Trust the benefit of the doubt
“Doubt comes when you care, It’s not bear or human, it’s the worst people who don’t doubt. The good people, they doubt, because they don’t know which is the right path.”
~Lyra, His Dark Materials. Phillip Pullman
Trust me when I tell you doubt kicked my a*^ this past year. Luckily, I’ve got nothing 😉 to show for it, must be all the padding or is it the pad’ma..ing 🌼 I acquired as a yoga bum.🎁😂
What did I expect, trying something completely new? Changing gears, a shift in career? That it would be all smooth sailing, with no flailing? If you truly want to deepen your relationship and understanding of how to do something, try teaching it.
Yoga and Craniosacral Therapy (CST), two of my loves, are paths to health and wellbeing. So, please excuse my limiting words and expanding metaphors. But, both rely heavily on anatomical and subtle body perception and awareness, but like languages their grammar and construction differ. CST is a treat-meant of applied meditation. Meditation is a yogic skill cultivated to experience who we really are, our one-ness. They dovetail ✌️. I get ahead of my Self. Initially, I felt like I was being pulled apart by this duo lingo, and in acquiring greater fluency with my CST language, I was losing my mother tongue, which felt a bit scary, like flying through the air having left one trapeze bar behind not sure if I would catch the next. I felt parts of me slipping away. Sometimes, we must go beyond words, so my whimsical genie, my writing partner, politely took a walk about, went on a hi-atus. Nothing truly yours though is ever lost. Experiencing and knowing this, one can find comfort with each catch and release feeling the pure joy that moves through us and the air when we are held by nothing. Flying….
Whimsy, my writing voice, finally got the sabbatical she’d been wanting, let’s face it, these past few years, pandemic posts were a tad out of her range. And that’s when doubt moved in, set up shop and started selling tickets as a side hustle. “Was this what I was meant to do? “ Change can feel awkward…and doubt and I go wayyyyy back. So, I took doubt on, climbed into the ring, hoping to go the full distance. [I did] It was a slog. I did well in the first few rounds, I’ve got good footwork. I was floating like a butterfly ….just being me. And somehow, that’s when it happened, doubt backed me into a corner….got me on the ropes. And there it was…a KO in the 6th, I didn’t see it coming. Still. Conscious. I was down. Tears. Ground. Surprise! While out roaming, Whimsy, who I’d thought had left for Good, came back, and settled with my Sirius 😉 side. Doggone. Dame-ons. Balance is flourishing.
Brené Brown is fond of noting ….’if I ask people about love, they tell me about heartbreak, if I ask about belonging, they tell me about exclusion.’ So, If I ask you to tell me about trust, you will probably fill me with doubt. Maybe, it’s not so much that opposites attract, but rather that polarity is necessary for us to know what it is we seek to know. Do we need to know up to know down, right to know left, space to know intimacy, doubt to know trust and conflict to know peace? We live in a relative universe, does knowing everything require a context of knowing nothing? Paradox points me toward truth.
But how do we know a true path, a calling, maybe for some even the exquisite joy of the one true thing: a dharma? Does dharma run out? Like a stream running into a river showing us a fuller path to the ocean? How narrow or wide will the lens of our purpose in one life time be? It’s doubt-full, you will know, until you get on the path and feel light underneath you… flying.
I recently came into possession, 😉 my 8th translation and interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita. Must I be a collector to know how to let go? It’s the way it’s going. 😂😍 And why so many? Won’t just one 😉 do? 8 just might be my lucky number….Yes Ma’am, No Sir …Titles, often provide illumination…as does punctuation, both of which seem so out of fashion.
The Bhagavad Gita, ‘the Song of the Divine’, a power accessory ‘peace’, long cherished and well worn, carried faithfully by the likes of Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, is only a chapter, it’s clutch though, a fulcrum, from a much larger tome, the Mahabharata, which at 10x the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, with 1.8 million words, is perhaps the longest poem ever written. And y’all know how I love a poem. 😉
I, 🐉, “When Love Comes to Light”, written by the teacher, of one of my be*love-d teachers, has turned out to ….be well…..a highlight. 💫 Wells and highlights, Earth and stars, Is true love simply a ladder of trapeze bars…. connecting earth, life herself, through the atmosphere to stars? Papa, please bring me the moon… Are they any different? Do names matter? Isn’t earth made from stars; aren’t we, y’all? And maybe it’s time to forget all this bullsh*t ….shiva shiva shambo….about living on Mars or being other than we are, and learn to love and care for what is already ours?
