What is undesirable in your life?
Criminals, perhaps?
Coworkers who you wish would just f*** off?
A habit or behaviour you wish didn’t rule you?
Memories, hopelessness, lack, fear or despair?
We are often so plagued by what we categorize as unwanted and undesirable, and we effort greatly in pushing it away, fighting or locking it away in the dungeons of our unconscious. We reinforce this effort by ensuring what is locked away doesn’t escape and threaten our carefully crafted illusions of security.
We are taught and practiced in this, whether the prisons are in the external world or our internal one.
A person who has committed an act deemed undesirable by society’s justice keepers is labelled a criminal and locked up in prison.
An emotion, memory or a quiet truth within us that causes us grief or pain or simply discomfort or inconvenience is buried within in, locked, with the key thrown away.
In both scenarios, we tend to forget what we’ve locked up. We keep adding to it allowing a festering, a resentment and inordinate pains to birth.
Criminality & Community
I heard a talk years ago by a First Nations Elder on the perception of crime and criminals.
He expressed that society sees wrong-doers as something to be cut away, like a tumour and punished. The belief here is this will ‘teach them’ and ‘keep the rest of us good folks, safe’.
‘But…’ the Elder continued, ‘is that what you see around you?’
He explained that he saw activities as crimes; not a person’s whole Being as criminal. He spoke to invisible damage of labelling and then treating people as criminals, which tends to keep them marinating in anger, pain and desperation; while also keeping society stagnant in the illusion of safety, false morality and misplaced goodness. Being from a First Nations community, he was very familiar with prison walls, social prejudices, attempts at reforms, and the (in)justice system in his younger day. As he got older and started to heal (not in the prison), he chose to support his ‘brothers behind bars’ and champion a harmonization and reintegration process with communities.
This perception of criminality, according to him, showed our collective misunderstanding of humanity and the human condition, which comes from separation from Source.
If a person chose to do an act of harm towards self or another, it is because that person views themselves as separate from the tribe, from the land, from Source. The act is an expression of that pain of separation, isolation and lack of belonging which breeds greed, hatred, resentment, jealously and confusion around one’s place in the world, even when they do not know it.
What society doesn’t like to see is how it collectively creates and encourages criminality by division, and then efforts in its imprisonment, and then efforts even more in ideas of justice and reform.
This is the difference between society and Community.
The responsibility of Community is to consider itself and figure out where and how ‘we all’ let this person or group of people down. The crime is an act that shows us where we are blind, wounded or in denial as a collective, so that, each of us can pour some consciousness and healing there, help each other through together.
Because, in terms of Wholeness, when one suffers, we all suffer.
Denying or casting something away, doesn’t allow for healing to occur for any of us, nor wholeness to be restored.
To Yield
To me, we exert in outer world what we understand in our inner world.
The parts of us that we hate, are disgusted or ashamed by, want to hide, perhaps these may always exist. What we do with these parts, that is the truth of us.
The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost.
The true heart can touch the poison of hatred without being harmed.
Since beginning less time, darkness thrives in the Void, but always yields to purifying Light.
- Ancient One, Avatar, Last Airbender
Do we truthfully, with every cell of our being believe in redemption and purification of what we hold to be light, love and truth?
And if so, can we conceive the truly incorruptible parts of ourselves regardless of what the external world throws at us?
Can our minds and egos trust our own incorruptible hearts?
Do we have our own permission and trust the awesome power of surrender to the Divine, that we transmute and neutralize the undesirable within and without?
True Power lives and is experienced here.
By its nature, it cannot be taken by anyone.
Here, we feel powerless when we give this power of ours away due to fears and doubts and illusionary controls we are seduced by.
After lots of fighting I’ve had to descend into what I am truly disgusted by, what I hate, the outer and inner characters of shame, terror, greed, cowardice and feel the collective pain of everything I have denied. It wrenches the gut and takes every ounce of faith. But, I have always found my truth and my knowing through it.
And I’ve seen it in others.
There’s something in our eyes that changes when we do this; when we come to this place in ourselves willingly (if a bit begrudgingly).
When we choose to stop imprisoning what is undesirable and in safe and sacred space allow it to rise and face it.
This place is the building block of Faith, Surrender and deep Trust.
It enables us to withstanding great pain and suffering and offer our overflowing love and healing. To me, this is the place of miracles and solutions that serve Humanity.
In practicing this, we touch the immovable within, and perhaps even become immune to the fear and control narratives of the current world around us.
This is the brilliance of Yielding.
When we first start our self-reflections, meditations and open to spirituality, we have to face things. We get more practiced in this, and it is deeply powerful and meaning work. And yet, we sometimes stay in this cycle of problem > struggle > reflection > release > realization.
But we do not always need pain, suffering and struggle to have our realizations and align to our Spirit and Soul truths.
To Yield is to open another path that enables us to live our radiant Wholeness through both the easy days and the more challenging times.
Instead of surrendering to the Cosmic flow, here we learn to become the Cosmic flow.
What do we Yield to?
That which is present, here and now.
All of it.
Every bit of it.
All we believe to be good, bad, desired, undesirable, neutral, remembering that these are constructs.
We do this one breath at a time, at the speed of the heart and the body, with full support of our Soul and Spirit.
From this place, whether we choose to fight in the outer world, stand in protests, plant seeds in our farms, challenge authority, meditate on love, or dig up corruption, we are able to access the nourishment and energy of those eternal parts of us- the immeasurable light that we all carry within us, which by it’s nature is purifying. Because we know all else yields to it.
May you seed love into everything within and around you that you perceive as unlovable, and may it bloom into Eternal Spring.