"You're ALL of it"

 In the last few weeks or maybe months, the sense that something is changing here comes on. Now it's coming clearer: the resistance to being in form is melting. 

I don't think I would have put it that way before now. I don't think I would have said that that's what needs to happen. But there's been a struggle to accept all of life as it is -- to feel that it was all right to accept it -- to just be the whole thing in all its messiness.

As I was thinking about this this morning, the words of Alan, the spiritual teacher in my novel, ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE FLESH, came to me. He's giving advice to the main character, Jeannie, as she struggles with rejection in love:

"'But I don't understand,' [Jeannie persisted]. 'I mean, I already realized I am the love I was seeking. So why am I still seeking it?'

'You're all of it.'

'Huh?'

'You are the love and you are the seeking.'

'But I don't want to seek what I can't have,' she implored. Yet, just as she spoke, another thought nudged: That's a lie.

'Do you have a choice?'

'But I want to have a choice. I want freedom. Wasn't that the promise?'

'Whose promise? Not mine.'

'So I don't get freedom/'

'Not freedom from desire. And not freedom from need either. Not freedom from anything. You get freedom to be anything. And everything. Meaning, freedom to stop fighting with yourself. That's all you get.'"

Indeed. Freedom to stop fighting with myself. As though I could change the reality of what I am, of what is, by resisting it! 

And when I don't, that mysterious sense of Presence comes.