Being God
“Contemporary spirituality” … what an interesting concept … what is it that we call “spirituality”, exactly? Is it subject to fashion? Or progress? Does God change with the times?
Spirituality, defined as being present as what we truly are, appears to me to be beyond times, societies, theories, schools, ideas and concepts. We are – and we make up stories. And sometimes making up stories about what we truly are, and then studying those stories, is called spirituality.
It always begins with an experience – let it end there.
How did I learn what I know? What teachers did I work with? What books have I read? What workshops have I attended?
I can tell you all this, I can tell you the stories of my life but they will give you nothing at all.
How did I learn what I know…
I learned by choosing to look, by choosing to question, by choosing to consider. I learned by listening to others and then looking within myself for my response to their words, for my opinion, for my way of seeing what they see.
I learned by looking inside to see my way of being me. [click to continue…] 
Stories, series of stories told by people who know how to live, who know the rules, who follow the rules.
I read about the rules as I stretch my arm …
“No, this is not how you stretch your arm!”, says the rule “this is wrong, you have to do it like that!”…
I move, flex my fingers … “No, not like this! This is the rule for how you flex your fingers, like this…”
I turn … “No, this is wrong, this is the wrong way to turn, the sinful way, it will have you damned, it is how you fall! Here, this is how you turn, this is how you stretch, this is how you roll, this is how you move, this is how you live, this is how you think!”
I move and stop … arrested, corrected, fixed, righted.
My body grows tense, rigid … I move just a little … “wrong!” … I freeze …. I try again, slowly, maybe this way … “no! wrong!” snaps the rule.
I stop. Shocked, terrified, blank. [click to continue…] 
I woke up too early. There were noises around me, water running into the bathtub, birds singing their morning songs, dogs joining in the chorus with spirited barking.
I did not open my eyes, I did not want to enter the day just yet.
In the hazy, undefined space I felt love … it didn’t feel good … I was not quite myself there, not all the way real … there was unconsciousness there, trauma …
Childhood trauma, that’s what it was.
I looked there, the unconscious place opened and drifted away and I was present, present in relationship as what I am, in relationship with what he is… [click to continue…]
Christopher sits in front of me. He is angry, angry at how I’ve been, at how I talked, at how I behaved. He talks and talks and talks. An endless litany of words that push me, poke me, assault me.
My mouth pressed together into a thin, angry line, my body rigid. I stare at him, unblinking, hardening with his every word. I am not angry, I am hardening my body into an armor.
He doesn’t talk now and I stare at him. I will have to say something soon, he waits for me to say something. But I can’t. I am so rigid, hidden so far behind my defenses now that all I can think to say are sarcastic, angry things. Words that will push him away, that will stop his words, that will let me escape.
I don’t want to say those words, I see what they are, I see what they are for, I see that they are not real. I can’t say anything that is real. [click to continue…]
