It is not a mistake that human beings are born with sensitive hearts that can sometimes feel raw and broken. Feelings of loss, hopelessness, confusion, and uncertainty pass through each of us. At other times we feel clear, hopeful, confident and faithful. This is simply an indication that we are alive . . . that we are a part of the tidal movement of energy in the universe.
Our vulnerability to the movement of energy is not a mistake, but rather, it is evidence of wholeness. The human experience includes everything. Life is full-spectrum, but so many of us humans are biased toward partiality, toward limited identities that pathologize the brokenness, that abandon the dark, that resist contradictions.
I notice that I have to attend to this tendency to react with judgment to the contradictions in my own experience, that I have to intend purposefully to enter and explore what is arising without making up a story about its worth or value, or its meaning, and without attempting to fix or resolve. I find I have to intentionally place myself in a kind of in-between state, perhaps a kind of suspension, allowing myself to not know for a few moments, with the understanding that I can assert knowing and analysis at any moment if I so desire.
The great good news – while simultaneously the excruciating news – is that the human experience is never going to conform entirely to our hopes, dreams, and the ways we thought it was all going to turn out. The divine truth which enlivens each of our bodies is not organized around safety and the known. It is oriented toward wholeness, toward inclusion, toward a full-spectrum experience of love.
What shows up as my experience is forever coming and going. My body is the vessel, the space in which this full-spectrum tide of life ebbs and flows. While I can’t find reassuring refuge in the ever-changing comings and goings of life circumstances, I can rest in the constancy of the breath, in the steady presence that observes and digests. There is nothing more safe or more sacred, than this attunement, and pure aliveness.
