a practice for the hard times

Hello Friends,

I have been quiet from you these past few months, on a healing journey, and write to you at some small point of culmination. Have you had those? I'm sure you have. I salute you in passing.

Today I am joined by a column of peace, a palpable thing, moving with me through the day. It is a peace all the deeper the more quietly attended to, the more I let it bloom forth without words. It is a peace I do not take for granted, as I know what it feels like to live without.

St Augustine said "God is not far off nor is he long in coming."

And sometimes he seems very far off and eternally long in coming. What of those times? Of those lifetimes? Because that is the way of it, it can be lifetimes. If you don't belief me look around. It is so. How do we reconcile that?

I have grappled with the inability to access God, some periods pronounced and intense, others for a shorter season. After some years of inner work, I surmised I was doing quite well. I felt peace often and awoke refreshed, not ensnared in what I experience as a 'pit of dead worms' in my chest. Yet over the last few months some of the old pain has returned, or more accurately, resurfaced.

And so, here is a practice in which I have found solace, even in the hardest moments. Perhaps we are ready for practices of this sort once the difficult times have softened a place inside, a place worn down and cleaved sufficiently that the medicine can find purchase.

Remember this when you have done everything you can, you feel defeated, and the old woe is still entrenched. So far it works for me even then, though I am sure I will encounter ever more along the way.

The practice is this; take all of the confusion, pain and despair, take it all at once in the fullness of exactly what it is right now, and give it to God. The mind does not know how to do this, but your heart does, not your emotional heart, but your true spiritual heart. Give it all, not as a misery nor by begging, but as an act of great love and devotion.

Do not leave anything out, if there are pieces of beauty and peace and love here, give them entirely to God as well, in the same moment.

Try this now.

Breath here, right now. Close your eyes and feel that you are here, now. Feel the room around you, the space of it. Perhaps even just doing this you feel better.

Let the breath come in and out, easily, on its own, in a way that feels good. Open to all of the little sounds, the movings of the day playing in their time around you, they play on as you sit. Take notice from here, now, the column of your presence here.

Once you are centered, open to the full content of everything in your field of awareness. Let there be no judgement of anything that you find. Keep expanding open open open around everything that you find here, now. Leave nothing out. Let your heart break if it will. And then, all at once, and without care of how, give it all to God.

Everything here is the entirety of what you have to give now. God does not mind what we give, only that we give it all, this means everything, the parts we love, the parts we hate, our jealously, the parts we don't understand, the ways of the world we believe are unacceptable. Everything that is actually here is, in any given moment, the sum total of everything we can give, so give that.

Leave nothing out. Lay it at the feet of God.

Let this complete giving happen with each breath. When the power of it fades, reinvigorate it by opening opening up up and around everything that is here, now. And then give it to God in one complete clear relinquishment.

This is a practice that can take you all the way to the edge where you know that you cannot bring a single concept to God. It is a terrifying and beautiful precipice that will tear apart the fabric of what you know. And from there, for now, you are on your own as I have not gone farther than that.

I write this for someone may need it today, and be helped.

Let us be so tender and kind with each other and ourselves, and when we cannot, may we be so tender and kind with that. It is as it should be.

I wish you so much love today,
Evangeline

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