A return to true love

A year ago I documented an epic event in my life through some photos.

I moved.

I did not only move house, I moved from solitude and a life of checking out from reality and in reaction towards humanity, back into the world.

I have always felt how overwhelming humanity can be. And forever, I was trying to hide. So one after another self-created illusion I built, and farther and farther I was from who I truly am. Eventually I was self-medicating every day by creating a life that was “idyllic” so to speak, in a house that was hidden in the woods, where eagles are encountered more often than human beings. Yet this idyll was in-truth sustained by huge amounts of energy that I had to constantly top up, for this bubble to continue to exist, and for me to feel safe.

But was I really safe? I had to constantly rely on the house and the environment there to feel safe. Even though I had to harden my body walking up and down hill every day, for 45 minutes to even buy a head of lettuce or bring my son to school, sometimes up to 3 times a day, carrying heavy loads of food and backpacks of stuff for work, I could not let go of this self-made idyll, there was just too much on the line. Stressing whether to bring a laptop or not became a serious issue, who could imagine?

By the grace of love, eventually one year ago I heeded my heart, as the impulse was too strong to be ignored anymore. We moved. Without knowing anything, I let go of almost everything that I had built up over decades that I identified myself with. The masks dropped, and I was traumatically terrified.

I did not know who I was. All I knew was everything that I had prided myself to be, was not IT. I had never lived the true me. All the protection that I have built, did not keep me safe when I opened myself in vulnerability to others, I was hurt and I still felt such deep pain. Even the idyllic house could not rescue me from this pain, I had numbed myself over and over again while living there. But now the pain can no longer be masked, I had run out of options.

It took me many months to even begin feeling safe again, more truly, to feel safe the first time ever in my life. When I had no one to rely on, I still had my house. I had the quiet and the stillness of the place. When we moved back to community, I could no longer depend on the stillness of nature, and I realized I was intensely chaotic and conflicting within. You can say I had no choice but to choose to remember my own stillness. In-truth, I had long ago chosen to return to true love, and finally, I was brave enough to live it, because the strength we carry is the love we are and always have been.

If I had never given myself the chance to live my heart, I would not through self-love, self-care and self-nuture re-discover and live for the first time who I truly am.  And who would have guessed the true me is so in love with humanity, because now I know the love for me is true.

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Love and only (true) love

There has been many years when I did not allow what is natural to flow. Until one day, I decided to write, not just write, but share what I have written. Then I realized, not only was I holding myself back for all those years, I was also holding back every single person in this world.

I had to share life. Life as how I have chosen and how it has been my teacher, my medicine. Did I always do life right? Hardly. What I wish to share about life is, it could have hardened me, and I have chosen many experiences that point to the road of big time hardening.

There was a spark, at times although so dimly felt, not because it is small, but because of my own self neglect and choice to not want to feel it, yet throughout my life it is always there within my heart. This spark, is my connection to love.

Did I always know love? I have always known love, but I did not always live it. Knowing love and witnessing myself not living it, is one of the greatest pains I have ever felt. Did I give up on myself? Almost, I almost bought into the guilt that does not fail to debilitate and cripple, because I have given my power to it.

What I did not envision after that was the beginning of truly living love. Not speaking or fantasizing or intellectualizing about love. But truly, responsibility, seriously, playfully, commitedly, consistently living love. This has nothing to do with being flirtatious or sexual with anyone else, but it is about being love and making love with myself every moment (again, nothing sexual is implied here). Making love every moment of my every day, what does that even mean? Imagine waking up, the first thought and the accompanying action—is that me being love, first and foremost to me? Am I being gentle to myself from the every mouthful I put in my body, to every word uttered to another, to the choices of what to select and put in my shopping basket and consequently carrying home? Am I putting love first when in a situation where emotions attempt to take over? Do I feel and honor every being in this world knowing we are all equal? Are any of my subtle expressions conveying separation that even I am unaware of? Can I continue to be love if everyone else chooses differently?

