Again and again, I have this same experience.  Some situation in my life is causing pain, something I can hardly sit with.  My mind roves around in rapid circles and tangles, trying to unravel it, trying to come up with a solution, trying through the panic of excruciating pain to polish the edges of the broken glass under my feet.  The more I handle the pieces, the more they cut into me, and the sharper they become until I am bleeding all over.

The closest friend of a former close friend shunned me, because I put the weight of my suffering on him.  Do you know what it feels like to be shunned by someone you love?  Someone you prayed for and admired?  Do you know what it feels like for someone to whom you sent light and energy in your nightly thoughts to cut you off, believing your only intention was to rob and manipulate?  It hurts in a million different ways.  A million yes, I know, because my mind has explored all of them.

But transmutation happens rapidly now.  I am learning that not a single one of those “million different ways” deserves an iota of thought, and even if I hit on that one right angle that makes the pain subside, I have only bought myself a little time before the next shard of glass falls in my path.  So I skip that whole exhausting mindfuck, and I breath it in completely.  I breath it in as though every shard will penetrate me at once and cut to the core, but instead of resisting it, I’m opening to it.  I welcome it.  Enter me, because I love you, little pieces of glass.  I receive your arrows.  There is nothing here to be injured.  I receive your cold shoulder.  There is nothing here to turn away from.

I am not “thinking” these things.  I just do it.  I’m not trying to be loving or do “the right thing.”  I just open.  Because I have no other choice… what a gift my losses have been.  There is no expectation that things will feel any differently.  No expectation that the situation will change.  Simply, I give myself to it.  I donate myself to the situation.  I would not even call it an offering, because an offering is one thing given to another.  There is no “one thing” and “another.”

In an instant, before I have a single moment to contemplate the causal chain and understand how this even happens, injury becomes bliss.  What was just a split-second before causing excruciating pain begins to evoke tranquil, buoyant, loving ecstasy.  The very same thing.

You would think that I would be left with some kind of esoteric emptiness, like being numb, or some gray between light and dark, or something speechless and formless and plain.  No, when resistance drops, something immediately sweeps in to fill the space.  And it is not of me, nothing I am doing or deserving or creating myself.

Spiritual metaphors and mystical poetry make me weary after awhile.  At a certain point, all of these poets are trying very hard to express something real and concrete, something that can actually happen, something you can actually experience, and metaphor seems the best way to describe it.  Except, the assumption of most readers is that metaphor is metaphor.  If I say, “she stabbed me in the back,” you assume that there was a betrayal but no actual stabbing sensation in the back, not literally.  With mystical metaphors, however, the sensations described are intended to be taken literally.  The experience is literal.  We do not just have our heads in the clouds.  We are not just trying to ignore matters of this earth.  There is no difference between the mystical experience of reality and washing dishes and changing diapers.  Mundane reality is the realm of spirit, and opening and receiving it in its current form is the portal to a tangible shift in consciousness as real and pronounced as waking up in the morning.  I just keep saying to myself, “Oh my God, this is reality?!  This is the way of things?  Wow, wow, wow.”

Again and again, I am finding that, contrary to my expectations and despite my imperfections, there is something more, and it is easily accessible to awareness yet difficult to communicate.  I see it, feel it, and become it when I just stop ignoring it.  Life, with all its “situations,” is just one prolonged distraction.  Well, functioning also to bring us back to the truth of who we are.

We are, apparently, nothing but bliss and love.  And I mean that literally.