Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage
Chapter Nine
The Edge of Limitation
I had been leading the group in our opening meditation, the one that encouraged each of us to leave whatever we had brought with us of our day outside the door — to create a sacred space. After looking around the circle and seeing that everyone had returned from their “emptying” process, I announced the open frame. This is the part of our gatherings where I invite anyone who would like to do so to share something of a personal nature pertaining to their spiritual development, or to ask a question. Several people shared their challenges and progress. Then there was silence. Silence being a powerful generator, I allowed it to gel for a few minutes. Out of the stillness came the voice of one of those in the circle, directing a question to me.
What is the edge of limitation?
The depth of the query startled me. It wasn’t because I thought the person asking to be incapable of such. Quite the contrary. It was the koan-like nature of the question. My remembrance is that I gave an answer at the time that spoke to the limitlessness of the Core Self. But even as I spoke I acknowledged that I had eschewed real clarity in favor of offering something to the questioner. However, it instituted the particular inquiry that I continued to surface in our circle in different ways over time, and that I remain sitting with today. My sense is that it’s a quest for each of us to determine our own meeting point between limitation and freedom.
It’s also important to realize the tension created where — what seem like — polarities join. In actuality, we could liken this display of thought and no thought to works by the late Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. Rothko explored the relationship between complements by placing large squares or rectangles next to each other on canvas, usually those hues opposite on the traditional color wheel. Where the two came together there was a shimmering effect and they fuzzed out and became indistinct at the edges, each merging into the other. Therefore, one informed the other. Relative to the spiritual path, we can draw an analogy to the veil between two worlds that really begins to overlap as we progress in our awareness.
Meeting Points
There is an old Sufi story about a lion cub that became separated from the pride. As the lion cub was wandering lost and crying, some sheep noticed him and took him in as one of their own. They taught him to think, walk and talk as a sheep. A few years later, it happened that another lion came upon this same sheep herd. While considering a tasty meal, he noticed a younger lion in their midst. The younger lion was baaing like a sheep while grazing!
The older lion was appalled. He thundered in and dragged the younger one by his sprouting mane over to a pond, shoving his face over the water. “You’re not a sheep! You’re a lion like me — majestic and courageous! Not some crying thing examining the tail in front of him or the ground below his face!” With that, the older lion let loose an immense roar.
That revelation and its punctuation excited, yet confused the younger lion and he let out something between a baa and a yelp. But over time and with the guidance of the older lion, who helped him reach inside himself, the younger lion began to roar.
The split second we attach ourselves to the physical body during the birthing process into the material world, we feel the existential pain of separation. One of my close friends told me an astounding story about his nephew. The incident happened during a family gathering when his nephew turned two years old. The two of them were alone in the little boy’s bedroom playing with toys when my friend asked him, “What was it like when you were born?” The little guy pulled a chair over to the wall, just under the light switch. He proceeded to clamber up onto the support and flip the light off and on several times exclaiming in his baby voice, “Cold! Cold!” When asked the same question by my friend a few years later, the five-year-old didn’t remember.
Most of us spend our lives trying to reconnect with what we intuitively know is there. But we get befuddled just like the young lion, because the farther from our birth date we get, the less we remember our original face. Due to our forgetfulness and inexperience, we allow others to fit a face of their making over our own that anchors itself in the mind to hold it in place. The problem is that sheep, even though well intentioned, have been through a similar homogenization process themselves.
While it may be useful to experience “sheep-ness” to some degree to understand the parameters of that particular pasture, it’s the Core Self, inherent within us, who knows the geology of the entire terrain. If we’re able to incorporate that deeper knowledge back into the pastureland, or animal husbandry, now that’s something for roaring!
The challenge is our sheep selves are most likely by that time fixated on individual blades of grass, where we believe we gain our sustenance. Occasionally during the grazing process, we may have some notice that our growing paws seem out of place among tracks left by cloven hooves. But we quickly divert our attention so as to deny the fact. Sometimes it takes someone or something outside ourselves to drag us over to a mirror and say, “Look!” Even then, we may refuse to acknowledge who is really there. It would mean moving out of the pastureland. And we remember the angst separation brought before.
Where is the meeting point between complacency and possibility?
Some people need to be shown the mirror over and over before they then begin to move toward integration. A number of years ago, I worked with Nina, a very dear woman who had been badly hurt early in life. While she did the best she could to keep the pain at bay, it naturally kept resurfacing because what’s registered in our minds we continue to resurrect in various ways, whether in memory, or through circumstances and others with whom we engage.
Even though she didn’t acknowledge it herself, her sweet innocence was plainly visible to me. My awareness made it that much more difficult for me to hear her continually berate herself.
Finally I said to her, “See yourself through my eyes. I see your purity, who you are.” She looked at me through tears, rejecting my version of her. But over time, as I continued to offer the invitation, she progressed from disbelief to doubt, hope — and then acceptance. It was a true joy to witness Nina’s evolutionary journey, the one that carried her original face to its resting place of honor, now conveyed through her glowing smile.
