Cristen Rodgers's Blog, page 19

No Matter How You May Wander

I suppose if there were one thing I could say to you, my friend, it would be to stop sitting around listening to me.  Stop listening to what other people tell you; stop following what you see written in books.  Stop believing that the answers are ‘out there’ somewhere.

 

If you only keep one sentence of the many that I so carefully pour my soul into before I pour them out upon paper, it would be the following:  there is no truth that I can tell you, nor that anyone can tell you, that you don’t already know somewhere deep inside of your heart.

 

If you really, truly want to find that place in life where you can drink deeply of beauty, of love, of personal passion, and where your mind is as a serene river; you need only remember how to trust yourself.  That place is inside of your own chest, buried beneath all of those layers of expectations, of definitions, and of restrictions that the world has piled upon you.  Trust yourself enough to unbury it; let the world keep their truths and just put a little trust in your own.

 

Don’t blindly follow my words.  Don’t oblige yourself to obey books or believe stories.  And stop looking to everyone else for the wisdom that you already have.  The heart doesn’t need to read and the soul doesn’t need to be taught.  It’s only the mind that needs these things before it can see truth.  So just stop listening to the mind for a little while, my friend, and open up to your heart.  Let your soul guide you and, no matter how you may wander, you will never find yourself lost.

©2015 Cristen Rodgers

After the Rain

Image source can be found by scrolliing down.

Have you ever noticed how much more vibrant everything is after the rain?  After a good rain, every blade of grass, every river stone, every bird and every ray of light has a special kind of glow.  The greens are somehow greener and the flowers are more vibrant, like the colors have an edge to them.  Even the trees stand slightly taller and stretch their arms and fingers a little farther out.  The rain, it seems, has a way of making things a little more ‘themselves’.

I think we’re a lot like the trees and the flowers in this way; and our struggles are like the rain.  They help us become a little more ‘ourselves’ by washing away everything that we’re not and reinvigorating everything that we are.

There’s no doubt that we, like the green world around us, have a certain beauty in the summer sun.  When we’re at our best, we’re deeply rooted, embracing the lessons of yesterday and drinking the warmth of today.  When the sun shines down upon the flower, she puts her best face forward and the whole world is rewarded with her beauty.

The winter, too, has its own kind of charm.  As that thick, white blanket drops overtop the world, the life below goes to sleep and dreams of what great things may come.  Beneath the safety of that cold cocoon, our tender soul gets to let go of the old things as we turn our attention to the coming spring, meditating on what new colors we may add to our artist’s palette.

Even still, nothing can ever quite compare to those first few moments after a long, hard rain.

During the rain, we aren’t growing but neither are we sleeping.  During the rain, we exercise our muscles as we withstand the storm and keep our eyes wide open for that silver lining.  While we are focused on standing our ground and holding it together, the rain replenishes us.  Though we may not see it while the storm is still raging, we are being gifted with the nutrients that will help us grow tall when the sun again graces us with its presence.

Perhaps the beauty of the storm is too often understated.

Eventually, the rain slows to a drizzle and finally comes to an end; and it’s in those first precious moments just after it stops when the real magic happens.  Just as the sun begins to peer through the remaining mist, we and the earth alike take on an ethereal glow, radiating a unique kind of magic.   This is the moment when the lessons begin to seep into the soil and surround our roots.  And as we relax our firm stance, we begin soaking them up until they make their way into our veins.  The waters that poured down upon us now begin to flow through us until they reach our hearts where they are transformed to become the source of our courage, of our wisdom, and our great compassion.   In this miraculous moment, we are instantly renewed, strengthened, and changed from the inside out.

This is why everything glows after the rain.  Because the struggle is never in vain; it always makes us stronger.

As it washes away all that dulls our shine from the outside, the rain itself seeps into us, reinvigorating and renewing our glow from the inside so that once the last drop hits the ground and the great exhale of relief washes over the land, for the most precious of moments, each and every one of us glows in a way that’s uniquely and enchantingly our own.

©2015 Cristen Rodgers

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Image source here

Sometimes it Hurts

Image: Queen Enigma – Coming out of the Cocoon

The thing about spiritual awakening is that sometimes it hurts.