As the story opens, Arjuna is on the floor of his chariot, paralysed by doubt. To do his dharma, his sacred duty, as a warrior means hurting, maiming and killing the people he calls friends and family in service of a more just world. Must we sacrifice small self to know Self, love? To not do his sacred duty as a warrior means abandoning his own sacred purpose, to the peril of his own soul, and living in an unjust world wrought with corruption, cruelty, and greed: all causes of so much of the suffering to the same people Arjuna loves.
And so he lay, pinned down by doubt, caught between a chariot and a hard place, when he realised, came to know that it was actually not he, never really he, who held the reins and drove his own chariot, but Krishna, always Shri Krishna, the man he called friend, who turned out to be the greatest chariot driver ever, an incarnation of Vishnu, the G-dhead as the great preserver, who showed Arjuna his own true nature, that who we are can never ever be lost, not even in death, and so Arjuna lets go, and surrenders the reins…. the rains, and the reigns….
To surrender the reins, rains, and reigns, all the things that hold us back from knowing love, who we really are, requires trust; to trust doubt. And doubt pinned Arjuna to the floor. Still enough to feel and know g-d. [that’s Sirius grounding 😂] And as they say, when ya know, ya know. When you don’t, you gotta let it flow. And many of us, I would venture most of us rarely know anything, let alone nothing, the nature of g-d. And if you have ever grappled with her, Mother Nature, you know she has no thrones. So, we read of Arjuna’s experience and use it as our guide, and trust that if we follow in his footsteps all will be well. And yet, if you are walking someone else’s path, no matter how great their outcome. The path is not yours. And the Gita is clear, better to fail on your own path or dharma than to succeed, whatever that means, at theirs. Maybe great hearts carry the Gita simply for that, great re-minder.
The ‘key’ to waking, to knowing which path to take, then is doubt. Doubt opens the door for Arjuna to know something greater. And paradoxically and ironically, once doubt opens the door, and Arjuna or you move through it, you leave doubt behind. It’s My Life. No doubt. Thanks Gwen! You go on, albeit forever changed, doing your dharma, the thing you need to do, maybe even a one true thing. Trust, surrender to the not knowing, is a path to meeting doubt head on, TKO.
Walk the path as it appears, allow whatever arises to arise and whatever falls away to fall away, to disappear. See what stays. Maybe it, or you, are meant to fly.
The mature spiritual practice turns outward toward Seva, the work that needs doing in the world. So I’m crossing my fingers, trusting my feels, that this will be the first of a short series about Trust. In the meantime…
May you always know doubt to have no doubt. Light needs dark. Dark needs light. If you don’t know, lean back, and recoil 🐍 in both divine human and mother nature. It’s my love, it never ends, caught in the crowd…the art of life … connection that bends.
Trust, the benefit of the doubt.
All the best in 2023…
I, Drag-on, New Warm Mountain I Believe in YOU!
Change!
Offering y’all …
All the best light and love in the New Year. May you be well nourished by nature, Mother Earth, and the light that flows within you, the true Self, who shines as love to all who can feel its warm.
Much love,
Jai Ma,
Shelly x
Catch my very short playlist….It’s my life, No Doubt, catch the video, its clutch, Gwen does the Gita
2 tracks, so apropos: Dragon New Warm Mountain, I Believe In You and Change both by Big Thief
Part 2: coming soon….
‘Trust your Gut, Making it Visceral’
All love is for the Self; all longing is for an object.
~The Ashes of Love by Rupert Spira
And a special footnote…. A shout out, `Hari Om’, to a very special teacher, Padma Devi Peacefulheart, who held my feet to the fire, annealing me, and helped me find the way.