Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage
Chapter Seven
The Space of No Need
A few years ago I traveled to Palenque, one of the largest excavated Maya complexes located in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and to the jungles and towns of Belize. Some of those close to me may well have wondered what I was doing taking off on a trip of this nature at a most inconvenient, and perhaps even foolhardy time, considering the tenuous nature of my life from an outside perspective. Maybe if it was work related they could have understood. More likely, I was projecting the questioning and judgments onto others when it was really that rational voice inside me that sometimes boomed forth and said, “What are you doing?” It turned out that it was indeed related to work, but of a deeper nature — the soul’s work.
There was a strong calling within me that said I was to go, something so strong that I believed I would be very sorry if I listened to that logical part of myself that weighed the checks and balances, particularly in this case. I had no sense of why I was to go on this trip, or what I was to do while I was on it. However, I had no doubt that I would experience things that would strike a deep chord of realization within my being. So, in that state of not knowing, I set my core intent toward what I would learn from this journey and let it go.
In places like Palenque and Belize life slows down. The humidity and the soft energy of these rainforest spaces won’t allow you to move too fast. In that lessening and more languid movement, distracting internal voices gradually hush. When silence is given space, elements of living you keep at bay are allowed to be fully present. Things we believe unreal or mystical begin to emerge.
That phenomenon was certainly true for me. Walking under the nearly full moon one night near the Maya ruins of Palenque, the stars so bright and close I could nearly touch them, the canopy of the mountainous jungle black against the sky, I had the sense that I was walking in the midst of a vast canvas of art. Another night, I had a dream that played itself out in daylight reality within the next twenty-four hours. I began to understand that my companion and I were traveling with Grace, a guide often forgotten or blocked in our Western culture. She continued to be with us as we prepared to leave.
We were so immersed in our experiences that we made no plans exactly where we would go once we left Palenque. We had no reservations — of any sort. We didn’t know how we would get to where we would go. About a day before we left, we did create a loose framework for Belize and found that even that vague structuring changed as we continued our travel — gratefully so.
Life became full of synchronicities that any well laid plans would have put to rest. Without looking at schedules, we often rode on one bus just to get to our intermediate destination and step almost immediately on another one. When there was a seeming inconvenience, it was merely an intervention that led us to meet someone who directed us to an unusual spot or told us an incredible story. We rode the wave of unfolding that Grace provided. It was only in looking back — hindsight often being more clear — that I understood it was through setting our heart’s intent and surrounding it with a warm permeable veil that we had “Indiana Jones” type experiences. This understanding led to the deeper meaning of my own function for this trip. By repeatedly being put in the midst of people or events that provided missing links for a story that had for a few years been on the back burner of my mind, my writing seemed to be one reason for the journey. But there was a much more important one. There were invisible shifts happening deep inside me that I couldn’t name. The conscious realization I offer now is that when we learn to trust, we will be led to all we ever need. Our only job is to be awake and follow the lead. Having had the experience of this truth, I told my companion that I wanted to re-enter my daily life with this comprehension at a cellular level.
Contrast
The gods quickly complied, but not in the way I thought they would. Having departed Belize, we traveled up the coast of the Yucatan headed toward Cancun to catch our plane home. We stopped overnight in a little beach town and the magic of our trip continued. We met up with some friends we had left earlier in Palenque and reminisced about the first leg of our journey. Hoping to cross paths with these compatriots again soon, my companion and I separated from them. Thinking ahead to the long and early ride into Cancun the next morning to catch our plane, we choose to enter that big city to find overnight lodging.
From my point of view, the chrysalis immediately fell away. It appeared to me that I was in any large metropolitan city in the United States, except worse in that moment. Coming from the jungle, I was repulsed by the cacophony of horns honking, high-rise buildings and large retail chains on nearly every downtown corner. Clearly, tourism was king. But I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to come there rather than stay home and experience the same confusion. I mourned for my peace.
The joke continued. We finally found a hotel and considered the price much too high. After having settled ourselves into our sixth floor room, we discovered the water in the bathroom ran in the shower but not the sink. And one of the several electrical outlets in the room worked. We were thankful that it was a bedside table.
Tired and needing to arise very early to catch our plane, I made an arrangement with the front desk for a wake-up call. Awaking with a start the next morning, I quickly realized that we had received no wake-up call and we were way behind schedule. Hurriedly throwing ourselves together, we went with our bags to the elevator. It no longer worked. While I flew down the six flights of stairs to pay the bill and find a taxi, my companion agreed to schlep our bags down.
