Deconstruction - Danna Faulds

 I am deconstructing.
My identity, built
assumption by assumption,
is crumbling at my feet.
It's clear to me the way
of truth leads into the 
unknown...

[.....]

Balanced on the rubble,
I grope for
handholds even as I try
to let go.  I am bared to the
bone by pain and the thwarted
desire to maintain control.  I

long to paint the scene the
way I want, while ignoring
how it is.  My practice now
isn't about rebuilding what
I knew.  It's not about
clearing the littered ground
of old illusions only to
construct new ones.
Emptiness has a stark
beauty, noticed only
when I stop looking
for security.  I sit on the
tumble of mortar and brick
and pray for patience,
pray for strength,
pray for the humility
to just keep breathing.

Danna Faulds
Excerpt from: "Deconstruction"
From: One Soul
2003

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

"Leaving" - Wehrman

Could he, he asked again,
walk out into the desert
of himself, let his self go.
the one built by the labor
of lifetimes - this one -
drop away into the ageless
void; and as he asked, he
knew; this is what it comes
to anyway, tonight as he
slept, or tomorrow, as the
result of old age, a natural
death, that waited closer
each day, a wordless chant,
it will all go, all of it,
castles and skyscrapers of
who you are, who you built
yourself to be; it ends at
the end - that's the idea - you
step from here, your
construction, into there,
the body abandoned - and
you saw it was not a despair,
but a ship to be boarded,
unmoored.....
free.....

Richard Wehrman
From: Being Here

Dark Night of the Soul - Mirabai Starr & Jeannie Zandi

The Dark Night of the Soul, as St. John of the Cross conceived it,
is actually an inner state of "spiritual crisis."  It is an experience
of being stripped of all spiritual feelings, all our false constructs,
and a dismantling of edifices of religious concepts with which we
are accustomed to propping up our inner lives.  In the Dark Night
we cannot feel the presence of the Sacred anymore, and the word
"God" becomes devoid of meaning.  It is a plunge into the abyss
of radical unknowingness.  It is only when we get out of our own
way that the Divine can take over and fill us with love.  But it's a
grueling process to come to this level of surrender.

But the Dark Night of the Soul is not only about being brought to our
knees.  It is about unconditional love, the kind of love that wakes
us up and affirms our deepest humanity.  The act of consciously
yielding to the shattering of the heart [in grief] is not high on the
 list of cultural values, but it is part of being awake [to life]...

The Dark Night of global crisis will reveal itself as a state of pure
luminescence, where nothing is as we thought it was...

Mirabai Starr
Excerpt from Dark Night of the Soul

~

Even the most sophisticated.....seekers are flummoxed by a dark
night experience, and this ability to flummox is at the heart of its
effectiveness and purpose.  The coping strategies of conditioning
must be entirely frustrated, the arrogance of the "me" must be
thoroughly met with a humbling, so that the being is left with
absolutely nowhere to turn to "solve the problem."  Thus the
brilliant survival strategy that has the illusion of separation at its
base is brought to its knees, so that a new reliance on the organic
flow of the Divine may rise.

The dream of "getting there" that the being invested all her life
energy, hours and efforts into is suddenly seen as a mirage.  And
trying to get to Nirvana with strategies [is seen as] hopeless,
because it IS hopeless.  The coping strategies generally have to
fail utterly for a new reliance on living radically open and
unprepared in the moment to be fully embraced.

What the soul is after is not a temporary influx of light, but a
thorough deconstruction of the false that results in the embodiment
of a light that shines through the darkness.

The Dark Night of the Soul is an initiation, a sacred passage, a
dying of the old and birthing of light enfleshed.  This process of
initiation or passage is not a problem to be solved.  Huge amounts
of shadow material will rise, identities will fall, coping mechanisms
will fail, and tremendous amounts of energy, mostly as emotion, will
emerge to be released.  The "me" coping structure undergoes a
massive deconstruction, and the fresh innocent, wide-eyed and present
Essential Being emerges from the rubble.

Jeannie Zandi

Excerpt from: Dark Night: The Breakdown of the Mythology of Me

Deconstruction - Danna Faulds

I am deconstructing.

