Thank you for that vacation, which I spent in meditation and writing.
AAM said on Jan. 23 that in February he’d be raising every core issue I had and that process continues. What a hair-raising ride it’s been so far.
One thing that’s emerged from all the looking that I did is that I feel ready. I am ready. I no longer feel myself to be inadequate for the job (whatever the job is). I suppose I had unworthiness issues, like so many others. They’ve been blown off by this rollercoaster ride I’m on.
I can’t prove to you I’m ready. There’s no evidence for it besides my word.
Does saying that imply that I’m a finished product? No. Does it mean I’ll make no mistakes from this moment on? Far from it. Let me count how many mistakes I made today. Which do you want? Big mistakes or little mistakes?
But I feel ready emotionally and I am ready by personal declaration and stand.
I had a spiritual experience that precipitated feeling ready. I unearthed a root vasana or core issue called “I don’t care.” It came from my early years with my Dad and was reinforced by the death of my Mother. (Long story. Not necessary.)
I’ve been living my life out of a wooden, constructed self each of whose planks has written on it “I don’t care.”
That vasana was seriously interfering with my life and took some digging to get at. When I’d completed my experience of it, it seemed as if everything in my life that had been bothering me calved like a glacier. Dilemma fell away. Anxiety fell away. I was left in a space of inner peace.
Seeing that decision I made more than fifty years ago and really experiencing it through to completion caused a lot of things to simply drop from my field of awareness.
This was the second time that I’d had a remarkable breakthrough on this vacation. Later I’ll discuss an earlier one (healing the wounds).
At one point, I felt the words form in my mind: “You don’t need to do any more processing.” At that moment (and for that moment only), I felt complete. (1)
And feeling complete, I felt calm, confident and certain. Not about something. Calm, confident and certain as experiences unto themselves – self-created, self-supporting, and self-validating.
Moreover, as happened on previous occasions, I looked at the space that I ended up in and found that space to be “normal.” After years of being a person with not normal responses to things, I came back into the middle and became normal again – in this area of life.
These kinds of revelations have very little value in the worldly round of life. Most people who read this might say: “Who cares?” But they had tremendous value for me.
The shelf life of feeling complete is like the snap of a finger. Today’s completion doesn’t buy us anything tomorrow. Completion is always now and now and now. Or it isn’t completion.
Now that I was complete, I could rechoose. And I did, much like Scrooge on Christmas Eve: “I do care. I do care. I care very much.” It was as if I was awakening a part of me that had lain dead or asleep for most of my life. And I know there is more to go.
I looked at what I wanted to do in life, from this new vantage point. There was so much I was doing that I didn’t want to be doing. It’s as if I was designing my life and failing to consider myself. I set about scaling back almost immediately, a process I’ll be continuing.
I saw that I don’t want to do something. What I want to do is be.
I’m becoming more and more aware that being – right now – is much more important than doing.
Somehow I have to create a lifestyle that allows that to happen. It isn’t a matter I can postpone any longer. Nor is it something that should be denied anyone else either.
Another way of saying that is what I hunger for is a quiet mind. In the quiet mind, in the windless place, in the still pond is the Self seen and known. I hunger for the stillness, for the quiet, for the Self.
In a reading I had with him on Feb. 20, I asked AAM if it was problematic that I felt such a draw inward and he said that this phase of building Nova Earth was one of seeking peace by going inward. So I don’t feel out of resonance.
I don’t say these insights apply to others, or that they should apply. They simply apply to me at this moment. It’s really the process that’s more important than the individual insights.
So thank you for that time off. Forgive me if you see me struggling in the days ahead to adjust my lifestyle to incorporate what I’ve learned and rechosen.
And remind me of my own rule: Never do anything drastic until three days after you leave a meditation workshop. We’re usually in an elevated space that we cannot later sustain. We therefore do things that we later regret.
OK, boss, bring on the rest of the core issues. I’m still standing. And I’m ready.
Starting this week, I’ll be taking Monday and Tuesday off on a regular basis.
Footnotes
(1) I don’t plan to stop processing, just processing this line of vasanas. Processing is for me an integral part of the path of awareness and of emergence.