Taking a Bite out of Karma
When I was 33 and had a spiritual experience through some psychological work I was doing, I suddenly realized that I was more than that person in a therapy group pounding pillows thinking she wanted to cast off the prison that had been constructed around her. I don't know that I even understood that desire in a conscious way. Had I understood it, I might have tried to put the layers back on. I remember shortly afterward attending a consciousness group called Erhard Seminar Training. After that weekend, there was such a feeling of freedom that I took up smoking, once again putting a layer of restriction around myself.
That new person was not to be denied although I tried. But it gave me a new presentation. Every time I felt the veil falling away and something new emerging, I would say to my friends I was having a new consciousness. This made them laughs, thinking it was just me being funny because neither they nor I really understood what I was trying to convey. Now I understand this to mean that I was trying to say that a piece of false self covering my true self had been removed. Through the psychological work that I was doing, I experienced a "realness," and in that
”realness" something was released within me or another way of saying, something was cast off of my person. I could not live the same life again and soon after repeated removals and one intense kundalini experience, I left the place I had called home for 4 years.
In the last few months, I feel the same thing happening; that I am again uncovering something inside of myself that has lain dormant over the years. I find myself impatient and insecure with meaningless conversation, people who live without awareness, and my own not desiring to do what came easily for me before, but which doesn't feel consistent with me now. The metaphor of peeling an onion which some psychologists use has truth in it, and as I go through my peeling, I look around to see if there are some who will support this change.
Even scarier for me, although I have lived on an ashram for over 30 years, I am shy about revealing that I have feelings for the various murtis and statues proliferating on this ashram. I am afraid to be found out, lest somebody think I'm crazy or tread upon what I am feeling is sacred. This is an old fear arising from when I was a young person who made some eccentric choices that people were quick to call "crazy."
Now I think of it as the "Hanged Man" in the tarot deck, where the figure is shown upside down. The card represents somebody who sees the world in an inverted way. That what was up is down and vice versa. Further, those things that you thought were important and credible are just as false as that smile you sometimes wear when something is not even funny but circumstances ask you to be sociable.
Looking for a logical reason for this feeling, I attribute it to perhaps it's the OA group I am now attending where my denial about my eating falls flat at these meetings. Or is it the fact that I pray to Dhanvantre, God of Healing, and finally he is listening to me. Or is it that I am holding Nityananda's hand and praying for discipline. Has he heard me yet? Or basically, is it the hour of exercise my heart doctor gave me that I am finally not resisting? And maybe it's the new medicine the acupuncturist has prescribed is really working.
Or is it something I dare not admit even to myself because then I would truly be living on a different planet from this one? Is it that I have finally taken a bite out of the karma with which I have been struggling for so many years? Is it time for it to be removed? Have I finally been granted that grace I have prayed for all these years?
I have known people to take off a mask and afraid they will no longer be accepted in "polite society," or whatever society around which they have gathered and grown their insulation. That scares me at times too; that I will not belong to the society I have held around me as a blanket. I am afraid that I will no longer have the friends I have relied on either. Jesus exhorted his followers to leave their families behind, to pick up their pallet and follow him. How true that sounds now to my ears. How freeing it can be. But am I willing to pay the price of freedom? I don't know if I am. When I sit still, this place feels familiar. I know I have been here before and run away from it. I don't know that I will not sabotage once more.
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