Open To The Dark

You don't need to construct a higher self or a happy face to deny your pain, your world-weary anger, or the loss you feel this moment. Just let your wound stay open, and the wound itself will flower.

If you are closed and your shell is hard, open to the dark ocean. Don't resist the tides of fear. Breathe every chaffing grain of sand into the mollusk of your heart. Embrace the jagged edge and splinter of the world. Split open down to your soft core, until you awaken the vast space, for it is this uncreated vastness that opens you, and its already there. What seemed like emptiness was calling you all along.

A fist is closed tight. It opens and is empty. Then you discover it is this very emptiness that opened the fist. Nothing from outside pried it. Unconditional vulnerability is your invincible strength, your nature. When you touch your core, the dark contracted bud that seemed so heavy with the toxins of human sorrow suddenly blossoms into one entangled whole. The fragrance of this wholeness is love.

How can such alchemy happen in the effortless depths of surrender, at the very moment when you feel that all is lost? Because all.... is.... lost. So you let it go. You no longer identify with the particular contents of your awareness, but with awareness itself, which was always empty and clear.

This emptiness, this sense of loss and lack, made you search. You wanted to fill it with something, some teaching, or teacher, some God or vision. But all along, this very hollow was your nature, the hollow space of pure Existence. It is not what you're looking for, it's where you're looking from. No need to fill that hollow essence with some-thing other. Breathe it forth as a gift to the world, for that is the secret dark ambrosia others are thirsting for, and it is you.

Beneath the fleeting sensations of the world - some pleasant, some painful - is the continuum of awakening. Yet awakening is not a miracle. It is simply the mirror that underlies its reflections. Images in your mirror may be terrible storm clouds of despair, or summer flowers. Let them burst, pass away, and return. But the nature of what mirrors them never changes: the unfathomable clarity, the immaculate stillness you are.