The new website is beginning to take shape. The re-designing is nearing its completion process. As a part of that process, I am supposed to send to the developer all the content regarding Paul. We are introducing a new section in the website, called “Honoring Paul”.
This segment will hold Paul’s nuggets of wisdom, his writings, links to his book, “The River of Life” and Church of the Wheel Recordings (meditations conducted every week as a part of Church of the wheel gatherings in 2020).
It has taken me forever to compile this data for the website. There has been a weird underlying fear/resistance or something else that I cant put my finger on. I have delayed this work for more than a month now.
As I finally push myself to look into this and begin compiling this, a gush of memories comes flooding by.
Together, me and Paul were so anchored. Someone told me that I was a very grounding factor for Paul. He could do what he did because I was his anchor.
In hindsight, the opposite is also true. I could do what I did, aspired, aimed for and felt so confident about was because he was there. Simply there. Although, while he was alive, I had this grudge that he always wanted to do what ‘he’ desired/decided and not what ‘we decided.
But even in that dominance, I knew what to stand for and fight for. It helped me know what was needed – personally or for shamanic vision. His force, dominion and stubbornness gave me a sort of a positive push to take charge of my life, my passions and gave me clarity on who I was and what I wanted.
On the surface it felt like a power struggle or an ego battle between two partners but deeply and subliminally, his projections and my projections, his baggage and my baggage kind of made it very clear who we were as people, what each one of us desired from the heart, wanted and needed to have happen.
Inspite of our challenges, I was so confident about myself. Passionate about my purpose and ferocious and wild. I did not care about the world and what they thought about me. For that matter, I did not even get deterred by Paul’s opposition of my point of view.
More often than not, he would always come back and say, “Darling, don’t let it get to your head, but you are always right.”
We mirrored each other’s baggage (we were twin flames after all) and we complimented each others’ strengths.
We both were an anchor for each other. The only friend we perhaps had and ofcourse the only family. We were family with and for each other. Both of our biological families were sort of absent and in many ways dysfunctional.
I for the longest time have taken pride in the fact that I have been the black sheep of my family and that all the family dysfunction that exists – ends with me. To process the pain of the lineage and clean the past has been THE most arduous task of my life.
The soul’s purpose to teach Shamanism and other subjects, and its evolutionary journey in this life time has been my biggest anchor in this life time until now.
It has also served as an anchor for keeping my relationship with Paul afloat because even in those challenges that I faced with him, I could see through a different lens. I could feel that my higher self was always present. The birds eye view of the conflicts and the relationship dramas that we created was always present. Our love and our spiritual work together was the anchor that kept me rooted and confident.
As I compile the data regarding Paul, all of this comes flooding back.
People feel that my grief regarding Paul is not resolved yet. While that may be true, because grief has no timeline and it is an ongoing process, I find myself grieving for different reasons now. I find myself lost not just for his loss but apparently for the loss of self too.
I don’t know who I am any more. I feel like I have no anchor.
My anchor in my own self feels penduluming.
Some find an anchor in their children. Their well being keeps them going. Some find an anchor in their work – career, job, business, making money. That keeps them driven. Some find an anchor in loved ones left behind – parents, children, siblings, etc. Their love and support and supporting them, gives them a footing to keep moving along.
Some find anchor in charity. Some find anchor in their pets. Some find anchor in their travels. For some, like me, often the spiritual journey becomes an anchor. Purpose and contribution drives us. The desire to do something better for society, for fellow human beings, keeps the flame burning on and keeps one anchored.
After Paul passed away, the only words that I found telling myself were “I am only alive for my purpose,” I want to finish my purpose.
For three years, my spiritual journey of UNBECOMING and my passion to teach what I so strongly believe in, kept me afloat. It anchored me. It helped me make peace with my human experience and existence. I started viewing human life with eyes of love, desire and compassion. I wanted to thrive and not just live. My despair was eating me away from inside but it is the spiritual quest, passion to teach and write, kept me anchored and yet moving.
More often that not, our anchor becomes our crutch and we become attached to it and thereby entangled in it. It becomes a part of our unhealthy ego state. I was guided to break away from my attachment to my purpose and an aching desire to contribute to society.
This guidance propelled me to birth my year long mentorship program, “Soul Re-memberance”. It was a sincere endeavour to explore who we are at the core if we are not who we believe we are.
This birthing was the most intense journey. And even though the mentorship program is over, it still continues to seed, sprout and grow in all of us who were a part of this experience.
Interestingly, this exploration, seeking, introspection, unfolding no longer anchors me.
I think of the kind of work me and Paul birthed while we were together. Even through opposition for and of each other, we blossomed. Our work bloomed. Whenever me and Paul reflected back, it would seem we have done a LOT MORE compared to the time we have been together.
