SpiritAwake

There is a calling that is being revealed through your words. Most of what you describe is similar to how a lot of beloveds first begin to experience and then become aware of this calling. Deep dissatisfaction with their lives, and then one or more experiences that seem to make a lie of everything they have believed up until then. Some seeking and looking into spiritual/meditation/awakening possibilities as a part of that.

Everyone without exception is looking for happiness, freedom, peace, the end of suffering, however it is voiced, and however it may be disguised by belief.

All sentient beings experience this desire, and at some point in everyone’s journey, in some lifetime or another, the calling begins to break free of all the ways we have been hiding from it, and we start to realize that we are called to return home, return back to our Self, and stop looking for peace and happiness in the illusion of an outer world of separation, seeming others, projections and beliefs.

This breaking free is often triggered by suffering. The experiences you had during your meditation retreat are gifts, sort of a taste of what the calling is calling us to. The contrast with your “everyday” world lends itself to the seeming spectacular nature of some of it, including the way such experiences can sometimes translate into vivid imagery and sensation.

It could be that the calling will keep working on you, so that one day, if you are fortunate, you will give over your whole life to the following of it. If that happens it will be because you have said a clear, firm and unequivocal yes to the calling.

At its most deepest level, the yes becomes a yes to not-knowing, a surrendering into a fundamental trust, because we cannot know what it is we are trusting in these early stages. First we become, then we know. A very different knowing than we can ever imagine.

We begin to trust what our heart of hearts is telling us, rather than what our mind is telling us. With our yes the calling can begin to lead us, through always deepening and ever more encompassing yeses, eventually back home to our Self, where in simple joy we discover that we never really left, only believed we did.

There is no fast way, perfect practice or ultimate understanding. It is a huge shift of belief and consciousness that is being called for if one truly takes up this journey. It is a great un-doing, rather than a doing. In one sense it is only a small movement, from the belief that we are separate from God, to recognizing that we never left, only imagined we did. We are what we always have been and always will be, the Love of God. In actuality there is no movement at all, the apparent shift being merely the dropping away of illusion.

Terms like “direct path” and similar are relative terms and can be very misleading. Compared to the paths that a world founded in the belief of separation promote and insist upon, any path one takes that begins to question those beliefs is going to be more relatively direct. Questioning a whole (seeming) world’s assumptions, beliefs and convictions is also going to seem like a very difficult path at first, because we have been conditioned by all those same beliefs of separation since the beginning of existence.

The short of it, in regards to what I am trying to say now, is that there is not a “solution” or “answer” that anyone is ever going to be able to give you.

There is only taking up the journey, stepping out onto it without looking back, and without asking how long or how far. Once that happens Existence can begin to help and show the way, each of us upon our own incredibly unique paths that is paradoxically the same path everyone must eventually follow. At some point we may even find ourselves sharing some of it with others in helpful ways. In these moments Existence seems to be using me to share some of it with you.

We must begin to say yes to Existence first though, simply because we do have free will. Yet this is the only real or true choice that our free will gives us, yes or no, return to the Love that we Are, or continue on for a while longer in the beliefs of separation, where all the illusions of choice give rise to the ten thousand things, and a world of suffering and pain. Eventually though, every beloved will find their yes and return Home. But why waste time? Why not now?

There is a lot on this site. Explore some of it, enter into it a little bit, and see if there are some openings you could maybe find yourself passing through, so to speak… Every page has a place where engagement can happen, and of course here on the forum.

Post questions, inquire, wherever you want.

Warm regards…