With my tired and weathered face pressed against the moist jungled earth, I lay there, unable to walk.
My sense of self obliterated into millions of tiny pieces.
Each little shard of self, like tiny grains of sand upon a vast coastline, each became their own universe that I seemed to be zipping in and out of.
The concept of “Michael” was nothing more than a laughable joke in this space.
And it became unnervingly obvious that time was some bizarre makeshift construct that seemed to be incredibly fickle, and easily broken here, as cycles upon cycles flashed across the screen of my awareness.
And yet my body lay there, unable to move with the impulse to puke continually rising up from the pit of my gut.
“God, where are you?”
I kept thinking.
“You must be here, somewhere.”
…
Lately, I have been noticing myself going through a very big change.
Putting words to it has been difficult.
In some bizarre way, I find it easier to articulate myself through writing and sharing here in this weird thought symposium of social media than I do often speaking these things aloud in person to others.
Maybe I feel too vulnerable in person. Too naked. Too awkward.
Or maybe all of my self-judgments kick in and prevent me from fully conveying what wants to be expressed.
Or maybe I get too caught up in other people’s perceptions of me, and it distorts the purity of the message.
I don’t know.
All I have to say is, thank God for writing. I find so much freedom here.
I hope to one day find the same level of freedom in my verbal articulation with others, but for now, writing feels like home.
Anyways, I don’t know why I am sharing this, but I am just trusting the mysterious impulse from which these words arise.
As I learned, “Michael” is just kind of some made-up thing, but yet there is a real intelligence that moves through me (all of us), that I am continuously learning to lean into more and more.
As of recently, I have felt a bit forsaken by God.
And yet I embrace this feeling of “forsakenness” as part of a maturation process, a sort of necessary hardening and strengthening that one must go through, in order to withstand the difficulties and hardships of this human experience.
It feels a bit like coming out of every fantasy, illusion, and denial, and planting one’s feet firmly upon the earth.
A loss of magic. A loss of innocence.
But not really.
It just looks different now.
A deepening. A grittiness that wasn’t there before.
A strength and wisdom that wasn’t there before.
A humanness that wasn’t there before.
Naiveté obliterated.
A decade ago I used to think that evil didn’t exist.
And that was the beginning of a ten year descent, to realize that not only does evil exist, but it exists within me, and it plays out through all of my addictive and self-sabotaging tendencies.
It exists in all of us, no matter how good we think we are.
And part of our maturation is facing that darkness, that “evil” within ourselves, and taking ownership of it so that we are in an empowered position to bring it fully back to God.
That we may be redeemed, and made new.
That we may breach new levels of psychological and spiritual wholeness and maturity.
Because within our darkness, there is a spark of the Divine that is seeking freedom and higher expression.
As we mature, we must claim and confront that darkness within ourselves, to free it and integrate it into a more developed and refined expression of the face of God.
And to be clear, we claim our darkness not to enact it and further perpetuate trauma in the world, but to accept it and allow it to be liberated. To take our power back, and to break the patterns of abuse.
And in reality, it’s not even all that personal.
Because remember, the whole of the world exists within you. And that includes everything.
The light, and the dark.
Because on the deepest level, we are One with all things.
And so when you take ownership of the darkness within you, so that it may be liberated and transformed, you are doing this for the whole of the world.
We face our darkness for those who may not have the capacity, yet, to face what is within themselves.
So we learn to face it within ourselves first, as an act of courage, to show others that they are safe to face whatever lives within them.
Because if it lives within one of us, then it lives somewhere within us all.
And thus we are liberated from shame, guilt, and fear – knowing that we are never alone in what we are facing. No matter what it is.
Nothing is ever as personal as we make it out to be.
And that’s where we find real healing.
In realizing that we are never alone.
…
As I lay on the earth, the stars and the moon hang in the sky, with wet jungle pulsing and breathing around me.
My body shaking and trembling, as generations of pain and trauma become liberated from the very coding of my genetic structure.
As I go through waves of somatic release, I hear a voice in my mind repeating:
“We heal together. We heal together. We heal together.“
“It is the coming together which heals us.”
And then I realize that the answer to my initial question has been answered.
“God is here, in our togetherness.”
“God is here.”