We barely made our plane. But make it we did. And it set us down just in time to catch the Phoenix rush hour traffic, a treat in and of itself. We spent the next couple of hours driving northward to my home up in the mountains. The next day it snowed. I grumbled for days.
I was finally able to laugh after the fact. I realized that I was being tested — and hadn’t necessarily passed the trial at the time. When we hold aversion in our minds we will continually be diverted. When there is no attachment, we will often be delighted. The ideal state to be in is the space of no need, where all experiences are equal places of learning and acceptance. I, of course, knew this lesson, but got to experience it again.
Some months later, some other companions of mine and I were offered the teaching once more, with a slightly different twist. We had all been working hard, too hard it turned out. I think often when any of us have had our noses too close to the computer, the wrench or whatever our tools of implementation, we tend to clamp down tightly around what we think will meet our needs — in any context. After all, there’s just so much time and so much energy to be expended, so what we seek had better be within our short- sighted range of approval.
We decided to take three days and go on a camping trip. Three days would do it and home on the fourth — refreshed and ready to lean into the wind again. We resolved we would go to the White Mountains, a few hours east of our homes. There we’d find a wilderness place away from other people, with a running stream or placid lake, and miles of beautiful hiking opportunities. We wanted to engage in quiet and the restorative qualities of nature.
After the initial three-hour drive, then three hours beyond that, we were still driving around and around, ducking into this spot and that one. The driver was getting irritable. Not only was there no running water to be had since rain had been sparse in those parts that year, but it seemed like most of the wilderness seekers had in mind most of the areas that we sought. Besides, the dream place that one of us had remembered from a previous trip had vanished into time.
Instead, we found forests that appeared decimated with many logged trees downed, rocky ground that would provide uneven footing in hiking and too many other campers in the area for our taste. In a couple of hours it was going to be dark. We finally pulled into yet another forest road and parked, each setting off on foot looking for “the spot,” even if only for the night.
We finally settled on a place, though not really happy about it. We set up our campsite, deciding that since we were there we might as well stay for the duration. It took us two days to finally get into the rhythm of the forest — an indication of something off balance to be sure.
By that time, we were able to appreciate the birds singing, the few coyotes at night and otherwise, the silence. There was the occasional ATV noise in the distance or other people going by on a nearby road, but after a while that didn’t seem so important. And then we got our wish for running water. Torrential rains began to come down. Strangely, instead of getting upset about the whole thing we joked about being careful what you ask for.
We began to consider it all an adventure and rigged up a tarp for shelter, stringing it from the truck to nearby trees. We made a game of moving our camp chairs around to avoid the drips. We relaxed. And when we did, the magic happened.
We saw the beauty “even” in that forest and explored areas of our lives with each other that we hadn’t touched on in a while, experiencing true community. We began to recognize how each of us had been wound up and figuratively depleted due to our own wrestling to control certain outcomes in our lives. And once again the Universe provided us exactly what we needed to be shown.
She provided us with the metaphor of our initial perceptions of the place where we stayed and the tight expectations we had to get each of us to look at our current autobiographies. The Divine has a wonderful way of mirroring what we hold within us, if we would only be alert. My companions and I caught on — again — and went home at peace.
Fresh Perspectives
There was a time in Berkeley when I talked to a group gathered to hear about my earlier book. I related to them some of my discoveries of the phases of the spiritual journey, other people’s stories relative to these phases and insights coming from my own travels — usually but not always in exotic locales. After a guided meditation, I opened it up for discussion and questions.
“At least I was able to sit still during the meditation,” this coming from a man seated in the front row. Then he looked dejected, “I see all these advertisements for these ‘spiritual’ trips to Egypt or Peru. You talk about going to India and all those other places. I can’t even afford to get out of this city! How am I going to ‘get enlightened’? Is it reserved for the rich? Do I have to travel?”
“That’s a very interesting point.” I was genuinely glad he asked the question. “I think you do have to travel. But not in the way you might think.”
For any of us to evolve, we need to remove ourselves from what is familiar to us. If we can afford the luxury, perhaps the easiest way to do this is to take a trip periodically, particularly somewhere we haven’t been, with a culture very different from our own. That doesn’t mean the travel will be easy. In fact, sometimes when the travel is most difficult, fraught with problems, we have the best opportunity to learn about ourselves and perhaps what narrow lives we lead and the paralyzed mindsets we have. The opposite is also true. We can learn about previously hidden attributes that heretofore we hadn’t exercised much. If we are open enough, we can grow through these experiences and return home.