Everything just flowed through and gushed through like the River. Everything was abundant. I struggle miserably, since the past several months to find that anchor again. Someone said that joy should be my anchor now. It felt like a wonderful thought.
I never knew what brings me joy. When I go to nature, I am thrilled. I am ecstatic. I am happy. I am content. I feel joy. And it makes me feel that perhaps Nature brings me joy and nature is my anchor.
I come back to the mundane and I feel the aching pain again. I feel the void and emptiness all over again. The misery starts engulfing me again.
Work, purpose, spirituality no longer anchor me.
I feel I am miserably failing to find the anchor in my own BEing. OR rather in JUST BEing. I am miserably failing at finding stillness and joy in each moment.
Sadness has made a permanent home and joy feels fleeting. For the first few years after Paul passed away, I struggled with harnessing a Desire within me. What should I live for? I felt absolutely desire empty. Healthy desire is the seed to evolution, expansion, creative expression and most importantly, ‘something to look forward to, something to live for.’
We are taught to abandon desire in the name of spiritual liberation. But this is just one facet of desire – desires that keep us chained in this human experience, life time after lifetime. But there are certain other aspects of desire that often the masculine spiritual way of being sort of over looks or doesn’t acknowledge / talk about.
Desire is holy. It is the seeding ground for birthing something. It is the ground for being fertile and alive, if we learn to harness its energy in an appropriate way. It is needed for creation. This is the reason, the Gods ‘desired’ the union of Shiva and Parvati. The kinetic force of Shakti was needed to help Shiva – the shav to come alive and ‘ participate’. Desire is pertinent to the forces of CREATION.
I have known misery for the first 50 years of my life. And after Paul passed, it took a lot of work to seed the desire to find pleasure in this human experience. The work first began with understanding my angst towards being human, being amidst the human field and seeing the good in it. The self righteous ego had to be pacified greatly. My soul had anger being born in this human field and repeating the life and death experience again and again.
But it was born nonetheless and there was an intrinsic hurry in what it did. All my life, I have not just been a fast speaker, a fast eater but there has been an inherent hurry in everything that I do. Even during my corporate jobs, I found myself finishing all tasks at hand, pretty cleverly and quite fast. I would wonder how are others so slow. I would wonder how are others so busy all the time ( I still wonder about this). I would always have ample free time at hand. I would always finish my work ‘fast’. I breathe fast. Everything is FAST.
This subconscious pattern to finish everything ‘quickly’ had also become pretty evident in my spiritual journey. There was a haste and a hustle in ‘finishing’ everything, to get everything over and done with. To clean the SLATE FAST.
Some of you who know me, often label me as being hyper. But, behind this state of being hyper was a deep seated subconscious pattern of “just finishing everything I am here for FAST” so that I can go back and return home. This pattern has only come to my awareness after Paul passed. The spiritual initiations kind of sped up and became more intense than ever. When I screamed for Divine Grace, I was reminded about my own desire to “finish” everything “fast”. I had to pray to ‘slow it down’.
It also took work to accept the fact that our human experience is not just full of struggles, challenges, trauma or misery but also a field for the Spirit to experience its divinity in its full grandeur and the soul besides having a purpose is also here to enjoy the human experience, fully.
We live inside the dream of a creator God and hence everything is but a dream, a play, an illusion. We often refer to this experience as “Maya”. To detach from life as an illusion vis a vis being in full acceptance of this experience and enjoying it without attaching or entangling in it is a journey we all are perhaps here to master.
So, accepting my human birth and desiring to experience its fullness by making peace with it and not rejecting it was the first desire. It took work to seed this in me,
Perhaps this seed can be my anchor. And the acceptance that the journey from ground zero until now has not been a failure. But a breeding ground for what might be ready to sprout now.
The mind has yet to find its stillness. The Being has to learn to just BE. Statements like “I don’t know who I am anymore” or what am I to do next often loop in the mind.
Spiritual seekers often get attached to their seeking. Dropping the quest and being present fully in any given moment of pain or joy and being in full surrender and acceptance of what IS, requires constant nudges to the programmed ego mind.
We perhaps incarnated on earth to experience life in the earthly dimension. In this process we somehow created a mess instead of just Being and experiencing life. In undoing this mess and in the process of unbecoming, we feel more pain and not less.
I am beginning to decide that pain cannot be my anchor even if it might have unconsciously become one in the past, quite unknowingly. As I struggle to find my new anchor, I remind myself to breathe. And this reminder to breathe becomes my anchor in that given moment.
Being in the present moment takes courage and is the most difficult aspect. The moment becomes present to all the pain we carry inside. But alongside the pain, while being in the present moment, is also the act of witnessing it without attachment.
There is “PRESENCE”. Can this be my new anchor, going forward? I don’t know.
I am present to my tears as I write this. I pause and just Breathe.
And the journey continues…
Header Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh