Dear Reiki Pulse peeps,

 

I’ve been in a bit of a funk this week. I was flying free and clear for weeks, and then I crashed. Why? I don’t know, a combination of factors: some upheaval in my family/home situation, some inner questioning and doubts, hormones, and who knows what else. Life!

 

This morning, I was looking at retreat centers online, fantasizing about being able to get away to somewhere pretty and do nothing but alternate meditation and writing practices with self-indulgent dips into peanut M&Ms and fantasy novels.

 

On the website for the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a monastic and contemplative community in the Benedictine tradition, I came across this quote:

 

Saint Romuald’s Brief Rule

 

Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms—never leave it.

 

If you have just come to the monastery, and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want, take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.

 

And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.

 

Realize above all that you are in God’s presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor.

 

Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.

Now, you can see from my comment above about peanut M&Ms that I am no ascetic, like our friend St. Romuald apparently was. Nor do I find myself with a true longing to chuck the everyday world for a monastic life full time, with or without peanut M&Ms.

 

In fact, I have developed a passion for devoting myself to spiritual awakening within a regular life, integrating them together in acknowledgement that spiritual life is not some special separate thing. It is right here in every movement, every relationship, and every breath.

 

But there is something about those simple words, “Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God,” that evoked dueling feelings in me today:

 

“Hell no! What am I if I am ’empty’? Just a shell?”

 

versus

 

“Yes, what a relief, let it all go and just allow the divine to fill me.”

 

Maybe the truth is a combination of both. If I let go of the idea of me, the spaciousness and lightness left behind makes room for the divine. So it’s not so much that I am a mere shell as that I allow myself to realize that I am both me and the divine all at once.

 

What I think of as me is an expression of the divine nature of all existence and beyond existence. I am the divine, and the divine is me, in form and without form.

 

I do love a good apparent paradox, don’t you? The truth seems to lie in the contradiction – or rather what seems like a contradiction but in a more holistic viewpoint is merely layered truth.

 

The trick is to remember that we are not solid. We all know we are made up of water and air, as well as earth. We have within us the electricity of fire and the space of the cosmos. These elements are in our bodies and personalities and souls.

 

So when we “empty” ourselves and wait, we merely let go of the illusion of being solid so that the divine can shine through. We can then see and feel ourselves in constant fluid motion, intermingled with and one with the divine.

 

We realize that the illusion of solidity brings with it the illusion of heaviness. We can be light, and we can be free. We already are!

 

May you each let go of the burden of the illusion of “you” and let the spaciousness within allow the Great Bright Light of your true nature to shine through. May this be a lighter, more joyful way of living.

 

With love and some lingering grumpitude,

Alice

 

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