The Vibrant Heart

The Offering Of Stuckness

When stuckness in some area of life prevails it is the highest
offering of all. It is what keeps inviting you to step fully outside
the mind.

Body ailments, financial distress, unrealized desires,
addictions.....whatever it may be, be assured it is serving you
greatly. Left to our own devices in the mind, all things going
relatively well, what enticement is there to leave it. Continuing to
identify with it must become extremely disagreeable or no serious
stepping back, stepping out of it will materialize.

Stuckness is usually where you've circled for years, mapping out a
small parcel of mind where, despite the suffering, you get to hold on
to the familiarity of something you must resolve, a great problem,
something that unconsciously binds you and holds you in separation.

It is where the Beloved is kissing you most fervently with a "Come
dear heart, come Home to Me." Its supreme gift to you is the beginning
of the end of you.

It may not feel in your best interest but you must leave the
exhausting merry-go-round of fixing, of seeking resolution, of
betterment. You are not abandoning anything except the unreal.

Let yourself be airlifted out of stuckness, out of mind. You are not
the mess, not the body, not the face you see in the mirror every
morning and are so convinced is you.

You are a fountain of clarity inside that is still and yet bubbles
with goodness and delight and joy. Let us come Home. And let us stay Home.

To Call Myself Beloved

Compassion for ourselves is not easily wrung out of us. The price, so
often, is some unacceptable part of our lives intensifying in its
very unacceptability.

That mind has already exhausted itself in the
search for resolution - this is a great blessing. Nothing to do now
but wait. Waiting for that surprising moment when the heart bursts
open, sometimes stimulated by an act of kindness, a touch of grace
from the external.

New levels of tenderness for ourselves, for all of life, are forged
open and we rest again in the dear, dear sweetness of the Heart.

"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth. "
-- Raymond Carver

We Rise Up

We rise up in the midst of darkness. We do not wait, bound to the dark, until it miraculously fades away.

Rise up, dear heart, rise up. Let the mind fall away from this pillar of Truth that You are.

It is time to stop believing the chaos, to take that Stand that ignores thought.

Do we really need any more evidence, any more time to realize the mind is a battlefield. One thought pitting itself against the next, a ricochet of taunts and barbs, a world at war with itself and only itself. A revolving door of pain and pleasure.

Leave the battlefield. Don't wait for enough healing, enough self-love, enough redemption.

And savor the delight of true Stance, where you are unaffected, undisturbed by all appearance.

Move Freely

If you hold back from following your heart, from simply doing what you want to do in the moment for fear of offending others, for fear of what they might think - this is the ultimate deadener. It is the sadness of life given that cannot be lived.

Act as if you're alone even when others are present. Move freely.

Speak the truth, be the truth, do the damn thing you want to do.

Goodwill

How beautiful it feels to let others have what you want. To see the specialness, the attention you have craved go to another and to have reached that place in your heart where rejoicing is the outcome. This is one of the places where our inner work inevitably leads.

The humbling of the ego, the erosion of personality posturing ushers in a new kind of glory. It's a quiet, inner resurrection of completeness in yourself that naturally extends out in goodwill, in love and support for others.

Speaking Our Truth

Good behavior won't take you home. It served us as well as it could
but breaking out of the box of conditioning is a whole new playing
field.

Some of us have great difficulty in speaking our truth. We qualify and
justify and explain. We preamble what we really want to say, trying to
be inoffensive, trying to soften things for other minds. We hold back,
hide, squash down our truth. It may be the expression of a need ( when
the conditioning has been that it's not OK to have needs). It may be
the honest, open relating of some true feelings, of vulnerability, of
hurt, sadness, anger.

Spiritual knowledge can compound the issue because now we want to be
loving and spiritual and we know that much of our relative truth is
coming from mistaken identity so we hold back even more, trying to be
loyal to the absolute truth that there is only love, only silence,
only peace.

But the great beauty is that our relative truth, when expressed as the
truth of what's here in the moment, is the absolute. No distinction.
Just truth. The fine mist at the top of the fountain is as much the
truth as the great surge at the base, as much the truth as the
stillness that fuels the surge.

Stop holding back this natural flow of energy. Stop deadening
yourself. Come alive into this one, organic Flow.

It's about firing the editor. It's about expressing ourselves, truly,
openly, honestly, not deflecting with mind monitoring and caretaking.

As Truth starts prising open the box of conditioning there may be a
lot of fear, confusion as to what expressing our truth really means.
What if we hurt someone. What if we lose something precious. This is
all to be expected and patience and gentleness with our fear is all
part of it.

There is no tried-and-true formula for how to be. It's an adventure
for each of us. No one can introduce us to this free land - only
ourselves as our courage and discernment grow around the fine lines of
being loving, being true, being open.

Out of the box. Speaking what could never be spoken. Free-flowing. O
the joy and expansion of it. Always landing on greater energy,
refreshing truth, a heart free now to love truly.

