When life turns upside down

I remember reading The Celestine Prophecy years ago and being much pleased by its assertion that there are no coincidences. That really resonated with me at the time, and I find I believe it still: there are no coincidences.

So it seems to me to be no coincidence that, having embarked on this Rumi retreat through the Spirituality and Practice website, it is not the poems themselves that are affecting me, it is the prayer practice to which we have been invited, this curious experience of the outbreath coming first; of breathing out "La illaha" (there is no god)and breathing in "il Allah" (but God).

The practice still feels upside down to me, but I am slowly getting the hang of it. And I am learning a great deal in the process -- both from the practice and from the life that surrounds, affects, and is affected by it. As I mentioned earlier, I have a head full of music and lyrics, and I am realizing that everything I do has a way of becoming a chant for me, develops a sort of internal rhythm. But this prayer is teaching me that those rhythms are thoughts, and not all that connected to my body/soul/heart -- because I cannot pray this prayer in any sort of predictable rhythm or it gets out of sync with my breath.

I am learning that my out breaths -- right now, at least -- are WAY longer than my in breaths; that I am having to spend way more time releasing "all those other gods" than I'm spending taking in "the one god." And as I sink deeper into meditation, there are huge spaces that grow at the end of the out breath as I sink into the welcome emptiness that comes as I release the tensions.

What I don't know -- since paying attention to this is new to me -- is whether the balance is always that way, or always that way for everyone, or just this way now, because of the sudden upside-down quality life seems to have acquired. But I do know that I was very struck by a passage in Anam Cara this morning:

"A special destiny was prepared for you. But you were also given freedom and creativity to go beyond the given, to make a new set of relationships and to forge an ever new identity, inclusive of the old but not limited to it. This is the secret pulse of growth, which is quietly at work behind the outer facade of your life. Destiny sets the outer frame of experience and life; freedom finds and fills its inner form."

Reading that, I could see that for some time now my outer frame of experience has been extraordinarily steady, like the dock reflected in this first picture. I know it's there, and love to watch the patterns it sets on the still water that lies beneath. And that which has been finding and filling my inner form has been like a lovely inbreath of God; like the tidal lagoon in front of my house, filling and emptying and always filling again.

But I can also see that I've grown a bit stuck, dependent on that steady outer framework, and have forgotten that the tides that flow into me come from a much larger source; that I could still have access to that same source if I were to face a completely different direction, or uproot myself altogether. In watching my breath turn upside down, I see that even if a life is turned upside down, the freedom, the tides, the omnipresent source is still there.

And if I tip the picture upside down:

I see that I have somehow gotten stuck on the shore, and what I thought was a stable life was really only an illusion. I need to clamber back up, and understand that what looked like a scary flip of circumstances is actually a delightful bridge to something new; that freedom is already standing on the dock, beckoning me out, inviting me to walk into a future that may be a little fuzzy, but takes me not away from Source but toward it.


NOTE: The John O'Donohue quotation is from Anam Cara (© John O’Donohue. All rights reserved). To learn more about John O'Donohue, be sure to visit his website: www.johnodonohue.com