Holding Your Experience
Will you make a commitment to no longer abandon yourself and your present experience? That no matter what thought, feeling, emotion, or sensation arises, you will offer it a home within you, setting aside the conclusion that it is a mistake, a problem which must be fixed, or evidence that something is wrong with you?
Begin with a sacred pause, touching whatever is there, and state your intention to stay close. Offer a heartfelt “yes” to your experience and allow it to be exactly as it is, cutting into the momentum of billions of lifetimes of turning from the orphaned ones knocking on the door of your heart. Call off the war with yourself, and see that arguing with reality will only ever lead to suffering for yourself and others.
From this ground of seeing and allowing, you could then enter into the most radical act of all: to meet whatever arises in your experience with what Rumi calls a mighty kindness. While it seems so simple, it is in fact a revolution in practice. Open your heart to your rage, your shame, your despair, and your sadness, gently holding and cradling it as you would a sweet little baby, unconditionally receiving it as a raging expression of reality exactly as it is. See that it, too, is path—come only to awaken one of the qualities of love within you.
It is through this wild kindness that you may finally see just how much space there is around your experience, how whatever appears—while very vivid, colorful, energetic, and even disturbing—is luminously transparent, and not nearly as solid as it seems. It is in and through your intimacy with your embodied, present experience that it will self-liberate, without any effort on your part, into the pristine, primordial awareness and love that you are.
This energy or movement of forgiveness, which is of course an important and noble one, has a way of arising naturally, on its own, when our pain, grief, and hurt is metabolized in our hearts and bodies, when we allow it to be touched by the light of our awareness. In this sense, forgiveness is not so much a “practice” that we do or even the result of an intention that we’ve made; it lives and breathes and moves outside of the conceptual world entirely. We see that it is a somatic process, one that is effortless in a sense. As our pain and grief is processed, in a deeply embodied way, according to a timeline that is unique to each human heart heart, forgiveness may naturally be there waiting for us on the other side. Forgiveness, then, may not be something that we “do,” or try to do, and is no longer seen as evidence that we are a “spiritual” person and so forth. Many people that I speak with have concluded that they have “failed” because they have not forgiven, they feel shame that they are not good spiritual practitioners, that somehow the mere presence of sensations and feelings such as anger or rage or grief indicate that they are lost, unspiritual, and unworthy of love.
