By Amaya Gayle Gregory
Vulnerability is up today. I love the feeling of being vulnerable. How about you?
Not one of us isn’t vulnerable, no matter how many stories we tell ourselves about our ability to weather any storm. Vulnerability is life. We are all exposed, no matter what we do or don’t do. Not one of us is immune to the dithering movements of our world, and these bodies in which we explore it.
Wake up, and you are still exposed. Surprised? It is inescapable. All that happens when you wake up is that balls to the bones, you recognize the inescapability of all stories, so in that respect you are actually totally exposed, absolutely vulnerable. You see that you can’t escape, that the story is always changing, that no one is in control, that this is a wild rollercoaster ride with no off switch, and you simply ride.
This is the ride of a lifetime … both meanings intended. What a precious gift a lifetime is, regardless of how long it lasts, what experiences come, what difficulties are encountered. You get to experience the depths of love and the intensity of loss, the giddiness of happiness and the aches or misery, the expansion of joy and the tightness of sorrow, the illusion of wealth and stark realities of poverty. No lifetime no awe-inspiring sunsets or hummingbird spun delight, no felt experience of grass blades between your toes, or wet blue hugs of the ocean. How incredible to be present to life in all its many forms, including the apparently life ending form we know as death.
This is no meager theme park ride.
I don’t know if we choose the life we’ll live … I tend to think not, since that would mean there is an I who chooses, who is separate and defined beyond the sneaky sticky superlative appearances here in duality. Choosing sounds like fun, but it seems though, to be one of the ways we hang onto our immunity, our invulnerability, one of the ways we try to outsmart life and end up hardening our case for separation.
That’s what ideas of ascension, rapture, heaven, life after death, winning, crossing a finish line, waking up, becoming enlightened, do. They are all the same story written with slightly different twists, and they have one mostly unconscious purpose: to stave off vulnerability.
We cannot but fail though, and something within us knows that (perhaps that is why we are so mixed up and unhappy), for what we are is vulnerability … at the whim of the universe, semi-trucks running down a twisty mountain without brakes. All the pain and suffering, the anxiety in our minds and tension in our hearts and bodies, is our attempt to not feel that truth, to avoid our natural state of open unfettered naked vulnerability.
It is a genius design, using the word design loosely. What we most want is what we will do our damnedest to avoid. No matter how many times we read the words or hear to just let go, to let it be, to simply be here now, we tense against it and hold our breath, waiting for the magnificent beauty of our innate vulnerability to pass.
We keep looking for something else, something that will deaden the pain a bit, a trophy that makes life less vulnerable, not realizing that what we want is to feel it all, to be totally alive, to let life rip through us like a tidal wave,
I can’t tell you what to do, let alone how to do it … that’s life’s job (well, not quite true since I’m life too .. as are these words). Life is quite adept, one-pointedly precise at providing the perfect experiences for each of its expressions (you and me) to expand and evolve, even when it doesn’t look that way. Life has us. Of course it does. It is you (and me) the formless and in-form you.
Every experience, yes .. even the ones you twist and try to turn about, are escorts down your uniquely exquisite path to the recognition of absolute vulnerability or said another way — limitlessness. Will you get there this lifetime? That’s a trick(y) question, for there is nothing else to be, no you, no there, not even a here … isn’t this a hoot!
Let your little truck race as it will … it’s going to anyway. Tapping the brakes, or slamming them to the floor, isn’t going to help one bit.
Like this? Check out Amaya’s new book, Actuality: infinity at play, in paperback and e-book at Amazon … https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY
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