There was a time when I would wander the New York City streets throughout the night in my velvet skinny jeans without direction or aim or knowing why I couldn't stop walking, searching for that elusive something I didn’t know but could feel just beyond my grasp.
Even years and lifetimes later as a internationally loved healer and teacher, still in skinny jeans, I can still feel lonely. I can still feel like the outsider looking in. It’s easy to get caught up in this funk, this illusion of separation.
Paul Simon once sang, “I am a rock,” a solid solitary figure apart from everyone else.
It can feel like I am alone in the world, but in those ecstatic moment, where all my ideas and ideals fall away, I experience a different reality. In this reality we are all more like the water; constantly moving, constantly changing. We are all a constantly growing consciousness that includes everyone, everything, every thought, emotion and possibility. It is an ocean of being.
The greatest discordance in my energy patterns, the most ingrained of cellular memories, the most limiting of beliefs, is that idea of “I am a rock” individualization.
The idea of individualization causes me to search for belonging. It feels comforting to belong to a family or a group, a cause, to label myself as something, whether its the label of "white," "catholic," "gay," or "slightly tanned, shaivite, hermit." They're all just ephemeral ideas. A label gives me a sense of weight, a sense of solidity. But it's false comfort and it halts my progress of actual self-realization.
So I sit here, sipping coffee, slipping out of my skins. All of them. Someone once asked me, "When you take away everything that's important to you, what do you have left?"
Digging down for who or what I really am, peeling the onion down, layer by layer, passed the layers of assumed roles, families, relationships, nationalism, race, sexual orientation, religious affiliations, below our job title, our physical image, beyond even our physicality, what am I?
When we remove everything we think about, what do we have left?
This, right here is where true knowledge begins.
When I let go of the ideas of my self and surrender into the arms of meditation, completely untethered, completely alone, completely free, in the quietude I will still always feel an EVER PRESENT VIBRATION. Vibrating energy, running through me, streaming all around me. This is what is left. This is who I am. This is who we are. This is ALL there is.
Try it.
Sit pretty much perfectly still, eyes closed, and breathe. Simple follow your breath. Fell what you feel. Whatever you are feeling is perfect. Just let go and feel everything's absence. Stay with this sensation for a while. You don't need to figure anything out about it, or give it a name. Just shut up, and open up, and feel Life Force vibration flowing.
When you do wake up and open your eyes again, see. All that appears solid is just differing relative vibrations of this vibration, this energy. All that is alive, all that exists is created by the force of this vibrating energy. It is the Life Force.
The Aramaic word for “God” is Alaha that means “essence” or “life force.”
In Islam it is Allah,
Hinduism calls it Prana,
Doastists say Chi.
All these ancient cultures knew that flowing creative vibration within themselves to be the supreme creating life force of all the universe. So communicating with God, Alaha, Allah, opening to Prana and raising Chi was interacting with inner creative vibrating energy.
We are and everything is just one flowing, creating energetic consciousness experiencing itself as varying vibrations. The only absolute constant is the eternal flow. The eternal flow is something we can sorta' identify ourselves as part of.
We can become more interconnected with all that exists and interactive with the creator life force by raising our consciousness on a daily basis, moment by moment, always NOW.
Obviously at this moment you are reading, probably sitting, maybe alone or in the cafe like me. Take this moment to relax all the muscular tension of the entire physical body. exhale deeply a few times and feel what you feel, whatever you feel, flowing through the room, flowing through you, flowing from you.
Is it warm or chilly, does the room feel light or heavy,
can you close your eyes and feel the four corners of the room,
can you feel the presence of other people around you, can you feel me?
What ever you are feeling in this moment is perfect; stay with it, flow with it.
Breath it in and exhale it out.
Become the flow of Life Force.
By practicing this exercise of non-doing integration you will become more and more attuned to the higher reality of your connectivity to the All, to every thing, to all ideas, inspiration and most amazingly all the love that is.
Tat Tvam Asi (तत्त्वमसि), a Sanskrit phrase, translated as “I Am That.”
When you begin every thought from this higher truth of coexistence, from ““I Am That,” how does it change your reactions, how does it change your conscious actions?
I slurp down the last of my coffee, push out through the door into the cold winter breeze. I breathe. This breath is full of love and light, another breath full of my brothers and sisters, friends and lovers, another day dancing, in the arms of the Divine, entwined with you. Tat Tvam Asi, “I Am That.” and we are never alone.