We talk a lot about the way that everything gets a little brighter and how the world transforms before your eyes.  We relish describing how there’s this bottomless well of love hidden right inside your own chest and the way that your relationships – with yourself, with others, with the earth, with god – suddenly and drastically change for the better once you learn how to tap into it.  We take joy in sharing the beauty of the journey; but what we often fail to mention is all of the pain that must be endured along the way.

We neglect to talk about how much your feet start to grow tired and eventually bleed as you learn how to walk through rather than around the thorns and barbs in your path.  And we forget to mention that courage doesn’t just happen; that you have to face your deepest fears and stand in the darkest of your inner shadows before you learn how to become the light.  We don’t talk much about the way that your concept of self is shaken until the meat of your identity begins to fall off; or how, even after that, your bones continue to rattle until even they turn to dust lying at the feet of your naked soul.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to call the process emerging rather than awakening.  Awakening deceptively illustrates the process as an effortless transition from the dream landscape of the unconscious to the sharp brightness of reality, wherein the closest thing to pain is a few stiff muscles easily alieved by a short stretch.  The word emerging, on the other hand, implies struggle.  You don’t emerge effortlessly; emerging is something that must be done in steps, each of which can only be taken because you grew stronger by taking the one before it.

The first step is perhaps the hardest, because it requires the kind of bravery that one only develops in the face of immense fear, the kind of fear that comes from challenging core assumptions.  When your foundational beliefs are questioned, the ground beneath your feet begins to tremble and shake.  Up and down begin looking eerily alike and the only certainty is that you still exist somewhere in between them.

This is how we learn courage.

It’s not by avoiding fear but by walking into it that we learn how to rise above it.  Then you discover the courage of your spirit – it’s not your mind or your muscles that put your feet in motion, but something far stronger, and deeper, pulling you forward from the inside until you finally crack the inner layer of your shell.

But this is only the first step.

Emerging requires more than just growing tired of confinement.  You have to break free; you must strip away layer after layer of who you have learned to be before you can get to the truth of who you really are.  Stripping away layers of self can be painful, and it can be frightening.   We deposit our beliefs, our assumptions, expectations, and definitions over our souls one layer at a time until they harden into a sort of shell behind which hides our true self – that wild, free, formless, beautiful energy that we call the spirit.  The longer that this shell remains in place, the more it begins to attach itself to the tender spirit beneath, so that peeling it away tests and pulls at the spirit. It can hurt but it also makes it that much stronger.

Usually these layers don’t just fall away easily like dead skin.  They have to be pulled away, like ripping flesh from the bone.  But, with each layer that gets pulled away, the light within shines through a little more.  And if we keep tugging at all of the things that we thought we should be, eventually we strip away that final layer to discover the true intensity of who we really are.

That’s the truth of it.  It hurts.  It’s frightening.  But it’s the most worthwhile challenge that you will ever go through.

Once all of those layers have been stripped away, you discover what it means to breathe.  You marvel at how you didn’t know that you were suffocating; and you can imagine no greater purpose than to help others find their breath.  You no longer fear shadows because you have become the source of the light.  You can be truly happy because you aren’t always fighting against unhappiness.

This is what it means when we say that if you run from the shadow you also run from the light, or that to know love you must be willing to walk through fear.

A flower cannot bloom without first suffering the darkness of being a buried seed.  A bird cannot learn to fly without first facing the fear of falling.  And you, my friend, cannot emerge without first suffering the process of tearing away at what confines you.

 

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©2015 Cristen Rodgers

Image Queen Enigma – Coming out of the Cocoon

Eternity in a Raindrop

Just as the whole sky can be reflected in a single rain drop, so also can eternity be felt in a single moment, if only we can remain still.  When the drop of water quivers, the reflection becomes blurry.  Thus, to catch a glimpse of infinity, we must learn how to be calm in the present.

© 2015 Cristen Rodgers

Image Source Here

The Still Waters of Waiting Potential

This day – this very moment, in fact – is a deep, still body of water that stretches out before us.  It’s an endless expanse of potential within which a single splash could ripple forever outwards, touching countless lives as it travels.  Yesterday and tomorrow are but reflections resting atop the surface of this water.  When we become lost in these reflections, focused on what was and what may be, we leave today’s potential untouched – we create no ripple and we alter no lives, not even our own.

