As I continue along my journey, I feel like I am only beginning to understand how to live my life in a way that glorifies God. I think when I die my spirit will go back into a different plane where God exist, and our human values don’t really matter anymore. Good and evil, happy and sad, male and female are all the same. All dualities transcend into one in a plane where time and space don’t exist. The individual is the same and everything and although I can’t really understand it all, I really don’t need to understand it. At least, not right now.
Right now, I am alive, on earth, existing in time and space. I’ve been trying to understand how to live my best life, but often fear, uncertainty, and anxiety get in the way. It often said that it was like fighting life. If I thought about life like water, when I tried to float, everything would be okay, but every time I tried to tread water and fought the water, then I would get tired and frustrated. I would feel like life wasn’t going well.
Recently, I think I found a book on ancient mysteries that explains life in a different way. There’s a balance between the material world and the spiritual world. As I make my journey through this world, sometimes I need to be more in the material world. For example, when I am exercising or doing some physical activity like bike riding, I need to devote myself to the physical material world. When I pray or meditate, sometimes the physical world seems to just melt away and everything is just in that moment in a space right inside my heart or right above my head.
The thing is that there’s times when I can be too much in either world. For me, there’s two good examples. When I am in physical pain, like a bad migraine headache, I can be too much in the material world. When I have a bad headache, I get to where I feel like that pain is my world. I can’t concentrate on anything else. That pain consumes me and all my senses. The throbbing in my head just pulls my focus to my body and the material world. I find it difficult to even think of praying when I hurt that bad. However, the answer for me is finding that balance. Finding a way to pray or meditate even when the pain is so bad, I don’t think I can. If I can just get out of my body and remember that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, then I know that there’s no pain that I can’t handle. On the other hand, when I feel anxiety, instead of being too much in the material world, I am too much in my head. Instead of my head throbbing, my mind is throbbing and causing everything to go haywire. When I have a panic attack, I feel physical pain, but the worst part for me is I feel like I have a million thoughts going through my head and I can’t stop any of them. It is like someone is dropping a never ending bucket of horrible thoughts on my brain and I just can’t take it anymore. At that moment, I am too much in my mind and my material body has just fallen by the wayside. The answer is to go the other way and find my material self. The safest and easiest way I have found is to make myself cold. I hold ice, take a cold shower, run cold water over my head, or turn up the AC. I make myself as cold as I can. I feel my body. I let myself know that I am here in this moment in this space at this time. When I do that, then I know that I can make it through this minute and if I can survive this minute, I can survive the next and then the next and so on.
So, maybe what I really need to do is learn to walk a tight rope between the material world and the spiritual world where there’s some perfect balance. A balance where I can feel my body in the moment and know where I am and yet at the same time feel myself as a child of God and be in tune with the light inside of me so that as I go about my journey, I can find the peace that comes with knowing that God is always with me.
I think it is like walking on a tightrope. The tightrope walker doesn’t have perfect balance the whole time. The walker struggles to maintain balance and not fall. That’s all I need to do: struggle to maintain balance, I’m never going to have perfect balance and God doesn’t expect that of me. He just wants me to walk and He’ll be there to pick me up if I fall.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
