Category: Awakening Essays

The current socio-political climate in the US, and much of the world, is such that we all have work to do to understand our relationship to differences in personal identity. Doing awakening work today requires us to lean in to how we embody our lived experience. In the Trillium Path, we awaken as embodied consciousness, which means that we do not transcend who and how we are. We transcend the limitations of who and how we are. It’s a fine distinction.

Our work starts with Greenlighting, saying yes to what is. As we Greenlight our experience, our feelings, patterns, and conditioning, we come to a point at which we can drop more deeply into Radical Embrace, which means that we embrace what is at the root of ourselves and we embrace it fully. The difference is between saying yes and saying come home to me. Radical Embrace is how we begin to integrate all of who we are. We awaken to the paradox of both and: we are both undifferentiated consciousness and a limited, finite, human person. These two things can’t be separated. I know that I am undifferentiated consciousness because I am in this body. Otherwise, I would live in the spirit realm!

For myself, awakening healed a lot of past trauma around gender and sexual orientation. It brought about an ongoing integration of my parts, past experiences in which I was shamed or which brought about a sense of shame; emotional wounds from not being seen and by being seen as a threat to masculinity, femininity, and  heterosexuality. It brought me to a place of familiarity, in which I knew myself as Self—beyond gender, orientation, ability, race, and ethnicity. I think for many of us, this relief of awakening to the truth of our Self as consciousness is a deep release from the burden of being separate, being Other. At the same time, the ongoing integration process requires that we deepen in our lived experience of the core paradox. We are simultaneously Divine and Human. In his book, Tantra Illuminated, Christopher Wallis says something very helpful about this: “It is out of love for itself that Consciousness bodies itself forth.” Consciousness bodies . . . forth.

Each of us bodies forth as a particular manifestation of consciousness, what I think of as a flavor or a filter. We have a race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and physical ability. These things are of the body. They’re not outside of us like religion and social class, and they are less fluid than age. Everyone everywhere experiences aging to a greater or lesser degree. We’re born; we’re infants, toddlers, children, adolescents, adults, elders. We can still be othered because of these differences, but they’re not inherent to who we are in the way that race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ability are. These are things that we cannot and never do leave behind. They are the filter through which the world sees us and we see the world.

Today it is more than ever important that those of us living awakening come to a deeper understanding of the role these elements play in our embodiment. When we say, with all good intentions, that we are color blind, what we’re saying, in effect, is “I don’t see you.” Because a person of color is never not a person of color. A Transgender person is never not transgender. A Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, or non-binary, non-gender conforming, or asexual person is never not that. That is who and how consciousness bodies forth as them. When we say, “I don’t see your race, color, ability, ethnicity, orientation or gender identity,” we may mean to say “I see your soul” or “spirit,” or “essence,” but that soul, spirit, and essence abides in a physical body that has its differentiations.

I have a number of tattoos on my arms. I wasn’t born with them. I had them put on my body on purpose. I chose them. I didn’t choose to be a cisgender, Queer, white woman of European extraction. My lived experience in the decades before my awakening was shaped by those qualities, and they cannot be removed. I’ve integrated my unique holding of the feminine with its flavor of the masculine, my sexual attraction to men and women, my Queerness in my generation’s LBGT spectrum which made the Q necessary as a place for those of us who identify as outside of what felt like a limited menu for sexual and gender expression.

Having lived among Black people for much of my life, I see their Blackness. I see the differences between African, African American, and African-Caribbean. And yet there is a world of Blackness that I do not know or inherently understand. But what I do understand is that Blackness is part of who those people are. It’s a part that has been denigrated, and subjected to attempted erasure. So I would not say to a Black person: “I don’t see your color” because to say that is to say “I don’t see your history. I don’t see how you got here.” I can see them as more than their color, but I can’t see them without it.

For many of us of a certain generation, we were taught to try to become colorblind. Michelle Alexander makes great use of this concept in the title of her groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, which in itself explores the paradox that we are not colorblind in this age. A recent image that appeared on Facebook makes this clear. Two men, one white and one Black who committed the same crime from the criminal history, adjudicated by the same judge, got horrendously different sentences. The white man got 2 months in county jail. The Black man got 26 years in federal prison. No age colorblindness there.

The murder of George Floyd, one in centuries of murders of Black men and women at the hands of whites, set off a strong chain reaction. It has put us on notice that because all lives matter, Black Lives Matter and Black Trans Lives Matter. While children of immigrants are separated from their families and kept in inhumane detention centers, Brown Lives Matter. All of us, wherever we land on the spectrum of Race, Ethnicity, Ability, Gender Identity and or Sexual Orientation have a responsibility to lend our love and our courage to supporting those who for centuries have been shown by our mass dominant culture that their lives are expendable. When we say “I see you,” we have to mean “I see ALL of you. And all of you is welcome here.” Anything else is too little to honor the beauty of consciousness painting herself on the canvas that is herself.

