This Being Human

Have you been facing big challenges in these last few weeks and months? If you have, you are not alone. There is a quickening in the transformation of human consciousness which is providing us with all the opportunities we need to grow in love and wisdom.

For me, one of these challenges has come in the form of a dear friend who is dying fast. For another friend it comes in the form of arbitrating a bitter divorce between her son and daughter-in-law which is stirring unresolved residue from her own painful divorce many decades ago. Another friend was smitten by a strange disease last week and reduced to lying helplessly on the floor. And in the bigger picture we watch the plight of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war torn countries in search of sanctuary and waiting desperately at the closed gates of their promised lands.

All of these experiences serve to bring us more intimately in contact with what it means to be human. Just as Guatama Buddha set off on his search for enlightenment after witnessing aging, sickness and death, so too we learn that the human body, much as it is miraculous is also fragile; that a human life is transitory and wrapped in illusion; and that we are really not in control of the story.

Like the Buddha, many of us have been on the path seeking spiritual enlightenment. Now I am reminded once more that enlightenment comes not only through cultivating bliss states and seeing the perfection in everything but also through the practice of descending fully into the body and surrendering into the fragility, impermanence and suffering of human existence as well as its ecstasies.  It is through these acts of surrender and acceptance that we shed whatever is constricting and limiting us and identify with the divine power that lives within and through us.

This is nowhere more apparent than when accompanying a loved one through the last weeks of life.

My dear friend, Woods, was diagnosed with lung cancer just a few weeks ago and, although he had seen it coming, it was a big jolt to both the personality and the soul inhabiting the ailing body, as well as to all of us who are connected with him.  At first we hoped for six months to a year – time enough to complete some creative work, for last visits and to savour the sacredness of life. He is in Virginia, USA, and I am in the UK and my first thought was to go and be with him. I wanted to take care of him, see him one last time and share in his dying experience in which I knew we would have some beautiful moments. Even though his wisdom was saying no to this and I wasn’t immediately able to leave I kept returning to this negotiation with determination.

A week ago it became apparent that his body is deteriorating fast, he is speeding down the runway and has no choice but to take off very soon into his next long voyage. End of negotiation.  Our dreams of writing together, my desire to be with him physically, evaporated, laying bare the stark truth that the story of Woods Elliott is almost over.

It has been a marvel watching Woods move to acceptance. He has done it so gracefully. I guess there comes a point when the discomfort and indignity of living in a failing body overcomes any desire to cling on to life.  This was supported in Woods by his decision to die consciously, an intention which immediately aligns the personality with the bigger wisdom and unconditionally loving embrace of the soul. It is through these acts of surrender and acceptance that we release our grip on the illusion that we are in control of life. We also release the burden of personal desire, our preferences that life show up in certain ways that suits us or fulfil a pressing need we perceive ourselves to have.

At the moment it became crystal clear that time is running out and a trip to Virginia is not going to happen, I let go into a big release of grief. I allowed in through my whole body and being the terrible sense of loss and knowing that my dear friend will no longer be available to me to talk with every week on skype and to visit in what has become one of my homes. I let myself know fully what I am losing in Woods that I treasure, and in particular, the sense of comfort I have derived from knowing  there exists at least one other human being on Earth who knows me through and through and loves me unconditionally and who I can always rely on to listen empathically and with great care and to meet me fully with the greatest generosity of spirit. This is a lot to lose. And yet, in the letting go, in the surrendering to my utter helplessness in the face of this reality, through a miraculous process, taking place over a few hours and involving a number of others with whom I shared candidly, I emerged on the other side, into a new knowing and sense of abundance.

Although I will surely miss my friend, far from losing him, I am filled with all the blessings of our relationship as dear soul friends. We have shared so much love, creativity, mutual support and growing.  I will never lose this.  Woods is now part of me.  And whoever he becomes “on the other side” I am now part of him. Death has transformed into harvest.

Bigger realizations and remembrances were revealed too: the realisation that our free will as personalities is limited to how we choose to respond to our experiences and how open we are to receive. There is a bigger power making the real choices – when we are born and when we die and how and when we meet our soul friends and companions along the way, and whether we have children. I call this bigger wisdom and energy the Soul. You may have a different name for it. My understanding is that we are souls here on Earth having a human experience so that the soul can experience through the body and the senses and the human mind and grow and learn from these experiences. This means fully embracing all aspects of our being – our often unbearably limited, tender and messy human-ness, alongside our beautiful courage and genius creativity, and the deep wisdom and growing compassion of the soul.

The limited self of the personality has the opportunity again and again to experience moments of union with the soul. Woods and I call these Magnificent Moments of Being and next year I will be gathering together some writings we have done together and singly around this theme, along with Wood’s own book, Dazzlephrenia, as a tribute to my friend.