A day will come when our bones have dried out and our muscles have worn thin.  We’ll lack the strength to swim someday and the waters of our potential will begin to dry out, as all things eventually must.  When that day comes, the only thing we will have left is that reflection, the memory of all the great dips, plunges, and splashes of our past – but if we spend all of our todays gazing at our yesterdays and tomorrows, there will nothing to reflect upon.

We have to swim while the waters remain deep.  We must jump in and splash about while the ripple of our influence remains strong.  The time is now to tell someone how much we love them.  This is the moment to take a chance and pursue our passions; to make space for the things that really matter and to set aside the time to be sure of what they are.  We must stop gazing at the surface, close our eyes, and just jump in before those waters – and the currents they carry – begin to run dry.

 

© 2015 Cristen Rodgers

Original image by photographer Holly Lay.  Photo filter added. Source Link

To my Twin Flame

How I cherish the memory of that day, the day we made a promise to each other there in what was our personal church and our favorite sanctuary – out in the open space and surrounded by the astounding beauty of our mother earth.  It was endorsed by the clearest of skies, by water that rippled with latent power, and by a stretch of beach that continued as far as our mortal eyes could see.   Our vows, it seemed, were magnificently displayed in the elements that surrounded us, as if we had painted them ourselves, and perhaps because of this we knew that we needn’t say a word out loud.

The clarity of the sky that day symbolized so perfectly the clarity of our shared experience.  It seemed that sharp blue continued forever upwards, with nothing blocking our view from that spot on the beach to infinity; and isn’t that what we have always strived for together?  To always keep the space between us clear of debris so that our love and energy can always flow uninterrupted?  In this way, I believe the sky was a mirror that day as we stood below it and marked the point in this life from which our united future began.

The power that seemed barely contained in the small, crashing waves of the ocean that day was of course, my love, representative of our combined power.  Just like you and I, the power of two combined elements rippled, ready at any time to explode, but remained for the time subdued.  Together, we carry all of the might of a hurricane – your flow and my force – but at our center we can be as still as silence herself.  The water, then, was there to remind us of both our beauty and our danger.  It seems that we listened well, my sun, to what she was telling us.  Let us never forget that our power demands prudence.

And of course there was that expanse of sand beneath our bare feet, symbolizing our eternal bond.  Just as it stretched out in both directions for what may very well have been an eternity, so also does our past and our future stretch far beyond this one lifetime.  Our energies, always caught in this dance, echo outwards from this point in time, in this one life to many other points in time, in many more lives, all centered on the same promise.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that, reflecting on that day, I find that we ourselves represented the final missing element.  The heat of our passion, I know we both agree, can never burn out, for we are of the same flame, you and I.  We are fueled by the same inspiration, we dance to the same rhythm, we burn with the same fervor.  We flicker across time and space, always seeking one another, until we again collide to burn brighter and hotter each time than any other before.   And so here we are, together at last, to dance wildly as together we chase away the shadows and bring a little more warmth to the coldness.

 

Author’s Note:  I have been told from time to time that I should share some of my more personal works, as they may inspire others as I myself have been inspired to write them.  For a long time, I was opposed to the idea because I felt that my personal works were not meant for eyes other than my own.  It has recently occurred to me, however, that they don’t have to be meant for anyone else to be shared with someone else.  I have thus decided that I will in fact share a few, select pieces of my personal essays to a new category in my blog titled Love, Light, & Sometimes Lemons.  It seems fitting that I should begin with this piece written to my husband and soul mate, Paul, about our wedding day.  I hope you enjoyed it!

©2015 Cristen Rodgers

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Image Source Here.  Copyright held by original photographer, unknown.

Clearing Out the Ashes

We all have an internal fire that begins as a spark at birth and, with the right care and attention, grows into a leaping flame.  We call this inner fire the soul, and we tend it by investing in our personal passions – our family, our art, or our interests and ambitions.  When we act from our soul, when our inspiration comes from this white hot center, we’re best able to sear our mark upon the world.  We become like living art – instead of building, creating, painting, or saying things; we become them.  When we live and love from the soul, everything that we do, create, and say is embedded with soul.

Because the best of human creations are always born of this inner flame, entire industries have been created to help us remain in touch with it and keep it burning brightly.  As a society, we have invested millions trying to bottle up the inspiration, the efficacy, and the artistry that come from soulful living so that we can hand feed it to our overworked, under-stimulated, and spiritually malnourished people.   The result of this has been the creation of a particularly dangerous drug, both addictive and destructive – the notion that good people are happy people and that positivity is next to righteousness.

