Lifeletter #169: Gleaming and Beaming

Last week my partner Jonathan had a dream in which I led him to an old dark house. We went inside together, and up some stairs. At the top of the stairs we came to a long dark corridor. I stood and watched as he walked down the dark corridor. At the end of it he entered a kitchen, full of warmth and light, and a group of people who drew him into the space with the energy of ‘gleaming and beaming.’

I love this dream. It illuminates how we can support the ones we love, and be supported. There are dark places inside all of us, old structures that we abandoned long ago. I used to feel a lot of sadness about this. Now I am learning how we can go back into these dark places, and allow them to open to the flow of life and light.

Sometimes we need someone to guide us to the place that is asking for our loving presence-this is what I did with Jonathan in the dream. Friends and teachers have done this for me, and I am grateful for those nudges, those moments of clarity offered to me by another. We can’t always see the places inside us that are asking for our attention, even when they are crying out to us. We have learned to be strong, to harden our hearts to ourselves and keep marching along, no matter what. It’s a true friend who can say to us, “I feel there is something here that is asking for light, for warmth, for presence, for compassion.”

I can’t walk down that dark corridor for you. You are the only one who can do that, whenever you are ready. I can stand here as your witness, knowing and trusting that whenever you are willing to enter that room inside you, help appears. Nourishment arrives. Sometimes it’s a tiny drop of light; at other times it’s a whole roomful of friends, gleaming and beaming.

How much support and love appears is directly connected to our willingness to ask for it and to receive it. Reaching out and receiving-these simple foundations lie at the heart of our humanity.  How radically different our life is when we can simply ask, when we can be human enough to say, “I need.”  How did this become so shameful? In my family, the words “I need,” and “I want”  were almost unknown. What a revelation, to embrace myself in all humility and to freely say, “I need help, I need guidance, I I need clarity. I cannot do this alone.” To say this, and to stand tall in the truth of it, not to shrink and feel it as a weight.

Our capacity to ask is married to our capacity to receive, to be soft and vulnerable.  Maybe Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said “Ask and ye shall receive.” As we enter that sacred space of asking and receiving, we give the people around us the opportunity to give. To offer us their presence, their caring, their clarity. The more we can receive, the more they have to give.

Being strong and independent is highly over-rated. We can think that we know this, but that doesn’t transform the hidden instructions in our DNA, that demand we be strong in a way that is not really human. This superhuman way of being, this fear of vulnerability, is deeply imprinted in each one of us by our families, our ancestors,  and our culture.  Each time I am able to reach out and ask for help, I send a blessing out into the wider field of life, a transmission of another way of being. And when I can receive, the same thing happens. It’s good news for all of us. It’s how we can actually begin to create a whole new culture.

This receptivity, this softness, is not the opposite of strength. It’s what makes me truly strong, rooted in something so alive and nourishing that I can begin to trust deeply in the loving intelligence of life.

Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.

 –William Stafford, ‘Today’

 

with love,

Shayla

 

photo credit: Galen Taylor, on Facebook