Ordinary Miracles

I set my Beloved free and found out my Beloved was me…

Fulfillment often comes in unexpected ways and through means we never imagined.  It comes as a grace of paradox and benevolent mystery.  It comes through back doors or cracked windows when we aren’t paying attention or when we least expect it. It sometimes comes in ways that generously and stealthily trick us into our own happiness.  Such is my soul story.

Throughout my life, I have felt a deep and profound longing to experience oneness with Spirit, heaven on earth, union with the beloved.  The heartbreak and heart healing of my life has been orchestrated by the ache of deep calling to deep, my own integrity calling me to live in alignment with who I truly am.  That meant and often still means changes that break my heart as I make them, but those choices also lead me into the sweet spot of living my path and of healing.

For as long as I can remember and perhaps like many of you reading this, I have been aware of a longing to return “home” ….to a place my heart remembers but my mind has forgotten.  I have longed for a home that seemed somewhere else, but in truth was within me.  I have longed to enjoy the relationship with myself that I have mostly looked to others to supply for me (yes, it is appropriate now to pause to send all my relationship volunteers your support because I can be very intense).

Intimate relationships have been my fast track to growth, as they are for many people. From my current perspective I rather suck at them.  Yet, they have served their purpose.  Relationships open me with the precision and intensity of a divine scalpel.  They provide the context for me to trigger into my unhealed patterns and take back the parts of myself wanting to return home to my heart.  They are the in-my-face mirror of my own unconsciousness.  They have also been a place of unsurpassed joy, belonging, acceptance, love, and healing as well.

Honestly, my path has been tough for me emotionally.  So tough emotionally that there have been many times I have begged the powers that be to take me home, to release me from my earthly experience. I have often struggled greatly to care for myself from this place of low self-worth.  I begged for healing but it seemed so slow.  I worked and worked on myself, but the patterns seemed unyielding.  I have been forced by the depth of my emotional pain and it’s unyielding nature to find a new way to relate to pain, to myself, to Spirit and to others.

Eventually and inevitably, we do the thing we thought we could never do and, in the end, it feels effortless and ordinary because we have become the person who could do it.  We feel the thing we thought we could never feel, we are the person we thought we could never become, we have the experiences we thought we could never have.

In the last year, this inevitability has happened upon me.  I have had the most remarkable quiet miracle show up in my experience.  It snuck in, little by little over time, perhaps while I have been sleeping and in-between thoughts and breadths.  Spirit answered my prayer to go home, but not by taking my earthly life from me. Spirit’s answer to my cries and work was to reunite me with myself.   In the reUnion with myself, I found reUnion with Spirit.

Somehow, and in a way I don’t fully understand, I have become my own Beloved.  Now, I can close my eyes, and walk the well worn path to ‘home’ that I have longed my whole lifetime to discover.  The path IS there now.  I DO know the trail.  I finally know where it leads.  This trail of tears and longing and commitment has led me home into my own unique essence in the company of Beings so beautiful that my cup gush-ith over.

Sometimes, we can only feel the trail home, rather then see it when the fog of confusion is thick and blinds our minds. In this place of ‘fog walking‘, we learn to trust the pulsing, aching response of our own hearts to some deep call that guides us as we put one foot in front of the other on our paths towards our fulfillment.

Then, on one ordinary morning, between sips of coffee and getting ready for work, between feeding the dogs and brushing our teeth, an ordinary miracle shows up in such an ordinary way, that we giggle and say…’oh there you are.  I’ve been waiting for you.  I knew you were coming” as our hearts flood with the rivers of gratitude that perfect understanding brings.

Happy trails trailmates.

All my love,
Mary

The Art of Enjoying the Red Light

How we show up in traffic is how we show up in life.  How we do one thing is how we do most things.  Everything in life is our teacher, our mirror.  We call experiences into our life as a guide to give ourselves opportunities to dissolve our blocks to  deeper experiences of peace and joy.  Everything is present for our benefit.  Everything.  If that pissed you off or depresses you…I get it.  I really do.  I have spent most of my life feeling utterly powerless and hopeless.  I know of that which I speak.  I totally understand if my saying there is hope intensifies your feeling of hopelessness.  Letting my hopelessness thaw into hope has taken more courage then anything else I have ever done.  You are not alone.  Keep reading.