My identity, built
assumption by assumption,
is crumbling at my feet.
It's clear to me the way
of truth leads into the
unknown...

[.....]

Balanced on the rubble,
I grope for
handholds even as I try
to let go.  I am bared to the
bone by pain and the thwarted
desire to maintain control.  I
long to paint the scene the
way I want, while ignoring
how it is.  My practice now
isn't about rebuilding what
I knew.  It's not about
clearing the littered ground
of old illusions only to
construct new ones.
Emptiness has a stark
beauty, noticed only
when I stop looking
for security.  I sit on the
tumble of mortar and brick
and pray for patience,
pray for strength,
pray for the humility
to just keep breathing.

Danna Faulds
Excerpt from: "Deconstruction"
From: One Soul
2003

~

Art - Dissolving the Masks

2017

Bring Your Attention to the Embrace...

First the weather report :) Today has been a beautifully overcast, spritzy, cool kind of day. We are actually getting a Canadian cool front, and weather similar to what the Northwest usually gets, while they are reportedly getting triple digit weather – the kind we usually get in this semi-arid climate in July. I *love* this weather. I thrive in this. We have actually had a whole Summer of the kind of weather that makes all the trees in our backyard look like a tropical rain forest embracing the house.

And on this wet, Fallish, invigorating kind of day I had tea with “Z” – a wonderful friend who helps me to see the Truth beyond my experience. He helps me unwind when I get a little too wound up in the mind, in the thought function of trying to figure it all out, and in my over vigilance *about* the words I’m using, trying not to *sound* dualistc. I sometimes find it hard having tea with “Z” because he tends to deconstruct all the fabrications that I have built around myself to protect myself. He points out to me, in the most non-judgmental ways, where I am still hiding behind the words - defending, explaining, clarifying - in an attempt to be “spiritually correct” so as not to offend, so as to be understood, and where I’m still caring about how I’m being seen. Sometimes in this allowing of myself to be seen in the places where I am still attached there is an incredible feeling of vulnerability, and a wanting to contract, to not see or be seen. But today “Z” invited me to see in a way that helped me let go of all that. (And here I want to explain that “we” really don’t “let go” of anything, it dissolves when it is truly *seen*. So you see the kinds of word games I get into here, wanting to be sure you know that I’m not caught in some dualistic way of thinking and expressing… :)

Anyway, what “Z” offered me in all my wrangling and entanglement in thought and words today was this: Who is having the thought that you have to figure it out, that you have to know, that you have to be vigilant about your words, about life? What part of you says what you know is not enough, that who you are is not enough, that the way you express is not “right”? In the moments of silence that followed, as I “checked in” internally (tea with “Z” is very experiential :), I met the internal monitor – this hyper vigilance about languaging and expression, the “aspect” that tends to want to monitor everything I do and say – and – I met the belief in inadequacy, in “not good enough.” And in that moment of meeting them I saw that all there actually is, is Embrace. There is only a deep, compassionate Embrace for these “aspects” (here I go worrying about the words again :). There is just Embrace embracing, holding this vigilance, this inadequacy, this not good enough *belief.* In the seeing of this all the contractions around the concepts relaxed – let go of me. In that moment of seeing I realized that what I had been struggling with doesn’t matter – the words, the vigilance, the inadequacy - because it’s all just being embraced - all the thinking and feeling and expressing and doing. There’s only Embrace of all that is, as it is. There is only the Divine revealing Itself *in* every expression. It is what I bring my attention to that fuels it into a fire of thought vigilance, a thought frenzy that obscures the *seeing* of the Embrace. I contract into, become fixated on, and identified with those objects of attention, unable to see beyond them; seemingly unable to experience the Embrace of it all.

In this incredible opening of a doorway into seeing clearly there was a sense of translucence, of everything being seen *through,* seen as it is – just thought forms, or objects *in* Embrace, in Consciousness, in Awareness (sorry, the word thing again :) that are utterly translucent. And with this also came the realization that I don’t need to explain or clarify anything. And then “Z’s” absolutely lovely words emerged into clarity. Don’t focus on the words, on the thoughts, on the concepts, just keep bringing your attention to the Embrace that holds it all.

In speechless wonder…

Heart Smiles – MeANderi
www.ASerenitySanctuary.com