The Sweet Ease Of A Loved Being

What a strange paradox that much of our awakening work lies in coming
to tender peace with what we seek to wake up from - the imagined
'me'. Most of our lives are spent convinced that happiness lies in
fixing up the personality and the body. We toil away at our
self-improvement habits and hopes, trying to find a foothold on
okayness.

But the ego will never be OK in its own eyes. It is far from natural
to us to be gentle with ourselves. There isn't a cell in our bodies
that is DNA'd to love our own beings.

This world of bodies and form was birthed with and from the belief that
we are separate from Love. As programmed egos we are walking, moving
automatons of unlovedness.

How does the great tide of the Heart turn finally towards this
innocent creature-being.

The great discomfort, the constant offness, the pain of
self-rejection must make itself known. That foothold of okayness
becomes a very slippery ground that can no longer provide the false
security it once did. Love is only intent on exposing what is unloved.
This exposure is a nightmare for the ego. All that's wrong with you,
everything you cannot fix is swimming before your love-starved eyes.
Whether it is body issues or personality issues, something looks
unresolvable. Love has you smack in Its embrace, cornered, stuck,
unredeemable.

We must bear the discomfort of this place. This spot is the very
gateway into the Heart. No other entrance point is available. And it
opens, it always opens, doing its own work, the mysterious alchemical
work of the Heart.

And everything softens again. The convincing issue collapses. Love for
the self peers through and you would not want yourself, your life to
be any different than the pure perfection of the moment. The sweet
ease of a loved being.

And this is all you have to love. In loving this being,we love the
whole world of the being. The end of projection, the end of denial.
The preparation for the full dismantling of a separate individual.

Receiving Energy, Receiving The Ego

Everything that feels separate in the system must come into the
openness. And it's the job of our life circumstances to trigger and
activate just this.

As old energy rises to the surface it flounders around initially. It
presents itself as confusion, small child, not-on-firm-ground
feelings, very busy mind darting around reciting all that's wrong with
you. It activates the 'groove' of the particular aspect of suffering
that your body-mind carries. What has always been wrong with you is
still what's wrong. Wherever you have gone historically, this is where
you go again. It can look like depression, anxiety, hopelessness. No
new issues. No new feelings.

It is just energy. We cannot say this often enough: it is just energy.
Energy being siphoned off and returning Home. If there were no
interpretation of it, it would be a breeze.

So it's to let this energy do what it needs to do. There is nothing
comfortable about it. So be it for a while.

Find what nurtures you in these moments. Cry it out some, storm it out
if necessary. If it has settled into a knot in the body, sit with it
or hold space for it. Energy does not necessarily move through in the
blink of an eye. It takes time, patience, holding. Just like a baby.

Of course, what the energy is looking for most of all is Love.
Ordinarily we know this but find we cannot turn Love on with the flick
of a switch. "May love come to this" is a sweet mantra that can help
tease open the heart. Even in the reciting of it there is already
great awareness of the bigger picture of what is going on. We can call
on the strength and love of Ramana, Jesus, Ammachi, any form of love
that resonates with our heart. This can help greatly.

The heart may open or not. If not now in these moments, it surely will
later in its own sweet time.

The flurry of energy passes, mind becomes substantially quieter.
Gratitude moves in, organic gratitude, natural to every single heart.
Life looks bright and open again, Love has emptied us out one more
time.

Love's Priceless Offering

Take care when you notice the thought arising about how tired you are of some patterning or life situation or how you can't wait to be free of it. This situation is Love's priceless offering to you, a classroom that is individualized for you beyond perfection. Relax into the grace of it and remember this is what is taking you Home.

A Dream Road

This moment is the final destination. It is the end of the journey,
the all-across-the-road cul-de-sac sign. Just This.

If you must, turn around and take a last look back at that long road
you've been traveling forever on. The sheer length of it, the
arduousness of it, the hills, the valleys, the detours, the bypasses,
the maze of it all, the pain of it all.

A dream road that was only, always a declaration of your wrongness,
your unlovedness. A wrong 'somebody' that has never existed, that
was never separate from the shining reality of Truth.

Meet yourself here in this moment. Meet every teacher you've ever had
Here. Everyone you have ever loved, friend, child, lover, animal. They
are all Here, whether it is known or not.

What do we do here. We do nothing. A big, giant nothing. Hanging out
in nothingness. Vaguely felt, thin , flat, it doesn't matter. We stay
Here.

And the more you give yourself to this, the more It gives itself to
you. And this nothing gradually reveals itself to have depth, great
depth, the depth of existence itself. Nothing outside it, everything
happening within it and it is You.

A Great, Full-Bodied Now containing everything, in which all things appear.

The Imperfect One

Gradually , over time, we learn to hold space for even the most difficult of emotions and the gnarliest of issues. We watch as tenderness becomes an exquisite form of self-inquiry, dismantling the walls and armoring of the ego-construct in the most beautiful way.

And we realize, to our deep surprise and overwhelming gratitude, it was never about having the perfect life, personality, body but that the sweet love that comes forth to hold the 'imperfect' one is all that was ever wanted and hungered for. And this love is our very own Self.