09/08/2016
LIMINAL SPACE--REALM OF THE SOUL
…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…do anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing.
--Richard Rohr
Each day, as I sit in meditation, I listen first to my worldly self speak of its many emotions. How are things going? What am I feeling? What is my current complaint? I allow an opening for whatever needs to be expressed, and deeply buried emotions occasionally rise up to the surface of my awareness, like bubbles in a carbonated drink.
Once that is aired, I sink deeper and ask for my soul’s perspective. What does it see? What is it longing for? What is its “take” on all that stuff my worldly self finds so irritating and confounding? (Most of the time, these two aspects of myself weigh in with polar opposite viewpoints.)
Lastly, I approach the Divine Within. Or maybe I glimpse it. Or graze it. Sometimes, I feel it wrap itself around the physical part of me. Sometimes I feel it glimmering like a live ember or a quiet jewel in the core of my physical form. The Divine is nothing but Being—unconditional and endless being. All the reactions and feelings and thoughts and opinions and needs and anxieties become a no-thing in its Presence, in its Envelopment.
The world we live in is a harsh place. And life in that harsh place has never been easy. But, then again, it isn’t really intended to be.
We commonly live under the illusion that if we get everything just right—whom to marry, and whom to befriend, where to live and where to work, how to dress, how to speak and present ourselves, that everything will turn out well; life will work out and become easy, and we will be happy.
What is oftentimes more true is that, the more we try and successfully achieve this delicate balance—this juggling act—the harder life in the external world becomes. Add in increasingly heavier doses of world strife and hardship, violence and daily acts of insanity, and you have an existence riddled with stress and adversity, confusion, grief and fear.
We are sometimes surprised by how difficult life can actually be. We expect the world, our government, our laws, our career, our loved ones, our healthcare, and our bureaucratic systems to work: to help and protect us, to support us, to pave the way, to provide shelter, comfort, sustenance, and we are puzzled and dismayed when these things are not as smoothly forthcoming as we supposed they would be. The flimsy reliability of these things and their failure to hold up under pressure deeply upset and dismay us. Their undependability doesn’t seem fair or right or even natural.
If we stop and think about it, though, we will remember what we have oftentimes been told: the world doesn’t owe us a living; the world doesn’t really owe us anything. As spirit beings, the world has little to offer us, beyond being a place to cut our teeth, test our mettle and learn who we are. The outer world is a means, not an end. It is not a paradise, but the strange and unlikely portal to one.
The aim of life is not to engineer our physical reality to meet the needs and requirements of our ego (our little self). Though we try—lord knows we try. The aim of life is to be in the world but not of the world, to widen and deepen the lens, to invoke the unseen, the unknowable, the world beyond the senses. And to surrender to that—to what we can’t know, can’t taste, touch, hear or see.
READ MORE AT
http://journeystothesoul.com/2016/09/08/liminal-space-realm-of-the-soul/
