You curse the day when you decided to pursue enlightenment and the spiritual path. It seems that the further you travel down the rabbit hole of spirituality, the more disconnected you feel from life. Spirituality was suppose to be your friend – your ally, and lead you to a place of freedom from the various sufferings of your life. Now, spirituality and the pursuit of enlightenment have become your enemy.

The promises you’ve read that all will be perfect once enlightened seems faint. Every now and then you feel at peace, but it quickly slips through your fingers and you’re back to the messy life situations that you’ve created – financial debt, poor health, disconnected relationships, etc. You want out of spirituality; I don’t blame you. But you can’t go back, can you? You know too much; you know of the possibilities and potential being the realized awakened one holds. It’s too bad that you can’t negotiate a deal with an agent from the Matrix and forget this whole enlightenment business.

I guess you are stuck with one option: keep going.

Back in 2008, I had my first glimpse of true reality and enlightenment. The thinking mind subsided and I saw reality without labels, judgments, and criticisms. A feeling of peace overwhelmed me, and the “knowing-ness” of being connected to everything and everyone was apparent. Talking about it does not give the experience justice, for the experience is not even an experience. It is beyond words and not even graspable; it is a complete oneness with what is. The best pointer I can give is this: What in this moment is lacking? It’s not meant to be answered, but rather, to free yourself from the thinking mind.

That glimpse of true reality, however, was like the opening and closing of a shutter to the lens of a camera: quick, but unforgettable. Just like the camera, it stored the enlightened experience on my hard drive called the brain. I couldn’t drop the experience. I knew too much. Curiosity got the best of me and my spiritual path began from there.

Over the course of the next year, I had glimpses of my true nature often. My life began to dismantle and cut out the unnecessary shit that was causing dysfunction. It was painful because the only way to cut the shit completely out of your life is to make it so bad that you finally surrender. There’s a period of flux that toggles between being the “realized awakened one” and the “unawakened awakened one.” The tendency is to resist the flux period – it’s our human nature to do so, but the more you resist the flux, the longer it takes to fully embody the awakened one realized.

The reason why you feel disconnected from life and blocked from spirituality is because you’ve had a glimpse of your true nature, Big Mind. What’s happening to you is the unnecessary baggage of shit your ego created in life is disintegrating and crumbling to the ground. You are becoming “poor in spirit”, as Jesus stated, and the ego structures are dying and a higher state of consciousness is becoming present.

It’s painful – I know. You want to regain wholeness and turn those glimpses into a sustained awakening. The key to acceleration is to surrender to what is and become one with the suffering. Yes…become one with your suffering.

The art of surrendering

Allow and give space for your suffering to exist. Don’t try to get rid of the negative situations, deny that they are happening, and focus only on the positive. That will lead to disowning the many aspects that make you a human being. Then, whatever is disowned and immature will come out in covert ways sabotaging your life over and over and over again.

If you have a financial situation that’s haunting you with debt, as I’m experiencing and have experienced in the past, how can you be the aware presence for what arises in this moment? Let’s say someone serves you a summons for bank attachment to a 10,000 dollar debt that you owe. Rather than go into immediate reactive mode from your old conditioning, such as anger, blaming the world, or beating yourself up for being unworthy, how can you break the chains of Karma and respond to the situation?

You always have choice to how you can respond in any given situation and/or moment. When you exercise that choice, you break the habitual patterns that are causing you dysfunction. Rather than resist what is, become one with what arises in the moment. If you feel angry, be anger. If you feel victimize, be the victim. Embrace each life situation, emotion, and thought like you would embrace your own child – with compassion and understanding.

Be compassionate because the energy patterns behind any and all life situations want to be loved and embraced. By giving your life situations the space to exist, without judgment, labels, and criticism, is the foundation for a true, heartfelt relationship and owning the many aspects that make up you.

Be understanding towards yourself because the nature of “your-self” is to grasp, attach, and be stuck. The Self is nothing more than a vessel with a name slapped on it that contains, embodies, and expresses the infinite amounts of life energies – anger, control, love, vulnerability, hate, desire, peace, joy, appreciation, gratitude, seeking, and on and on. The Self wants to do its job and express your fullest potential in a functional way. This means being anger, for example, in the most appropriate and functional way.

To embody compassion and understanding is to surrender. The way to surrender is to allow life to happen as it is and be one with it. The fear that your-self has is that if you become one with rage, for example, that rage will take you over and you’ll become destructive. That’s not true and it’s the illusion of being separate from your emotions. When you actually become one with your suffering – your rage – you embrace and transcend the rage. It now becomes a functional aspect to your Being and serves you when appropriate. Your rage will transmute into a powerful energy that corrects a situation, such as the court summons, in a functional way; or the rage will subside and turn into peace, in which “no response” at the moment is needed. I don’t know. The moment is not now. But when the now moment comes, embrace what arises and become one with it to find out.

Feeling disconnected from life is natural. And because you feel disconnected means that you have glimpsed your true nature and have awakened. Embrace life with understanding and compassion by surrendering to your life situations and what is. Ironically, when you surrender, you’ll naturally evolve, grow, and change with little effort on your part. You’ll live more to your fullest potential than what you could imagine. Your disconnection to life will transmute into wholeness through surrender. Persevere.

Love,
Big Heart