"Ah, but I was so much older then.
I'm younger than that now." ––Bob Dylan
I just had my AMAZING 63rd birthday and a Midsummer Faerie Party.
I feel so much older and so much younger than when I was 52 (when my alleged "life" fell apart), or 42 or even 32.
My life has been a very surprising journey. Although I was very surprised, aged 18, to find myself on the spiritual path of a monk (having been raised atheist), you cannot imagine my shock when I was hurled off the cosmic cliff, in my early 30s, demonked, and thrown back into the body, the unfelt emotions, the massive rivers and tides of the full human experience. That was the time when my career river––whatever it is––began spontaneously flowing without my really trying. And I've been riding a spontaneous wave of attempting to serve spirit in the healing and integration and me and others, ever since. Wave? River? More like a tsunami or a river rapid, it has been!
At my party, people kept saying, "You look so good for your age." "How do you do it?" Now, I'm a "girly" type, and I work it. I eat well, exercise, and do everything I can, including cheating (and if you think about it, even wearing a bra is "cheating!") to make my physical expression as goddess-like as possible. I just feel that this shining-forth beauty is part of my spiritual journey. It's not enlightenment OR feminine expression, but both/and. I'm in a female body, and in many ways I'm exploring a feminine psyche, although, like you, I'm really neither he nor she, but the I AM consciousness.
Anyway, the answer that I shared with my friends at my party is that, other than the above-mentioned surface reasons for looking young, I have been through many, many very intense deaths and, instead of accumulating them as layers of trauma that gradually cause aging and degeneration, I have (to some reasonable extent) moved into and through them until everything has renewed itself.
And––trust me!––any one of multiple traumas could have taken me out! Yet somehow, by grace, and my depending on grace, I feel as though I am not so much healing, as resurrecting. Not fixing the old body-mind that is on a trajectory through time, so much as learning to download a new energetic body from another dimension of consciousness, in the now, every day. Resurrection rather than healing. This is, of course, all relative. Aging is happening. But from descending INTO my own pain-body when life served me lemons, those experiences actually burned through my old, stressed, wounded accumulations, aka the alleged "me."
And talking of "life serving me lemons" (which it has, relentlessly in the last decade especially, on a certain level of outer desire fulfillment): I know, I know, we are supposed to "make lemonade." And I tried. I have practiced gratitude and re-attitude when situations and even people have seemed to attack or betray me. More valuable, however, has been moving into the deep, searing pain of the lemons that are trying to curdle the pain up from my very soul. Lemons are acid, yet somehow they alkalize the body. My emotional self has become alkalized by letting my heart break rather than going numb.
It's all about the heart. That is all this website and my work and my life are about, even though I don't say it all the time, because it sounds like some Hallmark branding. But my journey has mellowed and opened my heart, almost unbearably. That which is not heartful in people is clearly seen, yet there is a willingness to see through that into the heart we all share. Sometimes this gets me into temporary pain or trouble, but my inner guides get me out quickly. The true opening of the Heart to the divine in self and in all comes with inbuilt protection. And the rewards are THE BEST. Nothing else––not wild sex, nor money, nor Cirque de Soleil flexibility, health and fitness, nor the endless distraction of a modern New Agey or "creative" life (been there and done all that except perhaps the Cirque thang) can remotely compare. To the broken-open heart life, that is.
What would be the next step for you, today, towards living in love with everything. Oh, that sounds so clichéd, as I write it. What if it's the only thing that isn't a cliché?
xx
I'm younger than that now." ––Bob Dylan
I just had my AMAZING 63rd birthday and a Midsummer Faerie Party.
I feel so much older and so much younger than when I was 52 (when my alleged "life" fell apart), or 42 or even 32.
My life has been a very surprising journey. Although I was very surprised, aged 18, to find myself on the spiritual path of a monk (having been raised atheist), you cannot imagine my shock when I was hurled off the cosmic cliff, in my early 30s, demonked, and thrown back into the body, the unfelt emotions, the massive rivers and tides of the full human experience. That was the time when my career river––whatever it is––began spontaneously flowing without my really trying. And I've been riding a spontaneous wave of attempting to serve spirit in the healing and integration and me and others, ever since. Wave? River? More like a tsunami or a river rapid, it has been!
At my party, people kept saying, "You look so good for your age." "How do you do it?" Now, I'm a "girly" type, and I work it. I eat well, exercise, and do everything I can, including cheating (and if you think about it, even wearing a bra is "cheating!") to make my physical expression as goddess-like as possible. I just feel that this shining-forth beauty is part of my spiritual journey. It's not enlightenment OR feminine expression, but both/and. I'm in a female body, and in many ways I'm exploring a feminine psyche, although, like you, I'm really neither he nor she, but the I AM consciousness.
Anyway, the answer that I shared with my friends at my party is that, other than the above-mentioned surface reasons for looking young, I have been through many, many very intense deaths and, instead of accumulating them as layers of trauma that gradually cause aging and degeneration, I have (to some reasonable extent) moved into and through them until everything has renewed itself.
And––trust me!––any one of multiple traumas could have taken me out! Yet somehow, by grace, and my depending on grace, I feel as though I am not so much healing, as resurrecting. Not fixing the old body-mind that is on a trajectory through time, so much as learning to download a new energetic body from another dimension of consciousness, in the now, every day. Resurrection rather than healing. This is, of course, all relative. Aging is happening. But from descending INTO my own pain-body when life served me lemons, those experiences actually burned through my old, stressed, wounded accumulations, aka the alleged "me."
And talking of "life serving me lemons" (which it has, relentlessly in the last decade especially, on a certain level of outer desire fulfillment): I know, I know, we are supposed to "make lemonade." And I tried. I have practiced gratitude and re-attitude when situations and even people have seemed to attack or betray me. More valuable, however, has been moving into the deep, searing pain of the lemons that are trying to curdle the pain up from my very soul. Lemons are acid, yet somehow they alkalize the body. My emotional self has become alkalized by letting my heart break rather than going numb.
It's all about the heart. That is all this website and my work and my life are about, even though I don't say it all the time, because it sounds like some Hallmark branding. But my journey has mellowed and opened my heart, almost unbearably. That which is not heartful in people is clearly seen, yet there is a willingness to see through that into the heart we all share. Sometimes this gets me into temporary pain or trouble, but my inner guides get me out quickly. The true opening of the Heart to the divine in self and in all comes with inbuilt protection. And the rewards are THE BEST. Nothing else––not wild sex, nor money, nor Cirque de Soleil flexibility, health and fitness, nor the endless distraction of a modern New Agey or "creative" life (been there and done all that except perhaps the Cirque thang) can remotely compare. To the broken-open heart life, that is.
What would be the next step for you, today, towards living in love with everything. Oh, that sounds so clichéd, as I write it. What if it's the only thing that isn't a cliché?
xx
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