Is God in the brokenness?

I used to spend most of my young life believing that there was something wrong with me. I felt too much, and it was overwhelming and often painful. So I began to numb and to dissociate, I didn't have any elders or anyone to introduce me to practices that could help me become a wider channel for the immensity of life to move through me. So I made myself more narrow, more closed, more numb, I dreamt of becoming untouchable. This was a promise that lured me into early stages of spirituality, the promise of a holy land of detachment where we get to ascend (where?) up and out of this messy broken human experience.

Of course in my numbing, I could not feel much of anything. My lifeline with aliveness and with my eros was severed.

Then pretty soon after that I stumbled into some spaces where the teachings were founded on Shaiva Tantra philosophy and later down the line I was introduced to mysticism... The idea was introduced to me that everything is God, or the spiritual platitude many have heard "it is all one". But the Tantrikas took that to the furthest extremes - that if everything is truly the One, then everything is God, then everything is holy, then every experience is potentially a gateway to practice intimacy with the sacred. If nothing is more or less holy by its true nature, it is simply that we don't have the capacity in every moment to recognise that whatever is happening is drenched with mysterious source energy.

It was a path that was not teaching about good or bad vibes, just about widening our capacity to receive vibes, because it is all energy, and let it all enliven us as it moves (through) us. That everything that happens has the potential to awaken us, and that whatever energy is arising is inherently holy. (That doesn't mean that we never desire to change situations, or fight for what we believe in, it means that we do so in direct alignment to how Life wants to move through us). And whenever we don't see that, it is not because there is something wrong with us, but because we have forgotten. And we practice to remember. (Even the forgetting the Tantrikas would say, is the holy creative play of Awareness, to experience itself in infinite ways).

We practise to widen ourselves, to re-open our channel for life to move through as. To anchor ourselves back into the felt sense of the source energy of the highest. To re-sensitise ourselves to be with the mystery, even in our pain and in our grief, even when things fall apart.

These are broken times.

But god is also in the brokenness. In fact the paradox of mysticism is that we often have better access to a felt sense of god when we feel the most broken, the most on our knees. When we feel utterly lost, those times can lead us to being profoundly found. This is the initiation of dark nights of the soul.

xR