Home alone this weekend while my beloved is off at the Evolutionary Collective Retreat we were both meant to attend until our dog, Padme, dislocated her hip on the way to the kennel, I’ve been following a deep imperative toward comfort. At the same time, I’ve been heavy-hearted and grieving—the missed trip, my absent beloved, and the much loved dog, eleven years old and without a serious illness in her life, undergoing her second surgery in a month to correct the effects of what appears to be a congenital defect in her hip sockets.

After I took her to the vet, I did some grocery shopping, and a sort of comfort imperative showed up. I bought a chicken to roast. When Sugandhi is here, we keep to a vegetarian diet, and chicken is not my meat of choice normally. But there they were, locally produced, organic, already dead, and emitting a vibe that said: you need me.

Late this afternoon, after some Googling, I settled on roasting the chicken with the baby potatoes I’d bought the other day, some carrots, garlic, and onion. It came back, cooking like this, even after many years. Rub with salt and refrigerate. Rub with olive oil, more salt and pepper and paprika. Put a lemon in the cavity. Toss the vegetables in oil and scatter them in the pan. Bake for 90 minutes in a hot oven.

Then came collard greens and a pumpkin pudding made from a can of sweetened organic pumpkin bought by mistake. As the scent of the chicken wafted into the house, and warm from the wood stove and the oven, the lights golden, the dog sleeping, I realized that I was making a sort of ersatz Thanksgiving feast for one.

Following that was the realization of how much I have to be thankful for. I have all these resources. Money in the bank, a warm, safe home, love, companionship, health, all under girded by a sense of well being that allows me to feel everything that arises when and as it does. The dog is aging and our time together is growing short. I’m missing out on the retreat, and the Bay Area, and our beloveds there. It’s cold, and gray, and winter is surely coming bringing snow and ice, and the challenge of “walking” a two legged dog who is used to spending hours outdoors on her own. I’m alive. I’m awake to all that aliveness means. I’m grateful. I’m blessed. I’m here in this moment allowing it all to mingle together like scent and spice into a deep comfort. What more could I want?

It’s ironic that the thing most people want more than anything is also the thing they fear more than anything: intimacy. Intimacy requires us to risk opening ourselves to another, saying what we want, what we feel, and what we fear. The more we let fear separate us from our truths, the more power it has to separate us from those we love. We can’t be intimate with secrecy. We can’t be intimate with silence steeped in lies. Every time we refuse to truthfully answer questions about how we feel or what we want, we add another layer of separation between us and our loved ones.

I read somewhere recently that anger is the guardian of fear. I think that fear has a phalanx of guards. Glibness, optimism, transcendence, sarcasm, shyness, stoicism. There seems to be an almost infinite number of disguises for fear. We develop early on an awareness that our tender innocence is vulnerable and easily wounded. We learn to withhold, dissemble, retreat, or even attack when we are hurt. And the catalog of hurts begins early and grows with us. Paradoxically, we feel unsafe as children because we are surrounded by those who also feel unsafe and who deflect our and their own vulnerability with fear’s many disguises.

As adults then it’s no wonder that we have to unlearn the patterns of deflection that shaped us throughout our early lives. When we enter into intimate relationships, those old patterns, slights, and buried fears awaken. Once the glow of first meeting and new love ignite into passion and from passion settles into familiarity, the literally familiar becomes the coals on which we begin to cook. She reminds you of your mother. He channels your father. It’s difficult to see the face of your beloved through the lens of your early wounding. So you strike out, or retreat physically or emotionally, and a small door closes in your heart. Over and over, these small doors close until your heart is a shuttered and impregnable thing.

The only way to be fully intimate with another is to be fully intimate with ourselves. We have to be willing to open the old, stuck doors to our own hearts, release what’s hidden there. Let it flow freely through and from us until it finds its level and becomes us. Door by door.

I’m writing this from my own lived experience, what I have witnessed in myself and others. I learned and lived the lie of a sunny disposition in a childhood where tears and melancholy were not welcome or tolerated. I created a story to accompany the lie. I projected this elaborate falsehood into every relationship of my early adult life. On the surface, it was attractive and accepted, but it was not durable, and it ruptured every time a partner reflected the familiar patterns of my youth. The other problem was that it cast a distorting glare like a fun house mirror. If I was so sunny and easy going, then why did my partners sense turmoil?

The milestones of my journey to embodied consciousness realization were years of short term serial monogamy. Relationship after relationship, I strove to find the fit for the hole in my Being. It was a long, lonely, heartbreaking saga, fumbling in the miasma of mutual isolation.

