The narrative of story.....

One of the major crossroads that has made itself known as I continue to traverse this inner landscape is the perspective of story and the way they often prove to be coming from different places and moving forward in different directions in the fields of spirituality and the human experience.

For as long as I can remember, the human experience has been an incredibly interesting, complex and beautiful curiosity of mine. In all of it there was always a story, one that told of events the individual in question experienced, the ways in which they made meaning of those events, the questions left unanswered, the goals, desires and longings never persued, the logic behind the ways in which they made their decisions and prioritized their priorities, the things that made them laugh, made them passionate, their greatest sorrows, their greatest joys. The Indigenous of Turtle Island speak about the importance of always speaking one's individual truth, for in expressing one person's truth they bring forth their own unique contribution of teachings to benefit of the community, hence why they will tell you "your life is your medicine bundle". From what I have understood from spending time in these areas, the spiritual or metaphysical is not apart from these experiences that comprise the human story, in fact spirit is infused into every moment, no matter how sacred or mundane. Creatively bringing forth just the right conditions necessary to spur one into the next set of questions, the next set of experiences and essentially the next set of lessons.

Simulteanously, most would agree the human experience also brings with it the darker representation of story. After walking through a paralysis of lethargy that drives one to do little more than sleep, eat and poop or awaking on a cold tile floor after a night of substance induced vomiting, the story of those events often come with a wisdom, a backwards reflection on a compilation of knowledge you have gained, an awareness that lay blinded by only shadows before ripe for the sharing. It may also accompany a sigh of gratitude both for the things you have learned that will give you a protection from returning and the fact that the rawness of those times and events have passed. But in my experience, when your in the middle of them, it feels human, there is nothing airy fairy or beautiful about them when laying in the middle of it. In it, has meant for me a feeling like i am locked into a war i have no way of getting out of. To go through those moments shows me my humanity. To me, those are the cornerstones of what it feels to be human, probably why we have often refered to it as "the human condition". Therefore, the human story if made to be pretty, in many ways for me looses it's essence, it loses it's purposefullness or it's well deserved recogniton of the courage, bravery and tenacity of spirit that it took for that one single human to keep facing the life threatening shadows, keep moving with whatever light they knew was there and trust the process enough to keep walking towards truth, even if it meant allowing themselves to just sit on that floor and feel the density of the vomit against the ice cold tile floor.

Story, in the language of spirituality I have often found brings a different message. In some lines of thought, one would suggest that in order to spiritually actualize the harvest in the soul, the individual will have to lose their human story all together. That the human story is simply a joining of dots of perceived fact, more representative of the ways in which their self-delusions of seperation, personality and doing serve to keep them ignorant of the divine nature of all things. Unitive conciousness, asks that we see everything as part of a unitive whole, that the mind in it's monkey nature works tirelessly to create seperation, but the seperation is our delusion. Teachers of this realm, tell us to lose our story, not take anything personally, not indulge our dysfunctional emotional patterns and see through the illusion, nobody is doing anything to us, nothing is really happening. And so the discipline begins to witness the antics of the mind with de-tachment, to feal our feelings but not indulge them, to allow the story to leave.

I often wonder if the conflict between these spaces in the context of story, comes from my own tendency to create dualitys to which I have always been reminded by people I have encountered along the way, that everything is shades of grey, no single truth, no right or wrong. Kathy would say "our tribes never partook in Holy wars, they knew that everyone was right". Yet again, if it were so, what about murder? abuse? terrorism? genocide? Was that right? A divine peice of order, or was it reflective of the ways we had fallen away from our spirit?

That day on the mat, for the first time seeing the void, this place of completely peaceful surrendered order, said very calmly and peacefully that everything was always happenings as it should, there was nothing to be concerned about and as Shadow walker whispered in my ear "Racism, genocide, war, terror, hatred, abuse, rape.." in this place of witness I could see clearly my monkey mind freaking out, getting angry and political, the warrior in me that had fought against it most of my life, but there in my centre..all was well....a gaping chasm still a long way from obtaining a bridge neccessary to cross this divide.