I've just had the most amazing, magical weekend. I returned to London for a classroom on Friday night which was so powerful in terms of showing me just how powerful our individual identities are and how they prevent us playing powerfully as a team. The identity is all about keeping in place the point of view that we are all separate and alone and yet the truth is that we are all connected and united. I attend these evenings and am so fascinated about what I see operating. I don't know whether it is my Buddhist background but now I relate everything to the battle between identity and possibility, or between ego and soul. This is the game that all of us as human beings are engaged with whether we know it or not. To be able to see this gives a certain simplicity to life because I recognise that every tension is that of the identity and is not personal. So when I'm speaking with people I speak about that part of us that wants to keep us small and separate and how it works not to have us be powerful by making sure that we don't keep our word around things, and yet it's not personal. This is where the real liberation comes in, it's not personal, it's not about me, it's about a cosmic battle that is going on at a much deeper and higher level and I am just fodder for the game. To recognise and laugh at the game is to be free.
After the classroom we all went down to the pub. I am amazed at how much freedom and ease I feel around people now. I really understand that all there is in conversation is managing others and my own point of view. If everything is only a point of view then what there is to do is to become interested and fascinated by other's point of view. This genuine interest without having any desire to change or influence it is what is making me be a very good listener and in that listening I am seeing things I have never seen before. A lot of this I also understand has come from my insight into how I had to control everything and giving that up. It is the giving up of the control and going with the flow in any and every situation that is giving me the magical life I am living at the moment. On Friday night I was in the pub with people until almost 1am in the morning. This is unheard of for me. A friend was putting up me and another woman and in the end he drove five women and a chello home!.....it was the most fun and exciting evening.
I woke up on Saturday morning so excited. I was doing a double agreement because I had missed one and being my word means doing all of the agreements that I said I would do. In the afternoon I took the role of leader of the team and I was just amazed at how much freedom and ease there was. So different to when I was accountable and I lost it. Then I lost it because I wanted to control everything. This time, I said what we were playing for and what we wanted to achieve and set up a support structure and then trusted and got on with speaking to my own graduates about the power of communication and what it can provide in their lives. Out of one conversation I got a registration. It is never about the registration but the thrill of knowing that there is another person who is now going to take communication to a much higher level by learning new communication skills. Communication which increases love and affinity between people and reduces the power of the identity to maintain the illusion of separation. It is this that lights me up.
At the end of the agreement my team were so complimentary and I really understood what was said to me once a long time ago. A man once told me 'when you put your ass on the line for something, you become someone' I became someone yesterday and the memory of that experience will never leave me. I'm under no illusion that the identity is there ever ready to attack and I will have more dark times that no doubt I will write about in this blog, but I was not my identity when I was leader yesterday, I was nothing and in that nothing I was everything, if that makes any sense. I was all set to return after my agreement when a friend invited me to a party that was going on and my first thought was 'no I should get back' and then I immediately thought, why not, this is life taking on and doing things which I wouldn't normally do. So in spite of not having any change of clothes I said 'yes'. I ended up going out to this amazing party and then coming home and going to another pub and meeting up with this man who has a conductor in an orchestra. It was the most fascinating conversation and he was so sensitive. He spoke about those moments where the orchestra becomes more than the sum of its parts and I listened completely entranced with everything he was saying. There were two others out with us who also played in an orchestra so the conversation was so interesting.
But it was also the same, in terms of the experience giving a peak mystical experience where the conductor feels no separation between him, the music and the process of conducting. Everything becomes one. This state is often achieved in meditation especially with serenity meditation as opposed to insight meditation. To achieve this state of unity where the boundaries disappear is the aim of every mystic. It is the experiencing of the third stage of the spiritual path - KNOW THE ONE...it doesn't get any more profound than this.
So this morning found me up early and ready to return which I now have. I'm in an internet cafe writing this because I haven't had any internet at home and as the people I live with are away there is nothing I can do until they return. It's so funny I have never been bussier but then again I have never left so alive either.....