Okay, yes, there were periods of joy and ease glimmering over the shifting sands of my lack. I had to rot out of this search. I realized when I turned fifty the mistakes I’d made, and I began to search in earnest for the truth of my Self. The details of that journey are recorded elsewhere. It was Love, of course, that tireless and exacting master, that finally led me to the one with whom I could build a space of risk and revelation.

Intimacy is not found. It is built one revelation at a time. When I reunited with the love of my life after eight years and committed relationships with others, we thought that we had matured to the point when we could love each other freely and honestly. We were wrong.

Five years in, she told me one winter morning, “I can’t do this anymore.” The “this” she couldn’t do was not be herself to be with me. It was an excoriating breakup for me. I felt like Gilgamesh at the death of Enkidu and went on a search through the dim, dark places of my heart to find relief. It cauterized my Being. Luckily, I found some heart-centered Buddhist teachers whose retreats gave me a safe haven to drop into the mess of my emotional life. It was not easy.  Each retreat gave me another opportunity to be with my Self in an unadulterated way, and the few, brief vocal check-ins with the teachers helped me to see that it was not something that I could fix. I simply had to live it. I became, in a small way, like a monk, living my dharma day by day and waiting to see where it would take me.

Fortunately, enough happened that when, the following fall, we found ourselves at the same events, talking briefly each time, and she could sense the change in me. We decided to just spend time together and not try to be in a relationship.  By early the next spring, we found our way to the work that would awaken us fully to our true nature, then Waking Down in Mutuality. And after an event one night, sitting in her car in the cold dark, she said, “if we’re going to be together, we’re going to have to be completely honest.” I felt such a deep relief at those words. Something in me recognized that this was the only way to be intimate with her.

We had both done some work on our patterns, and as we continued to do the Waking Down work, we had ample opportunity to see, feel, and Be our conditioning and by doing so to slowly integrate it. At one point, when we were living on opposite sides of the country, on the telephone one night I told her a secret from my childhood that I had never told another partner, something that felt deeply shameful and that had plagued me for nearly all my adult life. I took that risk because I had enough experience with her, enough trust in the container we had built, that she would not judge me, and her response gave me succor and healing.

So when I tell people that the only way that their relationship is ever going to go someplace, go where they think they want it to go, I am not speaking idly. We all have our wounds, our fears, our feelings of worthlessness. Poets have written this over and over across the eons. We have to open the door, me, then you, then me, then you, over and over and over again until the light of our love illuminates the dark corners, and we know ourselves loved.

This process is never finished as we ourselves are never finished. Conditioning runs deep, and it wants to come up and be seen and allowed to relax its grip on us. Romantic relationship gives us a place to rest at the same time they activate our wounded nature. If we take the risk to love, to reveal ourselves, to build trust, we can know an intimacy with ourselves and another that we can find nowhere else except maybe in God. And how much more lovely to know God this way, in the life shared with one who can hold us and be held by us no matter what. It’s worth the risk.

I’ve been on a two week long journey into embodiment and pain. The source of the pain is unknown. Did I injure a muscle skiing the flat and reasonably unchallenging Nordic trail where I celebrated my first ski of the year? Did a follow up ski a week later reinjure it? Was it activated in some way by a massage I had, or yoga? Am I simply experiencing my body’s slow and inevitable decline, or genetic history of spinal degeneration?

To question is human. We want to know. Why? How? When? As if their answers will give us some purchase on the slippery ground of Being. It’s easy for me to rest in Being. I’m a recovering Transcendent, so the old pattern is there to accept what happens with a sort of fatalism, to try to impose a patience on the effects of life.

In this case, though, the pain got the better of me. I have used the word “excruciating” more times in the last 15 days than in the last 15 months. On a scale of 1 – 10, my pain has at times hung in at around a 12. Finally, I went to the “doctor,” actually a Physician’s Assistant whom I trust and respect. Time for answers. She ordered medication and X-rays, a first step toward finding out the cause of the pain.

The X-rays found no breaks or herniated disks. Somehow, the pain got worse. It was difficult to move, to turn over in bed an impossibility. The toes on my left foot started to tingle and go numb. I woke on a recent morning and felt completely done in. I went back to the doctor to go over the results of the film and let her examine me further. This is a very kind, patient person with a deep source of empathy. I felt so vulnerable in my pain. She prescribed another medication that “50% of people found helped nerve pain,” and upped my allowable level of Ibuprofen. I took a pain pill and headed home.

My days in this limbo of not knowing are punctuated by pill intervals. The medication helps immensely and fortunately does not have a significant negative effect on my thinking or sense of well-being. In fact I have experienced long periods of bliss and ease when the pain is present but like a ghost of itself, a mirage that slowly reasserts its grip on my body.

