Hello there. Did you enjoy last month’s break from the idea of aligning? It was meant to be a reset, a letting go of our concepts and ideas about what it means or doesn’t to align. Sometimes, more often than not actually, we think there is something that we need to do, accomplish, fight or change. True alignment is natural and unfolds the way a flower bud responds to the sun and water. Resistance is what kills it.
So what keeps us in the illusion that we even need to align? Where is our focus that instead of naturalness, we struggle? What keeps us bound and tight like a bud that never blossoms?
The Roots of Struggle
Struggle comes when we want to control our circumstances, relationship, and feelings. Struggle comes with pride that we are somehow special or better than others, especially when those “others” have chosen a different way of life. Ironically, what sustains superiority is inferiority and vice-versa. Struggle comes with arrogance and the idea that we actually do or should have a say in the lives of others, and even what we think is “my own life”.
There is a self-protective mechanism in us, sometimes quite at the surface and other times quite subtle. This mechanism, sometimes referred to as ego, wants to protect us from disappointment and other emotional pain such as rejection. It wants to keep us separate because anything else feels frightening or threatening.
This mechanism may have served us at one time. But with maturity, we could even say spiritual maturity, it is about transcending this way of coping with an uncertain world. When we’re willing to let go, trust, be more humble… this is when things start to change. It makes space for something greater to enter.
Our Practice This Month
This month’s practice is simply to prostrate, a practice not necessarily religious, but a posture of humility, surrender, and reverence towards the Natural Self, a nature that has been “conditioned” out of itself by all the rules of society, religion, and culture.
It symbolizes the dissolution of the ego as the strategy-center (our head) is lowered beneath the heart. It can settle mental chatter and make us more receptive to the clarity that comes with Grace.
To many western minds, the idea of bowing or prostrating is demeaning. But demeaning for who? It is that very sense of personal importance that keeps us from our naturalness. We believe there is some identity to protect, someone who can be demeaned.
Get down on your knees and pray a prayer that is not about asking for some thing or some boon, as is the more common practice. Rather, let it be a plea to the Divine to dissolve all in you that keeps you feeling separate and fearful that you may fully realize the Self. Ask for the support of Love itself, not to return you to your naturalness, but to reveal it, because it has been there all along…unstained.
Journaling
For those who are served by journaling, this month, take a moment to consider that which is natural to you and that which has been added to you since your birth. All your beliefs, your clothes, your work…it all came after. What was there from the start and has never changed the way your body has changed from that of an infant to that of an adult? Even your name isn’t original to you. Give this a decent amount of contemplation and return to it often.
This practice, offered by nonduality teacher, Mooji, is one of my personal favorites and may inspire your writing: