NOTE: I wrote this weeks, maybe months ago, got it ready to go and then left it. Because it’s (too) long, I recorded it so it’s like a baby podcast or some such, without the professional production qualities.🙌
So the actual post, the long one, for all my kindred “I’d rather read it” folks:
In my spiritual evolution over the last 45 years, I’ve happily abandoned concepts of sin and punishment, but also that gentler version offered by the eastern religions, karma.
At first, karma felt like a refuge. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism and its cohorts does at least give us a bit of hope. Maybe after ten thousand lifetimes slogging around the wheel, trying to get good enough to achieve nirvana ~ and no doubt experiencing life as a bug or a rock at some point because of how messed up humans can be ~ we’re finally set free.
Over time, though, that began to feel like sin and punishment lite. Just another admonition to be good or else.
I’ve finally come to see this human life as more like an art studio. I’ve heard so many analogies over the years and they all work to a degree: it’s a play; it’s improv theater; and of course “it’s a class.”
That last one raises my hackles. I rebel against even the idea of it being a class because it feels so restrictive and, worse, it implies that we’re missing something and have to learn it ASAP. (“Or else” again.)
Lessons. Pass/fail. Ugh.
Art studio, though. That’s pure creative space. Find your thing, your inspiration, and go for it. No projects, no goals, or direction, just freewheeling play.
Once I came to experience Who We Really Are, it didn’t make sense to say that I believe in an all-encompassing energy from which everything arises, and yet bits and pieces of that One Of Us are lacking something and need to be taught a lesson. How?
Lessons again. Ugh.
It really carries the feeling that we messed up in another life and need to receive our comeuppance. “For shame! You blew it. Now take your medicine.” And the medicine is always bitter and hard and it chokes us going down.
Punishment. Painful consequence.
In truth, what lesson am I learning if in my ultimate state of being ~ majestic, divine, purest Love as the One Of Us ~ I am ALL things?
I am bliss and perfection. Pure Love. We all are.
Even the ancients understood this. As Rumi said eons ago, “I am the entire ocean in a single drop.” Other mystics speak that truth in myriad ways. The tiniest fragment contains the whole. “Lessons” implies a failing, something lacking, and I don’t buy it.
But why quibble, really? Call it a lesson, call it a classroom, the whole point is just about having a new experience, and I am entirely on board with the idea that in my pre-birth state, I was eager for that. But all that I really want to experience, to “learn” about, is what it is like to live it up in this freewheeling, creative human art studio space as me (and you as you, and on and on).
In the All-That-Is-ness that is Who We Really Are, before Audrey brought me into this world, I decided on a theme for my art studio adventure. I came up with the story of Lynette, with all of her quirks and oddities, with her varied traits and qualities, little bits and pieces of amazing and not so much.
Her basic wiring, I decided, would be something different from what I had experienced before. And here it is, this Lynette story, and it’s still unfolding. It’s taken a lot of turns, it’s been a lot of fun, with many years of tears and fears, an abundance of love and friendship, some really unexpected detours, and some really, really hard things.
Like all of us.
My dead mother, hideously abused, seriously mentally ill later in life, coming through the medium SandySoulsister.com, said, “Even in the hard times, my soul was rejoicing.”
There are our human stories, temporary and fleeting, and then there are the stories of our souls, and our souls know they are eternal and can never be harmed no matter how hard the hard times. That reading with Sandy was an epiphany, one of those 180-degree rearrangements of what I knew to be true changing in the course of an hour. And my mother’s words ever since have become my mantra.
My soul, knowing what it’s about, Who It Is in big picture, looks at each experience, each ingredient, painful and otherwise, as simply being “of interest.” What will happen next? What’s this version of the Great One Of Us, this Lynette creation, what’s she going to do with this? Pass the popcorn, it might get wild!
So there’s that. And then my other rebellion against the concept of karma in particular, has to do with the idea of new and old souls. Admittedly, karma is a step up from what I learned with the Lutherans, because that promises a fiery and eternal hell. We were born miserable sinners and there are no do-overs in Christianity. It’s one and done. Pass/fail. (And woe betide those who never even hear of the risen Christ, for they, too, are doomed.)
But my rebellion is against the idea that “new souls” ~ which truly makes no sense in the One of us, but is part of this human rule set for the experience here ~ NEW souls would get the hard path because they don’t know anything, while the evolved many lifetime souls would get the easy path because they’ve earned it through good deeds.
I say nope to that.
If my soul doesn’t judge any of it, my soul would be bored to tears with a primrose path of a life. Long-experienced souls want to jump in full force, take on ALL of the challenges and test themselves.
My particular soul feels like a crusty old thing. It has a bad limp, a bunch of poorly healed broken bones. It wears an eye patch and it’s covered in scars. It’s a badass that can do really hard things. And just as you would never send a toddler into a knife fight, you wouldn’t send a tender, new baby soul into the kind of life that the more experienced crusty ones have come to relish for the trials.
It’s the battle-scarred veteran who chooses the hard road (See “Wolf’s Message,” “The Afterlife of Billy Fingers,” and so many others.) And even so, to the experiencer ~ to Lynette ~ it isn’t going to seem like fun as it’s unfolding.
But that crazy soul? It’s having a blast. “Even in the hard times my soul was rejoicing.” I’m sure that we plan some things pre-birth. Not all of it. Maybe we just map out potentials rather than a dedicated script, but also some special events. (And by “special events” I mean those things that my soul will relish while my human is all bug-eyed and screeching.)
