Accidental Enlightenment Part 3

A Blessing for New Beginnings

In out-of-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you had willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plentitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

John O’Donohue

As my accidents have come in threes and you know how often we say in this country “things come in threes” I decided to add a part 3 to my accidental enlightenment musings. And it actually feels fitting to add on this part.

In my first blog I spoke about being stuck and what that meant to me after the car crash. And yes my physical body felt very stuck initally and full of fear that this would not change. Yet change it has. As I stayed with the stuckness I discovered or should I say uncovered a new world awaiting me.

In the past few weeks I have discovered ways to move that have given me great ease and comfort and some degree of flexible movement. I have felt parts of my body setting their limits and calling a halt to my gallop. I have had the time to explore “slow” rather than “stuck” in my outer movements and as I said in my second blog that uncovered many new experiences for me.

Now I have found the time to turn the movement inwards to the inner landscape. To the mountains, rivers, lakes, byroads and superhighways of my internal life, to the ever changing weather systems moving inside me.

This has been the most revealing journey of all. I have met the really stuck places inside. My life to date has been a constant sense of movement/activity, speeding along hoping someday to catch up with………..I do not know what??????

I just know I have had the internal experience of racing to catch up. And in these days of having to deliberately and mindfully slow down, I have been able to sense the quality of this way of being and to see the loop it is stuck in. I had myself convinced if I could keep going, doing more, learning more, studying more, more music, more ideas I would some day arrive ……………..????????

This last week I have seen the treadmill of this way of being. I have seen how stuck I have become in this pattern and how I had fooled myself by constantly being on the move that I was not stuck.

It took getting physically stuck for me to allow the blinkers to come off and to see the real stuckness. And it is such a relief to clearly and compassionately see it. To be able to step back and observe this way of doing that has tried to serve me, tried to keep me safe almost all my life. And it has served me well in getting me to do many things I would have been afraid to do, travel to places I would have feared and met many amazing and wonderful people.

Yet as away of being it does not serve me well now and just keeps me in mindlless activity with very old thought patterns fueling it.

I have no idea what the alternative will be but as John O’ Domodhue says