When the old doesn’t fit and the new is but a breath away, can we allow ourselves to be poured out?
Below is an article by Robin Rice. After reading it, I’m even more inspired about my 30 days of Decluttering that starts January 9th. Will you join in?
It is in the pouring out, or releasing, that we can discover who we are NOW and what is next for us in this life.
Can we live in the empty space long enough to find out? That’s why I believe so strongly in decluttering. It’s more than just getting rid of the excess in our homes. (Although that alone makes me happy!) It’s bringing awareness to the emptying process that is naturally happening within us and honouring that by creating space in our outer world. Take a read when you have a moment. It’s deep but juicy!
With Love,
Paula
Life, Only Sideways by Robin Rice
Occasionally, life tilts on its side, as if pouring us out of who we have been. Once poured, we wait to find out who we will become, and go empty for a time in between. In the season since my last email to you, this has happened to many of my friends in the Be Who You Are community. And it has happened to me.
It has prompted me to ask, at a deeper level than ever before, how do we live as Divine Humans? How do we take all we know, including all that our hearts know and all that our soul knows, and somehow fit that into a daily sunrise and a sunset? In short… How do we KNOW who we are in order to BE who we are?
Before I attempt an answer, I have a thousand caveats, the greatest of which is that we are multi-dimensional beings. We are not only our name, occupation, and personality type. We are dreamers, night travelers with perhaps a dozen other “lives” we are playing out each night. We are souls, what you might call lifetime-to-lifetime travelers. We are singular, but also part of a greater collective, and as such are often moved by forces we only imagine are the result of our individual choices.
Here in what we call “ordinary reality” we are flesh and bones, yet a deeper look tells us we are mostly made of water and space. We are shapeshifters… now wife, now mother, now sister, now friend, now employee, now grocery shopper, now activist, now… We are moods and meaning and far more than that. We are sane and lucid, yet also possibly going mad somewhere inside of us. We are all of this, all at once. So long as this is understood, we can go on.
So… Be Who You Are
It sounds good, but how, exactly, do we do that in such a mess of Divine complexity? First and foremost, we shake ourselves of this illusion that we are our jobs and our clothes and our immediate circumstances. We pry ourselves out of the roles that define us and ask instead for Something Bigger, Something Better, which can only come from a Something Greater. We let go of the mind-locking ideas and ideals that promise safety yet in the end only pin us down and make us cry uncle.
We accept the Great Mystery on the Great Mystery’s terms, which is to say, we agree that there are none. We stop trying to draw a line in the sand, and instead agree to stand without even a foundation under our feet. We drop the desire for “ten steps to more money, love and every other bliss” and ask for total freedom right here, right now. We ask not to heal this pain and that, but for a quantum healing–a healing from the illusion that we have ever gained or lost anything.
I hope I’m not frightening you. I hope you were not expecting me to merely ask how we be authentic and still manage to pay the bills. In fact, I hope I’m telling you what, deep inside, you already know.
Understanding the Rules Of Divine Humanity (again, that being that there are none), we begin to make our way. We ask the deeper questions, of which just a few are below.
If I am made of virtually nothing, yet can make “things” out of this same virtual nothing, what do I want to make? If so much of my life is given as a gift to me, without even the need of my intent–the in and out of my breath, the knitting of my bones, my very heartbeat–what is left to choice, and what will I do with that choice?
If I can love without ever touching love, without being able to control or manipulate or do anything but flow with it, who and what will I love? How will I give and receive? How will I know what is true and what is tethered to my conditioning?
If I am to live these roles of mother and wife and sister and friend, how will I do that, so that my Divine Humanity–and not my surface limitations and (forgive me) personal crap– is what others connect to?
If I am to pay the bills to keep a roof over my form, by what method and what magic will this occur? What are my true resources? Do I use them? Do I trust them? Do I know their limits?
Now, more than ever before, in this moment, the gateway to who we REALLY are is opening. Layers and levels never seen are emerging. With this, the smaller questions of yesterday are fading and the bigger-deeper-wider questions of tomorrow are inviting. From this place, in the midst of a great sideways tilt of life, I can offer you nothing better than what Rumi offered us so long ago: “Out there beyond the ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
