Dharma Love

Hello,

How are you? I am well, feeling fully in the love-stream-flow today.

I have been reflecting recently on what really heals people the most. I have to say it is Love. Sounds obvious, but let me be more specific. When asked what practices we should do when we are not with her, Amma said only one word: “Sangha”. This means community, gathering together in and as what we truly value. In addition to a satsang setting, such as the wonderful Villa Devi offering, this quality of life happens naturally within dharmic friendship. It’s a phrase Adyashanti uses to describe the kind of friendship between two people on an awakening path. Touching this kind of friendship is incredibly transformative… You bounce off one another in your deepest places, encouraging each other to grow and face life with laughter and passion and warmth. Without any effort at all, the world seems to widen and disappear as the oneness you both are when you are together.

So I really encourage this. Yes, have healings, yes, do sadhana (spiritual practices), but often overlooked as an intense spiritual practice is – Call your true friend, get together, open your hearts to one another. No healing can truly take place without this kind of love and depth and intimacy.

The other thing which has been on my mind to share with you, is the way in which shifts move in most people, and the sometimes resulting confusion of this. Let’s say you have a shift or an awakening. Really the description doesn’t matter because when something like this happens to you, it is beyond doubt and needs no external affirmation. Perhaps for a while, there is a deep and overriding felt sense of oneness, Truth, Divinity. And then, it may feel like this goes away. This is the point at which it is very easy for cynicism, doubt or confusion to take control. You may even tell yourself that nothing really happened. In actual fact, often what did happen was a permanent shift: what was there before, never actually returned. Yet the sense of this can feel distant.

In my perception and experience, what has normally happened is that the sense of oneness / transformation has become ‘normal’ – it’s integrated into the background, into the body. But it can feel like you’re back to square one and that you’ve ‘lost it’. The tendency, then, is to give up too easily, listening to cynicism, fear or doubt. The thing at this point, is to keep going, with an attitude of open receptivity. The reality of living awakening / Truth / Love / oneness / transformation / healing is that most people are not going to have an awakening / liberation / enlightenment along the lines of Amma, Ramana Maharshi, Adyashanti, Eckhart Tolle or Tony Parsons. Even though these beings are here inspiring us and showing the way in an absolutely crucial sense, I think it is misleading to believe that ‘my path’ will be the same as theirs. And this belief leads to a great deal of misunderstanding.

Your experience is your experience, and no teaching can get you out of it, no teaching can change what you are going to have to go through to satisfy that yearning for awakening / Divinity / transformation inside you. For most people, awakening embodiment evolution is a life-long thing. It’s really like that. It’s not something with a ‘final ending’, and it’s not something which happens in a flash and stays feeling like that forever. It simply doesn’t work like that, except for a tiny minority of people. And that minority is highly unlikely to be you. Awakening is a blood and guts thing and you have to get your hands dirty. So quit spiritually bypassing, throw yourself into the arms of Divinity, of the private Silence within you, of your friends and of your suffering. I say this equally to myself as I do to you!

Finally, here is a piece of writing I did on a Day Retreat with Chetana and Will in the Sussex countryside. I hope you enjoy it:-

Divinity Intended

I cannot speak…for talking this out is nothing at all anymore. This Silence bears witness to all of that and is also all of that. No need for words anymore. My silent spoken friend, awareness, finally stayed after his tea was drunk.

I saw what is true for me and accepted the somehow burden of it. This being done, You came in again. Then, the deeper revelation – the surrender……. No holding back this time. You showed me all, You revealed Yourself in the night, in the day, in the detail – all at once. That timeless moment – Now. All my burdens are laid down in You. All my heavy weighty blindness and my deafness to Your song is gone. Now I see it all. The game that I played – You knew my every move. You were always bathing it in that Light, yet only now can I see this.

What needs to happen, needs to happen. Yes, this is true. But what I failed to understand was the pitch perfect way this is all going. The sheerness of a thousand songs called out in Your name. It must be as it is and as it will be. You are the One, I am That. I found You again, and in the finding, I am no longer me. No longer isolated from You, my beautiful Muse, my all, my everything. I didn’t know that this way is the way. This precise way which you are unfolding… Divinity Intended. Not outside anymore, not happening to a me. Divinity Intended. A button unbuttoned and a comb combed. The jeans and the hair of Existence.

What has to happen…it’s unfolding, opening – at Its pace alone. Only Your rhythm exists. You lovemaker… It’s all happening now, and now, and now. There is no other; no other at all. This is Your game, and I feel no distance from You anymore. Somehow, I have not transferred this, not managed to translate this – the incredible depth of what is here.

Love,

xDaisy