Life stinks! Life sucks and then you die. Aren’t these the sayings that come from experiencing? They ring true, we even laugh when we hear them now in recognition that we feel this way, often even, right?
All those positrons out there, tell the truth. Underneath all that positivity we push so hard for with false hope lies this swamp of grievances, resentments, unhappiness with how things are, how they are, the other is, how we are.
What if Life is a come-as-you-are party? And what if, even when it stinks to high heaven, something nourishing can come from it?
Sometimes when we eat poison, our body regurgitates it. It’s a self-healing mechanism after all. I had a case of food poisoning once. I was in Monaco for the Formula 1 Grand Prix race through the streets; a once-in-a-lifetime experience. My friends and I went to dinner after the pre-race the day before the big event, where the drivers get their starting positions. I had sea food by the sea shore in a beautiful open air restaurant with incredible views. Then I had my worst night and day, head in toilet, and missed the race. The lovely people at the B&B, via French, didn’t know anything about ginger ale and saltines. They were very kind as they shook their heads, listening to my in French request. It would have been good if I’d known the word for ginger I now realize.
So why do I use the word wresting? Because that’s how I experience working through some of my experiences, I’m wrestling BIG (By Infinite Grace) time with the experience I’m having. If it’s fun and joyous, as going to Monaco with my then love and also with my best friend was, no problem. An example of human good that’s pretty darn great, really. Head in toilet, a humbling example of not-so-good human experience, unwanted, disappointing, and difficult. And no ginger ale, either!
But both of these temporary human experiences are not it. See, they are not only impermanent, as in Buddha’s wisdom: that grasping the good and rejecting the bad is the cause of discontent, the don’t satisfy. Joel Goldsmith agrees and also points toward something else that is not dichotomous. So does A. H. Almaas. Most non-dual wisdom traditions and teachers all point to something freer, more pure and clear, beneficial and nourishing. And Yeshua, in his Christ of God/Christ of humanity stated and unforgettably demonstrated that even the most horrific torture can be Last Supper nourishing, and offer us a portal to something greater than the norm.
Being Still, presencing with and inquiring experientially into what is in the moment for me often involves what is pointed to with the word wresting.
he tried to wrest the broom from Angela's grasp. wrench, snatch, seize, grab, take by force, remove by force, force, prise, peel, pluck, tear, rip, heave, twist, tug, pull, jerk, dislodge; North American English pry; informal yank.
Yup, some days it’s all of that, including looking in dictionaries! It seems kinda violent, huh? Yet, that stubborn determination arises, seizes the Truth, plucks away at my experience, dislodges duality from the grasp of my mind/body. It cuts through the BS of me-ness.
Wresting first thing this morning, I wrote this to a friend of mine:
Word of the Day: Definition of: 'grievance' is: a real or imagined wrong or other cause for complaint or protest, especially unfair treatment: failure to redress genuine grievances. • an official statement of a complaint over something believed to be wrong or unfair: three pilots have filed grievances against the company. • a feeling of resentment over something believed to be wrong or unfair: he was nursing a grievance. ORIGIN Middle English (also in the sense ‘injury’): from Old French grevance, from grever ‘to burden’ (see grieve1).
Learn more at …
Home with our grief.
Interesting word to pop up today.
They build into resentments held onto because there’s a deeper grief they are intimately related to — our sorrow about being born into separation from our inherent bliss, rapture, ecstasy of total womb-like union of the not two: soul and true nature.
My complaints about self and other are perhaps wedded to the affect between the two that is aggrieved. . . and aggravated — which we know is the primary barrier to Presence.
As this penetrates in my system, my complaints about myself, (the main ‘other’ ‘somebody’ deals with here in my cabin) are linked to missing something lost that shouldn’t be lost. It’s not right, fair, just nor loving. It’s all in my ideas about “it isn’t how it should be.” How do I know that? What’s true about that?
I’m immediately taken back to what I spoke to in our conversation the other day: the 8 year old kid that saw and knew that mysteriously. That stunning view, that shining light that said, “it doesn’t have to be this way.” Was that an unrecognized spiritual experience? Some moment of grace that said something else is possible?
I sure didn’t know what to do with it as a kid. Had no one to speak with about it. It was just clear, implying something else was possible right there in the midst of awful. And kid me, being clueless as to what to do with that visceral clear information, was staggered. Yet it remained with me, unconsciously for years until it unearthed itself when it could be addressed.
Is it possible in this kid now with so much Presence consciously active within to open into the realm where the discord is actually empty? To actively essentially engage these Hungry Ghosts haunting the present from the distant past, seeking to live again, finally are put to rest in Peace? Can we grieve and compassionately forgive that in human experience: forgive the dreamed nightmare of the false state of separation actively othering?
Isn’t that the power needed to meet our experience we — as This Indwelling Presence — are wholly capable of responding to NowHere?
