imagine that - all this time I thought I was
releasing attachment, letting go, being so evolved and India showed me I was
simply trading one desire for another. It was a huge realisation that left
me breathless, because of course, when I came face to face with the
truth of my desire body, India said “Let that go too”.
So the meaning I was cultivating around 30 years of spiritual
initiation just went ‘pouf’. I have never been so groundless, so completely in
the void, so utterly connected to my soul’s journey. I don’t know where I am
headed and I don’t feel even slightly invested in the outcome. It's a psychological death of the most intense form, but it feels like the last hurdle, the final frontier of this phase in my journey has been exposed. How does one
move in life without desire? What replaces it? I’m looking forward to finding out – or not.
Namaste
Sally