Am I being “hard” on myself for attempting not to harden in life, you may ask. There are no rules in how I live. I do not abstain from eating any foods because I don’t allow myself to. I do not go to bed early because I have to. There is nothing in life I have to do. Every single action though is a choice from my heart, knowing it would support me in being love. Why is love so important? Who would even notice if we slip once or twice, and not be love to ourselves or to others? My body would register every choice of love and lovelessness I have ever made, and I am always responsible for all the choices I have ever made and will ever make. All diseases as well as incidents/accidents in life are a result of all the choices I have made. I cannot avoid the consequences of my past choices but I can always choose new choices from now on.

Why I am sharing this is, life is constantly a learning. I have not mastered anything in perfection, and I never will. Every day I may make an unconscious choice or I may override the knowing in my heart for convenience, but it is also I who has to suffer ultimately, sooner or later. And writing while living life in love, knowing it is surely and truly a discipline, in steadiness and consistency. And the first love we show ourselves is to be more accepting and less critical in what we have missed. In-truth, we are already there. We are already enough. We are ready. Don’t let the imperfections of what entails a human experience cloud truth. Truth can only be felt within the heart.

Without honesty and responsibility, there is no true love. And knowing love, and allowing ourselves to feel the love within us, the spark which I mentioned earlier, is actually a blazing flame. And no matter how far from it we have tread, its warmth and light will always be there for us to feel, if we decide to return.

Let life be our art

A child can see and hear multitudinous more than a grown up, sometimes.  For we are all born with eyes and ears, nose, limbs and tongue, inside our hearts.

As a child I can feel so much going on, is not it.  It is not truth.  Simply because it does not feel right within my heart.  Yet, as a child, having such natural feelings can overwhelm, not so much because of feeling them, but more so how to communicate these feelings to a world, and be understood, when the world does not communicate in this way.  From very young, I have made up my mind, that no one would understand.

Yet, feeling I continued.

Growing up, my ears could hear so much more than what was spoken, all the honesty unexpressed, but niceties wrapped up in sugar and honey was how we communicated.  So I stopped speaking.  Because I do not know how to not speak truth–the truth of the reality that moment, and the truth which is absolute in my heart.

For many years I felt distraught, but never did I give up on the truth that my heart knows, although sometimes I chose to not heed it.  Not knowing how to otherwise, I began exploring this in art, (without studying it–my degree is in chinese studies) where possibilities are endless.  Art is an arena where beyond that of “reality” can be expressed freely, although, I was actually only wishing to express the reality that most have forgotten to be true.

I began taking pictures, from a second hand automatic camera.  I wrote and wrote and wrote to allow all the conflicts that I felt but have not expressed throughout the years to flow.  No coincidence that I got myself a job with no experience in photography or journalism, in a magazine publication.

I did not want to “create”.  I am not interested in making up something that I feel may be better.  I know there is a better.  And this better simply begins with being loving to every single being. I only wanted to express this in all ways possible with this vehicle.

And thus, life, has become my art and my medicine.

Mediator

A hybrid of a firey heart and a self effacing personality, the body acts as mediator.

This moment, I have no words or desires but am prostrating to this vehicle in utmost respect and humility, its agreement to take on one of the hardest tasks, and yet have over and over again through its compassion and wisdom, worked endlessly to bring back harmony, to constantly teach and learn to incorporate soul into what is not of soul.

I

Am

Too humbled

For words.

Eternally

Learning with you.

我們是光造的孩子

 

Meeting Femaleness

To find oneself, many times we first deny who we are.A child at 12 being innocently denied of her openness to love and to share her love, grew up embodying all the religious connotations of what it means to be proper with her body and her sex. She breathed and lived guilt with each step in life. Yet the life within her refused to be denied. The more it was repressed, the harder it wants to express. The child was too tired to fight and too scared to speak out, repeatedly her life was snuffed and her voice disappeared. She was ready to give up life. At 12, she died symbolically in a car accident, miraculously surviving with barely a scratch. It is not her time yet, there is still much to learn and share.She grew up in her teens still in conflict, confused, fighting. Her heart wants to open but her body is frozen. When her body is ready, her heart is two steps behind. She is broken, fragmented. There is no harmony. She does not feel worthy enough to take up space, she is unsure why she is here. She has misinterpreted that to be loved you need to give all that you are, and even more than you have.

