To be human in these times is to have a backlog of unmet, unloved issues within us. These issues are often held by castoff parts of our psyche, which we have excluded from our sense of self. Yet, underneath and amidst all of this complexity, there lives an inviolable and dynamic background of wholeness. By this I mean the ongoing unification of the warmth and clarity of the heart with the totality of our somatic expression. We start in the clouds, utterly divorced from this earthy body. Modern culture gives us countless convincing reasons to avoid intimate vulnerability with our body and capitalists are all too willing to sell us deeper and more efficient estrangement from ourselves. Yet, your body never stops aching for your attention, love, and presence. Woven into the body’s cellular matrix are all our past unmet hurts and joys—this body is the world of ten-thousand joys and sorrows.
To know the present moment, let alone the dynamic experience of awareness as embodiment—the internal experience of the five elements (earth, water, fire, wind, and space) in ceaseless and mysterious play, we must bring this wholeness together with our soma—the lived experience of embodiment. In all likelihood, the experience will not be immediately pleasant. Your soma will not be impressed by your sudden change of heart. It remembers the decades of abandonment and dissociation. You will meet numbness, confusion, tightness, trauma, and pain on the way to joy. You will want to turn back, and you will—countless times. You will retreat into fantasy and the mediocrity of concept. Come back. Come back. Come home.
You will meet yourself, and who you are will surprise you. The shallowness of a mentally imagined identity cannot compare to the liquid flow of unplanned embodied being. The soma, unconstrained and unburdened of abandonment, is so close to your true nature. You cannot bypass it. A purely mental sense of identity is a dry an arid wasteland when divorced from the soma's living spring.
The good news/bad news is: there is no final date of arrival. What fun would that be anyway? This is not something you can check off your to-do list. To be in the flow of wholeness, tenderness, and love means never arriving. Destinations are a fantasy of the immature mind. So, take this out for a spin:
there is no arriving
Walk a mile or five hundred in these shoes.
You are not a thing. You are this mysterious and unceasing flow of awareness, manifesting as warmth and tenderness that exists without reason or condition. This warmth lives in/as your heart and, if unshackled, will pervade every square inch of your world. It is in fact your world. But now, there remains a gap between our anxious conceptual mind and this warm presence. The only way to bridge it is by feeling everything. Good luck.