Positive thinking is a powerful tool for building our reality; but more powerful still is what comes before thought: the soul.  To live from the soul is to be completely present in and accepting of all of life’s experiences, and to feel them equally and absolutely.  Soulful living doesn’t allow for the plastered smile that so many industries rely on their consumers craving and their workforce donning, or the strict adherence to only positive notions implied by so many of today’s self-help books.  It’s not always about smiles and light – sometimes it’s about facing and truly feeling the fears, the pains, and the disappointments.

Soulful living is all about tending our inner fire, and sometimes the best way to tend that inner fire is by letting it burn out.  When a fire burns hot, it occasionally runs out of fuel, and it’s during this time of cooling off that we have the chance to find new fuel – new inspiration – for our flame.  This is also true for our thoughts and our feelings; they must sometimes be permitted to grow cold and to go dark, because it is often only during or after this state that we are supple enough for change.  And when we are in a state of supple stillness we have the chance to crawl into our cocoon and do some inner growing, so we may later be reborn with even more beauty, strength, and ability than before.

Because burning out is a natural stage of life, trying to prevent it only causes more pain.  Instead of the sudden, sharp pain of negativity that is a natural part of life; we end up experiencing the slow pain of becoming disheartened.  Becoming disheartened – which is to say tired, bored, and lacking passion – is like a slow drizzle of tears that smothers our inner fire one drop at a time.  It’s the pressure to manufacture positive thoughts and feelings that most effectively steals away from the potency of the real thing when it comes along.

It’s for this reason that we must learn to allow and even embrace all of life’s ups and downs, all of our own light and dark, and to permit both our positive and negative thoughts.  The secret isn’t in fighting negative thinking, but in observing it with detachment, allowing it without following it.  Nor is the answer to push away or bottle up dark emotions.  It is instead to allow them to pass through us without letting them define us; this will keep us open enough that when the brighter feelings wash over us, we are capable of feeling them deeply and wholly.   When we aren’t wasting all of our energy trying to fight the negative, we have it available to invest in the positive.

Just like a flower needs occasional cover from the life-giving sun, so also do we sometimes need to fall into shadow.  When we learn to balance the two, we are free to step back and soak up the beauty of the bigger picture, the whole of our experience.  And it is from this eagle’s eye view that we can see the inspiration for our own passion and appreciation painted in bold colors before us, moving us to care for those inner fires and use them to sear our mark upon the world.

©2015 Cristen Rodgers

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A Mysterious Moon

I looked upon the moon tonight and she told me a secret.  Tonight she surprised me, the moon, because instead of being the familiar and comforting sight I was expecting, tonight she was dropped below her normal perch, and she was adorned in an unusual golden gown that I’ve never seen her wear before.  I was silently shocked; I felt both like I knew her and yet like maybe I didn’t know her at all.  After all, who was I to think that I had seen every gown in her wardrobe?  I recognized the same round, glowing form posed against the black backdrop of night that I’ve gazed upon my entire life; and yet with one turn of her phase, she was suddenly cloaked in mystery.  And that’s when she whispered that secret, right into my heart.  She told me, “You should remember that nothing can ever be truly known, not even me”.   I realized in an instance how right she was; because every person, no matter how familiar they may seem, has unfathomable depths that can never be explored from the outside looking in.  And every thing, every place, every truth can only ever be known in part and in passing because, by the time we lay claim to that territory of knowledge, the entire landscape, as well as the eyes that look upon it, has completely changed.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

©2015 Cristen Rodgers

For more information, visit my website at cristenrodgers.com

The Lonely Light Bringer

A firefly is most striking in darkness.  While the rest of the world rests in shadows, she threatens their slumber as she passes by carrying her little lantern with her.

Though the light bringers of the night are some of our most precious resources, they are often the subjects of the saddest stories.  Unbeknownst to them, they have the most important job, bringing the passion and the soul to the bleakest communities.  Yet these little messengers must suffer the darkness all around them when all they truly want is more of the light.

The little firefly must carry her own life breath upon her back, only ever enjoying what light she herself can muster, unless she stumbles across another of her own.  Even then, two or three little torches in the middle of a long night can begin to feel cold and lonely even to those with the warmest hearts.

