ADVENTURES WITH RUMI
I was scared going in this time. Not for any particular reason. I wasn’t thinking of any reason that I should be afraid… but I was. My body was hot and pulsing with little shockwaves of adrenaline rushing through me.
I wasn’t going to let that stop me from going forward but I was hoping that some outside force would stop me so I wouldn’t have to go through with it but also wouldn’t have to back out (When writing that it sounds more fucked up than I thought it was in the moment).
I laid down and tried, unsuccessfully, to get centered while the bag was filling. Since breathing and centering didn’t seem to help I spoke up and shared my concern with the facilitator in my last stitch attempt to get out of it. I actually thought for a minute that by saying I was afraid he would say that I should just wait and do it again another time when the fear wasn’t there. Looking back on it I’m not sure how I convinced myself that that was going to happen.
He told me something that I can’t remember that I think was intended to comfort me… it didn’t work!
I inhaled…
Now I was laying there in fear while everything I’ve ever known of life or myself was being stripped away so quickly that I couldn’t grasp onto any of it. The fear quickly turned into terror while I tried somewhat hopelessly and desperately to hold on to something – anything.
This out-of-control stripping of my ego continued while I sort of swirled into, through and around the terror. At this point I had the awareness that I was in a room having an experience and that any moment I was going to be asked to take more. I wanted to fight that because I wanted out of the fear as soon as possible but I remembered to tell myself “yes”. And I allowed for more to come into my system.
Here, the stripping sped up and intensified until, after a couple seconds, everything was stripped away and I just was…
There was no more fear. There was no more terror. There was no more anything… except the beauty and ecstasy of “being”. All concepts of my reality and personality ceased to exist and I was in the experience of the one. The experience of pure love.
Then, all of a sudden, I was terrified again. Then I was in ecstasy. Then terrified, then ecstasy. This went back and forth half-a-dozen times or so until I got it… the terror is ecstasy! There is no difference. When we stop placing judgments and meaning on experiences they are all just expressions of the One which, ultimately, is pure love.
Once this clicked inside of me everything that I felt, heard and experienced drove me deeper into ecstasy. I felt the sensations of my body; every breath, every movement pulsate through me as ripple running through the pool of consciousness. Each sensation allowed me to experience a part of myself more deeply and more beautifully than I ever had before.
I laid there quivering, shivering, moaning, crying and laughing while I fell more deeply in love with myself and all life than I even knew possible. The shivers of joy and ecstasy continued to ripple through me as my conscious mind began to re-emerge. My mind slowly rocked in and out of my awareness. Each time it emerged I was able to consciously see how beautiful life is. Each time my mind set on the horizon I was more deeply filled with ripples of agonizingly beautiful elation. Rocking back and forth between conscious mind and pure awareness I continued to fall more deeply in love the sensations of being human and became increasingly grateful for the opportunity.
While I was still in this place of oscillating back and forth I was hugged. It wasn’t just my body that was being hugged. It felt as if every aspect of my being was being embraced, seen and appreciated. I opened my eyes and looked around the room to see the most exquisitely beautiful faces smiling back at me as if they too, got it.
To say that this experience rocked my world would be an understatement and wouldn’t do justice to the experience. I think the best way that I can sum up the entire experience is… Whoa!
