SPIRITUAL NURTURE FOR THE INTERIOR JOURNEY, CONNECTING HEARTS & SOULS

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Universal umbilical cord


My head’s not on fire any more, I’ve been sleeping, my body is unwinding, my mind is calmer, the heaviness in my heart has lifted, I have an exhilarating focus, I don’t feel alone, and energy and creativity course through me.

I am grateful and blessed. Prayer truly works. So does opening personal burdens to Spirit, companions and community.

Everything I didn’t have last week, I have since been given. Best of all, I have been in a place to receive.

Even the reminder shell of pain is tolerable.

During the past several weeks, I have been counseled and listened to by amazing people, including here. One suggested I was in a “dark night of the soul,” which I had not recognized as such. It has seemed more like a dark night of the mind, battling against all else. Yet I think she had a point. It’s as if my mind/ego jailed my soul and my soul was only doing what was necessary to escape: GET MY ATTENTION by any means possible.

Maybe she’s right. I have been dissatisfied with prayer, worship and my faith community, storming at God and wondering if she even exists. I can’t remember a time I had that much doubt since embarking on a spiritual path. I felt listless, purposeless and well, useless. I’ve had spells before, often precipitated by pain, but the quality of this felt very different. Before some thread (deep worship, a project, life) provided the momentum to stop the inertia. This time, I hit a wall; a wall of desperation and fallibility that mirrored my miserable self. Something bashed that reflective obstacle and freed me. I don’t know how else to articulate it. I don’t really even understand it.

But on this side is freedom … in the form of something rising internally. I understand it is of me, not me, deeply rooted and connected, like the Universal umbilical cord. My lifeline.

• How have I experienced desolation, isolation or darkness?
• What have I learned being this side of it?
• How has it changed my understanding of myself?
• My understanding of the Creator?
• What did the experience shape me?


seized
with pain
aloneness

robbed
of energy
identity

foraging
for love
understanding

offered
a different
path

that was
inside all
along

yet I had
stood in the
way


  

No comments:

Post a Comment