The only time I write anything that I come anywhere close to feeling good about is when it comes straight from the depths of my heart.

If there is any other motivation other than True Expression—if I want to impress someone, or to show how great I am at something, or how much I know, or ‘teach’ someone something – then, well you know that feeling you get when you sick up a little in your mouth—that’s how I feel when I write something inauthentic.

So writing, for me, is both cathartic and painful.

It’s painful to bare my soul again and again. Even when what I’m expressing is pure joy there’s always pain close behind. When I’m truly expressing my Self, there’s both joy and pain, because that’s what we are—us little humans spinning through space on this great, beautiful, wondrous Earth-Home.

At our core we’re made of light, and the only way light can exist is in the context of darkness. Without darkness there is no light.

What we really are is pure consciousness, or love—and the only way love can know itself is in the context of life. So here we are…

We’re divine animals. Sacred beings blessed and cursed with the potential to experience the full range of emotions, feelings, and sensations that this miraculous body gives us. And spirituality, if it’s real and authentic and grounded, as opposed to the kind of escapist, bypass spirituality that is unfortunately all too common, is painful. It’s dark, and it’s bumpy, and rough, and treacherous.

Because it’s all about bringing out the light more fully—and the only way to do that is to go right to the heart of the shadows. Only from there can the light be experienced fully.

If you do the opposite—if you aim too much for the stars, then all you’ll see, in the end, is darkness. Try too hard to bathe in love and in the end you drown in fear.

I’m convinced that we’re not really here, as many think, to become Gods and Goddesses.

I’m convinced that we’re here to simply be more fully human.

Why else would we be embodied beings?

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Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo: courtesy of the author