"The shock of our human experiences will be so painful, so disrespectful of who we are that we will choose to turn off our feelings - thereby, flipping the switch that connects us to our soul.
We will suffer... from soul amnesia."
--from Gururattan Kaur Khalsa's Your Life is in Your Chakras
All my life I've struggled.
I've fought hard to discover peace within my physical body.
To find balance in a regular amount of the necessary exercise and dire exertion that I use to move me forward through space. Back and forth, from side to side, I've wrestled, attempting to temper my red-hot passion by channeling it into inspired creativity.
For decades, I've lacked an ongoing practice
of bowing down
to humility,
of opening myself up
to this moment now,
of surrendering
to the strength of my own raw vulnerability and of trusting
that what my heart truly seeks and what is meant to be are both the same and will,
in good time and honest intention,
unfold.
Painstakingly, my monkey mind has seemingly held me prisoner
in its endless tinkering, in its ongoing
chitter-chatter, like the pitter-patter of feet across the roof above my brain.
Never stopping.
Always churning.
On and on and on and on and on and on and on..
the endless parade
marched.
God certainly seemed a novel idea.
Yet, no matter how hard I tried
no matter how much I desired more
more depth of feeling
more ease and grace
more in-joyment and less suffering
no matter how I pleaded otherwise,
I couldn't relate.
The concept felt like yet another trick, another tool
method and means
for cultivating ignorance by kneeling before
a might outside of myself.
Still, the pain kept coming
the shame, guilt and fear
the noxious insecurities
and those dangerously subtle voices
of parent culture, societal conditioning and anthropological history
ever ringing in my ears,
"You're not good enough"
they chime together in unison.
So, I listened
even when I tried hard not to
and I heard
even when I pretended I wasn't.
I felt and I felt and I felt and I felt.
I identified with this pain and the tumult,
with the turbulence and the grief,
I thought I was simply this
a personality in a body.
"When the body goes, so goes this,"
I erroneously believed.
