Capacity = Bliss = Freedom
Being human has been all the things recently. In my own life, I’ve noticed my mind furrowing my brows in judgment at people behaving in ways that my mind has all sorts of opinions and stories about. And when I occasionally peer out at the polarizing shenanigans in the collective from my particular vantage point, it’s enough to make my mind take a running jump over the nearest precipice with a final jubilant geronimo!
Recently, I realized that my mind has done just that.
It’s finally gone and jumped head-first into the deep waters of the heart, and is playing and flowing in the currents of those sweet waters. And it feels…blissful! Instead of furrowed brows at the choices of others, it’s orienting towards the heart, the heart’s choices + decisions, and getting into right relationship with those.
The truth that it can’t source meaning and joy and nourishment and truth and beauty from trying to control anything much out there has evolved from an intellectual knowing into an embodied experience. Yet through my mind's immersion in the heart’s sweet waters, it can relate to and even play with everything out there in a whole new meaningful way.
And from there change organically happens in its own space and time, without the acidity of controlling, dominating, disassociating.
For instance, right now my husband is watching the rugby world cup in the kitchen while I’m here writing about bliss to you. I can hear the sound of sports which to me is torture. I am not a sports fan. Sporting events are the very antithesis of bliss to me. I can very strongly feel the part of me that wants to go in and irritatedly demand that he go into another room, or even better, take his phone and throw it out the window.
Life is happening.
Having everything exactly as I want it is wonderful, of course. And equally if not more wonderful + liberating is noticing that deeply irritated part, which is right now showing up in and as my clenched jaw. It’s liberating because I get to turn towards a part of myself that still believes it has to control and dominate the world out there to get its needs met, that it has to fight for a place in the sun for a few measly scraps of bliss which it will have when everything is exactly and fleetingly as it wants out there.
Instead of becoming the tense irritation in my clenched jaw, when I turn towards and relate to this part with curiosity and compassion, it loosens its grip. (At the same time, Oli has in fact gone into the other room and the sound of rugby has receded from my space.) Meanwhile, with the loosening of its grip, there’s a sigh from this part as it feels the sunlight of my awareness generously shining on it. It realizes that it doesn’t have to fight.
The sensory dissonance of the sound of sports (which I’m firmly identified with loathing) turned out to be a portal into deeper connection with my Self, into more capacity for Life, and more Bliss - with a capital ‘B’.
I don’t have to outsource any of this, don’t have to make the world or other people responsible for it. It’s right here - intimately, inseparably me + mine. And from here freedom flows. From here, in vibrant spaciousness I get to choose my relationship and response to Life, rather than trying to control and dominate it (and others people.)
From here, instead of annoyance at this beautiful, complicated and rugby-enjoying human, I start to feel appreciation for the many ways that being in relationship with him brings me into closer communion with Life, with my Self, with loosening the grip of control on my mind’s rigid scripts of how people and things ‘should’ be.
My capacity for difference expands. (And collectively, that's something we very much need right now.)
Nature, through Life, is always inviting us to merge with it - because we’re not separate from it.
And over the last several months this is what my mind has been doing: diving + merging head-first into the waters of the heart-soul-body to unify with Life, through the never-lying felt-sense. It’s done it before, in previous cycles of re-membering. This time however, I’m present for every nuanced aspect of it.
This isn’t always comfortable, of course, this sensational immersion into the heart-soul’s Bliss. It means releasing all that's a ‘no’, from the heart, and becoming willing to be with any grief + discomfort that arises. It means attuning to the heart-soul’s ‘yes’ which is often counter to the ‘shoulds’ of a culture that needs to keep us externally referenced (especially for our joy), disempowered and hooked into false + numbing constructs. It means learning to cultivate safety from within. It means becoming rooted and stabilized in the ground of Being, and allowing the emergence + rising of my Bliss from there, trusting it and following its undemanding guidance.
(The heart-soul doesn't understand let alone enforce mandates. Choice is Queen.)
And it means making a commitment to the felt-sense, the body’s language of sensation, over and over again - and cultivating the capacity to do that.
The consequence is that the body can become space for powerful currents of (non-rational) joy - space that includes both pleasure and pain, jouissance. Bliss-infused Beingness can then become the soil that nurtures our doing.
This radical, evolutionary frequency of embodied Joy is our north star this autumn (and beyond) in Root + Rise. Under the apprenticeship of Goddess Oshun, we’ll be allowing, swimming and flowing in these waters of jouissance.
(Jouissance arises from the verb jouir - to play.)
Come play + invoke Goddess through the ever-renewable energy of Self generated, reasonless Joy this autumn in Root + Rise.
Registration closes at midnight PST on 30 September