Core Training

“We cannot live without being affected by others, but we are only real when we let truth and love shape us from within. Our want to be liked, our want to avoid conflict, our want to be understood–all these traits tease us away from taking the voice within seriously. Though the Earth is touched by everything alive, it never stops turning around the fire at its center, and though we are touched by the stories of strangers and the far-off songs of birds lost in wind, we find our way by Following the spirit’s voice at our center. Too much is lost in waiting for someone else to tell us that what moves us is real.“
~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

We are gifts to one another, inspiration and salvation wrapped in skin. Hands and feet of God Her Very Own Self.

We need one another, like life needs skin, like a river needs its banks, like a blind man needs his hands.

And yet.

While it is often through the medium of another that I am most thrust towards the Universal, towards God, it is also through that same other that I find myself tripped up, stuck, paralyzed. If I’m not careful, or even if I am, it is this very other that can throw me into a tailspin.

It’s the long lesson of life, to find that still center within ourselves, to anchor deep, and to somehow operate from that center. It’s the definition of the spiritual life, to settle into who we are, to stop fighting what is, to plug in and connect with the Whole. To be one with the vast cosmos in which we spin and also the deep and infinite cosmos within each particle that makes me me. To learn how to be touched by everything that is, but never to stop spinning around that center.

“I shall become a collector of me…
I shall Become a COLLECTOR of me.
I SHALL BECOME A COLLECTOR OF ME…
AND PUT MEAT ON MY SOUL.”
~ Sonia Sanchez

I’m not finding the quote I’m looking for, so you’ll have to take my word for it, but Richard Rohr likes to say that a great teacher doesn’t show you anything new, but opens up a place within you where you finally connect with what you’ve always known. A great teacher doesn’t teach, but somehow throws light in such a way that you recognize the truth bubbling up within you resonating with the truth now filling your field of vision.

Talk about loving louder.

If we’re lucky, we’ve known some great teachers.* Some folks who have found ways to break through our crusty and oxidized shells and–often shockingly–brought to life something inside of us that has always been there but was never allowed into the light. They snuck in through a back door and liberated the parts of ourselves that we had been wrestling with in the dark. They gave utterance to the squelched bits of us that needed a voice so bad it hurt like a sunburnt lip.

Let’s not forget that we are all called to be great teachers in our own ways, simply by being our true selves, using our true voices, and living our true lives. One heart speaking to another and sparking–a combustive miracle–recognition, connection, union. One center allowing another to find theirs.

When we’re driving from the center, when the wheel is balanced and we’re not set a-wobble by our trickier desires–to be liked, to avoid conflict, to be understood, to be __(insert pretty much anything here)__--only then are we are able to hear the voice within and be our true selves, use our true voices, live our true lives. From that seat at the core, we are finally able to see clearly. Only then are we able to be a great teacher.

Only then is the God in me able to recognize the God in you–only then can we touch and be touched, inspire and save one another, yet not be throw from orbit.

Find your center. It’s time to love louder.