I have written several times before about a series of shamanic journeys I undertook in the Peruvian jungle some years back. Beautiful and sometimes shocking truths about the nature of Reality and illusion were seen and imbibed. Because these openings were shamanically induced and not a natural, organic evolution of my being, they faded but the memory of what was glimpsed is often, often revisited and serves to open the heart in many challenging moments.

On one of these journeys, the experience opened into incredible pain. It felt like something was coming for me and I was going to be skewered, annihilated. Like the center would be taken out of me.'Centrified' was the word that came and it felt unbearable. ( It was only later that I realized the feeling was of terror. I had never consciously experienced terror and so the ability to label it was missing).

The intensity eased up and then I circled around in mind, for a long time in great fear of "it" returning to get me. Circling, avoiding, it felt like I could live lifetimes of ordinary suffering rather than go back to face what was there at the core.

At some point out of sheer exhaustion , I turned to Mother and asked Her to take me back.

The experience opened into this invitation to give up what was important to me in life. My daughters, the pleasure of sweet conversations with people. Then came my ex, to whom I was still emotionally attached. Giving up the sweetness of the romantic, special love relationship. I was finally able to do that.

And out of nowhere came the question " Was I willing to give up thought".

I circled with that for a long time. There was so much fear to be without thought, nothing to locate 'me', to anchor 'me', the personal construct. Not to be able to describe what was happening ever again,to be swallowed up in the nothingness.

Utterly exhausted with mind spinning, I was finally able to surrender to this.

And then the most beautiful experience of coming home to my dear Father, like the return of the prodigal son. Such incredible release from all the suffering. Being embraced in the most loving Arms. My heart broke open and the tears of gratitude, of overwhelming gratitude, flowed for a long time. My Father was so happy to have me home. Jesus, my teacher, was there and it was a full rejoicing.

My only job now was to love. Nothing else. Just to love, to love, to love. To live the very simple way of love, nothing complicated. There was such purity in this love, a thrilling purity. A deeply personal love where everything about me is adored. All of the humanness and little personal ways of being that sometimes brought shame, all so incredibly sweet in this great love.

There was an outpouring of love for all the people in my life and an
overwhelming, oh-so-beautiful gratitude for everyone I ever had difficulty and conflict with. The recognition that these people had brought me to this love.

Over and over again, I was reassured that my experience of love and loving is very simple, just like this felt. Just the heart pouring open in tears, in hugs. Not necessarily blissed out states of love as I sometimes imagined it should be.

I kept returning to my Father to be reassured He would be there loving me as all the specialness and impurities were cleaned away as the work of my life continued.

And so it does continue, continues for all of us until it is known that the Heart is everything, the Heart is all, the Heart is all there is.

Let us take our grasping, fixing hands off the screen of the dream.
Just to lift them off.

To recognize there is nobody out there. And neither is my body.
Whatever seems to be causing the distress is not really there.

The distress is all, already inside me. The discomfort I am aware of
was projected out onto images, scenes, people, my body......making it
look like these are causing the discomfort. It is all the other way
around. The original pain in the system is the author, the projector
of the dream.

So we come back to the disturbance, we withdraw all attention from the
external and our job is to bear the disturbance.

This is a mighty recognition and can cut through an enormous amount of
torment and mind spinning.

So here we are with disturbance. All that's asked of us is to receive
it. To receive what is already here, what is already in the process of
self-liberating. A layer of energy has surfaced from the unconscious
and its very presence shows its willingness to be dissolved.

Love rushes to meet Her long lost children. This may not be our
experience yet, but can we greet them. Can we say 'hello'. Can we be
glad that what is driving our dream of suffering is arising and
returning to peace.

All things 'prodigal' come Home. All things eventually weary of
hardness and unkindness. All things deep inside secretly long for
love. Sons of ego come to flicker in the shadows a while but
eternally, truly, always Sons of God.

" For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found."

The ego needs specialness like the body needs water. The crumbling of the small self necessitates an entering into the areas where it has gotten its specialness in life or where it craves it.

These areas were perhaps unconscious to you but they become glaringly more conscious as separated energies come closer to the Heart.

Loss of specialness for the ego is no walk in the park. It can be experienced as a slow burn over time or as intense periods of feeling like you're being raked over the coals. By the time we reach these core spots of ego we are well-versed in the ways of the heart and the pain is often laced with beauty and tenderness.

Love seems to be woven into and through the fabric of the energies that are being loosened and reclaimed. The gift-Giver is never far away from His gift and our tears now are a divine duet of hurt and blessedness.

Specialness gives way to love and layer by precious layer the joy and vibrancy of the Heart is reknown.

Thank you, Beloved, for bones that creak and limbs that ache, for age and fragility and dysfunction.

For systems that no longer work so well, for nothing being as smart and quick as it once was. For a mind dulled and fogged and wondering how it can go on.

For repeating thoughts of missing minerals and exercise not done. Seeking either to self-condemn or foolishly believe I can better or control.

For showing me the magnitude of identification with this bag of bones I call my body, I think is me.

All of this I need to come to You. You loosen these hands that claw and grasp at body wellness as if it were my ticket Home. Prising my fingers and gaze off yet another worldly prize and opening to what does not even know of such a world.

