Sunday, May 25th, 2008

I have decided that yoga is essential to my well-being.

It isn’t that I become someone else when I do it…it is that I become more myself. Everything begins to roll off of me in waves, and I begin to shake the dust off of my wings, and the restraints. But I have learned that I don’t do it on my own. I need to have a group to do it with, and I am okay with that. And I have learned that if I leave it long enough, coming back is hard…like a smack in the face. Like hitting the brick wall of everything I have been holding onto or repressing, and having to actually feel the achy and painful stiffness I think I will never overcome. But I keep going back, and getting broken, until I feel free.

I have decided that music is essential to my well-being. When I can’t breathe because the waves of my huge ocean heart are rushing up against my chest like pressure on a giant bruise, or because the energies of the world and the cosmos have just been turned up another few impossible notches…there is music. I find a song, or a beat or a melody that completely embodies the fullness of the emotion, and then I can breathe again. I can get up and go out and face the world again with a still-open heart and the courage to continue to be sensitive in a vast energetic landscape of over-stimulation and hyper-exposure. I can deal with feeling everything…once again.

Because I am not going to stop feeling it all. It isn’t in me to stop. I wouldn’t be living my destiny, and I have no doubts at all about its clarity. And, destiny aside, I am spoiled now. I am spoiled by the benefits of the intensity, and I wouldn’t want to experience creation any less beautifully than I do. I don’t want to stop feeling. And yet stop feeling is exactly what we are asked, or even required to do in this world to handle it and still be even functional, or certainly joyful. And just when that system of walking around mostly shut-down has been working alright for so many of us sensitives, the universe, and even the world, are asking for something different. Everything is asking us to blossom…right here…right now. Everything is asking us to open in the most surprising and difficult of circumstances. We think we must be crazy.

Thank god we are.

I have decided that dancing is essential to my well-being. If I can’t feel a beat moving through my body on a regular basis, I begin to feel lost in a way that is so subtle it is almost imperceptible…it goes unseen until I begin to move again and I remember. I remember what it feels like to be totally free…and to be totally myself. My soul becomes honey again, and everything in my life, in the universe, somehow makes sense. I let go because the music holds me. I don’t even have to be myself because I don’t have to be anything. Everything just is. And everything is good. I think it isn’t about always being in that space…it is about being in it as often as possible…and not being too hard on yourself when you are not in it. I think that is one of the secrets of the universe, in fact.

Self-love is not just a realization…it is an act. It is an experience. It is a practice, and one that feels damn good after we make it through the brick wall of pain that we first experience when we start down the path of re-awakening to how unbelievable and beautiful we really are. How perfect, and how whole. Even when we hit the brick walls, defeated and unknown.

If you want to love yourself really well you have to love yourself like a lover…and feed yourself like a flower. You need to know what makes you feel good and do it as much as you can. Then you are not just telling yourself words…you are giving yourself actual reasons to feel love and joy.

I have decided that writing is essential to my well-being. There is a feeling when I put something into words that I thought I could never describe that is like seeing a harvest moon you didn’t expect at a moment when you feel totally alone. It is like reaching through the dimensions and bringing back a lost love. It is like finding a redemption that you thought would never come. Absolution. It is the testimony of your soul’s experience that otherwise seems to wild or too deep to be true, or too insignificant to be recorded, and revealed. For everything that matters enough to us to record in any way, matters more than it seems to. We are divinity scribbling into space, and making masterpieces.

I have decided that being in nature is essential to my well-being. When I am in nature there is no break in the continuity of my being slipping into the everythingness…in fact all of the sudden I am sharing my body with my entire surroundings…and my heart is spilling out and nourished all at once. Bliss and abundance are no longer terms from spiritual books. They are reality. I have decided love and art, laughter and late-night movies, music magazines and bare feet, hands in the earth and good parties, travel and coming home, revealing myself and making mistakes, crying and singing and risking and trying and everything that comes into my path…are essential to my well-being. And I am going to face brick walls and beautiful everythingness with all the openness I have. And when I need to close, I’ll close. And then I’ll build strength to open again…and both will be beautiful, and hard, and bittersweet, and a miracle.

And I’ll get strong again by filling myself up, and doing what I love and what feels good, so I remember I am free. Because we are stars, who get tarnished and burdened by wear, and all we need to remember who we are is a good shining. A soft cloth…like movement or nature or laughter, to help us shed the layers that make us forget ourselves, and feel trapped. We are stars, and we never stop shining underneath. And we must remember how much the world needs our shining, and how much we are fed by knowing our own glistening light.