I find myself ever present. The pain increases, then decreases, then increases. I do laundry, read, drink coffee, work online. I grieve a little each day that finds me indoors instead of out on the beautiful, beloved ski trails of my home. I think of my mother, severely limited by chronic pain for the last twenty-five years of her life. I remember my occasional impatience with her. I wonder if I am slowly moving in her direction. I cry when I think of her and with the frustration of the gnawing pain in my leg that comes back online as the drugs wear off. I rest in that feeling, let it sing its song throughout the finely tuned cathedral that is my body.

For me, on my path of awakening, embodiment has been an edge. I was trained by my father, dead at fifty-seven of lung cancer, who used to say, “It came by itself; it’ll go away by itself.” And by my never-the-less long suffering mother, whose favorite response to pain, sickness or difficulty was to “persevere.” I remember when she sent me an article about meditation and pain management years ago, long before her death. I embraced this idea that we could get out of our suffering, out of our bodies; that this was noble. That equanimity was the ability to transcend our humanity and respond to life with serenity, no matter what.

Ha! That will only get us so far. Life is a beautiful and horrifying venture. We are typically born in blood and pain, and we are likely to die in it as well. Along the way are poignant stops that bring us great blessings and joys and then the unfathomable grief of their loss. We must allow ourselves to live the full spectrum of this truth. Anything else is a lie, and we will leave this body and the life it has either enjoyed or endured without having known our full potential, without having known God, Love, Truth. Whatever we call it, the only way to know it is to let ourselves descend fully into each experience, to make room for it, to live it to the fullest of our ability. This is the path to wisdom; this is the path to living a life in and as consciousness in whole Being realization. This is the path to awakened life.

I continue to follow life’s path of mysteries and mishaps with an open heart and trust in Being. There’s no right or wrong way to Be. We are as we are in the moment, in pain, in bliss, in emptiness, in love, in anger. The fabric of Being is rich and varied. Let it enfold you, and see what I mean.

This is a mystery that has recently been revealed to me. It’s the tail of life’s comet full of “unexpected” events, and a way to fall more deeply into love with life, your life, as it shows up moment by moment.

I’m sitting in a big easy chair in my living room surrounded by silence and the gray light of a February day. I’ve just awakened from a short nap that overtook me while reading a book after chopping wood.

I’m home today because freezing rain falling across the valleys of North Central Washington closed the college where I teach part time. I’m tired because I got up at 5:00 to cover an 8:00 class for a colleague, and I wanted to leave enough time for the forecast sleet and stop at my favorite coffee place before school. Halfway through my breakfast a little after 6:00 am, I got the email that the College was closed due to the weather.

I’m here alone because my partner is working on two new paintings in  her studio, something that takes her out of the house now daily as long as there is light to paint by.

None of this sounds particularly meaningful on the surface, but for me it is the source of a deepening relaxation into what shows up.

Recently I resigned from a job that, while part time, occupied my mind 24/7. It had been both a profound source of joy and more recently the cause of considerable discomfort. The discomfort, my partner has helped me see through the ongoing process of lived daily mutuality, came from my refusal to love and honor myself enough to listen to my intuition, which had been telling me for months that the job was over for me. Once I opened the door to that, a great equalizing of pressure swept me out of the position like an energetic tsunami that has cleared out three more days a week for me to Be more than Do.

At nearly 62 years old, the tail of my comet contains remnants of the emotional detritus of this particular and conditioned life. The person who needed outside validation, couldn’t be or act alone, emitted a bitter projection of my neediness on those in my personal and professional sphere, a force field of activity to counteract the discomfort of being alive.

Today, I am relaxed about the emptiness of home, life, days. I am always getting what I need to come, and be, more fully alive in each moment. Minute by minute I’m letting go of ideas and leaning into what arises. To the unfathomable curious mystery of Being alive.

To riff off the old Stones standard, you may not always know or get what you want, but if you relax into what arises, you always get what you need.

Now you might say, do I need disease, disaster, and death? This is where the mystery deepens. If you accept that you are not, despite your best intentions, in charge of what arises, what in the common human parlance, you call your life, you will go more easily through it. A teacher of mine once said about the awakening process, “be prepared to live with a broken heart.” If we can trust our human vulnerability and live and love in this broken openness, our lives unfold exponentially.

Don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. The next time you find yourself wishing things were otherwise, dare to lean into the way things are and ask yourself: what’s in this for me? There’s a gift under the disappointment that only you can open.

It’s snowing now. Tea is steaming on my desk. The dog wants to come in. There’s a woodpecker eating the suet in the pine. Moment by moment, life is revealing itself, following its own path like a stream or a river in which we are afloat. Let go and see where it take you.