Sunday, December 30, 2018

Breaking Free

Life always gives us
exactly the teacher we need
at every moment.
This includes every mosquito,
every misfortune,
every red light,
every traffic jam,
every obnoxious supervisor (or employee),
every illness, every loss,
every moment of joy or depression,
every addiction,
every piece of garbage,
every breath.
Every moment is the guru.
(Charlotte Joko Beck)

I had an epiphany when I read an excerpt of the book that Suzanne Yang translates for her mentor to the English-speaking audience. In it, Suzhen Liu describes how after a number of calamities, and after even facing her own death, she awoke to the mental and emotional patterns that were ruling her. After crying, awakening and letting go of her pain body for nearly a week, she achieved a state of enlightenment. She now spends all her efforts in helping people awaken to these thinking and emotional patterns that rule us and tries to relieve the suffering that plagues so many of us.

We are bio-robots of sorts. Mental programs are running us; undigested traumas, stories of who we think we are, and how the world is supposed is to work, not to mention the pain bodies that trigger us into doing things that seem uncharacteristic to our true nature, to say the least. How can we heal some of these maladies? Well, I am eagerly waiting for Suzhen Liu’s ‘Releasing your Suffering’ healing program for that. Meanwhile though, let’s appreciate life with all its blessings and burdens. It is designed to make us aware of what’s going on under the hood. That’s what a spiritual path is all about—we are being set free!

The other day I posted a note about Eckhart Tolle’s Awakening. It was even more mysterious than Suzhen Liu’s experience. He somehow fell into a vortex after a deep depression and literally rose the next morning as an Awakened man. What I appreciated even more about Suzhen Liu’s Awakening experience, there seemed to be an actual process behind this mystic experience. She literally saw the programs dissolving that were running her in these seven days of transformation and letting go. Layer by layer, she disentangled the messed up thought processes and cleansed and threw overboard many misunderstood and wrongly stored emotional baggage. All that took place in a few days, and later, over many years.

There is a long list of spiritual leaders who have tried to communicate this process of disentanglement at our disposal. Buddha, J. Krishnamurti, and G. I. Gurdjiief are a few important teachers who tried, but there are many others. Suzhen Liu adds to this understanding by putting as much emphasis on our feelings body that begs for healing just as our thought process. I came away realizing after reading an excerpt of her forthcoming book that life gives us in fact these self-discovery opportunities all the time. We can literally peel the onion of our being, occurrence by occurrence, thought by thought, and feeling by feeling. Life is always perfectly designed for us spiritual travelers to understand, transform, let go, and break free. The only requirement is to face life openly, fearlessly, and with an open mind. We are also encouraged to set aside sufficient time for meditation, reflection, and letting go.

Moment by moment, rain or shine, this disentanglement process is at our disposal. Sit quietly, take a good look around, can you peel the onion of your being? Join our journey to break free!

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