It’s Life After All

By Amaya Gayle Gregory —

Sedona, AZ –If I point the way and you follow it step for step, it can never be your own. I think that’s why people tend to struggle, sputter and fizzle out following so many prescribed teachings, including the teachings of the masters. Stories always tell us about the past. They’re echoes, retellings of how life was then, what that moment’s intensities brought forth, the actions that naturally fell out of a unique moment in time.

They don’t say, this is how it’s done, so do this. That’s all on us.

Teachings, at least the good ones, say, hey, this is how I tripped and fell, how I picked myself back up. They may even point to the tripping hazard so you can walk around it if you are paying attention. Following step for step pretty much guarantees that you’ll step right in the middle of the same pile of shite.

Rather than paint by number enlightenment, learning the right techniques, following the steps—which is what most of us want, either that or for someone to do the work for us so we can sit at the feet of a master and magically awaken—perhaps it might be more fun, not to mention rewarding, to do you, to lean into the dark corners you avoid, to find out what you’ve hidden there, to see the parts of you, the ones you’ve disowned, that want to come out and play.

Freeing the imprisoned radiance is what being you is all about, and what meditation and all the techniques and workshops point to whether they realize it or not. Waking up is the big reveal, a PhD course that unravels all the learned tactics that prevent you from simply being you. It’s not about finding something you aren’t. It’s about freeing the glory hidden by the lies of your inadequacy, your unworthiness.

The simple you isn’t so simple anymore. You’ve spent most of your life adding layers of complexity, burying the parts of you, the unacceptable bits, that you’ve stuffed into little coffins in the dark corners of your mind. You’ve jailed your wide-open heart, your innocent childlike nature, the little one who has cares deeply. You convinced yourself that this absolutely lovable being, the one who wants only to love and be loved, isn’t loveable, that something must have gone very wrong and s-he is broken and in need of a fix.

Oh sweetheart. It just isn’t so.

You’ve done it for so long that you don’t remember who you really are, what’s real, what the authentic you would look like.

How do I know? Because I am writing about my experience. I could be speaking to my younger self. Heck, I could be speaking to my current self at times. We humans are magnificently messy creatures, and I am human, just like you.

I have hidden my brilliance, dimming myself to hide in life’s shadows. It felt safer there. I’ve been afraid that one more hurt would do me in, that I didn’t have one single bounce-back left.

I’ve felt like I had a target on my back, that life had it in for me, that I must have done something really bad in a past life, so making a home in shadowland was instinctual. I was a wounded animal looking for a place to hide. It wasn’t something I chose. It’s not something anyone chooses. I needed a safe space, time to catch my breath, to retune my nervous system.

Perhaps you did too.

I have closed my heart to protect it from more grief, not realizing that closing myself off from life guaranteed more grief, creating exactly what I tried to avoid. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Closing off, and finding its blessed curse, opened me up again.

I have wanted and not received, loved and been rejected, risked and been betrayed. I have yearned to be included and found myself left out. We humans aren’t all that different from each other.

For a time I lost who I was. I forgot my true name and in my pain I hurt others. If there is a fall from grace, I fell and did not know how to get back up.

It’s life after all, and life will teach us all the ways we look outside of ourselves for love.

Thank goodness something magical happens when you give up, when you hit bottom and can’t defend yourself one more time, when there’s no way out, and you clearly see that all your back-up plans are nothing but a bunch of hype. When life brings you to that point of total surrender, all those layers of protection that you tended and worked so hard to keep in their place, all that meaning and purpose bleeds out.

We’re not supposed to admit all this stuff. We’re trained to hide it, but that’s just plain wrong. Most of the teachings are all about how to avoid this mess. Well, this mess is life. It’s my life and it’s yours. It’s our genuine authentic experience and there is nothing wrong with it. It is what it is, and we are what we are, and what we are when we are not hiding ourselves, is magnificent. Surprisingly, I find myself more in awe of the hidden gem too the further down this rabbit hole I go.

That’s what all real teachings point to, but somewhere along the way we thought they were pointing to a better me, a more enlightened you, when what they were touching into was the beauty of who we are in our unabashed vulnerability, our unleashed authentic expressions, our genuine compassionate beingness. All of which we have in spades when we simply allow ourselves to be nakedly real.

If life wants anything from us, and I tend to think it doesn’t want anything at all, it’s to be the innocent love we are, freed of the mental constructs of not-enough-ness, enjoying life’s bounty, sharing our authentic hearts with each other. That’s not some utopian fantasy. Life is love, and love just loves. Anything less can never soothe the ache.

Don’t know who the authentic you is? That’s okay. You’re in good company. Finding out is more than part of the fun. It’s the sum total of life.

Like this, and want to read more? Check out my latest book, Actuality: infinity at play. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

Photo: Barrie Thomas