Today, I stopped praying for things to get easier.  It just occurred to me that it wasn’t necessary.  For many months, every day has been a challenge: Raising my two little boys on my own with no help from family, one of them overwhelmed with grief and anger, losing all my friends and lovers, trying to sell the home my ex-husband abandoned when he left the country, fielding constant attacks on my character from him and his mother, watching my graduate career and heartfelt ambitions I pursued for two decades disintegrate as my advisors left the university, and facing deep-seated fears of the stigma attached to intense emotional suffering.  The difficulties dug down into my foundations, ripping out everything I clung to for comfort and tilling my very identity.

Then, in the midst of it, I finally stopped trying to hold my cracked shell together and let the pieces fall to the ground, and instead of being obliterated, I found my core of light, the indestructible ever-present singularity of blissful awareness.  The blissful light is as indescribable as the suffering that preceeded it.  All it took was an absolute surrender to the possibility of my own destruction, the end of my body and the failure of my soul, my fundamental imperfection.  Why did I think that being broken was a bad thing?  Broken is good.  Broken is just the old skin of wholeness, shedding.  If the thought of it makes you cringe, you don’t know what it is to embrace imperfection.  See the emptiness in your worst case scenario, and you will see the Divine, the light that your small self cannot wrap itself around.  You may take lifetimes to gather the courage.  It is that scary.

So when I think about the difficulties that fell into my lap, I glow with gratitude and feel the enormous, inexpressible love it showed me.  People notice it.  I talk about the past few months, and I glow all over.  I am beaming.

I am infatuated with Now, utterly in love.  In this infatuation, I feel, I move, I laugh and cry.  I am my ordinary flawed self through and through, but instead of causing me suffering, it touches me all over like warm sugar.

I caught God gazing at me so in love, I knew I could do no wrong.  You know those lovers you can never disappoint?  God is like that.  If you want to be able to hear it, be a lover like that.  A judgmental lover looking for perfection, doling out rejection at the drop of a hat, will have a hard time receiving it.

By “God,” I mean the inexpressible suchness of this something right in front of you right now, so close you can taste it, the deep indivisible core of your own consciousness, which you think is all yours–the most personal, private place in the cosmos, but in fact it belongs to the cosmos, is the cosmos.  You, the small you, the ego you, your personality or your identity, who you refer to when you say “I am such-and-such” or “I want such-and-such,” are just the flotsam and jetsam on the surface of that consciousness.  You think if it floats away, there will be no more you when in fact, only then would you be YOU.

But what a scary prospect it is to let the small self float away!  You must have an intuition though, a dim memory of what you find when you run into the fire.  Is it stronger than the twang of fear?

There is a trick to it, I think.  The twang of fear is a reminder that self-flaggelation is counter to divine love.  How do we surrender and embrace our impermanence without casting ourselves into needless asceticism?  Asceticism strengthens the sense of self.  Surrender dissolves it.  Just go with your intuition.  You already know your way.  Maybe all you need is for someone to tell you that… you know that way, so trust your inner compass and be kind to yourself.  You are so loved.

Give up whatever draws your eyes away from the Divine Beloved, then remember that your eyes can fall on nothing else.

Byron Katie wrote, “If I had a prayer, it would be this: ‘God spare me from the desire for love, approval, and appreciation.’”  I stopped praying for a partner months ago.  I don’t pray for someone to ease my loneliness any more than I pray for conditions to be just right for me to start experiencing unconditional happiness.  Yet, to Byron Katie’s remark, I would add: Do not pray to never need anyone again.  Pray that both your need for others and your togetherness carry no suffering and bring you only bliss.

You can need, desire, fear, grieve, and fail, all without suffering.  In other words, you can be yourself even as you lose yourself.  How else could you lose yourself if not through embracing everything you are in this very moment?

A poem on the contradiction between perfectionism and enlightenment…

The prod to enlighten
has taken its Tolle.
What do you do
when you’re already whole?
What is it really
that betrays your “samsara”
but dissatisfaction
that others have for ya?
Where are you going?
What will you find?
The fullness of heaven
that leaves you behind?
Make yourself perfect
so that you can be seen
upon the front cover
of Om magazine
and you will be loved
by everyone standing
in line to buy groceries,
eager for branding.
Or just be yourself.
How else could you see
this suchness that is
unless you just be?