Your life is always working, whether you know it or not. Sometimes it works to bring you what you want, and sometimes it works to keep you from what you think you want. — Neale Donald Walsch; Tomorrow’s God
This is the last entry I’ll be writing within the framework of the Experiment – because it’s finished, and it’s turned up enough of a practice for me to let go of, satisfied that it has carried me this far, and that it has been a teacher beyond anything I thought was possible.
An important lesson came to me yesterday on my birthday. Thinking about being 55 and what that means it became clear that now I’m ready to accept my destiny as it is. All of the life that I’ve lived so far – leaving traces that co-determine what the present is for me and those around me.
Today learning that some of my family believe that my father is very close to the end, I think this is the one ‘thing’ I can give both my parents. And I’m thankful that they’re still around to be able to have me give it to them. If I were to formulate what the essence is of what I have to say, it would be this, “Thank you for giving me life and doing what you could to raise me. What you might consider your failings have influenced me making choices in my life that were not always in the best interest of everybody involved. I have hurt others and myself out of lessons from my childhood were I misunderstood what went on.
Where I stand now – at the beginning of the middle of my life – and where you are – drawing closer to an end – I need you to know, that even though I have behaved far from perfect I have been blessed by gaining an enormous richness of experience. I cannot know what would have been possible without you and what you co-created my life to be in the first 16 years of my life.
Whatever may be the case – and there are also movements that are very much beyond me – I have accepted this destiny and I pledge myself to live according to the deepest love, joy and beauty that is in me. You have co-created this moment in my life, thank you. Thank you.”
When I think about how I would call my practise then it’s Intentional Vulnerability. The vulnerability is a fact of life. To ‘plug in’ to the feeling-field I need to be vulnerable. I can either be vulnerable or I miss that whole area of unfolding life and not feel vulnerable. The strange logic I now have makes me see that vulnerability is a fact of life, as I said above, and it doesn’t care whether I feel it or not. Derestricting myself on the feeling level, the practice that evolved during the Experiment, I plug in to the feeling-field and am connected on the non-rational plane. Many, if not most, of life’s flow is happening on that level (today I found out that there is actually a tribe that lives within that ‘region of existence’ by the grace of their language), and being vulnerable, I am connected. This actually is not a choice, it comes with accepting your particular destiny as it unfolds.
When intentionally vulnerable I hold the space that all emotions need to unfold. Holding the space I do set a limit; the perimeter of the ‘sacred space’ in which I can hold space, where I actually am open to what unfolds in the inner and outer between-us’, where I can be with whatever comes as the host, the caretaker of the guesthouse.
So what about all the guests that visited me during the last month of this Experiment?
They have indeed “cleared me out”, and in a way “for some great delight” – not an ecstatic delight, more of a deep “This is indeed the way it is. And it is good.”
I might still analyze the blogposts that went before, but I do not feel that it is needed to come to a proper conclusion and rounding of the Experiment. I think the basic lessons are recorded; whatever else I might glean from the former posts, it is what moves me in the present and almost naturally that truly counts.