On Emptying: Part One
This year was the year of emptying myself.
If I’m honest, my entire life has been a journey of emptying myself. But this year, in a deep, deep spiritual sense I have been invited over and over and over again to empty - to become nothing.
When I heard Elena Brower’s words: “…and I am disappearing…” in her Instagram Live yesterday, my heart opened wider and I felt an old and familiar gnosis which touched a holy ache in me.
I crave not knowing; of being so empty that I can only be filled…wide open…in full surrender.
The “disappearing” Elena spoke of is rooted in yogic and Buddhist philosophy, and I also know that the Sufis wrote about the “Nothings” which I learned this year from a beloved sister who shared her wisdom in the Soften Sanctuary each week in a series of classes called “Embodying the Devotion of Love.”
“Nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as ‘I’ or ‘mine.’ Whoever has heard this has heard all
the teachings. Whoever practices this has practiced all the teachings. Whoever has realized this has realized all the teachings.” - Buddha
I remember sitting in a light-filled studio in San Francisco many years ago, during another yoga teacher training with Rusty Wells mesmerized by the philosophy lessons. We were learning more about Aparigraha, at that moment I was steeped in my aloneness and letting go in big, big ways. I raised my hand and asked the teacher if there was any danger in getting too light, or too unattached. I honestly wondered. And he said, yes… (After all, I’m reminded by reading Meggan Watterson’s wise words that we are 100% Divine and 100% Human at the very same time, and “the body is the point” of being here.)
The Sufis say: Your innermost core is emptiness, pure sky, or nothingness.
They call this fana or dissolution.
When I think about all that we cling to in this lifetime: our emotions as we feel them, our wounds that keep us bound and running in circles, our beliefs that are hard to challenge and even un-do, our conviction with each certification and training we accomplish…add in what we read, experience, and feel deeply as if we “know.”
Even more, all of the things and the people…the way my heart ‘clings’ to my niece is real, and very human. The Taurus in me covets the altar treasures I carry with me when I travel…and my precious books collection is out of control.
This year has been the culmination of great emptying. In the wake of losing my favorite sister, and my thyroid in two major surgeries to remove cancer, I found myself emptied in big ways so that I could be filled with my husband’s love: we were married in February of this year. This could not have happened for me, until I healed my own inner masculine and papa wounds, which filled me with so much density that I could not open in ways that I deeply desired to.
In September, on the mountain where Mary Magdalene’s cave is, I received my newest mystical revelation which emptied me in the most profound ways (I’m still integrating, actually)…what if everything I thought I knew about Jesus was not true? What if there is another story?
On the last day of our pilgrimage, in an ‘extra’ morning practice that felt incredibly divine, I handed each sister a cup of water and called it cacao as we began together. I invited each one of them to receive the “cacao” just like I had the days before…only this time we were all receiving an invitation to empty ourselves of everything we thought we knew, so that we could be filled…
“When your mind becomes vacant,
endeavor to fill it with the awareness of God and His contemplation.”
― Anandamayi Ma
I find myself, just days before the end of 2023, taking inventory of all that has fallen away this year and in years past, feeling into this emptiness, the thought of becoming nothing…asking myself in this still and sacred place if any of this feels terrifying or unstable, and there is nothing but space.
What happens when you don’t know? What happens when you don’t have the title, the wisdom, the degree, the answer? What happens when you are alone? Without? What happens when all that you thought you knew turns out to be untrue?
There is an emptiness, a space, a light-ness, a void…a blank sheet of paper, an open and surrendered heart…
Ready to be filled.
I’m feeling crystal clear about the exact things I’m desiring to fill this space of me in the coming days. There will be a lot more stillness for conversations with God, there will be a season of art and more poetry, there will be bigger devotion and even bigger service. And, I’m feeling deeply that the word and energy of the new year will be “altar” for me; as I recommit to the altar of me and continue to hold space for all of us to sit in sacred space together. I am craving the time to study faiths and praying for the ways in which this desire will fill me…feeling called, so called, to lead us into remembering that we are Love.
Gorgeous