Showing Up
Pat and I had our sharing time before our meditation time on this Labor Day morning. We reflected on our families and their challenges, wondering how to be more supportive of them in their significant challenges. Then Pat felt it time to meditate, but she invited me not to join her, which would be breaking a three-year daily routine! I sat with her invitation and decided to stay on the porch while she meditated. I wasn’t sure what would happen.
Immediately I realized that reading a Pathwork lecture would be what I most deeply wanted to do, to be with this material. To take it in even more slowly. The next lecture in my recording project is 174 Self-Esteem. As I began, the words of the greeting penetrated me, receiving the Guide’s love and blessings on me.
After the greeting, the lecture began by speaking of our problems related to Self Esteem. I paused before even getting through the first paragraph of introduction and a string of insights floated up. I am so nourished by these experiences with the Lectures and with my own reflections stirred by them.
Here was the reflection that arose. I could see a Puer Eternis (Eternal Boy) in me who had not taken responsibility for manifesting his life. I could see this boy having fallen into the work-hard pattern of being responsible to others and to society, finding his identity within the social, family, and religious structure around him, but a boy who left his true self undeveloped. He had adopted a “reward/punishment” belief to life. “Please others, please God even, and you will be accepted, respected, and liked.” This form of responsibility constituted his ego development and by this he got along well in the world.
But in the end this boy was tricked, because while he was accepted and respected by others, this acceptance and respect by others was not what his soul longed for. His soul longed to manifest his true self, but forever young Gary would not take responsibility for manifesting Gary. He had become alienated from his true self.
The life he had created was so deceptive, because in a way Gary had a good life. It just wasn’t his life. I had not taken responsibility for becoming me, whoever “me” was destined to become.
So let me bring some awareness into the picture right now. What enlivens me right now? It is not, in this moment, meditating with Pat! Rather I feel quite enlivened just sitting here on the deck reflecting on the few words of the Pathwork Lecture and feeling the arising of this insight of my self-alienation! And I feel alive in putting these reflections out in this blog. This blog could be narcissistic I suppose, and there is an inner critic within that could go there in a heartbeat, but on a deeper level, at a feeling level, this blog seems to be my way of showing up. It matters not whether anyone reads any of these entries, but only my experience of joy in expressing my deeper self into the Cosmos. As the Pathwork says, this is my way of squandering myself into the planet.
So this has been my “morning practice” while Pat meditates. I feel alive and refreshed. Eager to be in this Now as I enter the day. Yes, this is me, rather than meditating as I have been doing for years. And this, too, could change, and when it does I’ll go with that! I feel a freedom in all of this as I drop another “ought to” pattern.