Behind The Velvet Rope: Fear Vs. Spirituality.
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As you prepare on your spiritual journey — whatever that may be, your humanity in every flavor is your muse.
Just as a person will never become impervious to the doubts of others without exposure to doubt, commitment is not something that comes without challenge. Commitment to our humanity is the hero’s journey. A true hero sees no division between fortune and failure, gift and curse.
She is able to create triumph with the reality of her humanity. As she travels down the tunnel of soul work, she develops an understanding of all that great, big life she manifested at her trembling fingertips. She may not even realize that the simplest act of love is the greatest conquest.
Don’t kid yourself by starting off on the wrong foot anymore. You do not need to know how to do this. No one is ever born with all the answers, not even the gods we have created in our image.
It is through the hardships, the doubts of others, and the failed attempts at understanding ourselves fully that we grow by leaps and bounds. This way we ultimately become fully unified with this experience, letting ourselves recognize that we are divine force in action.
Through the intricacies of life, most of which are esoteric mysteries never revealed to us from behind the veil of our learned ancestors, we are bestowed the magic of being able to live through the pain and pleasure of all that surrounds us.
One day we may transcend attachment, aversion, pain, pleasure, desire, and all of the trappings within the body, but most of us will never experience such a rarity.
When we are tired, whether we have been enlightened to the highest vibration or are scraping by on the dregs, the sweet darkness of Lady Death cradles us into the grandness of the night.
Life is the greatest religious experience. We are in the temple every single moment. The esoteric knowledge that we were not given from the clandestine hearts of our foremothers was what we have come to quest. We want our divine right to be divine in our own right.
Now is the time to define terms.
Spirituality itself is not an act of being holy or doing good deeds for the promise of eternal bliss. That’s emotional entrapment. We are the only species in nature that thinks wearing robes, reciting mantras, speaking scriptures, denying a desire, and having to obey rules makes us better.
We confuse feeling better with a spiritual status that has been used to create a hierarchy within limitlessness, but you know how we humans are.
Now, I am not saying that we become cannibals here. I am just saying that we require a box around the infinite, if we understand the truth in the value of all that is within and around us. We honor what we know to be perfect.
We have placed such a stigma around our ideas of what is divine that we have induced amnesia about our seemingly unknown origins.
We have almost completely forgotten that even in the least and worst of us, there are not only the same elements that hold the force of all that is and ever was, it is also divine. The fact that we almost forgot our origin is one of the greatest wins for the erroneous human in all of us.
Some inner voices would say that the error is forgetting our divinity and others would say that the error is in believing we are divine. Then the voices outside ourselves tell us to pipe down and just do the ritual, divinity is no concern of yours.
There is a very tired energy that surrounds the act of obedient ritual, one that doesn’t satiate the thirst and hunger for life’s passions or give flight to the sacred act of life. The act of spirituality is to commune with oneself in the dark and lightness of life.
It is the ability to come to a place of appreciation and acceptance of all that surrounds you. It is the act of attuning yourself to the kinship of the supreme vital energy that is the current of all living things simultaneously occurring in this moment. It is in the fearless play in it all.
It is in the inevitable release of its sweet visitation in as many vessels that could fit such a finite exuberance. It is in soothing the slashes and the poorly healed scars. This is a sweet romance, if you allow yourself to breathe a little and look at how good life is for you and how good you are for it.
Self-acceptance is the gateway to the unknown and the unknowable. It is a love beyond guarantees. It is a way of living in the present moment, while being able to freely access our divinity all at once.
This is the element that is missing from most of us, and incidentally it is the same element that allows us to see through space-time and lift the veil of falsehood that seems pervasive throughout the material world.
When we accept ourselves, our life, others and their lives, and of course the containment of it all — life itself, we discover union. We are then behind the velvet rope, carrying ourselves as vessels of wisdom while mingling with the greatest aspects of the universe.
When we realize that we are one and the same, our greatness is granted access to rooms within our temple that were once barricaded by rotted walls.
We come to a realization that this truth is too good not to share and we begin to proclaim our greatness in front of those that do not support us or believe in us. We learn to walk by those who hate and who do not understand us, with our heads high and our knowledge sharpened behind our eyes.
And when we enter the great hall, we meet our origins in dated reenactments of life we never let ourselves mourn. It is so tempting to go back to the script for old time’s sake. We know our former roles with people we love and wish so badly we had the power to change their story.
When we realize that our story is the only one we have the responsibility to tell, the moment dies and a new moment begins, with the breath. We begin to see our past fall to dust, creating an etheric soil for the cultivation of something way better for ourselves.
We have to confront our very human parents and tell them that we know what’s best for us. We invoke the cyclical elements by teaching our parents what we were never taught. After all, no matter what kind of life or parents we had, every parent fucks up.
In all the generations of the human family, we have created a blight of fear that has become the root cause of family-borne illnesses, spiritual pathogens, and physical maladies. These have been created from a deep sense of lack coupled with delusions of control.
We have societal rules based on perfectionism and obedience to an invisible presence of higher control. Calculating decisions based in self-hatred, ridicule, and even well-intended love begins to set fear-based consequences in motion. We have learned to self-medicate with dangerous emotions, money, food, and any other excess that distracts us.
We see it every day, and have tuned out the noise in our periphery.
Fear has been passed down through generations of fearful children who knew how to clothe it in love, apathy, anger, indecision and more expressions of an emotion we can’t really define in ways we have yet to discover.
Those same fearful children grew up to raise fearful children who bury their parents, and raise fearful children to bury them.
I don’t think any of us really wants to be afraid anymore, but whenever we find the off-switch to the dizzying cycle, a new one begins; we are reborn into our formative years again and again. Even with all the wisdom that we have acquired from the greatest teachers, we still don’t get how not to be afraid.
Maybe we are supposed to be afraid. Perhaps fear is one of the greatest tools we have, but we just don’t realize it.
Is it possible to make fear our ally?
*****
Anjana Love Dixon is a Spiritual Thought Leader, Interfaith Minister, Psychologist, and holds a doctorate in divinity. In 2012 Anjana launched The Anjana Network, the home base of her wisdom writings. It is from this place that she delivers deeply personal reflections of her journey to wholeness, inspires change, and provokes thought. Through sharing influential insights through interviews, articles, and her unique connection to the world, Anjana has become an internationally renowned wisdom writer and cited spiritual thought leader with contributions to major online publications including Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, Match.com, and HuffPost Live. Anjana is a member of The Beautiful Writer’s Group with Danielle LaPorte and Linda Sivertsen and is currently preparing for the launch of her second book, Start in The Dark: Soul Work for Opening the Heart and Creating a (Real) Life.
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