I’ve been shifting and sorting through the levels of my psyche, searching for the words to describe the core of what truly matters most to me. To be honest, it’s grueling and often messy work, and not for the faint-hearted. As I wrote about in my last post, “Standing on Shaky Ground,” excavating through the layers of expectation and disappointment that accumulates over a lifetime rattles the nerves and destabilizes the equilibrium.
Getting to what truly matters, to what’s most essential, takes deep inquiry, and this process is rocking my world.
Weeks of questioning catapulted me into a transition, or bardo, and making me feel like a pebble in a rock tumbler. I have a sense that I’ll continue to bounce around until my edges have been smoothed and my realization glistens on the surface of my skin.
The sense of uncertainty and instability is opening me up to directly experience what it feels like to be awake, to exist in a space beyond limiting beliefs. And now, the deepest intention I’ve ever declared in my life — to know what truly matters most— is destabilizing the world as I’ve known it and cracking open my body, heart, and mind.
And I have to tell you, it’s quite a trip.
The answers to my questions do not appear in words. They reveal themselves in momentary ah-has and short glimpses. I sense them through physical sensation such as release of tension in my face and an opening in my chest. While words never suffice, they are a means of sharing insights, they are how, as Ram Dass says, “we walk each other home.”
I share my deeply personal process with you as my way of reaching out to hold your hand as we walk home together.
So here’s my sincere attempt to express what it ultimately inexpressible.
What truly matters most is to live in Reality, the space beneath chatter and beyond illusion. To do this, I must be willing to allow everything (and I mean every thing) to be just as it is, where nothing is hidden or sugarcoated. What truly matters most is to experience the purest sense of “me”— my prime being — in Reality, and when I do so, my life will be sourced from the greatest, most expansive unconditional love imaginable.
I will not fool myself any longer. I want all in.
I want to experience my prime being in Reality as much as possible. I won’t allow myself to slip back into half truths, holding back, playing small, being proper, courteous, contriving, controlling, or careful, for when I do so I suffer.
I suffer when I stray from Reality, when my words are not completely true or how I express myself in the world is tainted with traces of denial, doubt, fear or judgment.
I sense that we don’t realize how deep our suffering goes until we begin to sincerely ask the important question, like what truly matters most. When we get curious (and courageous) to explore beneath the static of our expectations and disappointments our lives start to organize on our behalf. The walls of our belief systems begin to crumble in a way that shifts us, shakes us, and wakes us up. Reality reveals itself to us and our prime being, our essential nature emerges.
What truly matters most to you?
Are you willing to find out? Are you curious enough to get at the root of who you are? Are you courageous enough to really experience Reality?
When you sincerely ask these questions, you may catapult yourself into your own bardo. You may be shaken awake. And when you do so, when you allow the ground beneath you to tremble and the world to swirl around you, you will meet your purest self, your prime being, as the greatest, most expansive unconditional love imaginable.
Take my friendly advice and buckle your seatbelt, because the ride will get rocky. But I promise, it’s so worth it.