And then we gather our materials and slip into the studio to see what happens when it comes together ~ and to see what we can add to and make of the special events.
I was 15 years old when one of the loveliest human beings I’ve ever encountered showed me how to make beautiful things out of the unexpected. Maxine Warren, an extraordinary high school art teacher, took me under her wing when I was objectively a mess. She was endlessly encouraging and kind, and so much a booster of my art. At the time, early 70s, art was pretty freewheeling, as was Maxine.
She would take me aside for little chats as the other kids were sketching or gossiping, and she would offer up possibilities. “Lynette! I want you to think of using found objects in your work. I think it will inspire you to make great beauty and meaning of even unwanted and discarded objects.”
I thought the term was so funny. Like you’re just walking down the street and trip over something that suddenly shouts I AM ART!
I think I was her “found object.”
And I still very much love the idea of great beauty being found in or made of discarded things. What is trashed, forgotten, or unwanted turned beautiful.
As with most of us, I’ve encountered a lot of “found objects” on my path through this life. Beginning in September of 1999, my husband’s sudden illness was a found object, something we stumbled over out of the blue on what had been to that point a perfect storybook life together. After came 12 years of illness, unrelenting siege-like stress, and two more years of trying to regain my sanity after his very complicated death.
That happened. I got better. I was able to find meaning in the rear view mirror, coming to terms with such grief, eventually coming to know that he was not gone, that he still existed though not in the physical of this human realm. My broken heart healed. I came into balance again, only better, because now I knew things.
A new reality came into being years after the deeply unwanted found objects of illness, death, PTSD, and grief.
What I did *not* know was that there could be an actual physical cost to the siege years. For him, obviously, but also for me. That’s been the big surprise of late, the current found objects on my peaceful path of living a life I love. It’s as if those 14 years had been wadded up and stuffed back on some lower shelf in the art studio only to tumble out and trip me up out of the blue.
And what did I trip over? Two diagnoses. Two autoimmune disorders. TWO. What?? How could this happen? I am connected. I am deeply spiritual. I’ve done the work, for decades. I know who I am!!!
When I look up what that opinionated heifer Louise Hay says about autoimmune disorders (she of the think-right-and-be-healed school of thought), I can see how that and similar works have shaped my perception of the why of illness ~ and that perception was wrong.
I didn’t create the stress hormones that are installed in our bodies for a reason. I didn’t manufacture the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis or the unavoidable in-built release of cortisol and all of what happens when we are faced with danger.
And now they’re here, these two found objects, unavoidable arrivals that I, by design and the human rule set, do not recall agreeing to, and that do not feel much like creative play. It’s very strange to feel absolutely amazing, very, very well, full of energy and happiness and yet here they are.
Found them. Don’t want them. And yet it’s life, right?
So what to do with this, given what the evidence shows about who we really are, and what we’re really doing here? I know a lot about daily challenges, as well as trauma and healing and grief and recovery, and how that can impact the body. I do know a lot about how to reduce the toll that the pains and challenges of living have on quality of life.
But I didn’t know that inescapable stress ~ siege-type stress ~ can have a lasting impact on the body that isn’t changed by my happiness or my repertoire of wellness and healing practices. The damage was done in those 14 years, when I didn’t have an extra jot of energy, barely even a free moment for the basics of life, let alone self care.
It’s as if I drove my low mileage, well maintained, beautiful car up and then down a mountain, and along the way we encountered washouts, ravines, boulders, viciously sharp rocks that peppered and punctured the underside of the car no matter how slowly or carefully I drove. Yes, we made it up that mountain and down again, started to breathe, got better. But the car was unavoidably damaged, and some of that damage was hidden well enough it didn’t even begin to reveal itself until years later.
I can’t undo the drive. I can’t take back the 14 years, nor would I, because it was Mike.
But in looking at it, in coming to see that I chose the life I did because of what he and I had together, another found object appeared, and this one, too, was a surprise, but in a beautiful way. I took another look and I can see that I really, really like that woman, the one who kept going through all of that. I love her, honestly, the one who survived those 14 years of hell. I admire her strength, her commitment, her refusal to quit. All of it. All of her.
And she’s still here. On one hand, living her best life. Happy, joyous, and free. And on the other, dealing with found objects of the much-unwanted kind. We really can be two things at once. This AND that. The older I get the more I see that evidenced in just about every aspect of life.
I am crazy healthy,* happy, AND completely fearless. I have a couple of things happening that could change the healthy / happy of that AND that’s not happening today.
One of the greatest ongoing struggles of my life has been to learn to extend to myself the same compassion, tenderness, and kindness that I have no problem extending to others. Maybe at this point, that’s what’s unfolding here in the studio: an exercise in unconditional love. For myself.
Sometimes I think that, in the end, the hardest thing any of us really have to learn is how is to truly love ourselves, no matter what, to allow for imperfection and *gasp* even frailty.
And yes, let’s call this one a lesson, because it is a hard one for many of us: to give ourselves the holy generosity of grace.
Looking at all that transpired both in my life with Mike and after he died, faced with these diagnoses and their likely origin, I became willing to open my heart to myself, to grace, to allowing that I am all things including vulnerable.
That’s my dream for every one of us: a soft place to land when hard things turn up. And if we trip over something new and unwelcome, to be caught and held and reminded that we are so deeply loved.
*in so many ways, and these new arrivals are simply additions, not indictments
