Rise Renewed

The world can be an exhausting place. I don’t mean physically exhausting, at least not from physically running around. I am talking about mental exhaustion that comes from watching the news, going to a dead-end job, or living a life that seems far removed from the challenging career that we all dreamed about when we were six years old (you know: fireman, doctor, policeman, Superman/Spiderman/Batman or maybe Supergirl/Batgirl/Wonder Woman).

But we have arrived wherever we individually are, and adulting is now a way of life. Paying bills is as natural as breathing, and turning on the news is something we do without judging the impact it will have on our ability to be centered.

How do we live from a place of Peace, Love, and Joy?

My usual answer is, “slowly, we turn.” Sort of like a massive aircraft carrier making a U-Turn. We have so much inertia that making the change is a process. We hardly see it happening, except when we think back to how it was last year, and we realize that we are no longer who we were. That is the reward we get from the daily spiritual practices, the prayers, the reading, and all the classes we take.

But sometimes, the change is rapid. There is an “AHAH” moment, and we are suddenly transformed because being who we were is no longer in alignment with what we think we are. I call these “God Plop” moments. They are an experience of the Divine that we have never had before.

I remember the first one I had where I attributed it to God. Before this, I had only experienced moments of awe that I attributed to nature, where the beauty of what was around me took my breath away. But this was different. I was not in nature but the classroom at Namaste, a Center for Spiritual Living in Long Beach. It was choir practice, and Soni (the music director and a practitioner) was praying us out. My heart was already full from singing and being in community with my friends, and as she started to pray, I lost my sense of time, and the boundary of my individual beingness seemed to spread out so that I felt at One with all that was around me. It could only have lasted for seconds, but I changed at that moment, and I would never be the same.

That moment was far beyond accepting that Spirit must be there, and having that visceral experience of the Divine shifted my understanding forever. Not only was I assured of the existence of God, but I became consciously aware of my connection to It. I knew that I could never be separate from It, and my intention was now to move closer to it all of the time.

The effect on my life was that the old me burned away, and the new me was able to rise and be renewed by a new understanding of everything around me. I felt the Presence of Spirit, not as something outside of me, like the burning bush from the tale of Moses, but as Life that is closer than my breath. I came away with a new relationship with my soul. Since Spirit creates our life based on what we believe, this fundamental change in my understanding of Spirit meant that everything was different. My reactions to life morphed, and the mental exhaustion that I had felt from the buzz of living In the modern world faded away.

Whether you change your life step-by-step or by having a God Plop moment, know that you can always rise renewed by having a different relationship with Spirit.