Open to the Fullness of Life
“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor ...”
This week, I have been alternately thinking of the above Rumi poem and the image of the yin and the yang. Last Thursday, I was humming happily along, moving forward with joy as I have been, and, BAM, I was hit with an enormous migraine. I have a migraine about once a year and they always take me by surprise. This one was different for me because even though I took all my drugs right away and lay down as soon as I had my light flicker, this one did not go away as they usually do when I take care. It was brutal! I think it is important in the context of you reading all of my inspirational bits that you all know that I was flat on my face on the bathroom floor, sobbing for hours. In an instant, my joyful and optimistic self plummeted to the absolute depths. I was in so much pain and my mind just went to every dark place. In that afternoon, I was absolutely a failure, nothing I did had any purpose, and all of life was just one loss after another. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say that the light was just OUT. And while I was miserable, I truly could not see a way back into the light. And no, it didn’t just spark back on. I moved forward dull for days, and still feel some of the residual.
What this allowed me to do was focus on the full nature of the gift of being alive in the moment. I kept seeing the yin/yang image moving fluidly, not so solid as it looks in the attached image. One full human, the dark and the light, all part of the beautiful experience of being alive in each moment. And the light is next to the dark, and you can move from one to the next. There are times when you feel like you are in the thicker, more absolute sense of the energy, and there are others that are more ambiguous.
We all have failures, loss, meanness, lonliness, shame, fear, and we all experience light, success, kindness, community, confidence. If we were perfect, if life were all sunshine and roses, how could we learn? To move forward into joy and a radiant life, sometimes you just need to process the loss - the shadow might just eat us up if we don’t spend some time there occasionally. The key is to try not to live there.
So, don’t worry about me, I am getting better and am so so grateful for all of my practices, my books full of wisdom, my reiki, my friends and my yoga community and my basic healthy nature because my journey out of the dark has been made smooth. When you are experiencing your own dark times, I hope that you, too, have some resources to call on. And, of course, I am always happy to offer you some light, love and support.
Copyright 2019 Nancy C Murray
Nancy C Murray is a yoga teacher, yoga therapist, Reiki master and spiritual leader. She leads public and private yoga classes and healing sessions and also retreats and transformational journeys.
If you would like to read the full text of the Rumi poem, click Here. I myself don’t have the copyright permission to print the whole thing!