Shine bright, Oracles…shine bright.

Love, Jennifer

Monday, May 12th, 2008

On a long night with friends recently I was talking to the Buddha during a quiet moment.  I had been sort-of complaining about how most people think that enlightenment is a far-off goal that you obtain when you reach “perfection,” having left all of your “flaws” behind.  Buddha came to confirm that enlightenment was more like a line he crossed into bliss, and wavered in and barely out of for the rest of his human life.

Most of us who are spiritually-directed have already had many moments of enlightenment, and really it is more about making more and more of them occur, rather than seeing Nirvana as a destination.  If nirvana was something we were meant to arrive and permanently “hang” in then we probably wouldn’t be in a body.  The idea is to be able to walk in both worlds, and easily between them.  It’s about keeping bliss close, so it is easier to get to.  And it is about honoring the other feelings that come in the meantime.  Then they don’t feel so separate and different.

After all, I said, after Buddha reached his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, at some point, unless he left the body…he had to pee.  And when he peed (pardon what may seem crass…though I don’t find urination crass myself) he was both enlightened and doing something very much in his body.

I already know I am everything.  The realization and even the feeling of it is very real in my consciousness and I experience it constantly.  What next?…I was asking.  Okay…realizing enlightenment is a place we visit and detour from (and that accepting that might make us feel even more enlightened)…means we realize we are truly already there.  So what next?  We are still in a body…loving, hating, crying, aching, laughing, feeling like a fool, stumbling, dancing, losing, succeeding, doubting, failing, trying…blissing.

Lately my beings have been asking something difficult of me.  They have stopped giving me information on how to be fearless, or be in my power…they have come up with something much more intense.  Just enjoy.  Enjoy anything and everything you can.  Make enjoyment the priority.  And when things are hard and you just can’t possibly enjoy it…don’t.  Get through those times and be open to the next time you can enjoy.

Find things you love and do them over and over again until you wear the hell out of them, or forever if they just get better and better.  If you have free time do the thing that would feel the absolute best.  You have reached, they said, a very high level of truth.  It is about feeling good, as much of the time as you can, and being as okay about it as possible when you don’t.  Don’t be hard on yourself.  Don’t judge yourself.  Don’t think you are “wrong” or “off the path.”  Just be with it.  And then do something that makes you feel good again.  And work it.  And love it.  And give yourself more gifts than you thought you ever could.  Be prolific and abundant in your heart the way nature is.

And if you don’t have anybody to love get a dog.  And if you don’t have any money write songs.  And if you can’t sing write poetry.  And if you don’t have any free time play hooky on one thing one time a week no matter what.  And if you can’t have a massage have a really nice long bath with music and salts.  First find a way to feel again, and then find a way…small as it may be…to feel good again.

The thing about feeling good is that if you build up enough momentum it starts to grow on its own…it starts to get magnetic and insanely contagious.  You see, its hard enough to be a mystic in this world.  It can drive you absolutely mad.  It can bring you down to your knees and then even lower than you thought you could ever go.  It can make you feel so sensitive that you think you have lost all control and all mastery.  This is what it takes to become great…to become real…to become what you really are.

To say the landing at home, after two-and-a-half weeks in Egypt in Greece was bumpy is a bit of an understatement, and at the same time it has been sublime.  Isn’t that just the way it is most of the time?  I live in a gentle paradise.  I think it is the only way to handle the inner expeditions that are constant in the life of an Oracle…the life of a passionate, sensitive creature who doesn’t shut down to feeling…and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The day after I got home I stood on my porch in the sun with bare feet and breathed deep.  I smelled kelp.  It was endless.  It was rich, like the depths of beauty and creation.  It filled me up.  It told me I was home.  In trying to keep with the idea that I am now here to enjoy, I take even more careful note than ever before of what sustains me, fills me, gives me joy, makes me feel good, saves my soul.  Like having bare feet, sitting in the sun, planting flowers, staying up all night laughing with kindred spirits, finding a song I love enough to make me feel like I want to levitate and everything really does happen exactly as it should.  Dancing.  Dressing up and the new sandals I bought.  Coffee.  Sitting here in this cafe.  The fact that the lilacs are coming out.  The promise of summer.   A good hug.  Doing things that scare me.   Making new friends.  Even losing some in good faith that life is showing me which way to go.

There is so much more.  It just gets more and more simple.  This is how we will make the new world.  Yes, with coffee, and kelp.

Love you all, Jennifer

(this is a picture of Sebastian and I and our friends at the temple I wrote about in the previous post.)