Where is the meeting point between pain and healing?
I have a round face. It’s not nearly as round as it used to be, likely due to the number of years I’ve worn it. But when I was a child, it was decidedly round and its unsuspecting shape was the source of much of my suffering. My early school years are mostly a blur, but the times I do remember with crystal clarity were when my classmates used to taunt me, one boy even spitting in my face. “Pumpkin head! Pumpkin face!”
That was not the kind of notice I wanted at all, if any. I withdrew around other children for the most part, preferring to be around adults or alone with my own company, becoming painfully shy.
There was evidence of this transition in my childhood pictures. Early photos showed a bright-eyed, happily inquisitive child who sometimes appeared to be seeing something beyond the setting in which she posed. Once I entered school and stretching into the years ahead, the pictures shifted dramatically to that of a deadly serious girl, looking mistrustingly at the camera, probably because it would capture the features she thought had betrayed her. I considered myself lacking and unacceptable to others and myself in my supposed difference. There was also a part of me that knew better, the one who embraced her parents’ love and filial pride.
In my twenties, I even worked part-time for a while as a runway model and did a local television commercial or two in my unconscious attempt to show myself that my physical presence was favorable. That endeavor, of course, proved to be an oxymoron, the industry itself being fraught with mixed messages that can instill even further doubt. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for my deeper sensibilities to be appalled at the plastic and sometimes vicious nature inherent in that field. I left the exploration and took my lack of confidence with me unappeased.
In reality, what child hasn’t undergone teasing and bullying to some extent? For some reason I can’t determine, I internalized the hurtful messages at an extreme level. Even as an adult, when someone would innocently comment on the shape of my face, I would flinch. It’s only been in the last several years that this former shame transformed itself. And it was through a series of synchronous events placed closely in time that I came to relate to a deeper aspect of myself coming to me through my heritage. That reinterpretation freed me.
It started one spring when I attended hypnotherapy training. During an experiential portion, I was paired with an older Navajo man. It was my turn to guide him in a trance process. I have no recollection of the nature of the work or the words I uttered, but I vividly recall his response. Upon returning to the present moment, he looked at me and cried ecstatically, “How did you know to lead me to the fire?”
Whatever happened during his reverie seemed to have profound meaning to him, but it was more likely his interpretation of the language I used than any directed command on my part. However, over the next day or so, I noticed him periodically watching me from a distance. Finally, he approached me.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” There was something incredibly humble in this man’s demeanor that endeared him to me. After I gave him permission, he continued, “Do you have Indian blood?”
I affirmed his question, but was astounded that he could see beyond my blue eyes and very light complexion and hair. “How did you know?” I was curious how he could detect, the full-blooded portion down my mother’s line being at least four generations removed from me. I hadn’t thought much about that part of my lineage since she had told me when I was eleven years old.
He gave me a quiet smile and said, “It’s the way you speak and the way you move.” Somehow, his ability to see and acknowledge me in that way, beyond the surface presentation, was very important to me. It was as though he had, in turn, led me toward a kind of purification fire. It seemed to leverage an opening of some sort inside me, even more so than I conceded at the time.
Less than two months later, I was in Aspen for a couple of weeks. When I first arrived I had noticed an announcement in the newspaper for a showing of Edward Curtis’ photography in a local gallery. It caught my attention at the time because I was fascinated with black and white photography. But I didn’t know where the gallery was and made no effort to find out.
About a week later, I had made an appointment to get my hair trimmed at a salon in the village and right afterward was to proceed to a cranial sacral session. Because I didn’t know where the stylist was located, I set out well before my appointment. Strangely enough, it turned out that the gallery displaying Curtis’ works was right next door to the salon. I also had a good length of time to spare before my haircut. So, I entered. The entire upstairs of the gallery was devoted to the exhibit and I was the only one there.
In the silence and through Curtis’ genius, I was drawn into his photographs. I lingered in front of each one examining them in detail, as though they all had some connection, something to say, to me. Indeed, it seemed as though something was building as I moved from one to the other, witnessing the quiet dignity and sometime stark beauty in the images of the Indian peoples from long ago that he captured on paper. Then, I noticed the very round shapes of many of their brown faces, just like my own — and I stood stock-still. Suddenly a voice came from my right, materializing out of thin air, and said firmly, “It’s time to remember our heritage.” I didn’t recognize the voice, but its message generated a kind of internal solidity that hadn’t been there before.
Glancing at my watch, I realized I was late for my haircut and reluctantly turned to leave. Even though keeping such a mundane appointment seemed ludicrous to me at the time, given the deepening I had just undergone, I went. From there I had just enough time to make my cranial sacral session. I was to find that the experience wasn’t yet completed.
I have told some of what was to follow in my previous book Calling Our Spirits Home. For perhaps a couple of years, I’d had intense pressure at the base of my skull when meditating, like a plug in a dike wanting to blow. What I now know is that I’d had a blockage there that had kept my Third Eye from opening.
