Art of God

This time I'm going back for my nephew, the only child in our family. He’s not yet two and my sister is a pretty good mom and my parents are great grandparents, but still: he needs one really sane person in his life. I’ve visited him twice. Even though he was initially suspicious of me this time, I'm relieved to know now that there is a solid connection. It resurfaced after a day or two and the little guy was right there with his gummy smile and his pudgy arms reaching up for Auntie Erna, a pure beacon of everything that's beautiful in my family.

And here I'm getting to the answer to my dilemma: feeling. Feeling might be the answer to all the questions that I could ever have. There is no getting to being except through feeling and as Brooks teaches, being is the key to changing reality.

We learn in Art of God that if we can let go of who we were conditioned to be by our lineage and society and just be who we really are, that significant achievement will change our lives and change the world. Feeling leads the way through all those illusory places of false self through to all levels of being of God and beyond. Where we are taught not to feel is where we have been programmed to be slaves to our history, to limitation, poverty and duality.

And unfortunately, I am first in line at times when it comes to the belief that not feeling is a really great solution when it comes to some of the crap we have to deal with in this world.

I have been dragging around these past couple of days with a brain that feels stuffed with socks, laden to the core of my being with all the trauma of my family. Me being the sensitive flower and sponge that I am, sometimes I really resent having to feel all that, especially since the rest of my clan insists there is nothing to feel.

Going home, I was determined to be who I am and nothing else, to show up at my high school reunion in all my prominence and glory. I wish that I could just enjoy the reality that the opportunity of going back is to become present in all the places where I, contrary to my bravest intentions, automatically merge with the trauma of my family and lose myself. But I don’t enjoy that opportunity. I hit those places where I’m going, “but I don’t want to” in my most brattiest voice.

So as a result, I didn’t feel very glorious or prominent there. I called Brooks and he said, you’re not feeling. I said, what! I am too feeling. But then he helped me experience a subtle level I don’t usually tune into and I could feel where my energetic nervous system was going into revolt. I realized that I’ve been doing this my whole life when I’m around my family. So I opened up and he said if you can stay here, anything is possible. Well, I'm good at opening, but staying there is a topic for a whole other essay.

My favorite song right now is the Chemical Brothers “The Pills Won’t Help You Now.” I always hear snatches of songs that have pertinent messages for me, and sometimes I pay attention. The words from this song that I’ve been hearing over and over again are “You’re probably poisoning your body/I hope you’re all right/and the moment you feel/you dig in your heels/the pills won’t help you now.”

It wasn't sounding like it had a direct meaning for me. Because, hey, I’m feeling, and I don’t take pills (anymore) so I’m not poisoning my body. But come to think of it, I can very well see how I am. So after a couple of days of being laid flat and sick I called Brooks again, and he said, “You need to let go. Let yourself take a poop. You’re releasing lots of family trauma and where you’re not letting go of it is where you’re reinvesting in it and it's making you sick.” That’s all that most illness is, he says.

Love that word, reinvesting. It’s such a great economic term, so Art of God and Gift of Sovereignty. I’m not saying that facetiously at all: it’s a perfect spiritual/emotional/economic term that unites all those concepts together, seeming to explain everything to me.

In my mopey state today I got started wondering why my life isn’t changing, where’s that guy I want to show up in my life, when are all those Art of God goodies going to start raining in my lap already. How am I going to be a world-traveling teacher when all my sensitivities make me so vulnerable when I step out of my comfort zone? I torture myself silly going on in that vein.

I am housesitting, so I had the luxury of an actual bathtub at hand. I sat in my Epsom salt bath with essential oils that I was still too stuffed up to smell, and I let go and opened and let go some more and I realized I was shut tight like an anemone all curled up inside itself. Squeezed into a little box, reinvesting in all the trauma I witnessed and felt with my family; my parents and their weird, never-ending drama, my sister grinding herself into a raw exhausted wreck with her 16 hour days seven days a week running a day care and taking care of a home and baby.

I was in so much pain about how she was doing it like our mother and our grandmother did it instead of the way that she could have if she had just been willing to be her beautiful being. I was reinvesting in the lack and survival consciousness, reinvesting in the chronic, unexpressed sexual trauma that clogs the family system. Reinvesting in God knows whatever kind of garbage that has nothing to do with me.

Not feeling is reinvesting in all the crap that I am not. I realize this is tantamount to buying something back that I never wanted in the first place at a much higher price.

I’ve had the same aha! 100,000 times: Aha! What am I squirming away from? If I just stay present in this pain, this yuck, this trauma, no matter how deep, it just goes away! It’s not real. It evaporates like wisps of fog in the brilliance of the sun, and that easily. Feeling my pain is painless, actually. And it’s free.

And feeling is freedom.

Did I know that I was avoiding my pain? No. That’s why I have the same aha! so many times. Did I really have to eat that pint of ice-cream/watch those seven hours of Weeds Season 2/engage in all the many more hours of self-loathing and negative thoughts? Yes, until I got tired of feeling safe with the misery that I know. And when I let go of any self-recriminations that waking up from a three-day stupor can bring on, then I get to go to the good parts:

I opened up and I could feel how when I stop contracting that guy I want is right there, a gentle presence that I keep saying “no” to because I can’t just relax and say “yes.” And it's not a yes to him that's missing, it's a yes to all the parts of me whether I like them or not.

I opened up even more and I could feel my mission in the world, all those great things I could be doing, all those many people’s lives I could be touching. And opening even beyond that, I was surprised to feel all this help: many disincarnate friends reaching down to me and cheering me on. I have a whole cheering squad out there. It feels like they want me to keep the channels clear so I can feel all their support.

And I’m starting to get it: If I could stay clear and keep feeling through all the yuck, whatever it is, then I could go to all the scary places in the world like home and still be only who I am, only who I want to be and only do what I want to do. Even better, everyone gets to enjoy and benefit from that, not just – but definitely including – my little nephew who’s still hanging onto his vulnerable connection with God.

Yeah. I think I’d rather invest in that.