Life is a mystically magical tangle of highs and lows, shadow and light, happiness and sorrow. Most of us want the highs and light and happiness without that other stuff. It may be natural, but it isn’t possible. Desiring the good without any of the bad, devising ways to win and conquer, or at least to not feel as bad, is life as most live it: round and round on the hamster wheel. It’s spiritual mud wrestling with a ghost, in short, the hero’s journey.
Funny that it’s called a hero’s journey. Makes it sound romantic. Looking back, it seems more like a comedy of errors.
Our hero, or heroine, doesn’t want to hear about the shadowy darkness, the valley of the shadow of death. There’s enough of that in life. That’s the reason for the journey, to escape the darkness. The star of our show wants to fill the holes with what seems to be amiss — love and light and joy.
There is only one problem and it’s a rather unwieldy one.
Love and light and joy cannot be separated from fear and shadow and sorrow. They are different aspects of the seamless sameness, the infinite aliveness that knows not two. The attempt to separate them, to choose one over the other, to look away rather than looking directly at, is the cause of all suffering and the impetus behind the quest.
Wanting the honey without the bee’s stinger simply cannot be. There’s no campfire without smoke, no blackberries without thorns, no life without the labor pains of birth and the last heartbeat of death. Life is duality. There is nothing seen without the perceiver, nothing thought without the thinker, nothing felt without the senser — nothing known without the knower.
Life is a joyous dance camouflaging a quick walk from cradle to grave, It is sunrises and sunsets set upon the backdrop of emptiness. The grave, the emptiness, are exquisitely synced to the spiraling forms, the kaleidoscoping colors of life. Neither exists without the other.
To want, to seek, only the happiness and light is to deny half of ourselves, to split the one that is not two into pieces, to make fractions out of the whole.
Our hero yearns for wholeness while grabbing for pieces, pushing away that which will heal, that which will whole. Life asks you to embrace it all. You already know this. Every time you turn away, everything you deny or dismiss, every way you protect yourself from feeling, from experiencing life as it is, just as it is, breaks your heart into smaller and smaller pieces. You feel it even though you may not know what it is you are feeling.
It’s not all bad news. There is good too. Duality has its perks. With each experience you embrace, even those you remind yourself to feel, every time you turn towards what you cannot bear to feel, each time you open your heart rather closing down, even if only for a tiny bit, when you actually allow yourself to truly have the experience in front of you, the gazillion pieces scattered on the floor reform, rewhole, reveal themselves to be the always unbroken, never fractional, heart of aliveness.
It doesn’t mean you will feel good all the time, that it will be easy, or that everything will magically be better. It means rather than being one of the walking dead, a mere fiction of life, you are willing to be alive, truly completely absolutely, to feel all of it, the joy and happiness, the light and the love, the frustration and anger, the heartbreak and sorrow, the silliness and insanity, and the loss and woundedness … every one of life’s precious experiences.
It’s hard to resist life, to hold your finger in the dam while the pressure builds. Have you had enough yet? The hero doesn’t win by controlling his mind and emotions, by finding her way to the golden chamber of all good. He wins by stopping the fight, by ending the search, by letting life be.
There is no appropriate bio for Amaya Gayle. She doesn’t exist other than as an expression of Consciousness Itself. Talking about her in biographical terms is a disservice to the truth and to anyone who might be led to believe in such nonsense. None of us exist, not in the way we think. Ideas spring into words. Words flow onto paper and yet no one writes them. They simply appear fully formed. Looking at her you would swear this is a lie. She’s there after all, but honestly, she’s not. Bios normally wax on about accomplishments and beliefs, happenings in time and space. She has never accomplished anything, has no beliefs and like you was never born and will never die. Engage with Amaya at your own risk.