Magic. Truth. Beauty. Love. None of this is easy stuff. It’s not pretty. It’s not fluffy. It’s not for the faint of heart.
It’s all rather like a large body of water, especially an ocean. It can look so lovely and yet it can kill you. And when it does, it didn’t mean to. It was just being itself.
Part of my intention for this year is to dive deeply into the philosophy and practice of tantra yoga, and already, only 14 days into this new year, it is revealing a huge and unhelpful chasm in my approach to life. This is stuff I’ve always kinda known was there — we all know it’s there. But like most of us, I danced around it. I thought about it here and there. I could talk about how I was unlearning it, but in reality, it was growing in size and threatening to swallow any happiness in its path.
And all happiness is in the path of this one.
I know I’m not alone with this. I see it at play every day all around me, in particular in the number of people suffering from lifelong, debilitating, chronic depression (like myself).
William Styron wrote a great and very personal account of his lifelong depression, and he wondered if a depressed brain is born or made and he decided that it doesn’t matter, that we can never know.
Here’s what I think: I think some of us are born with a brain that is more susceptible to depression, a brain that is more “sensitive” to stimuli, but also a deeply inquisitive brain that kinda… gets lost in its inquisitive nature… a brain that follows dark lines of thought and then can’t find its way out.
Over time, this starts to look like a neurological or chemical imbalance, but like all disease, it starts elsewhere, an elsewhere that current medicine is not able to locate or understand yet. (And do NOT read this as a “blaming” of the sick. NOT. AT. ALL. My point is that we are complicated, feeling, thinking organisms for whom those thoughts and feelings play a much larger role than we currently understand, but then those thoughts and feelings meet up with environmental factors — from family to community to earth — and that’s where the complicated comes in.)
WIth my study of tantra yoga, I’m coming face to face with this: I believe that life is being DONE to me.
But this begs so many questions: By whom and for what reason and to what end?
A God who “does things” to us, including all the difficult things, to “teach us lessons” just sounds like an asshole. A human made asshole.
Humans made that God out of their observation of human assholes writ large.
I don’t want to believe in that God, but deep down, in that dark chasm, I DO.
If I’m sick, I must have been bad.
If someone dies, I am being punished.
What? It hit me yesterday that THIS — THIS — is the blackened heart, the very core of my depression. Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that they had so little power in their life? Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that their “God”, the larger universe was out to get them? Who wouldn’t be depressed when every little or big bad thing that happens (normal things that happen to everyone because this is LIFE) was a judgement of their value as a human being?
Tantra yoga, on the other hand, is a philosophy of nonduality. There is no “out there” God. There is only one soul of which we are all part. We are drops in an ocean of soul.
And life happens because life happens, and whether we evolve or not is about how we react to that.
Everything that happens is neutral, neither good nor bad. It’s only what we label it and our labels hold all the power. Our labels determine our experience.
I’m sick because I’ve been at the highest level of stress in my life for three months because I was helping my mother help my father to not die.
We know, more than anything when it comes to the disease process, that stress leaves us open to “catching” illness. We are not “unlucky.” or “bad” or “sickly.” We are stressed.
And THAT is something we have control over.
Again to refer to tantra yoga: the ultimate energy, the ultimate underlying reality is awareness itself. And we come from that and so we are that.
We can wake up, right now, to this reality. We can decide to embody that awareness.
It won’t be easy — there’s no magic spell here. It’s a matter of observing ourselves and catching reflex habitual thinking and asking, is that really how I see the world? Is that really the world I want to live in?
This is scary to me.
Even thinking about changing this way of thinking makes my stomach do flips. The known is comfortable. And what the hell will happen if I decide to live in a FRIENDLY and LOVING world? What will I do when “bad” things happen? If I let go of my grief and despair, who the hell am I?
I am the ocean, that’s who I am. I am the drop in the ocean, and I am the ocean.
And like I said, truth and beauty and love and magic — not easy and a whole lot scary but a life of freedom and no delusions and feeling what is and not labeling? Yes, please, because THAT sounds EXACTLY what I know when I am dancing.