I bow down Beloved to You, to You that knows so refiningly well what this dear soul needs.

"Let Thy will be my pleasure". And may it always be.

Hold this bundle of ineptitude you call you. She that doesn't exist....... but yet before she disappears into the mists of time, let us love her first so completely and tenderly and gratefully that no part of her
need ever rise again to look for
something in the eyes and heart of what could not bless her or see her innocence.

We stroke this being of body and mind with all its ingrained habits of energy that we have struggled and sought so valiantly to fix and better. All in vain. She could never be more than she was. Not one step of hers was ever out of line, every movement the perfect product of a decision made long ago to be out on her own and make a body her home.

But this body is not her home and neither were the countless ones she thought were hers before. Decisions made that seemed so real leading to worlds of form that now seem so real.

But Home we did not leave nor ever could. The loveliness of God is always ours, awaiting only our soul's holy and courageous choice to lay aside our toys and idle dreams, to make our home anew and rest again where we and God would have us be.

There comes a point for those of us on the journey of the heart where adversity begins to be felt as a special secret between you and your Beloved. The challenges are recognized to be the precise and grace-filled offerings you need to open to the totality of the heart, to open to the precious vulnerability and fragility that is taking you beyond it to the invulnerability of your own Self.

Such a complete package of tears and beauty and love and strength and knowing and truth.

The sense of being victimized falls away, the need to speak of the difficulty of it all falls away because here you are in a cocoon of love and trust with your Beloved.

You are indeed the special one, the chosen one, not in the way your dear construct longed for or could ever have envisaged but here it is, where every ache of body and mind generates the feeling of the Heart wrapping Its shawl of love around all of you in the most personal, close and complete way. You are home and all is indeed very, very well.

Let yourself breathe, live, love, drown in the question "who".

Who doesn't feel well. Who doesn't know what to do. Who needs
to come out of the box. Who needs attention. Who is tired and achy. Who did a good job. Who is having a wave of angst. Who is crying. Who feels loving.

For every thought, feeling, action, there's a "who" waiting to take the wind out of its ownership sails.

Let all your resolve now be on the heart of the matter - a full-blown shift in identification from the character to the Self. Don't dilly-dally any longer in trying to make the character whole and shining and smelling good. Or fix up the character's lot in any way. It is futile. A shiny character cannot come Home no more than its not-so-shiny neighbour. Home and identified character can never meet. There is no point of intersection.

The belief in a you is the awful joke. There is no Santa Claus, there is no you. There was no Big Bang and everything we see, hear, smell, feel, think has been imagined into existence. When we know this to be true, all the way in, the suffering will end.

Marry your attention to the heart and hold on tight with all your might to your Beloved. He has been waiting throughout time for you and rejoices without measure in your homecoming.

Many of us in this extremely challenging and beautiful time of Self-realization go through periods where the experience of having a vital and energetic body is a distant memory. And every attempt to restore wellness eventually comes back to ground zero. We are left in 'nothing works' and 'no control'. Grounded by Love.

This is the time to let all ruminations about fixing go and simply receive the offering of the aches and pains of a broken body. This is the time to see that every ache is like a kiss from the Beloved saying "Not here, love. Not here." The answer is not here in the body. Not only is the answer not in fixing it, it is nowhere near the body at all.

It is found in the seeing that a well body and a broken body are one in kind, they are both illusion. That a clear, light body has no more value than a body filled with energy that is purging and releasing - they are both imagined into existence.

It is cultivated in the gentle, firm and knowing 'so what' and 'nothing matters' arising in the face of unwellness.

The body's welfare is pre-ordained, the script already written. Can we walk through the play holding its hand, letting the newly-shining truth of its unreality and 'not mattering' open the heart to great mercy and tenderness for all that is not real. Mercy for the unresolvable issue in our lives, whatever that may be, for how in its unwavering relentlessness it is waking us up out of the heart of misidentification; its tugs on our attention losing their strength through the sheer exhaustion of their known ineffectuality.

We rise up as true Self in the midst of the unfixable. This is its job and this is its grace. The rising up of the internal Real that sheds light on the unreality of all that is temporal.

Old, old, ancient energies seeping through our systems now. All manner of bodily phenomena emerging, releasing itself. Who are we to argue with one ounce of God's holy work.

Let us weep and shake and sound and hold space for all of it. A precious, tender, receiving Womb for the long held-in pain of believing we are here at all.

We are so big and unshakeable now, so practiced in the divine art of meeting ourselves. For we know now that what looks and feels like darkness are just these lost, suffering, innocent clouds looking for heaven.

And Heaven we are. And Heaven's gates we open to them in the simple receiving of what is here now.

And how willingly they come now, these exhausted, broken ones - how dear and tender and complete is the love that rises to greet them. A divine fusion and homecoming. Heart waters break and flow profusely. Body and eyes soften and glisten. And peace abides.

The unresovable issue is truly the Holy's fierce and loving offering. Exhaustion with it actually starts to feel good. Nowhere else to turn now but to the Beloved.

And there is great peace in the realization that not being able to fix something is not a problem at all. We're not supposed to be able to fix it. It's the ego dying and this is so much greater, so much more glorious than any "perfect" dream, that has no meaning at all.

Can we relax into the unfixable, could we even celebrate it.