How often do you remember that you are a living Miracle? You were made from a spark of Life, igniting in union, triggering the mysterious process of becoming a tiny human. Your embryonic self absorbed and digested your mothers rhythms, blood, nutrients, emotions, breath, conscious and unconscious thoughts throughout your time in the womb. Even after your birth, as your cells continued to divide and specialize, you were somatically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually cradled and shaped by the adults and environment that raised you. Right now, below the level of your consciousness, trillions of intricate cellular processes are operating in perfect harmony to keep you alive. Your subconscious mind is continually tracking & automatically adjusting to 40 billion bits of information & experiences every moment, both inside and outside of your body.
The identified ‘You’ that you know yourself to be could not possibly coordinate such a vast amount of information. Most of your existence is in the realm of the mysterious. You are indeed, a walking, breathing Miracle! .
Though most of our awareness seems to remain sourced in our conceptual mind, concerned with defining our world, the Great Mystery inside of us never stops being Alive. An infinite dance, beyond our imagination, is unfolding inside of us in every moment; we are constantly touching, and being touched by, the Sacred.
Although we have been deeply programmed to believe that the Divine is outside of us, Ancient Wisdom tells us that we are made of it. This means that wherever we are, and whatever we are doing, the Infinite inside of us is also there. What would our navigation be like if nothing in our experience was outside the Divine?
Most of us navigate life through a separation of the ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Ordinary’. We generally see things like worshiping in a church, communing in nature, or doing our Yoga practice to be ‘sacred’, while cleaning the bathroom, brushing our teeth or taking out the trash, remains in the realm of the mundane. Do you notice that we seem to bring a heightened attention to what we consider ‘Sacred’, and a predictive, sometimes begrudging attitude towards the ‘ordinary’? It’s unlikely that we speak in hushed tones about what we’ve jotted down on our grocery list or who is dropping the kids to swimming.
In keeping with the deep programming we have received from our parents, teachers, religion and culture, we have used our powerful conceptual mind to create a world view where we choose what is Sacred, and the rest is either ‘less than’, or in some other category like ‘practical reality’.
Ancient Wisdom tells us that Life / Creation / Spirit permeates all being. In the light of this paradigm, everything is Sacred.
Some of you might be scratching your heads right now, wondering how your dirty dishes might be considered ‘Holy’. One answer lies in our preconceived definitions — the ways in which our minds have been separated to be pitted against ourselves and against each other. What if our notions of the Sacred have been fed to us, and include definitions that are seemingly out of our reach: pristine, devout, without ‘sin’, elevated, pure and most importantly: ‘connected with God’. We have been taught, for millennia, that we need an intermediary to contact the Divine. We have been taught that we are unclean and not worthy of the purity of this connection.
What if just the opposite is true? What if the Sacred is operating in and through everything, including our own bodies, minds and emotions? What if everything is Sacred just because it exists? How would this change our navigation and experience of life? We may find ourselves in a new matrix of understanding. In other words, Instead of ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, we could experience the energy of motion or stuckness, inspiration or lack of choice, expansion or contraction, stillness and flow.
Our attention to the Mystery in any experience, means that we are mostly attentive to what we don’t know. Instead of approaching the world with our known conclusions, we become receptive to more of what is actually here. More of the Mystery of Life is able to reveal itself, and we find ourselves in a state of discovery. Indeed, we may find a whole new ways of perceiving. We may discover the profound expansion of Aloha, which, in one definition, is “the acceptance of everything inside of us and compassion for all that exists.”
To me, Living Yoga, the ability to meet Life off of the mat, is the embodiment of this deep Aloha. What the world needs now is our commitment to discover our own grounded experience of the Sacred — Alive in us, and in all we touch.
~ Published in Living Aloha Magazine Fall 2017 in the column 'Life Meeting Life' by Jody Mountain ~