Kundalini Splendor

Sheila Foster––Temple of the Sacred Feminine

Trust

I see the so-called future as only an idea, a way of organizing our lives in this third dimension. In Reality, there is only Now, and it is utterly unpredictable, mysterious, and everything is always changing and sending us into the Unknown. The source and essence of Life is creation which is never static, and just as we conceive a child or a project or a vision of what is to be, we don’t really know. Often our creations are very different than we imagined they would be, just as our lives are.

There are countless times when change rises up out of still waters like an unexpected hurricane or life-shattering accident, or we simply come to the end of a road, a path, a relationship, an event in our lives for which we may have prepared, or not. We still don’t really know what is going to happen, despite any plans or plane tickets we have. How often do we expect or believe someone or something is going to be a certain way and it doesn’t turn out the way we imagined, expected, or hoped, and we are disappointed or hurt?

Knowing, I have come to see, is highly over-rated. It feels to me like a creation of ego to avoid or deny the discomfort, the pain, the shame, the anxiety, the fear and terror, that we have learned to associate and/or create with not knowing. Yet this myth of knowing and our attachment to knowing is constantly busted just about every day. Paradoxically, if there is something important for us to 'know' such as guidance, something important out of the blue, or some kind of spiritual 'knowingness', it will arise in the the space of not knowing.

The stories we tell ourselves about the unknown or what will happen if we don’t know, generate our fears. We grow up in families and schools where we are conditioned to know in order to feel safe or avoid unpleasant consequences. When I was a kid in grade school and high school, I was terrified of certain nuns because they were so punishing or shaming when we didn’t know the answer to a question. I can re-member and feel the physical sensations of shock, numbness, and terror in my face and small body when confronted by my second-grade teacher, Sister John Agnes, who shamed me in front of my class and I did not know what I did wrong—I nodded like I did when she yelled at me, “Do you know what you did?” but I still don’t know what I did that was so terrible in her eyes.

Things like this may have happened to you, too. We may have been traumatized for not knowing at one time or another. As a child in a highly dysfunctional family, I felt like I had to know what was going on for survival. I listened at doors and to phone calls, hid on the stairs, looked through desk drawers, eavesdropped as adults talked around the kitchen table because I felt it would somehow protect me from a repeat of the horrendous shock and trauma of being sent away again without being told it was going to happen or why.

This is Life having a human experience in duality. What comes, goes, and this cycle repeats itself so many times in one lifetime. Sometimes, like the buffalo who are now heading away from the possibly erupting volcano at Yellowstone, our bodies let us know change is coming. We may feel uneasy or anxious and not know why, or we are standing in the grocery store and our intuition sends us home immediately just in time to be there when the call comes telling us something has happened to one of our beloveds. In my healing work, a sense of that something is needed arises, “the stretcher from Grace” appears, and I cannot claim that it is the ‘I’ that knows what is being called for, but whatever appears is what I offer and often turns out to be just right for that moment. Guidance arises and emerges as words, intuition, or a felt sense, and I can follow this lead very easily as I trust it far more than I trust my egoic mind that thinks it knows. So often ego tells us to do this or that, then chastises us when we do, or hangs us up in conflict as it swings back and forth trying to decide. All that to say that we may have more access than we realize to right action from trusting what we do not consciously know. We have access to direct experience when we don't know.

(Image from above site)