Are these things we call needs hungry ghosts?
Where is our nourished fulfillment in every moment?
“What OUGHT to be IS” Yeshua said. If I’m missing it, isn’t that on me & my hauntings? Me and my shadow?
Can my daily grievances be held in This Light until they dissipate as if they never were all the way way back to their inception point?
In stillness and silence it is already so. Love’s Word never uttered a grievance about Its Life. It’s only the Joy of Being that’s uttered Here.
Let all my grievances hear This song and come to sing along.
What have I to grieve in Love’s everlasting Life? The genuine grief of lost loves is Love expressing through the system that adores Its unique expressions. From Here, nothing comes and goes.
My little self nugget is being transformed, even by my dictionary app’s Word of the Day. ☀️🖤✨✌️🫶🤸🏻♀️🐬
Thank you dear true Friend. 🤗
To explore wresting nourishment from our experience as it is requires quite a bit of Grace. I find myself engaged in the process now because Being Still, presencing and inquiring are active in my system as a way of being. It’s mystic paradoxical cosmic humor to work so hard to release the somebody doing something to get somewhere they’re not only to find that self never existed. There’s nowhere to go, and no one to get there, and nothing to find that isn’t already Here. That self is the construction of grievance.
Another dear friend no longer on planet had an inquiry he lived within: what if there’s nothing wrong?
What happens to our hungry grievances then? How do we genuinely engage and wrest nourishment as we tell the truth that we experience being aggravatingly aggrieved in some way? There’s plenty in life to be aggrieved about, and we sure do have grievances aplenty. That’s the truth.
So the question we engage in (and we want really good questions to explore experientially) is what if there’s nothing wrong with what I’m experiencing? What if there’s a treasure to be found in the good/bad, right/wrong judgements involved with the pleasure/pain of normal experience?
After all these decades of inner exploration, wresting something pure and meaningful from my experiences, discovering that all experience has the potential of being nourishing while whatever may be toxic is naturally excreted. There is a discernment in conscious presence that alchemicalizes and brings about the integration and digestion of our experience as we allow it to meet and unfold, honestly. Barf!
It’s a tough JOB (Joy Of Being) accomplished BIG (By Infinite Grace) time (Now) as we unlearn how not to Be Who we are in Truth, experience by experience. It is the unfolding of living by grace inside the Majesty. It’s supping on and drinking in the fruits and nectars of the Tree of Life instead of the poisonous fruits of the tree of dualistic knowledge of good and evil and the sickening judgements thereof.
It seems like a thankless job, since it goes on inside us. There’s no one that knows the goings-on within us, so they can’t say thank you for the Self-luminous liberation/actualization work going on within us for the good of all of us. But we give thanks every day for it going on within us, and for the good it does all our relations whether they know it or not. And boundless gratitude is a nourishment that comes as the various forms of Love and harmony in our lives where the within is as the without, not two.
We live in a world at war. It’s undeniable. It enters our living rooms, is on our ubiquitous screens 24/7. We can’t make it good. It’s not. But something else is possible when we entertain that our experience of it can nourish something else entirely. How many stories have we heard of those raised up amid the melée? And that nourishment can feed the multitudes when we share it. There can be 12 baskets left over. Then life and our experience of it can be another way. Instead of stinking to high heaven, the sweet scents of blossoming conscious Love can blow on the winds of change we breathe out, and sound out.
It’s only natural.
I can't explain the comings and the goings -- you enter suddenly and I'm nowhere again -- inside the Majesty. ~Rumi
From a favorite song by Mirabai Ceiba, from their album Between the Shores of our Souls. Grateful to Marcus and Gely for this their life’s resounding work.
It’s a snowy, now called (at least in the north americas) black friday. It’s snowing here at Vallecito Lake, 10” are due today, finally getting the benediction and inconvenience 😉 of much needed moisture and winter sports can begin. It’s so quiet. In the editing phase of publishing this, I thought to find a link to reference hungry ghosts as they are understood in buddhism in case someone was interested. I came across this article in Elephant Journal. It is a person who also wrests nourishment from experience, though she doesn’t use that language. I do love to read! https://www.elephantjournal.com/2022/01/the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts-the-buddhist-notion-that-explains-our-strive-for-perfectionism-rasha-al-jabi/
There are lots of skillful means for feeding the hungry ghosts.
As we meet our hunger, our unmet needs, with an eye toward what will nourish and feed them into satiation, a way opens. We are the Way, the Truth and the abundant Life. Though those around us may provide some nourishment, while also providing those experiences that we wrestle with, what finally satiates and nourishes comes from Withinness. We become increasingly mature, independent and autonomous in the sense that we are less and less at the effect of the effect. It becomes increasingly apparent why it is necessary to make This LightHearted Being primary in our daily lives, first and foremost, above all ‘others’ — realizing deeply and profoundly, there are none such.
It’s only natural.
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