The Importance of What Is Not

The Importance of What is Not

In any process of learning, growth or change, it’s terribly easy to get caught up in the illusion that you’re becoming “more”.

We send ourselves to school to get titles and degrees – to acquire knowledge and develop the intellect.  We comb the far corners of the world to explore, see or experience more.  We strive in our jobs and careers in order to become richer, promoted faster, or accredited and known in the process.  We save and scheme and plan for a bigger house or more luxurious car, to live in a better neighborhood, or to send our kids to superior schools.  Elite athletes train to break records, celebrities vie for more time in the spotlight and press than their peers, and politicians must outdo their opponents in fund-raising and face time to even get in the game.

Such is the metaphor for success in the modern world: climb, rise, move up, escalate, soar, transcend.  Most days it feels like if you’re not advancing, you might as well not even get out of bed.

This is a serious pitfall for any seeker, because

When You Hate the Human Experience

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“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Today, I hate the human experience.  Today I curse the day I decided to take form in this body, live this life.  Why? What possessed me to come and do this now? Again?

I want to disappear. Vaporize into pure spirit. Go back to the before.  I want to float out of my body and drift weightlessly, boundlessly free of the emotions that surge through it.

I desperately want to unite with the all-encompassing bliss I was lucky enough, once – just once – to feel after a weekend spiritual retreat.  The warming, flooding perfect joy that shuts out all else; that is pure love, or God, or whatever you choose to call it.  I want THAT again. Now.  But it eludes me.

Today after my husband finds fault with me yet again after I feel I’ve tried so hard to change I feel like giving up.  Today after my business isn’t where I want it to be after six years I feel like throwing in the towel.  Today after yelling