The lonely firefly suffers the darkness, not because she fails to bring the light, but because she is too busy tending her own inner flame to consider that perhaps she just needs to leave the night behind.  Sometimes the most beautiful souls are those who are so busy trying to better themselves that it never occurs to them that perhaps they are just surrounded by the wrong people.

Our torch bearers, who bring light into the night, serve their purpose when the time is right; but it’s up to us to make sure that they don’t get left out there all alone forever.  Those of us who have suffered through the long night and have awoken to the brightness of day owe it to the messengers who have stepped up behind us to leave signposts for them to easily spot.

We must shine our very brightest and let our rays reach the farthest they possibly can so that, when the time comes for her long night to end, the lonely little firefly can find her way to us, to find her home among those who live in the day and can join with us as we bask in the sun that we have collectively made.

Those of us who live according to the love in our hearts, those who seek spiritual understanding, those who have awakened from slumber, must remember that, though we may have found our own communities of like-minded people, there are still so many out there who question their own sanity because no one seems to understand them, who suffer due to their difference of thought and their unique perspective, and who have been taught to think that the depth of their feelings is something to be ashamed of.  There are still those who don’t know that they are not alone and that there are others like them.

Perhaps the best way for us to show our gratitude for the homes we have found amongst one another is to be sure that those who are still out there in the darkness will eventually find us and will feel immediately, always and humbly welcome.

© 2015 Cristen Rodgers

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The Beauty of What’s Not Meant to Be

If we could see with our physical eyes what’s happening on the spiritual level, the whole world would shimmer.   Every person, mountain, and blade of grass communicates with the world around it through waves of subtle vibrations, like the wind speaks to the trees by rattling their leaves.   I imagine that, if we could see these vibrations, everything would sparkle like a dew drop resting upon a quivering flower petal.

Besides possibly being quite beautiful to behold, these vibrations serve an important purpose.   They are our most valuable and most underappreciated means of understanding the world around us and how we relate with it.  Every time that we feel the fingers of apprehension move up our spine, the warmth of familiarity fill our chest, or we see a flash of premonition, it’s because we are picking up on these invisible vibrations.

Many of us instinctively know and understand this, and are naturally inclined to listen; while others take a little time to begin hearing this inner voice and interpreting its song.   Either way, most everyone accepts that not only is a ‘gut feeling’ real, but also that a wise person always listens closely to what it says.   What isn’t so often understood; however, is why we get the feelings we do from these invisible vibrations.

We may be tempted to think that when a certain place gives us the shivers or a particular person makes us feel on edge that there is something wrong, off, or even somehow wicked about them; but this is a misunderstanding.   While the vibrations that we pick up may be objective, how we interpret them – and thus what our instinct tells us – is subjective.  Though something may feel bad, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is bad, at least not objectively.

Our gut instinct has as much to do with us as it does with whatever we’re observing.  Like a stone dropped into a still pond, we create ripples that echo outwards from our center; and every person and thing that we come across is likewise sending out its own ripples.   When two ripples crash into one another they create a new wave; and the new trajectory of this combined wave is what our instincts either pull us towards or push us away from with feelings of attraction, anxiety, belonging, or misplacement.

When we listen to and follow these internal messages, they keep us in harmony with our world and with our Divine purpose; yet we must remember that our world and our purpose are only a small piece of a much larger whole.   Everyone and everything with whom we interact is a part of countless other stories besides our own.   What may be dangerous or wrong for us may also be perfect for someone else.  We must remember that even those things that our instincts push us away from have within them the same light, the same Divine beauty, as those things that our instincts pull us towards.   After all, everyone and everything is both wonderful and terrible in this perfectly imperfect world.  It’s all about the subtleties and the variables.

To stay on our own best path, we must trust our instincts as the wise messengers that they are.  But we should also remember that even the simplest things have complexities just like we do; and although not all things are meant for us, we can still always acknowledge and honor the love and the beauty that resides within them, even if only in passing.   If we can do this, if we can appreciate the flower without picking it up and taking it with us, we will surely find the greatest pleasure while also pursuing our greatest purpose in this journey that we call life.  Namaste.

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©2015 Cristen Rodgers

Image Source: Pixabay