Liturgies

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, that violently sweep your house empty of its furniture

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi,

Good morning everyone,

I’ve had many such visitors in the past few months. Even when I put a sign up saying Vincent lodge full- No Vacancy...Still .. they kept coming.

Today I am going to be sharing with you all my own experiences of just being fully present to my  emotions, my humaness,  paying attention to them as Brian would say.. Honouring them by  simply being with them  without any aversion to or grasping onto them.

To simply experience and drop, experience and drop. And what followed for me was a complete sense of freedom, deep peacefulness, of simply being Love, that which we all are.

The only reality that exists according to all the mystics.

By  Feb 2013  my 2 older kids had moved out of home and I was left in this fairly large home with just my 10 yr old son Damien. I was still occupying the master bedroom which is a very large space on the lower level and so  I decided to move upstairs and release the lower level for other usage. Having moved all the furniture, the only thing left was to transfer my wardrobe. I had kept postponing this for a couple of months. It was a Saturday evening and Damien had gone for dinner with his dad. As I was emptying my cupboard I found this file which I had hidden away at the back. In it were all the  love letters that my ex - husband had written to me when we were dating, the cards over the many years and the pictures and lots of other sentimental stuff. Within a few minutes I was a mess, and as if that was not enough I then went to the bookshelf and started flipping through the photo albums of my kids when they were  little. Suddenly I felt  all alone and miserable, in a total victim state. I started to question my role as a mother, was I a good mummy? etc.. Anyway I decided to ring my daughter, Alishya who immediately recognised my tone of voice and said , what’s the matter  mummy? When I told her she said “ It’s ok mum, I understand, you were with dad for 22 yrs. Its ok to feel sad, cry with me, I  am here.”  Was I a good mum?, I asked ..She said ..”you were the best mummy”. Alishya is one of those daughters delivered straight from heaven...she stayed with me for about 10 to 15 mins whilst I had a good cry and left me with the assurance that she would call again later to see how I was going. I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted more attention so I rang  my son Daniel, … “sup ..mum”, he said. “Sup” is short form for “what’s up” and when I told him , he very abruptly said… “shit happens mum, move on with your  life, I’m going skating!!”.That was a 1 min conversation, but I did manage to squeeze in … was I a good mum..?  “you are  awesome”. he said .Half an hour later Damien ,  my youngest arrives back and sees me sniffing away and comes and sits beside me on my bed, puts his arm around me and asks why are you sad mum? on telling him… he rests his head on my shoulder and very soft says… “be in the moment mummy…”

I was taken a back by his response and said…. “where did you get that from” and he said,  “ah, I hear you talking with your friends about this ...a lot”.

I realised in that moment that I  had my own panel of counsellors, one that told me to just stay with my feelings, don’t be averse to them, the next one to move on from them… don’t grasp them and the third one to come back to the present moment.

I decided I was a good mum after all.

So coming back to the last few months, around mid Nov 2014, I felt like I was suddenly ambushed with a whole swag of challenges that seemed to descend upon me within a 2 week period. Some physical and some emotional. I was telling a girlfriend of mine “ I feel like I have been given a second innings of challenges  and she said  “second innings for caro and not yet out”. Dont we love our girlfriends? This one always makes me laugh.

Anyway after a couple of weeks of feeling sorry for myself, that incident of 2 years ago came to mind. I had also read from numerous sources the importance of allowing my  feelings to arise  , honouring them, giving them the time of day  as well as recognizing that we store our emotions in our bodies.

It would be good if we could store them on icloud or some google computer.!!

With all this in mind I  decided I was going to intentionally and consciously  feel my feelings. I was going to honour and befriend them. Having the clear understanding that I am not my body or my emotions, I felt brave enough to really go into them. So one day I lied down in my bed and I focused my awareness on my body and I did what I call a body scan, noticing where I experienced tenseness. Then I vividly replayed incidents in my minds eye and simply allowed myself the absolute privilege of letting myself be present to whatever came up.  There was sadness, there was anger, there was frustration, there was helplessness. I allowed it all to surface, all along keeping my awareness on my body. As I did this more incidents seem to surface from my past  and again I simply let them. And then lots and lots of tears followed. I cried and I cried, curled up like a little baby.

I realised I had been so busy dealing with life, my kids , my husband, my business, my home etc etc all the stuff that we deal with everyday that I had not really given myself the time of day to simply process my emotions fully.

Our world has provided us with a myriad of ways to distract ourselves. We are taught from a very young age, don’t think about it, its in the past,   go do something else, take a walk, go for a movie, talk to friend, do some retail therapy ,have a whisky, and worse still a joint of marijuana. I have yet to try that one!  And while they all have the potential to alleviate the pain they are all only bandaid solutions… I have learnt. Some of us have  become so numb to our own feelings as a natural way of coping. However numbing is not selective. When we numb ourselves to  pain, we subsequently numb ourselves to  love. That which we all are and which I personally believe is our purpose here on earth. To simply experience ourselves and others as love. The only reality that exists .

Studies have shown that until we actually experience our emotions fully, even the slightest ones, they are stored in our bodies and if they are not given the outlet they rightfully deserve they generally manifest in the form of some disease in our bodies in their quest or desperation to get out. We store our issues in our tissues … said Bernie Clarke, Founder of Yin Yoga.

Jesus said..The only way to my father is through me. I interpret that as meaning. The only way to experiencing our Godness is via experiencing our humaness.

Jesus did not resist the agonies of his  crucifixion, he surrendered to it all . Every slash on his body, every deep wound that was inflicted upon him, dripping with blood…the hammering of the nails into his hands and feet, he surrendered to it  all  , a surrender that led to his ressurection and union with his father which again for me is that state of deep peacefulness complete freedom, of being Love . That which we all are, the only reality that exists.

For until we can experience ourselves as what we really are which is love, we cannot possibly experience others in the same vein.

Neil Donald Walsh says it so eloquently .. “ It is a principle of life that we cannot experience what we truly are for as long as we are experiencing others for who they are not”. That is anything else, but love.

I have found through my own journey that life in all of its amazingness and juicyness is there to be fully experienced without any aversion to  or grasping of any of it. In other words non attachment. All of it, the good and the bad, the sadness and the happiness, this world of duality is our access to the world of non duality , our oneness our Godness, Love that which we all are .. the only reality that exists .

I a going to share some words by popular adventurer and writer Courtney A Walsh, sent to me by a girlfriend quite synchronistically in early December.

Dear Human

you’ve got it all wrong!

you did’nt come here to master unconditional love

That is where you came from and where you will return

You came here to learn personal love

Universal love. Broken Love.Whole love. infused with divinity.

Lived through the grace of stumbling

Demonstrated through the beauty of … messing up. Often.

You did’nt come here to be perfect. You already are.

You came here to be gorgeously human.

Flawed and fabulous.

And then to rise again into remembering

But unconditional love? Stop telling that story. Love, in truth, doesn’t need ANY other adjectives. It doesn’t require modifiers. It doesn’t require the condition of perfection. It only asks that you show up. And do your best. That you stay present and feel fully. That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU. It’s enough. It’s Plenty.

I have learnt that when I can look at my challenges as opportunities to access my Godness, firstly, it profoundly alters my experience of them  and secondly it opens me up to feel deep compassion for the suffering of others and throws me into service to them.