Hi Friend,
I wanted to take this time to thank you for reading my writing. Some of you have been reading along for over a year (my first letter was sent April 9, 2018!), and others have joined the party more recently.
Regardless of how long you've been subscribed or how many letters you've read, I am immensely grateful for each one of you. Each week when I send these out, I paste your email address individually into the BCC line and think to myself:
The divine light in me sees and honors the divine light in {your name}.
And take a meditative inhale and exhale. If I know you, I visualize you in that moment. If I don't, I hold your email address in my heart.
I understand a listserv would be more efficient; however, I am past the point of believing efficiency is the aim of life.
So with a heart full of gratitude, I wanted to inform you that I'm taking a break from writing these for the foreseeable future.
One reason for this is other personal pursuits. I am going to Europe from May 9 - May 26 (first to a meditation retreat in Southern France, then to a sister trip in Paris and London). Also, there is another creative project I want to put my whole heart into for a while. I will be sure to let this group know when anything manifests on that front! :)
Another reason I'm choosing to take a break is more internal. I feel I am on the precipice of change right now. The precipice of an expansion of my awareness. It's difficult to describe the feeling—as it's a feeling of the heart, not a mental thought.
Perhaps, I stand on the precipice of knocking down some inner barriers within me. Although it's difficult to narrow down his immensely moving body of work, if there is one guiding Rumi quote for me, I think it is this:
”Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
I think in my first wave of spiritual development, I found some barriers. I have the feeling I am about to find more. Perhaps deeper and darker than the ones I initially found, but also more freeing to finally identify.
Many of these letters have been about, more or less, my knocking down barriers and, thus, seeing life in a new way. I was so excited by my new perceptions that I felt compelled to share, with the hope that maybe my words could spark something within someone else, could help them see things differently.
Marcel Proust says:
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
And Wayne Dyer says:
"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
And Henry David Thoreau says:
"The question is not what you look at, but what you see."
And Anaïs Nin says:
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
Many of my letters were inspired by me seeing things anew. Polishing my own lens. And now, I feel called to go within, and do more polishing and less public sharing. See if I can see everything anew—again.
I believe I can.
Have you ever known an addict? One thing about addicts is there sometimes seems to be no such thing as rock bottom. Rock bottom always has a basement. I love addicts, for many reasons, but one is I believe they are staunchly on the vertical path (they just happen to be traveling down instead of up).
They often don't agree with the rules of life as set by society, so they drop out of the game. So many people blindly devote their entire lives to a game they don't even know they're playing. Often, addicts have a sense of clarity and an ability to call the bullshit on mainstream society.
I am not trying to glamorize addiction—it can clearly be horrifically brutal in myriad ways to those who are addicted (to anything) and to those who love addicts.
I am just pointing out that most addicts reject societal norms. They don't buy in to "the system." And most people dedicated to a spiritual path must, by definition, do those things as well. You must reject how the masses view things in order to view things differently.
And just as there is truly no "rock bottom" when it comes to addiction [or, as I've heard it said, you only hit rock bottom when you stop digging], there is also no "top level" to seeing things more clearly. There is no "point of arrival." There are infinite levels of clarity. There are infinite levels of spiritual ascension.
The horizontal path is finite. The horizontal path is constrained by the illusion of time, of birth and death. The vertical path is eternal.
Consider the symbol of the cross: A short horizontal line across, a longer vertical line pointing up. Where did Jesus go before he ascended into Heaven? As the Apostles' Creed reminds us: he descended into hell.
The truth is we are each somewhere on our own vertical paths—and whether you find yourself immersed in your own personal hell or seeing things through a newly polished, more peaceful lens, know that, even if it feels like you can't change a thing about your current life situation, you can always look inside and change your perception. You can always change the way you see things.
So that's what I plan to do next. Look inside more deeply. And then more deeply than that.
If this inner looking results in new perceptions I feel moved to share, I will. But it's impossible to predict when those new perceptions will emerge—when you are on the edge of anything, you must step into the unknown and embrace the mystery.
I will close this letter how I've taken to closing my yoga classes. Imagine me saying this to you seated cross legged with my eyes closes and my palms pressed together at my heart:
May you be safe.
May you be healthy.
May you be happy.
May you live with ease.
The divine light in me sees and honors the divine light in you.
Namaste.
with eternal Love and with infinite Light,
Joyce