Dot Six

In 2013, everything seemed to fall apart.  I had been off work since 2010 and used savings, retirement, and credit cards to pay my and my mom’s expenses.  I had never had a problem finding work; but, after my mother’s passing in 2012, I could not get back into the job market to save my life.  I started work/trade at a yoga studio for classes.  After only a month or so, I was fired!!  Can you imagine?  I couldn’t even keep a free job!!

The next day, I broke my foot.  Now I had no money, no job.  I was immobile.  No swimming, running, bicycling, yoga, showering, walking without crutches, or sleeping comfortably.  Every month I would return to the doctor who would tell me that the bone was not healing.  I was in a boot for seven months!  I wanted to kill myself.  While I was going through it, all I felt was struggle, pain, and horribleness.

Looking back, I realize that I moved to another level.  My journal entries are critical because I wouldn’t remember the details today if I had not documented every emotion, thought, activity, and insight and every angry, hopeless, fear-filled, enlightened, relieved, and joyful moment.

Reading A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield lets me know that I am not the only one to experience a succession of difficulties, mistakes, fear, painful patterns, and dissolution that comes from not having the life I desire, expect, and feel that I should have because of my ego-centered reasons: I earned it, I’m a good person, I’ve done the right things, other people live well and prosper, etc.

As part of my spiritual practice, I used to recite a Tibetan prayer in A Path With Heart:

Grant that I may be given appropriate difficulties and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion may be truly fulfilled.

After awhile, I disposed of that prayer.  I had had enough difficulties and sufferings.  Time to move past that.  I couldn’t even remember where I found that prayer until I started re-reading A Path With Heart.  It must be time for me to become reacquainted with it.

Sometimes, going through life’s challenges, we are growing exponentially and can’t see it.  Looking back, the growth that I experienced during 2013 and 2014 would not have been possible without the seeds that were planted between 1994 and 1998.  Those were the years that I got off of my first treadmill and resumed an inner focus that began when I was 19.  The next 15 years were my experiential, living-life years.  That period made me find my dormant seeds and start watering them.

Dot Seven

This year, my No More Drama seeds sprang forth – again.  I thought I had learned those lessons.  Looking back, I see that the circumstances of my life simply reveal more layers that need to be peeled away in order to explore parts of me waiting to emerge from deeper crevices and canyons.  Time and age expose broader contexts to my life that cannot yet be discerned by my limited perspectives and understanding.  I can only accept and trust in the process of evolution.

Looking back, I see that I tend to change when I can find no solace or explanation for my continuous suffering.  During these hard times, I become intensely focused on changing me, changing my behavior, and my thoughts.  I move past intellectual agreement with wisdom teachings and towards implementation as best I can.

Sometimes when I read my journals, I feel that I haven’t changed because I’m still exploring the same concepts, still asking the same questions, still exhibiting the same behavior: impatience, judgment, quick to speak harshly, failure to be peace, inability to express love in the midst of unlove.  Yet, looking at the entirety of my growth, I’m definitely at a different place and I wouldn’t have gotten here but for all of my so-called traumas and dramas.  I see that these intense periods caused evolutionary shifts in my life.

Jack Kornfield references the mystic St. John of the Cross in describing “a long period of unknowing, loss, and despair that must be traversed by spiritual seekers in order to empty and humble themselves enough to receive divine inspiration.”

Connecting

Things happen to make me grow.  On the surface, things seem to be falling apart.  A horoscope reading stated that 21 years ago I went through a reorientation and, if I used that time wisely, it will help me.  Twenty-one years ago, I entered theology school.  It seemed to be a miserable time.  Looking back, I see the beneficial product of my work to become aware, to awaken, and to reveal more of my spirit.

Within those 21 years, my sister and other loved ones died, I gained and lost jobs, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimers and died, my life fell apart and, unlike Humpty Dumpty, I’m putting it back together again.  After my mom’s passing in 2012, I completed a book begun in 1994.  In 2015, I started Ancient Seeker.  I have released and shifted a lot of energy.

Looking forward, I know that, as I continue to grow spiritually, I will develop the capacity to engage life’s chaos with less stress and complaint.