Her fragility misled her to believe that to be whole we must seek completion from the outside. Yet all the searching, seeking, discovering, told her otherwise. Nothing and no one can complete us, without ourselves first realizing the fullness within.

Therefore, broken, in heart, in body, she returns within. Fragmented, she pieced the soul back together with bleeding hands. She finds that some pieces cannot be found and others will always be imperfect, but now she can feel her heart again.

The woman within her is vibrant and dynamic, strong. She is fully open and totally in femaleness to receive. She is love in stillness and compassion. In every heart beat, she continues to tread on the path, simply for her own survival. Although without much angst, the rebellion is there, silent.

With each step she walks, she also holds the hands of all the women who have been experiencing similar. She strips her roles, after being in all of them—the virgin, the whore, the dakini, the lover, the daughter, the wife, the mother, but none of them can fully express her. She rather just calls herself, a woman, an eternal symbol of the moon.

She can feel every heart of every woman. All the madness, the lack of self-love, the feeling of unworthiness, the pulsating desires, the suffocating jealousy. She may not understand, but she accepts. She cries in pain but she accepts. And this acceptance has led her where she is here now.
She will continue to walk on this path, with her arms outstretched. And in her heart, she knows the beauty, the grandiosity, the breath-taking grace and deep inner strength she feels of the female race, will be honored in much greater magnitude when we begin to see ourselves truly, face to face.

The love for humanity

Many moments I have no idea how to continue.

One of the greatest agonies in life, is not when you don’t know.

But when you know, but do not yet have the ability to translate what you know.

When you understand and can see it with clarity, yet cannot share what you can see.

Or you are sharing that, which humanity is conditioned to greatly resist.

This is the greatest pain.

If God has a weakness, it would be his love for humanity .

Simplicity

Life is actually very simple.

Our spirit and our minds are masters in making everything much more complicated, and most of the times, we buy into it.

We create multitudes of complex situations in life due to separating from our Soul.  The pain which results in turn lead us to seek for outside solutions, which does not actually heal, but cause more pranic energy, and hence, more pain.  Deep down we may be aware that how we go through life does not solve anything, yet because of the spirit’s pride, we are unwilling to admit it or change the energy we have aligned ourselves with.

In- truth, it is unlikely that we are experiencing this for the first time.  What we have experienced in previous reincarnations will naturally feel more comfortable for us in this life, and consequently, we go through it again, unaware.  If we do not stop and make a conscious choice to experience something different, we will go through lifetime over lifetime, supporting prana; leading us further and further separated from the Soul, where unity lies.

In deep pain, some choose to ignore or avoid it.  But life is not just love and light.  We cannot cover up what is there, and hope it will go away.  It won’t.  If we don’t choose to face truth, truth will catch up with us and make us face it.  Facing truth may bring up emotions, be aware that in these moments, we may become controlled by the emotions that surface.  If this happens, it is only just another game that perpetuates prana.  It is unnecessary to immerse oneself in gatherings or meetings which support the arousal of emotions, because any situation which encourages the mass expression of any kind of emotion, is causing more pranic energy to be released into the world.

Prana, or emotions, is the root cause of all pain, and dis-eases on the planet.  It is also what the Mother Earth is desperately trying to re-harmonize herself from.

The imminent more frequent upheavals of the Mother Earth, termed as “disasters” by mankind, is a wake up call for all.  Life until now is not working for the planet.  Unless we begin to see differently, choose differently, what has been, cannot be the way forward.  Choose to connect back with your Soul.  Return back to the inner heart.

The recent earthquakes and tsunami around the planet may have brought you back into your heart.  Albeit a shattering, the heart is felt once again.  This is a beginning.  Now we know what it feels like to have a heart.  We begin to feel what is a connection to all, that what has happened to the people in another part of the world, could have easily happened to us.  Nothing is a separate or individual incident.

