“I am part and parcel of the whole and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
The search for love is fundamental part of human nature. Leading us from peeks to valleys outside of ourselves, at a certain stage we turn – or are turned – inside with an inquiry into the nature of love itself. What is it? Where is it arising from? Where does it lead? How could it be lost or won? For many, a paradigm shift occurs when love itself moves them beyond personal identification, and even beyond identification of the “object” which is sought for love. In this liberation, an understanding emerges of the omnipresence of love – regardless of time, space and form – and a process emerges to blend with it and allow it into the mind, gut, heart and body.
Blissful and unidentified, unconditional and unlimited, this love unconfined by identification can lead to periods of bliss. Yet such episodes (recognizable at the end of a healing workshop, or after a sudden unconditional deepening of heart), have a whiplash. This has been written about in books such as After the Ecstasy the Laundry by Jack Kornfield.
“Enlightenment is only the beginning, is only a step of the journey. You can’t cling to that as a new identity or you’re in immediate trouble. You have to get back down into the messy business of life, to engage with life for years afterward. Only then can you integrate what you have learned. Only then can you learn perfect trust,” writes Kornfeld, quoting a Zen Master.
Such is the nature of unconditional love, that as the spiritual teacher Bob Moore said: “Love is a law that operates in such a way, that you and I cannot dictate to it, we can only blend with it.”
As such, love, the great harbinger of unity, will lead our attention directly to the exceptional – to those areas where love is not free. This can be areas of energetic contraction, reflected in a narrowing of perception and a constriction of mental thought processes. It can be towards areas of trauma or grief. It will – more often than not be to those parts of our physical, psychological and sentient form where we are wounded.
In every cycle of healing, small and seemingly minor, or at the core of karma connected with the mother wound and the shock of our incarnation, love will trigger a reaction. And while allowing love to do it’s work in and of itself can bring a magic of healing, there is a deeper power, arising directly out of the source, with which we might have even deeper conflicts. This power is recognizable as the energy of peace.
The Core of our Psychology
Regardless of our beliefs in the individuality of life before birth or after death, there are three factors which are indisputably found at the initiating core of perception of being here, alive.
Whether or not we believe in life before birth, at the moment of our conception there was a unity; A unity of the sperm with the egg. A unity and seamlessness of the life within this collision with the life outside of itself; a unity and seamlessness with the core or source out of which we emerged (even if that source is nothingness).
Whether or not we believe in life before birth, at the moment of our conception, there was love; the love of one human touching another. The love of the cells within the body of the mother, assembling themselves for new life; the love of her mother, and the mother before that.
Whether or not we believe in life before birth, at the moment of our conception, there was peace; the peace of undivided wholeness; the peace which is the background to the miracle of perception; the peace which is here prior, during and after every physical creation.
As such, many of our deeper karmic wounds are to do with these three aspects, and where our connection with these aspects was lost through the confrontation with the vibrations of the physical dimension – and our identification with those vibrations. In short, belief systems become built on structures of belonging, aversion, grasping and survival.
With the last structure – survival – peace can be perceived as a death threat. Peace is returning back out the of the door of conception rather than embracing the vibrations of the imperfect mother and environment with unconditional love. Peace is to give up the struggle for the unity so recently lost. Peace is death.
When Peace comes to find you.
Wherever we surrender to love, peace will soon seek to surrender us to itself.
Conceptually, perhaps, the idea that peace can be apprehended instinctively, emotionally and psychologically as a threat can seem outrageous. Who doesn’t want peace? Why would we try to resist it? Why would we panic when peace is coming, and coming for “us”?
Yet the paradigm shift beyond mind that allows us to open the heart to allow the presence and flow of unconditional love through all the empty fibers and spaces around and within all we believed ourselves to be, will rapidly bring peace. And then we can discover ourselves diving head-first into the “Laundry”.
Where could the conflict with peace be? Here are just some of the areas into which we are liable to find ourselves suddenly entangled.
– How can we find peace when there is such cruelty in the world?
– How can we allow peace in the whole area of intimacy when we are so liable to violated?
– How can there be peace when we could be shamed, blamed and banished from the group?
– How can the allow peace when there is death and loss?
Reactions to peace can bypass thought processes altogether, moving directly to the 2nd brain in the stomach. Connected to our conscious brain through the vagus nerves, this center of physical and emotional reactivity can literally scream “NO” to peace, as if it is a death threat.
Peace can literally be experienced as undigestable. Peace would mean breaking the basic energetic contract of incarnation which is found in the natal identification of the baby with the atmospheres, contractions and subtle behaviors of the mother. It also allows the possibility of unity between male and female aspects (mother and father) which can be so deeply wounded in early energetic conditioning. Feelings can vary from a dread of deep betrayal, horror, jealousy or even an all-out terror of death.
These are the feelings of thwarted peace. When we meet such contractions inside ourselves, especially after boundless experience of love, it is extremely important to not try and pursue, possess and tie down the apparently lost love, but to take the frightened body, inside and out, and encourage it to allow the care, love and support of peace.
Peace is not a death threat, it is the source of love. It is the first vibration emerging out of the deepest non-identified, non-reflective source of all we are. Peace is not a restriction on the possibilities of living, it is the that which releases all the possibilities. It is not the end of life, but the source.
When we instruct the body to relax, inviting this peace into the contractions cell by cell, we can begin to reunite with the imperceivable, powerful, universal support that has always been a backdrop to all our relationships, no matter how damaged.
Unconditional peace is not surrender. The opposite of surrender if war. Beyond the twin dance of was and surrender, between every object and within every form, in the most intimate breath of our inner vulnerability, to the distant precincts of the physical universe, this peace is here for us, and we are here for it.
Indeed, there is no separation.
