NOURISHED BY LIFE ITSELF
Every feeling we have is a child of God, yearning to come home to the lightness of an open hand of love. When it sits lightly in the open hand, there is no attempt to reject it or to hold on to it — it has come home to love. This means that the feeling passes through you more quickly, because it has nothing to stick to. It falls into openness. And this falling into openness is grace.
Grace is the movement of life when it flows through you, unimpeded by you. In this openness, everything is given to you — birth and death, gain and loss, pain and pleasure — all of it moves through you gracefully. In moving through the open vessel of an undefended self — a self in which the rigid shell of resistance and self-righteousness and erroneous self-beliefs about being abandoned or rejected or punished by life, has fallen away — all of it is experienced as the exquisite richness of life.
Both agony and ecstasy are exquisitely rich. Consider this — whatever you experience is never to be repeated. Each moment (if we could dissect the eternal moment into moments) is never repeated. Contemplate this, feel this — let it sink in. It is never repeated! Every time you reject an experience and deny it by saying, “This is not good enough, this shouldn’t have happened,” you reject the gift of that moment. It is never going to be repeated — you have missed it, just by waiting for the perfect moment. This is a siphoning away of aliveness.
By truly cherishing each moment — not by possessing it or owning it or making it special so that you can feel special about yourself but by just being with it, by holding it lightly, by meeting it all the way, by honoring its very existence in this moment — it can flow through you. Whether there are mountains or vales, whether you walk through the valley of darkness or fly through the heavens of light, it’s all grace. Yes, all of it! And yet we often miss that opportunity by creating mental imaginings of how life should be, images about what I should be feeling or experiencing in order to have a better life.
I invite you to abandon or throw away all "shoulds" and "shouldn’ts" and instead really taste what’s here — really take it in. In this way, you will be nourished by life. When you are eating and you really taste the food, it gets metabolized into nourishment, into fuel for life. And so it is with life itself. Ans so it is with every experience you have.
If you don’t taste what life offers, it doesn’t get metabolized into love, it doesn’t get transformed into grace, and you don’t feel nourished by life. So then you go looking for nourishment elsewhere — from your relationships, from your work, from your possessions, from the accumulation of wealth or recognition or knowledge.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these things in themselves — they are expressions of life — but looking for nourishment in the world of form doesn’t bring lasting fulfillment. Looking for fulfillment in the world of form leads to codependent relationships.
A codependent relationship is one in which you’re seeking something in order to know yourself as something — you seek love from a relationship in order to feel loved or to feel lovable. You have turned love into a commodity, something that you can give and receive — and this is not true love. It’s the same with recognition or approval. When you seek approval or recognition or worthiness from the work you do or from the creativity you pursue or from any activity, your relationship to that becomes a codependent one — you need to keep doing it in order to feel fulfilled, at least temporarily.
But when you are truly nourished by the aliveness of each moment, there is no codependency. There is no give and take, there is no need, there is no expectation. There is only oneness with life itself.
This alive presence is the source of true nourishment. There is fullness, and yet you are empty of self. This is true fulfillment.
