Living the Answers

When I sit and go inward in meditation and prayer, I don’t always get the immediate guidance that I am seeking.  At times, for days and months, I walk through each day knowing that I have no idea what I’m doing, where I’m going, and what company will accompany me on my journey.  It’s called living purely in the moment.  It feels like I’m driving on a long highway road, on a road trip with no particular route, only a general plan, driving due west and seeing the beauty of the light and darkness  in the sky.  A bit of  a paradox – I have no idea where I’m going, but do know where because I know something within is saying yeah, this way feels right, just not sure at the moment what that may mean.

Living purely in the moment is not just the moment of enjoying the sweetness of some herbal tea coating my throat or the smell of the fresh flowers in bloom pleasing the tiny hair particles in my nose to vibrate happy messages to my brain like happy tail wagging dogs; it’s wading through all the unknowns with hope, faith, and resilience.  And, then it’s called waking back up with the fortitude to do it all over again shifting our weight away from the fear paradigm into the love paradigm.

When I think of living the answers, I think of practices in letting go and accepting.  To learn to live the answer within the love consciousness paradigm takes practice and accepting that perfection is off the plate. How do we let go and accept the chaos in our lives?  How do we know the difference between letting go and accepting as is and implementing goals and guidelines to keep us on track?

I like to think of the answers to these questions in terms of space – expansion and contraction.  When I make a decision, communicate in a certain way, think about things or set a goal and I feel contraction in the physiology of every cell in my body then I know that I am not practicing letting go and accepting enough.  Sometimes my mind will even rationalize other reasons for why the contractions (think stress, illness, tightness, shortness in breath and words) are happening in my body, instead of accepting the real triggers.   When I make a decision, communicate in a certain way, or set a goal and I feel expansion in my mind and body, I feel light and energized, I feel open and free, I feel an unparalleled trust in my faith, then I know that I am practicing letting go and accepting enough, and there is something comforting even in the unknowns.

This is where the magic in a meditation/prayer/yoga practice takes effect –  it’s through the expansion, the brain and the body reaches homeostasis despite the chaos and all the unknowns in the outside world.  The magic is also being aware that the fire can keep you warm, but it can also burn you.  Knowing how to navigate these spaces in grace purely in the moment, accepting the warmth and letting go of the burn, is the key to living the answers joyfully.

In the words of Rilke:

 “I beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the  questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a   foreign  language.  Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you  would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Love the questions  now.  Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without ever knowing  it, live your way into the answers.”

So this is another brushstroke of color on the canvass of our life – to live the answers purely and earnestly in each moment practicing expansion in the paradigm of love.  And well, after that, every little thing may just be alright.

Om Shanti Om ~ Athea

Athea