From the space of the heart, which still experiences emotions, gradually we return to the inner heart.  Here there is stillness.  There is Joy, Harmony and Love.  In the inner heart, there are no emotions such as elation, because to experience elation requires one to rise from somewhere low (depression) to somewhere high (elation).  But Joy is a feeling in the inner heart, it is permanent.

When we return to the inner heart, life returns to Simplicity.  And the planet will also reflect that back to us.

Photo: CK (Secret Nine Productions)

Choose Fire

Can you imagine how it would be like if nothing ever changes?

And can you imagine how it would be like if everything changes in a split second?

In the experience of life we have probably chosen somewhere in between.  Generally speaking there are two types of conscious changes that happen for those who wish to be aware of them.

The first type of change is a desire to improve on something,  because we feel there is a lack within us, in desperation, we search for something outside of ourselves to fix what we feel is lacking, be it health, relationships, career etc.  We need to feel good again, feel young again, feel vitality again,  feel whole again, but we don’t know how or why.  Therefore, we try from yoga to shopping therapy; veganism to guru-worshipping; drug and alcohol dependence to religion devotion, everything we can lay our hands on in the external world.  Desperately, we search and grasp, still without knowing what it is that is causing the deep agony we wish to distract ourselves from.  This type of change is such that causes and accumulates more prana in one’s life, in other words, it is the desperate fight that spirit puts up before going into the good night.

The second type of change is when the utter agony caused by the first type of change  (or no change at all) is too much to bear any longer.  Then there is no other choice, but to return inward, back towards oneself.  This is sometimes presented as a wake up call–when something in life changes dramatically such as an outbreak of  illness, relationship breakdowns, accidents etc.  When we consciously return, we know there is no where to go and nothing to improve.  When we realize we are whole and in unity with all by returning to our SOULS, the search ends and life begins.

Life is a returning.  Going back within, into our inner hearts, is not an abstract or elusive thing.  It is walking waking life, each moment, with our inner hearts.  It is not keeping this knowledge in our minds, and still go through life numbing ourselves with all kinds of distraction such as compulsive working and studying, television, movies, alcohol, drugs, sex, food, facebook, even meditation with an inappropriate intent, and the list goes on.  It is dealing with life, every moment as it comes.  When we begin to see and act through our inner hearts, life becomes an experience of GRACE.  The inner struggles, fighting and disharmony dissolve, and we begin to breathe and live FIRE rather than prana.

This is the beginning of glory in one’s life.  And this moment, everything changes, truly, in a blink of an eye.

Dreams

Dreams are like a pair of strong arms that wrap around your body when in need of a hug, they bring you back.

Dreams can take one far, but they also ground one here, because dreams are to be experienced, to be lived.  And the way to the livingness of our dreams, is to be able to go beyond only dreaming.  Without dreams, life could be like an unpleasant hostel, where one can’t wait to check out from.  When one dreams, each moment we return, to be here.

Life itself is one long dream.  Every moment of this dream, there is deep yearning to live what is being dreamed.  At four years old, my dream revolved around the question of love.

To return to where we all began from, this dream has to be lived, this life has to be walked.  Love has to be experienced, so does all that is non-love.  Love in all its faces, degradations, illusions, misinterpretations, truths and non-truths have to be tasted.

Emotions surrounding love, however grandiose, or subtle; breathtakingly potent, or unbearable; each minute sentiment and feeling etched and lived…forgotten perhaps never, yet they begin to lose their grip.  Because the heart is tired and it refuses to be in the agony of separation any longer.  The heart thank all emotions, whether belonging to oneself or not, that has once impressed upon the body.  Truthfully in gratitude, for that in itself is living what it is to be human.

The dream continues, the livingness of being human ultimately is to return.  When emotions are lived and honored, they choose another body to host.  If you are ready to begin to truly live, there is only one place to return to, the unity of our soul.  Herein no questions are relevant or necessary.  Love, joy and harmony are the only states that pervade in eternity, and  they are nothing we know them as in this human experience.  This is when we begin to walk with our hearts,  so the dream is truly dreamed and lived to its fullest.

 

photo:www.jonejone.com