I think part of the challenge of being on a spiritual journey is that sometimes we can get all “Lama-Dama-Ding-Dong” about it. We think enlightenment is serious or we express these platitudes of love and peace and Kumbaya – when in actuality, real transformative, spiritual change occurs by getting into the nitty-gritty of it all. It occurs by working with our stuff. The stuff we judge to be too dark or weird or messed up. The stuff we tell ourselves that leaves us feeling untalented or unworthy or unlovable. The stuff that makes us feel separate and alone and alienated from everyone else.
And that’s the left brain’s job: to make us feel separate because of the nature of the thoughts we incorrectly think about ourselves. We are left feeling we’re the only ones who think this way.
Yet everywhere you look in science, it’s been proven that humanity is pretty much the same. We are all made of the same shared stuff of the cosmos. From billions of years ago, we contain the stuff that birthed the stars – we actually are stardust – and contain these same atoms that have simply been reconstituted over and over again through millenniums.
Our genome composition is 99.5% the same among all human beings.
Psychologically and emotionally we are the same. Yes, we each have different individual, conscious experiences along our journey, but the universality of feeling is the same for everyone.
If you but realized that the person sitting next to you on the bus or at the movies is confronted by the same stuff you are, you’d be a lot more gentle with yourself (and humankind).
But we don’t connect to the sameness that we share with people because we listen to our thoughts that tell us we’re stupid, a bad mom, we drink too much, are lazy, or watch too much porn.
These things are not robbing you from the light that you already are. These things actually jettison you into the light when you take them out of the dark, scary places in your head and begin to work with them, share them, bravely confront them, breathe into them.
When you do, two things happen.
You reveal back to humanity what it truly means to be human.
And you become the kind of person (and artist) you’ve always wanted to be: dynamic, empowered, exciting, dangerous, funny, present, creative, compassionate, real, honest, raw, expressive, sexy and fearless.
Now what’s “Lama-Dama-Ding-Dong” about that?