Possession is the name of the game, whether it is money, toys, power, life-style or
people. All wars, all strife, all crime, all cruelty, all subjugation of others, all persecution, all deceit and betrayal, is the enacting of our infantile insistence on getting, having and keeping what we want.
Not surprisingly, our intimate relationships have to carry a lot of this turmoil. I guess we all know the confusion and embarrassment of functioning as an adult body with adolescent desires acting out infantile needs.
Without a real commitment to our personal growth it
is very difficult to awaken out of the mass hypnosis that regards clinging and holding on to each other as love. Our traditional marriage vows actually honor and sanction possessiveness: "I take thee…to have and to hold from this day forth … till death us do part."
All our popular media feed us the message that if we love each other this means you belong to me and I to you, and the equally important adjunct, churned out in a million pop songs, that if you leave me, if I lose
you, I will die! This is not love. This is imprisonment and emotional blackmail.
Love says, "It gives me joy that you are you; and if I am hurt when you are not who I want you to be, I accept my pain and I let you be."
We are not yet this grown up; we prefer having to loving. We refuse the surrender that would begin our real awakening. Instead, we distort the meaning of love until we can’t tell the difference any more between "I want you" and "I love
you".
The journey from wanting to loving is the journey from holding on to letting go, from controlling to letting be. It raises us and transforms our getting into giving. It makes us rich within ourselves, but the journey requires courage because, quite simply, we are frightened of letting go.
As long as we carry this fear within us, it is as though we cannot let anything die. Holding on is how we protect ourselves. Letting something or someone go is allowing a kind of
death to happen.
We may go to church on Easter Sunday to celebrate the resurrection, but we have no trust in resurrection happening out of the deaths in our own lives. We only keep ourselves in the fear of losing.
Resurrection is the mystery of transformation and renewal through allowing death to happen. As long as we do not learn this, we are invested in our misery. We cannot open because we may lose something in doing so.
It is because we have lost ourselves in the
having and getting and holding on that we cannot experience life’s most exquisite moments. Letting go does not only mean releasing that which we are holding on to; in the very act of letting go, we let ourselves go into the mystery of this moment.
We become available to all the life moving in us and to the dance of existence that is happening here and now. Our relationship with the present is intimate and open. Not only do we experience the beauty in a smile, a song, a raindrop;
being present is in itself beautiful anyway!
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When death is allowed its natural place in life it offers us a thousand invitations to learn the opening that makes life beautiful.
Can you imagine, having learned death’s offered lessons, how dear it can then be to sit with a friend who is dying? If they too understand, then something sacred and ecstatic beyond words becomes possible. And if they don’t, your presence and your quiet understanding may slip
past their fears in some undefended moment and invite them to open in love and let-go to the mystery that is happening to them.
Now dying is awakening. This is the blessing death invites us to learn in our lives. This is what Shakespeare meant when he said, "Live each moment as it were thy last."
Learning how to let go is learning the real meaning of personal liberation. It means being free to flow with life happening, free to enjoy our own creativity and
inspirations. It opens us into our most vital and powerful potential for living - not wrapped fearfully around the things we’re busy holding on to, but enjoying the gifts life brings us, surrendered to that which is taken from us, and free anyway to do whatsoever.
We may still want to make a million, but if we have learned letting go, the endeavor is without desperation, without stress, because we are OK anyway, even if we lose a million instead. What all this means in short is that
death wants to teach us how to say goodbye, not as an ending, but so that we can say hello to this, here, now - whatever this here now may be.
| |  | © Alan Lowen
| | | | Alan Lowen leads workshops on this subject, entitled: The Universal Experience: A soul-touching Encounter with your own death
| October 12 - 15 | Dorset, England
Bookings: (+44) 1603 788221 | November 3 - 5 | Waldhaus Zentrum, Switzerland
(English with German translation)
Bookings: (+41) 34-461 0705 | December 1 – 3 | Stuttgart, Germany
(English with German translation)
Bookings: (+49) 761-409 303 | | | Other Workshops titles with Alan Lowen include: | | | October 19 - 22 | The Miracle of Being, Germany | November 10 - 12 | Freedom to Feel, Freedom to Love,
Switzerland | November 10 - 17 | Body, Heart & Soul Part 1, Switzerland | November 23 – 26 | Love & Relationship, England | | |
| For more information visit: www.theartofbeing.com
Or e-mail: info@theartofbeing.com
Voice-mail: (808) 572-1435
The Art of Being LLC, P.O. Box 269, Paia, HI 96779, USA |
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