This is a a story about my own life mirrors.  It is a story of how my red light lesson introduced a life practice that has helped my desperately impatient self to find a new way of being.  Once I decided I couldn’t live without hope, I was desperate to find where it lived.

Years ago I was in the midst of my hour long commute to my job as an RN when I had an epiphany at a red light.  I ‘heard’ a voice (heard a thought) that said “enjoy the red light’.  When this type of thought pops into my awareness, I listen.  It has a certain soothing quality to it that feels like the way home when I am lost.  And I sure was feeling lost.

At this particular time, I was in the midst of a separation leading to my upcoming divorce, working as an ER nurse which was sucking the life out of me, and driving an hour to work and back every day while doing 12 hr shifts. I was feeling utterly lost in this life free-fall.  I was in a season of walking through my deepest fears to be free of them.  It was kicking my rear end.  In a way I can’t always explain, I knew I was following the faithful guiding voice within me that was connected to ‘All that Is’.  Even so, at the same time in my “oh so humanness”…I was feeling full of sadness, grief, guilt, overwhelm, and other lovely sticky things.  Life was hard.

I was unsure of my destination even as I was trusting guidance deep within me.  If this path I was on wasn’t really my path, then I was screwed.   I had jumped off the cliff of life and was free falling through the air.  I didn’t know where I would land.  Yet deep within me I believed that I would ‘land’ in the next phase of my life where my joy lived.  My destination was some obscure landscape of trust within my deep self where I would be free to love BIG, not constrained any longer by my fears of judgement, rejection or failure.  My journey was an internal one.

So, on this particular day, I was on my way to my ER job feeling completely unhappy with my life and impatient to find some of this ‘joy’ that I new was the pot of gold at the end of my rainbow.  I wasn’t feelin’ it.  I was in a funk.  There was this one super long light on my way to work.  I always seemed to play a game with it to catch it when it was green.  Most days I did pretty well.  On this particular day, it won.  Damn.  But then I heard the ‘thought’…”Enjoy the red light”.

In that moment of awareness a different way of traveling was available to me.  I ‘got’ that the red light wasn’t the problem…it was my impatience with WAITING that was my problem.  I’m sure those that know me are giggling and rolling their eyes at this statement because I have been known to not wait gracefully.  I often feel allergic to limits that I perceive imposed upon me by life and rules.  What a perfect metaphor traffic is for my allergy!

The truth is that peace is found in deep acceptance of limits and full buy-in of them as servants of order that benefits us (yes, my inner rebel is choking on the truth of this statement).  Honoring the ‘red lights’ in my life, when viewed from the lens of being in service to my highest good, creates a space of openness.  I began to play at red lights.  Now I can often be found murmuring a silent ‘I honor you’ to a red light while finding a awesome song to ‘sit dance’ too.  I’m sure the the drivers around me have often wondered about my sanity…but who cares.

The choices I make at the red lights of my life…are mine to own.  Making red lights work for me is now a creative space of play that has completely facilitated my deeper healing in life.  Yes, I often still go kicking and screaming into them…but the space of possibility always exists for me now if I am able to trust the goodness of life’s pauses and search for the gold in the moment.  In embracing the red lights, I have begun to learn the joy of waiting.

Waiting can be a rich experience of anticipation of knowing that all the goodness we are creating is coming to us.  Waiting in a space of trust for the coming of what we long for is so different then the waiting we experience in the space of  discouragement or hopelessness.  Each serves it’s purpose.  I would never know the joy of waiting if I didn’t also know the hopelessness of waiting.

As the Dali Lama says, “know the rules so well, you can break them effectively”.  And that, my friends is the Art of Waiting at Red Lights.  Find the bliss of waiting…then use your joyful place of inner wisdom to know when to intentionally run the red lights of life or respectfully wait at them.  When you are connected in freedom and self trust to all options and possibilities…you will know your own personal ‘right’ choice.