The Field and the Feel of the New

New Year's Retreat 2011-2012

When we sink our attention down into this felt vibrating ocean, we can start to discern the energy of immediacy, the energy of aliveness, the energy of nourishment. We can also start to discern when that’s lacking, when there’s a feeling of flat or dead--no juice. Every aspect of the constructed “me” is old and dead and flat—the sound of the voice from there, the feel of the energy emanating from a being who is speaking or loving from there. The “me” is a dead remnant of a moment once alive, now gone. To live embodied in God, as God, listening to God, is like feeling into what is alive--what words are alive, what action is alive, and moving as one with that. This is the new. Through manifestation, the Holy is giving birth every single second to a whole new world. A world dies and is reborn, everything, a continuous blooming and dying off. When we cling to things that are older than just here, just now, we remove ourselves from our source of joy, nourishment and aliveness and we suffer. Instead of surfing the wave of immediacy, we build a concrete bunker in the middle of the ocean and get inside it. You can feel in the space when someone shares something from the quaking naked immediacy (yum!), and when something is encumbered with past encrusted concept (ho hum). You can feel and taste the difference.

In any given moment, there is felt information coming from this field. It doesn’t come to your head. This information is about what’s real, what is, and what action, or inaction, word, deed or stillness presses your body against the body of the Beloved as one. But to hear and feel this, at first anyway, we have to slow down, because we have to be softened open, below conceptual speed reality, to the texture and movement of this now and its texture of aliveness.

It builds on itself when we’re willing. When we find ourselves softened open to the field and something real moves and we follow it, the bridge of embodiment is strengthened. Our bodies sense that to be real and here and open and willing has its own reward. The field actually feeds the body--it’s almost like little doggy treats when we risk to stay true. Everyone around us might be freaking out, our life might be falling apart, but inside, every time that we adhere to that feel of aliveness and rightness and wholeness we are basically participating in God rather than battling God. There is an ancient conditioned habit in us to be on autopilot and to let our conceptual strategies, both conscious and unconscious, run the show. Same as it ever was. The body knows that that does not bring the kind of food we’re looking for, we’re longing for, we’re starving for. We can focus on some kind of big bang awakening down the road as the grand solution to this starvation, this agony, but in every moment, the awake, vibrating, quaking invitation is right here in the felt field. Will you dance with me? Or will you ignore me, be unconscious of me, and follow your own godless way?

So much of this is unconscious, so that when we name these things, we have to constantly add a blanket of mercy on ourselves for the unfortunate fact that we are human. It’s only unfortunate until we realize how fortunate we are… just to be here. To notice that, we have to let go of all the demands we’re making about how it should be and open to the feel and miracle of how it is--the feel of the new, the feel of the birthing. You can feel in your body the feeling of the new through this softening, opening, dropping attention into the field, every cell opening like a little cup to the immediacy and vibrating of just now. Let everything else fade, all our security blankets, our teddies, our bunkers. The Holy wants us naked, unprotected, clueless, open and innocent, so we are soft enough and open enough to hear her. Every bit of suffering comes from hauling something from the past into the present and worshiping it, and turning our backs on what’s here, alive and vibrating. So welcome to the last day to which we’ll give the name 2011! Every moment there is a sunrise, there is a birthing, there is, as my friend Elle says, the rosy glow of a new day. We have to feel for it like an anteater sniffs out ants, fall in love with it, risk our lives for it. Welcome to the new!