Work-Awakening

artwork by Susan Seddon Boulet

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This essay is in response to Beth Kempton’s Soul Circle topic last week-Awakening and Work, from the pervious week.

“All spiritualities consistently describe the same state: a direct experience of reality unclouded by thought. Love, presence, God, enlightenment-same thing. This is what happens when the mind grows still. The end goal is to wake up to this moment, fully, and live from it.” Paraphrased from Damian Echols

Our work in this world is to be present and attentive to what is happening around us and to us so that we can respond rather than react. That’s it. The Divine Feminine is imminent, that is, within everything all the time, therefore, She is here in our present moment, in our actions and thoughts, not directing them from eminence. Thus, our awareness of each moment is a gift from Her, and a reminder that we can listen to the voice within and depend on it to deliver truth in every moment.

The work to be present is the challenge, for sure. When I am present, I notice the awareness behind the thoughts in my head, just waiting to be remembered. Listening to my thoughts is where the magic happens. Wisdom and knowledge are held in my body ready for me to access them for healing and intuitive guidance.

The magic: Yesterday I listened to Tim Arrigo (Beyond Driven, Breakthrough Academy) talk about the beliefs that run our lives. Those beliefs are created when we are young as we make sense of whatever is happening in our world. They serve us at that moment, but they can destroy our lives as adults. (Gabor Mate)

These beliefs are simply our interpretation of what is happening, not truth. For example, if you ask 10 different people the same question you can get 10 different answers. So, which one is true? Each person answers from their interpretations, therefore it behooves us to look at why we have the beliefs we do. “Beliefs are just a feeling of absolute certainty,” he said. Here’s the awakening: We can ask ourselves if the belief is true, and if it is not, we can change the belief.

This is not new information. We know that what we put our attention on is what grows, so when we run our lives by beliefs we created in order to survive a negative situation, and it works, we keep believing it. When the belief no longer serves us, we keep believing it because it is so ingrained.

An example from someone on the call last night: My parents fought all the time, and my father left. My mother drank a lot and wasn’t around for us kids as we were growing up. I took care of my siblings, made dinner, washed their clothes and got them to school. I learned to be everything to everyone. As an adult, in my marriage I made sure my family had everything they needed, and when they didn’t, I felt like a failure, and started drinking to blunt the feeling that I couldn’t succeed. My marriage fell apart, and I rarely see my kids. (The belief is that he needed to take care of everyone in order to feel successful. It worked as a child, but destroyed his life as an adult.)

In these instances, Tim’s instruction is to change the belief. We don’t know what happened in someone’s life that caused them to behave in destructive ways, until they tell us. And usually they are ashamed, and don’t. Once we excavate our lives and see the beliefs we have carried into adulthood and how they are destroying our lives, we can “wake up to this moment, fully, and live from it,” in Echols’ words. This is enlightenment: being present to the moment we are in. Living free from those thoughts, the beliefs, is a manifestation of the perfection and divinity we were born with. She has led us to see and understand that we are not the one who is deficient. We are the one who did the best we could with what we had, and in the words of Maya Angelou, “When you know better, you do better.” We can change the belief from “I am a failure,” to “I am learning and growing in this moment.” That is the gift She has for us, the truth of the present moment.

This is the dharma, this is the refuge, this is the perfection. This is the work, and this is the awakening.