Turning Inward

Eager Night spreads velvety embraces earlier with each passing day. 

Those of us who relish Autumn’s gentling of the year are twilight lovers, too, and Autumn is twilight season as much as it is leaf-turning season. I love to watch night slip in like molasses, love to watch the world turn to gold as the skies dress in all the colors of Autumn in joyful harmonization. My breathing and heartbeat slow down, my thoughts still, and I turn my attention inward.

Winter encourages contemplation and stillness. The world sleeps, there are fewer distractions to anchor our thoughts in the world. We cozy in at night, draw the drapes to guard against the cold, and the focus is suddenly within the home.

For some, it’s excruciating. There are too many souls in this life who love not their own company, and so alcohol consumption goes up, and the really addictive television shows ramp up to hook the unwary so they don’t have to endure the profound loneliness of self-loathing. I know people who never turn their televisions off when they are home.

Wise Socrates stated, “An unexamined life is not worth living,” and he was so right.  

These days, we seem to be taught by most institutions–schools, churches, governments–to fear self-examination, to fear desperately what we will find in our own heads. But the Bible itself says quite clearly, “The Kingdom of God is within.” Heaven is not some exclusive club that we have to apply to years in advance to reach; it’s inside our own heads. All we have to do is lovingly, trustingly, sincerely, look within.

I’ve been frequently stunned at the lack of understanding people have of their emotions. Our emotions aren’t toxins designed to torment us or lull us into a false sense of security. They are tools that we can use to help guide us through the labyrinth that life presents every day. There are indeed forces of chaos who really and truly do exist just to add insult to injury and make everything we experience worse. Learning to navigate the emotions can help us ward off the chaotic dog-pile of additional stress.

Most Americans I know, self included, have been programmed to just keep going, power through, don’t give in, don’t let anything stop you, no matter what. And most Americans I know are suffering from the horrendous effects of stress, including depression, insomnia, anxiety, exhaustion, pain, illness/disease, cancer, migraines, digestive distress, immune distress, binge eating, alcoholism, self-medication or abuse of prescription medications, side effects of said medicating . . . I think you get the picture.

As a newly-minted sound healer, one might think I am rubbing my hands in avaricious glee.

As a decent human being, I would rather permanently heal everybody and be out of work than allow this needless suffering to continue. I’ll find something else to do. No worries about that.

But back to the point – does any of this describe you? Because I hit many of the high notes described above when I was living a normal American life. It has taken years for me, nearly a decade, to recover from that–and to uncover inner peace–and I still have much work to do. How am I doing it? By turning inward.

By paying more attention to the longings of my own soul than to the conventions that surround me.

By examining my past through a rational, adult perspective and seeing so much more clearly the stuff I didn’t understand at the time it happened.

Let’s face it, kids lack the experience to suss out the nuances and the undercurrents of adult interactions, which is invariably compounded by the habit of adults to speak in code about anything they think the kids wouldn’t understand anyway . . . How much of our childhood guilt and fear comes from adults trying their best to shield us from stuff they feared would upset us? Huge chunks of it, that’s how much.

But we can’t undo that damage unless we are willing to turn inward and examine it with our adult senses and adult minds and adult perspective on relationships and family.

We also have many layers of Karma to work through, and that involves some suffering as well, sure. But when we wallow in our suffering, or if we shun our sorrows, fight the fear, and distance ourselves from distress of all kinds, that Karma takes so much longer to clear.

Maharaj Sawan Singh (1858-1948), known as the Great Master, taught that all suffering comes from our past karma. We all have many past lives, some good, some bad. Mostly we just plodded through, totally unaware of anything other than our daily grind. Some of us were warriors. Some of us worked for the Inquisition. Some of us fought in the Crusades. Some of us slaughtered, murdered, raped, pillaged, sacked, burned, enslaved and tortured the innocent in order to conquer the perceived world. What if we were the very ones burning all those Witches at the stake (I’ll bet that leaves a mark on a few egos). I’ve suffered from ‘hot feet’ for years, unbearably hot, tortuously hot, can’t-possibly-sleep-with-feet-this-hot hot. I always thought it was some kind of past-life memory about being burned at the stake; now I have to wonder if maybe I wasn’t the one holding those innocent feet to the fire. (Still eager for that past-life regression? I mean, somebody had to have done all that stuff, ‘cuz it happened. Why wouldn’t it have been me and you?)

Don’t fight it, accept it with grace. Don’t feel horrified or guilty, because duh, you’ve grown and learned and become a smarter, kinder, nicer person, which is what is supposed to happen. Use this current suffering to help you become an even kinder person. Revere the sanctity of your own soul, and give thanks for the chance to refine and clarify it.

I had an interesting experience recently; I was driving around with my son in a town intolerably beset with road construction, which was clearly putting a lot of otherwise chill folk on the cranky side. Rudeness and aggressive driving were rampant. It got to me, and it colored so much of the rest of my afternoon that I found myself being really snarky and uncharitable about events and people than I ordinarily would have been. After I got home I noticed I had a sore throat, and that my tongue was very painful when I swallowed or moved it. Chewing was extremely uncomfortable. It felt very strange, and I wondered if I was coming down with a cold. I decided to have tea and do a little reading in the comfy chair, and just happened to pick up one of Master Singh’s books of letters to his disciples, The Dawn of Light, and read that line, “All suffering is because of karma.” I stopped reading, put the book down and accepted the pain in my throat and tongue as payment for the debt I incurred by being snarky and unkind. I later woke up in the night, as us post-menopausal types will do, and as I was trying to get back to sleep, I heard a soft but brilliant chime in my head, and my suffering immediately began to ease away. I said, “Thank you,” and it was over. Just like that.

Turn inward with love and humility. Examine your life, reverently, gently and with great tenderness. You can wash away so much pain with this simple remedy. Bless the Autumn for reminding us with its quickening dark to look within.

But seriously, does the above description of stress-related discomforts describe any part of your life? No judgment and all love here. Let’s hang out together and see what we can do about it. And hey, maybe you should come see me.