Life Is Hard To Figure Out

“Life is hard to figure out.” I wrote this to a good friend in an email. And she wrote back:
When you’ve got it all figured out, please let me know!  (big smile)

If that doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will. Here I am, a supposedly mature adult on the path of inner development who doesn’t have it figured out yet.  I could claim to be super-enlightened, but that is becoming commonplace.  I had rather cop to the plea of “Only don’t know.”

So I am going to go out on a limb here. I don’t know who I am or why I am. I only know that I am. Surely that is enough if you pay close attention to how hard life is. And we are life itself pretending to be otherwise.

I am love pretending I don’t know it or remember it. I stub my toe on the Rock of Ages. I lug my cross grimly up to Calvary. I sit down and shriek, tearing at my clothes and storming heaven. I have forgotten that I am the Christed One. I don’t have it figured out yet. When I will, it will be the Second Coming.

The Second Coming is close at hand and so am I. I run right into the brick wall of thought again and again. I think I can figure it out. “Take no thought for tomorrow” doesn’t work for neurotic little minds who want to win or avoid losing. It doesn’t work during dark nights of the soul. But the sun shines on it all.

In case you are wondering why I call myself a spiritual writer, it is because I know how wrong I can be. That is my main qualification. The others don’t amount to a hill of beans.

Bean There, Done That

Writing about spirituality is as easy as falling off a log. Living consciously is a different matter. All of us are wired different genetically speaking and we get messed up in different ways. Unwinding the kinks in the machinery is an ongoing process. At the same time, no one ever existed. Don’t you love conundrums? I thought not.

I am not sure when God created paradox but it was early on. Since then, He has been swinging us like dead cats who think they have free will 🙂 Sorry, but humor figures largely in His Story as well.

I am glad that Easter is over. I cooked a good dinner and ate it alone. My son is in the kitchen now and will eat his soon. He worked today. I have dutifully eaten an entire chocolate bunny, having passed up some chocolate crosses with chocolate lilies on them. They all taste the same, no matter what persuasion you are. I have seen lovely chocolate buddhas as well. Religion can be just as fattening as anything else.

Most of you know what I am about. Pity I don’t. See, more humor on a sacred holiday. I watched The King’s Speech and enjoyed it so much. Thought Rush was as good or better than Firth. Anybody agree? There aren’t that many movies this good out there. I would say most of my Netflix picks are a disappointment.

Segueing into nonduality, I feel much the same about the plethora of online deliverers of awakening. There are too many; so many you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one (but I repeat myself.)

Have a chocolate bunny. It’ll look good on you. Tomorrow is The Day After Easter Candy Sale Everywhere. No discrimination. It’s all half off and you’d have to be half-crazy not to pick up a few dozen  (chocolate) ears.

Please order a copy of my book. (Click on the book image to the right). You will be helping me maintain the website. And donations are always needed. Let me hear from you….

Vicki

Sacred Space

“It is for you to discover the sacred place inside yourself and when you find that, that
is the end of your desperate search here on earth.”  ~Vernon Howard

This is a sentence from Vernon Howard. It speaks to the need we all have to find a place of safety, a place where we cannot be hurt. We do not have to circumnambulate Arunachala or make a pilgrimage to an outer location.

What is the alternative?

Invert your mind to find out. Bring the focus into your heart and breathe.

There it is. The sun is rising inside the sacred space of the Self. You are the sun. You are the Self.

You may rise and go out into this mirrored reality. Who knows? The tao flows in all directions once it is located inwardly.

I Need Your Help

All of you should have ordered my book by now, either from amazon or booklocker.com. If not, please consider ordering it. I wrote it from my heart and just read something from a book called Einstein’s God, by Krista Tippett. She is interviewing Sherwin Nuland about his book, How We Die. He says, “Do you know what I learned from writing that book, if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be, and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.”

LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT is my own intimate look into how it feels to be on the path and be caring for someone who is dying. Do you dare to read it? If I could dare to write it, maybe you would discover your own fears and loves as I stumbled through mine. Also, every sale helps me offset the costs of publication. I am one woman in a world of a billion books. Every now and then I need to ask people to buy it. No one yet has said they were sorry they did.

From an amazon.com review by hbarrett:

“She accomplishes with beauty what so many spiritual writers fail to do — describe awakening as it occurs in ordinary life. In her case, the ordinary life includes caring for her very ill husband, Bob, at the same time that she maintains an uncompromising look at the movement of her own spirit. There is no question that the message in Vicki’s book is that ordinary life is IT!”

Consider ordering a copy or make a small donation to the site so it may continue on. This is a labor of love but the occasional donation is greatly appreciated.

Send me a message on the comments page if you would like to order a signed copy. You  may also order from amazon.com or booklocker.com if you should prefer an ebook for your Kindle, etc. Let’s make LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT an underground bestseller.

Vicki Woodyard

http://www.amazon.com/LIFE-HOLE-Thats-Wisdom-Awakened/dp/1609102770/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297273020&sr=8-1

 

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Shhhh…

Sometimes the soul takes a rest from this world. Sits quietly among the thronging thoughts until they depart one by one. Left alone with the void, one becomes the void. Surprisingly, the thoughts are respectful at last. They wish me no harm and are happy to evaporate into the nothingness from which they arose.

I am sitting in a cluttered dining room at my cluttered desk. It’s been messier since the kitchen was painted. Boxes sit around waiting to be delegated but I am not able to carry out orders to them quite yet. The spring green of the trees outside my window are chartreuse. I see two old squirrel nests abandoned and as messy as my desk.

Stillness has arisen amidst the clutter. Shhhhh.

Remembering

The intellect wants to crucify awareness. This is the story of humankind. The evolving intellect is like a parasite taking over a strong and  healthy tree. Every time I see wisteria in beautiful lavender flower, I am reminded that it is a parasite. Our minds are feeding off our strong and beautiful essence.  Awakening is about seeing that.

I come from parents who were from uneducated. My mother went to college for only a year before her father told her she must go to business school, and so she did. But she was naturally intelligent and had a deep interest in spirituality. She gave me books that I immediately loved.  Yogananda, Joel Goldsmith and many others. I took to the path like a duck to H2O.

My father had to leave school in the eighth grade. But he was so bright he ended up starting the first pharmaceutical company in Memphis, Tennessee. I get my writing ability and humor from him.

What happened to me was what happened to every child in the world. My intellect became predominant. My parents wanted to be educated and so they did it themselves, in a sense. I made all A’s and graduated from college. I loved to read and built a fort of thought around myself to keep me safe. Once the fort is built, it must be taken down brick by brick by brick. That is the path in a nutshell.

Inside the bricks resides the Self. I have never fit in to this world. I was born with a knowing that I was somehow in the wrong place. At thirteen I began having panic attacks and agoraphobia. This became social anxiety, and I still have a certain degree of  it to this day.

At the same time, I exist in a field of grace. A place where my inner knowing thrives. I seek to drop the bricks of thought and revel in this field. I try to share it with my readers by just letting my fingers say what they will.

I know some of you relate to this, because it is every soul’s story. It is the story of the prodigal son or daughter that one day wakes up in ruin and decides to make the journey back home. We all know what is going on, how we are taken in by our thoughts and made to forget our true heritage. Suddenly I see the real possibility of remembering.