EMPTY YOUR VESSEL

Empty yourself.

Empty your mind of unexamined beliefs, passed down through generations, inherited without question .. they do not belong to you.

Empty your heart of accumulated grievances, held onto regrets and resentments, hardened into a story of ‘poor me’ .. this is not who you are.

Empty your cells of undigested memories, toxic emotions, calcified into lethargy and short-sightedness .. it’s not how life is meant to be.

Remove the blinkers from your eyes. They kept you safe for a while, but now only serve as a prison to keep you locked into the matrix of conditioning. Allow the glaring truth of direct experience, untainted by fear and hope, to pierce your retinas and purify your sight .. be blinded by the light.

Rip off the band-aid, air your wounds, feel the searing pain. Be raw, be vulnerable, be tenderly naked. Throw away the should’s and shouldn’ts, dump them in the garbage bin, burn them in the funeral pyre of freedom. Do what it takes to drop the baggage .. let it go.

Scream, shake, shout. Get in touch with an ancient rage, a primal fear, an existential terror. It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to be reasonable. For once, let go of equanimity and trying to keep it cool. Let loose, abandon yourself. Let the fire of irreverent passion swirl through every fiber of your being, every ounce of your body. Dive into a dark underworld of fury, be consumed by an untamed grief, fall into the abyss of unspeakable aloneness. Let hot tears run like torrential rain, flooding your eyes, carving rivers in your skin … let yourself drown.

Scream, shake, whirl, dance. Do what it takes to go deeper than thinking, deeper than feeling, deeper than memory. Go so deep you touch the groundless ground. Go so deep you no longer exist .. become empty of self.

In emptiness, mind dissolves into sky, heart is uncontainable, and body is permeable. In emptiness, there is space inside .. and now the light can filter in. Now life can flow through you, unimpeded by self-imposed obstructions.

My friend, be unconcerned with awakening as the remedy for your pain. Be unconcerned with enlightenment as the perfect destination. Instead, be willing to open so wide that nothing is denied or suppressed or hidden in the shadows. Be willing to empty yourself of every vestige of resistance, even if it means digging so deep into the encrusted mechanism of self-preservation that it rips you apart. Be willing to bear the unbearable and be broken open.

My friend, be concerned only with emptiness .. because only an empty vessel can be filled with God.

• Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash