March 7

FAITH MONTH: DAY 7: “According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.” ― Deepak Chopra

YES!! This has been happening for me since I was a young girl; the synchronicity part, at least. I have been aware of great coincidental events in my life since I was little.

The rest, the true test of the transformation has been a slow progression of greater and greater peace and happiness over the years since coming to this recovery process.

I have stopped worrying so much and become so much freer and light. Even when I am in a crazy space, it lasts for mere minutes, rather than the full-blown meltdowns I had in the past. I entertain fewer of the toxic ideas and allow fewer toxic people (or their toxic ideas) into my world every day. It is not that I am enlightened, but that I am in the process.

I consider myself to be a follower of the Vedanta. I have resonated with this particular path since I was very young. It speaks to me of how to care for my body, my spirit, and my thinking life. There are so many of these practices that have been a part of my life for many years, some even long before I got to recovery. As with the synchronistic nature of my journey, there was evidence of these things all through my drinking and drugging life as well. I was just not able to fully embrace them all.

In fact, I was talking to a friend the other day about the word “Namaste” which has a pretty widespread use today. In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was new here, I used this word freely. Many people would ask me what it meant and I would tell them the literal translation. I also told some folks my simplified version, which is: “My inner divinity honors your inner divinity. We are joined there.”

Recently, a friend and I have been conversing about the idea that God is something that resides within us, rather than on a cloudbank in a far-off distant piece of sky. This also resonates with me so deeply I have come to recognize the space within where that exists.

Also, I believe this is the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell. They both reside within me and I can reside in either one, my choice. I recognize quite deeply within my soul this truth. There is no “there” with either of them.

In fact, the duality of them that I was taught is another parallel, but still contained within ME. Heaven was upwards, somewhere in the ethers of space, and Hell was somewhere under the ground, perhaps in the core of the planet.??? I am not sure where those ideas struck me as wrong, but it just never made sense. Instead, I am very comfortable with them being places of either my ego or my spirit. Both reside within my consciousness, or perhaps I should say, the lack thereof?

So, the directions for each of them is basically correct. If I follow Vedic teachings, and look at the chakra points on the body, my root chakra is the lowest form of energy movement, located in the area of my root when seated on the ground. That is the area of my seat and pelvis, or base instinct (Hell). Rising up to the top of my head is the movement toward higher consciousness and higher energy, called kundalini. That would be the rise toward spiritual enlightenment and Heaven.

I can see that the ego is the baser instinctual activity of life; versus the intuitive areas of the heart and the higher mind which I call spirit. Energy rises toward the spiritual as we heal.

This is not particular to addiction. All ego-based life is base and dull. The energy is heavy and does not flow, because the ego is busy blocking it with standing in a space of non-movement, non-acceptance, and non-change, which is judgment, control, and fear.

Healing is releasing the dams we build around ideas, thought, beliefs, and systems built to protect them. These are the baser behaviors that are always considered non-spiritual by every tradition. Hence, we are creating another path to the heights of soul.