The reality is, though, that many people don’t have the financial resources to physically travel like that very often, or perhaps ever. In these cases, people who are able to travel beyond the familiar and expand, yet stay in their own backyards, are perhaps due much more of our respect. What is involved here is an uncanny ability to be one’s own witness while immersed in the daily life.
My guess is that these folks have a much easier time of it with re-entry. The requirement for learning that way involves the ongoing ability to shift perspective momentarily to obtain a greater view and then go about their daily business with wider choices. While physical travel and contained retreat or workshop experiences create a safe cocoon for us to try out new thoughts and behaviors away from friends and family, we must learn ultimately how to effectively return home with our experimentations intact to integrate into our everyday reality. Otherwise our forays into the unknown are no different than continual mental and emotional masturbation.
One of the Big Questions
Sooner or later, traveling along the path of our own evolution, most of us come to the question of life purpose. For many of us this is a time of great teeth gnashing because we don’t know our raison d’être and sense we aren’t fulfilling it anyway. On the opposite end, we may do a lot of chest beating proclaiming our “mission” to the world, and spend a great deal of energy trying to get others to hear our message as they turn and run in the other direction. Likely, we will slide back and forth between the two extremes because we can’t quite settle into either one. This question of purpose is an age-old, but maybe not with quite the twist it has had in our particular times.
Krista was a brilliantly intelligent woman of a certain age who had made a pleasant life for herself after emerging from earlier times associated with tragedies. She had a few irritations at work. But mostly these had to do with her own responses to others — she discovered — and her tendencies to want all to be perfect according to her own judgment. Otherwise, she had a beautiful long-time intimate relationship that fit wonderfully for her. And she had the means to do most of what really meant something to her. Yet, she experienced an incredible fatigue and great gut-wrenching spiritual angst that tore at her continually. She felt abandoned by God and betrayed by her Core Self.
“Life is so hard. I’m like Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill. I almost get to the top when something happens and the boulder rolls over top of me and drags me all the way down to the bottom again.”
She felt as though she wasn’t doing what she was put here to do and didn’t know what that something was anyway. As we all have, Krista had her own special circumstances of living and the mind’s interpretations along the way that developed outlooks and life beliefs about self and the world in general. In her case, no wonder she was so tired and spiritually anguished when she tormented herself with an ongoing, albeit mysterious, lack.
I can’t help but think that some of the current New Age philosophies that seduce our egos by touting grandiose life designs may have contributed to her sense of failure and frustration. Maybe it’s because we live in an age of transformation and recognize that we are likely fast rushing toward some kind of genesis that will take us through the threshold to another way of living. It seems it must happen like that if the global community continues to consume the way it has. Or perhaps it’s because the story of the Messiah returning to this physical plane is so ingrained and we have limited interpretations of the prophecy.
There is a preponderance of self-proclaimed avatars out there today hell-bent on saving the world when all any of us can really do is to heal ourselves. Siddhartha didn’t start out thinking he would be the Buddha. He had his own torments to uncover. The same must have been true for the person known as Jesus — who later became a consciousness called Christ. The times before His ministry are kept secret from us. Any of us have the choice to take the figurative trip into the desert to spend the forty days and nights it sometimes takes to spark illumination that allows us to even be aware of the castle doorway leading to hidden Dwelling Places.
This is the journey that brings us back to our true identity. If we think our purpose is anything other than that, then we’re misguided following the lead of our own inflated ego. Once we reconcile ourselves to this understanding, life gets easier in many ways because we learn that it’s not about external striving, but inner attunement.
We can relax to the interior expedition over which we have complete control in the depth and breadth of its unfolding. Or do we? After we’ve surrendered the reins, the Universe may accelerate the trip, showing us again what the real ride is about.
The process of our lives will create the content of our fulfillment. The outcome of our learning then is the real gift that we can share with others just by virtue of reflecting inner light. For Krista, she finally had this realization and determined, “Being is enough.”
All events described in this book are true. Some of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
I will publish chapters every few days until complete. Find links in the Table of Contents below.
Table of Contents
Chapter Three: The Inner Point
Chapter Four: Intentful Existence
Chapter Five: Connecting With the Cosmos
Chapter Seven: The Space of No Need
Chapter Eight: Conflicts on the Path
Chapter Nine: The Edge of Limitation
Chapter Ten: Asking the Answer
Chapter Eleven: Living With Contrast
Chapter Thirteen: Unconditional Being
Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage
Copyright 2004 by Carla Woody. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be directed to: Kenosis Press, P.O. Box 10441, Prescott, AZ 86304, info@kenosis.net.