I’d made the acquaintance of Aspen herbalist Todd Welden the previous year. A truly gifted practitioner, he also did cranial sacral and somatic release work. I’d had a sense that he was the one to help me with the pressure. Indeed, he’d barely touched the back of my head one time and asked me if I’d incurred an injury, perhaps even during birth. I hadn’t, confirming that fact with my mother, or during any other time to my recollection. But emotional injury can certainly be lodged in the subtle energy field or the physical body. I’d also had an intuitive understanding for a long time that the spot where pressure built at the back of my head was a place that certain knowledge entered. I thought that the entry point had been blocked at my birth for some obscure reason.
Todd had put me on the table and moved my physical body in certain ways. Then, he stationed himself behind me and barely tapped the back of my skull. When he did so, I began to have multiple, clear images of ancient Native faces moving swiftly across the movie screen of my mind’s eye. Then, gut-wrenching despair started to surface, even though I did everything I could to hold back. I normally subdued such intense feelings. But his kind voice assured me it was perfect to let it go. And the floodgates opened. I had never felt such acute emotional pain. I released it with wracking sobs that came from some place beyond any experience I could have imagined. After a time my grief subsided, and with it something flew away. The space previously blocked was wide open.
The anguish had been such that I questioned if it was mine alone. We often carry with us what was sent down the generational line, even though unintentionally. Perhaps it was that the healing I’d experienced was shared with all of my ancestors, no matter their cultural origins. I hoped so. Whatever the case, it’s my belief that my Native forbearers have been making their presences known to me ever since. Even now after all this time, I regularly smell tobacco burning, as though during ceremony. Usually, it happens during my meditations. But sometimes I smell the rich scent during walks in the forest. There are also times when it wafts through during the normal course of my day. I feel my roots. They comfort me. And I find strength there.
Where is the meeting point between forgetting and remembering?
The Holy Grail
For most of our lives we search for those things outside ourselves to inform who we are. A natural tendency toward doing so exists because we first knew of ourselves through others and the surrounding environment. We began to develop an identity as children, through external messages that we ingested. But that’s about the development of the personality and also learning accepted methods for navigating in a material world.
The acknowledgement of our Core Self is another matter, and one to overlay the everyday self. If we allow ourselves to know the boundless aspect that carries us, we will entrain our lives with all eternity.
We get off track on the journey when we believe that the Divine lives outside us. How could we not be permeated by All That Is? It’s contradictory to think otherwise. Indeed, it may even be considered blasphemous, although there’s no need for anyone to be struck down, just opened. We could make the decision to hold Divinity outside ourselves, leaning out farther and farther for the golden ring that never quite comes within reach. But we could make the choice to allow that Presence to emanate from our innermost dwelling place to the outermost point of our everyday lives.
We regain this hidden knowledge through an appointment we make — the one with intent. It’s that lightning strike, invoked through the crown of the head, which pierces the bowl of the pineal gland. Then the charge travels down the glandular channel of the upper chakras, the energy centers, to cleave the covering of the foundational place of the heart. Thus discovered, the heart first smolders. But presently its enraptured beating ignites a blaze that will infuse our lives.
We are broken open. There was never any informing to be done. The mold was made in Infinity and the substance that would fill it was poured into the interior cavity of our being before we were even born. What we thought lost and stolen was not just the radical magic of the pineal cup, but also the knowledge of its secret support and resting place in the heart. And we find that the Holy Grail was within all along. The search is now over. The integration can begin.
Where is the meeting point between parallel worlds and infused existence?
Distinctions
We all have our own spiritual research to undertake. It may be about the personality and its residential landscape, but the distinctions made will be about the internal Infinite. In our exploration, we can look to the common threads that run through our lives and point toward our particular affinity for speculative learning.
Where is the meeting point between self-doubt and humility?
Where is the meeting point between denial and recognition?
Where is the meeting point between pity and compassion?
Where is the meeting point between control and surrender?
Where is the meeting point between loneliness and solitude?
Where is the meeting point between withholding and intimacy?
Where is the meeting point between aversion and acceptance?
Where is the meeting point between fear and distinction?
The outcome of this scrutiny will be the finely honed attunement of the tensions we hold. Perhaps we will allow the overlay to occur that will dissolve any separation. The edges will cease to exist. The energy of the threshold will carry itself. We will know That which lies beyond the doorway to be ours.
All events described in this book are true. Some of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
I will publish chapters every few days until complete. Find links in the Table of Contents below.
Table of Contents
Chapter Three: The Inner Point
Chapter Four: Intentful Existence
Chapter Five: Connecting With the Cosmos
Chapter Seven: The Space of No Need
Chapter Eight: Conflicts on the Path
Chapter Nine: The Edge of Limitation
Chapter Ten: Asking the Answer
Chapter Eleven: Living With Contrast
Chapter Thirteen: Unconditional Being
Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage
Copyright 2004 by Carla Woody. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be directed to: Kenosis Press, P.O. Box 10441, Prescott, AZ 86304, [email protected].
