Enlightment is Awesome - Finding the Center

The best thing about being a teacher is how much I learn from myself. We teach most that which we need to learn most. We work our way through it for someone else and are therefore brought to the light of the situation ourselves.

Grief is tearing and painful. Joy can be as well. And when it feels like all is turbulence around you, the joy and the grief seem almost intrusive. It certainly feels fatalistic; the emotions so explosive, I feel my head might burst, my heart might stop, my breath might fail. I long for the quiet dignity of the single poetic tear glissading down my cheek.

By having been requested by circumstance to repeat and repeat and repeat the calming phrases and steps to calm decision making; by showing the way to the center of self; by spouting virtuously that the center is the best place to make decisions from, I have led myself (or stumbled along behind my student) finally to that calm and centered place.

And when the comfort food is churning acid, and the alcohol is vinegar, and the sad songs are annoying and the happy ones are raucous; when the words spoken and heard no longer mean anything, finally I come to the center and the peace. I fall away from the pressure. I deny it. I float free, down and in. Calm. Connected. Grateful that the violence has passed, if only for a moment. Every time the moment lasts longer.

The hardest part to learn - this calm, this center, is not a denial of the emotion, be it joy or grief. It is acceptance. Total acceptance. Complete acceptance. Acceptance deeper than the grief, than the joy. Deeper than the fear and the hope. Deeper than the learned perception of self.

Follow your breath in. And Down. Find your center. And discover a whole new world with me.

Enlightenment is awesome - The next step

There is a step beyond coping, dealing, surviving.  There is a step beyond the vortex of sadness or joy, horror or excitement.  There is a step beyond.  It's called living.

You can only grieve, replay, cling, bask, deny, rejoice for so long.  Then you have to return to the world.  You have to put food in the belly and clothes on the back.  You have to shower and drive and interact with others who are dealing with their own vortexes of celebration and sorrow.

It's natural to stop, to freeze, to fight or flight.  Then it's natural to breath again.  It's natural to laugh again.  It's natural to cry again.  It's natural to let the wounds heal, the lights dim, the vision turn to the next goal, the next horizon.  It's natural to move to the future.

Every day we deal with sorrows and joys, trauma vortexes of various colors and intensities.  And every day we step out of the drama, and continue living.

You can take the next step.  Walk this way.

-Lila