Live Awake

Starting season two off with some gratitude. This episode is a reminder that everything is a gift, a raucous, riotous, astonishing gift for you to revel in. There is no right and wrong, no good and bad, no must be’s, this is it. It is a tale of fervent love. A tale of how you learned to discover the immense beauty living inside of you.

I know you have tasted the sun on your skin and inhaled with complete trust, and that you too at times, find it hard to move without knowing what’s next, that at times life feels paralyzing.

I know you live in the tear between these two worlds. Between the dark and the light, between trust and distrust, between love and hatred, between acceptance and resistance, between control and faith, between sun soaked mornings and dark forests.

This week we explore the elements of being human, of living in both trust and disconnect and how to be gentle with ourselves in the process.

When we reach our limits in love, in the stillness of nature, in winter, what would it look like if we stepped one step closer into it rather than, as we so habitually do, away? When we’ve reached our breaking point what could these places of discomfort bring us, if we choose instead to explore them further?

There is richness there, hiding at our borders, hiding in the places we don’t care to look, avoid or find our greatest challenge in facing with grace rather than resistance. If we could learn to wander in instead of away, if we crossed our road lines into the unknown territories we have called too boring or uncomfortable, what could we find?

I wish someone had told me, when I first began my journey into a life of my own, that where I needed to begin, was sitting on the floor, with my eyes closed. I wish someone had told me that my first step, the first step anyone must take is inward.

I wish someone had told me when I felt I had nothing to offer the world, that all I needed to do, was sit down and breath. That all I needed to do was learn the practice of opening to and discovering the true self, sitting inside of me, quietly, and that from there the rest would come easier.

Our entire lives we search for meaning, for answers for something to show us which way to go, a map drawn out just for us. Our moments of inspiration is the map. These are the markers, the landing points for us to explore. These blinks, or images that bring a song to our hearts are the gate keepers of our souls here to guide us in the exact direction we have been fumbling around in the dark for.

This inspiration that eked past our borders and thick brick walls has a great purpose. It has surpassed all of our defenses for it is holding great wealth cupped in its hands.

Often change can catch us off guard. It comes like a gust of strong wind and blows away the ideas and structures we have worked so hard at building. Sitting in the rubble we tend to forget the part of us that had been crying out for this very thing. We wish we could take back our secret prayers and scramble to put back the pieces of the comfortable existence we once had.

When faced with great change we must trust what comes budding forth. We must quickly release our grasp on the old and familiar in order to plant our new garden. Resisting change is futile. The longer we fight our current and therefore only reality, the longer we remain in limbo, trapped somewhere between the past and future, far from the present. All change has been called forth from our soul our lesson is to learn to honor the knowledge of your divine being.

As we grow, the world of form presents before us a barrage of different scenarios that dance into frame. Each one inspiring us to exude more of our love or make us retract or withhold. To those we give love, we and them grow more full, creating more of that loving feeling. To those we close and call hateful words, both we and them become small and less luminous.

Gradually, without knowing we give small portions of our power away to each such scenario which has made us feel closed or restricted or condemning. In the act of doing so we unknowingly yet willingly hand to it a small pouch of our most precious gift. Slowly, our free spirits become feeling stuck and unable to enjoy the gifts of our life. Something seems to be paralyzing our joy.

This weeks episode helps us travel to the places we have become divided, break the attachment to the these places, and in so doing return to our wholeness.

“We can relax and relate to life with faithful knowing that if we cease to act, life itself will not cease. It may in fact grow full.” This phrase has the power to strike fear in the hearts of many for we have become so afraid of entering the place stillness and

non-doing, that the very prospect of it triggers an unhealthy avoidance to this very place within us.

There are cycles we are ignoring. There is a spirit world we are forgetting the language of. All life needs rest and incubation. All life needs time bellow the surface, where it can breathe itself full and round, where it can reconnect with its nature and sprout again in its flushed form. Just as you can not force flowers to continually bloom, the same is true for all human beings. There is great value in letting go and dropping down. We must learn to remember, from time to time to be like the tree in the winter.

Dear women of the world let me remind you of the ocean of strength that lives within you. Rest a while and listen as I tell you of the great powers resting there on your hips, on your breast, in the fibers that twist and twine within your flesh, of the greatness you possess in which I think you need to be reminded.

What if I told you freedom isn’t a destination, not an idea or ideal or dream? It is ours, in this moment, living within each of our breaths.

History and the stories we have chosen are the very things that stand in the way of our joy and freedom. The past, even just a minute ago, has gone, yet we remain in the woes we have so complicatedly wrote. Its easier for us to hold on to the idea that someone else is responsible for our unhappiness, than to open our arms up to the wide open sky and say I don’t need this pain anymore. We are afraid to let go, and instead hold tight to everything we wish to resolve within.

This episode aims to help us move from a place of being fixed in suffering to entering back into our intended state of freedom.