Leaving, Left Behind Me

I have to leave. The thought startled me with its intensity. I have to leave.

Hot sand. I press my legs into its warmth as the wind begins to blow more fiercely. It is winter in the desert. Warmth from the heat of the sun juxtaposed against biting blasts of wind. Sand in the face. Sand in everything. Hot on one side, cold on the other, my body wants to keep turning to stay warm. The sun is setting.

Cold — time to break out the warmer layers and perhaps the down bag strapped onto my backpack. When the sun sets, soon now, it will be freezing. I dare not move, not wanting to risk a sound. He is speaking. “…being with a Teacher is a feeling. As long as that feeling is present, the energy is appropriate and the association is beneficial. When that feeling changes, you will know it and it will be time to leave…”

“NEVER!” my mind insisted. “This is what I came for, where the truth, the magic and the mystery lives.” In that moment a vow was remembered. Like distant wind chimes, it reverberated its truth through my body. “Never leave. Never betray. Always remember; loyalty ‘to the end’”. “To what end?” I wondered, silently, straining to hear his voice above the wind.

Then, for one moment, in the gusts between the winds, I felt HER. A fleeting starlit glimmer on the edge of peripheral vision, a hushed whisper of another kind. “Not this time”, SHE said. “This is My time”. I knew it was SHE…without explanation. And, engrossed in the transmission at hand, held within my vows, I forgot once more… until SHE called me home.

Six years later

I have to leave. “Impossible!” cried the voice in my head. The voice of discipline, of devotion, dedication, of all that had held me at his side these 13 years. You have to leave. The certainty of it struck my heart and winded me. My body fought for breath as the worlds swam around me.

Something had shifted. I walked along the periphery of the huge outdoor banquet, doing my job, patrolling the area, keeping it ‘private’ for his intensive. Palm trees swayed overhead, torches streamed in the breeze, the surf crashed close by, and I longed for the feeling of what should have been heaven. The light is the same, as are these companions I have spent years with, shoulder to shoulder, carrying the task of enlightenment. And yet ~ as I smiled from the depths of my heart at all that was spread before me, the truth was undeniable. Something had shifted. My place was no longer here. And I, like the lyrics from the Broadway musical A Chorus Line… ‘I felt nothing’.

It sized me up, this nothing, this neutrality where there was no pull in any direction whatsoever. We circled one another warily. Unsure of what would happen if either moved a muscle.

It took some time, leaving. The more I tried to hold on, to be worthy, to shift myself, the more I remembered. Little by little, stronger and more clearly, I felt a difference. A re-membering of unacknowledged clarity had found my inner core. Undeniable. Embraced within an active flow of Grace, I fought myself, my chosen path, my feelings of guilt, remorse and, finally, grief. Grief that had no horizon, only the unfathomable depths of what was sure to swallow me and bring me to oblivion. I will drown here. I knew it, could feel it in my cells and in my bones. The drama was better than the alternative.

I have to leave. Not just my teacher. Everything. I must walk away from my way of life, my friends, my understandings and concepts of lineage and mastery. I have to walk away from everything I think I’ve gained. It is all unreal. Not just the distortions, the conditioning, the ego, but all forms, all awareness… an ‘everything’ that is so complete and comprehensive I cannot imagine nor envision existence outside of its reality.

“Is this the void?” my mind asked, trying to stay in control. The answer was HER laughter. You know better than that. I did.

I remembered my first year, sitting in front of his picture, meditating on it as his students were taught to do. The voice of the Infinite, HER voice in my heart, insisting Feel the light, not the man. Focus on the love, not the lens through which it comes. I listened and I knew. And yet the pressure to conform, to be as they were, to be seen as one of them, to be worthy, crept in.

Sometimes in a completion lifetime, we set ourselves up to experience as many loose ends as possible. The first nudge came on that evening in the desert. The next time, SHE took me by the hand, then grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, shaking me loose.

Are you ready? I heard, first in a dream, then more loudly, persistently, as a voice in my heart. I had no answer, no resistance, no momentum of any kind. I had to leave.

I remember the day when, finally, I answered. I had left my teacher years ago now, begun studying yet another path of egoic dissolution, been introduced in various ways to the forms of Great Mother. I had received ordination yet again, and again. Three ordinations in three different paths, each one holding familiar truths. Even these, it seemed, had to be left, if not behind, then on some distant shore of past experience, of ‘otherness’ to be surrendered.

I remember that the answer rang through me, realigning all that I knew myself to be. “I do not know what I am saying yes to, but I will not say no. I will no longer deny Presence, nor hide from it. I do not know what this means, nor do I need to.”

I do not know what I am saying yes to, but I will not say no.

I walked to the mirror in another room, vibrating intensely. Light was streaming from my body like a many-rayed star. I blinked … is this real? 
This is real, and it is time.

Was my mind being dramatic? Probably. I had certainly done the inner drama of the thing. I re-read everything on my teacher’s list, to see if it resonated differently outside of his aura. I re-watched every film. I observed myself in the act of everything. There were some vast differences, and some things that were the same. I found my own resonance again through the voices of those others, those traditions, those forms. Comparative analysis paralysis. Multi-dimensional jnana yoga in every possible direction.

Just in case I’d been wrong, you see. In case I’d missed something or made the biggest possible mistake ever in any world or incarnation. Just in case.

The physical steps out the door came first. The knowing had always been there. I am deeply and truly grateful for every moment of learning, remembering and becoming. For my Teacher, I hold only love and respect and an ever-growing amazement at everything he was and for how long. For my other mentors, I am also grateful. I hold you in my heart with joy.

I had to leave. And in that leaving, separation left me.

I no longer need to leave. I am the love that leaving left behind.