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Dear Friends, Yogis and Yoginis, Blessed Solstice! We've spent the last season at the studio exploring the Shadow of self, consciousness, yoga, life and love. This time has been an appreciation of the Power held in the Shadow and an exploration of what it means to Allow, to Taste, to Touch, to Understand, to Nurture and, finally, to Enlighten the Shadow material. I use the acronym ATTUNE to remind myself that each of these approaches to the Shadow material is a way of creating sensitivity and allowing discovery. In late Spring I came across Mirabai Starr's translation of the Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. What better night to contemplate these dark passages than Solstice? Here is a compelling excerpt from her introduction, titled Saying Yes to God: Say when you were very young the veil lifted just enough for you to glimpse the underlying Real behind it and then dropped again. Maybe it never recurred, but you could not forget. And this discovery became the prime mover of the rest of your life, in ways you may not have even noticed. Say you have explored a multitude of spiritual paths. Maybe you have been the embodiment of devotion within each. You perform more austere austerities. Your attention to liturgy is so pointed that you become sacred language. You meditate into the small of the night. Your breath grows so gentle that it can scarcely be detected. Say these practices fill your heart. They make you feel holiness like wind through every fiber of your being and think rivers of holy thoughts. You recognize the communities they bring you to as your own lost tribe. You get very good at being a Sufi or a Taosit, a contemplative Christian or a yogini. The passion of your love for God intensifies. Say that while each of the world's great spiritual traditions may hint at that vastness you have longed for, none of them returns you to its threshold. Each of your chosen paths is about something, when all you've ever meant to choose is nothing. Simply because this is where you first saw God: in the emptiness. Say prayers start to dry up on your tongue. Sacred literature becomes fallen leaves, blows away. Meditation brings you no serenity anymore. Devotion grows brittle, cracks. The God you bow down to no longer draws you. Say you bow down anyway. You repeat your mantra along the line of your prayer beads, continue chanting the divine names, melodious. You reread the scriptures, go to mass. You find satisfaction in none of these, yet, you persevere. Why not? The things of the world are no competition. You long ago lost interest in material gain, in social status, in interpersonal drama. This wretched limbo lasts for years. Say each of the familiar spiritual rooms you go to seeking refuge are dark now, and empty. You sit down anyway. You take off your clothes at the door and enter naked. All agendas have fallen away. You grow so still in your nondoing that you forget for a moment that you are or that maybe God is not. This quietude deepens in proportion to your surrender. Say what's secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God's first great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. And that this darkness of the soul you can not seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you. Because it is only in this vast emptiness that he can enter, as your Beloved, and fill you. Where the darkness is nothing but unutterable radiance. Say he knows you are ready to receive him and to be annihilated in Love. Can you say YES to that? -Mirabai Starr, Dark Night of the Soul, 2002, Riverhead Books, www.mirabaistarr.com Mirabai's words are a powerful reminder of my own path through the thresholds of God. The veil was lifted in my early life in the violence of my household. Seeing God was a survival strategy, an escape to the possibility that one could not just be put on the planet to suffer, but to find love. Practices saved me; from art to meditation, from hiking to yoga, from vegetarian food to chanting, etc. And yet, I was also unaware of how much I was cultivating a practice not just to deepen spiritually, but to Control, to Escape, to put the pieces together in a framework of intellectual understanding. As pain or suffering would arise, I'd often respond with "more practice". Years later, I'd shun the practice idea altogether and grow cynical about people who seemed more pious or devoted. In times of ease, the practices were simple, nourishing. They became expressions of love and gratitude, prayerfulness and communion. Our personal Shadow gets created in a similar way as the spiritual paths I'd chosen. As a survival strategy, we put certain aspects of who we are into the dark corners of the Shadow. In order for our practices, be they art, music, yoga, meditation, contemplation, to carry us to wholeness, we must Allow for these dark corners to be a part of who we are. We taste them. For example, enacting Violence is in my Shadow (and for good reason since it was the source of much suffering in my life). If I allow the Taste of violence in my awareness, I come to know it as subtle, alive, fluctuating in power, shifting like the flavor of foods slowly eaten. If I allow the presence of violence to Touch my awareness, I feel its electric power, its angry force, its internal and external pressures, its fear. I come to Understand that violence creates psuedo-power, is composed of fear, frustration, separation, and shifts like aromas, flavors or the weather patterns of the season. By storing violence in my Shadow, I was also storing away my freedom to experience power, fear, frustration and separateness. I followed the path of non-violence and we-are-all-one-ness, which would reduce the need for fear, power, separateness, etc. At our core, non-violence and violence must both acknowledged. That is not to say that we ought to perpetrate violence, but nor should we condemn those who are; nor those aspects of ourselves that are (how many people have been on ‘violent' diets in response to mindless eating?). Distinction and unity must both be understood. This is not to say that we should hold ourselves as separate and perpetuate the painful dance of arrogance and shame. But if we melt into we-are-all-one-ness without nourishing our uniqueness, some part of our brilliance is relegated to the shadows. To Enlighten the Shadow, we acknowledge it in ourselves. When we see it in others, we can use that as a reflection of our own darker aspects as well. But, when seen in others, if we condemn, we put this material further into our own shadow again. Compassion, literally meaning "to suffer with", opens the possibility for us to ATTUNE to the shadow in self and other. I wish you well on this Solstice exploration. Blessed be, Sarahjoy |
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