Tag: No More Ego

Forgive

On By rrainefioreIn Awakening, Uncategorized1 Comment

Warning: Spiritual big concept stuff in this blog.  If you aren’t into that and you just want to see pretty pictures of China or hear funny tales of adventure, tune in later this week.

Yep, my sketchy flight from Phuket to Bangkok ended up being legit.  Go Thailand!  I got into my hotel in Bangkok and was hungry and sore so I headed out for dinner and a massage even though I needed to be going to bed to get up early for my flight to China.  There was a food market nearby.  I didn’t see anything I wanted so I had coconut ice cream for dinner.  After massage I had a crepe with mystery green goo (pandan?), sprinkles and jelly balls.  This did not make for a healthy dinner, but it was quite delicious.

During massage the word “forgive” kept coming to me.  Ok, got it, forgiveness.  I tried to figure out who or what I need to forgive.  During massage, it felt like the list is so long that it is comical.  It doesn’t feel like any big injustices, just a lifetime of tiny judgements and petty gripes.  This isn’t a 12 step process and I don’t think listing them all out makes sense or is useful.  The big one, the original one is the one that all the others are actually built on.  For any person or event that I haven’t forgiven, it’s not actually about that person or event, it’s still the original.  Years ago I discovered that I had a belief that life itself is unsafe and that I was angry with life/myself/god/the greater power/the universe or whatever you want to believe is the greater power or knowledge out there.  I was angry, scared and mistrusting.  As I’ve worked on this over the years, my allergies have been disappearing, my non working thyroid started working again as well many other healthy changes in my body.  As much as I have worked and as much as I have let go, I think there’s more.  I don’t think forgive at this level I’m working on is “I forgive you for being mean” or  “I understand you didn’t know better, so it’s ok”.  There’s ego in that.  There’s a sense of blaming “you were wrong” and a sense of ego “I am the bigger person and I forgive you”.   The forgive that is coming up is not that.  It doesn’t have to do with a person, a situation or an event.  It is a letting go and surrender, again not of a situation or event.  It is to let go of everything – every event, good or bad, every person, every interaction, every judgement, every belief, the world as I know it, everything I think I am, everything I ever wanted to be.  I have been working on this little bit by little bit for years.  Investigate this feeling, that belief, this relationship, looking into every nook and crany of my brain.  I have changed and made it quite far in this process.  But, it’s still me, my idealized self image, a series of thoughts in the brain that is making all this “progress”.  In an earlier post I talked about how I wanted to live abroad not to find myself, but to lose myself.  The forgive that is coming up is to let go to the point that I lose myself.

When I speak of myself, I don’t mean I won’t remember who my friends and family are or that I will simply cease to exist, or I’ll become a monk and sit on a mountain top meditating for the rest of my life.  I’m referring to the self image, who I think I am which is just a series of synapses in the brain routed and created from my experiences and interpretations of those experiences.  I am not the synapses and memories in my brain.  I am something else completely (so are you).

I got to the airport in the morning for my flight to China.  I found most everyone to be annoying.  I found myself to be very judgmental about the way one person acted or another was dressed.  People were in my personal space.  The airplane music threatened to send me in a downward spiral.  Why is airplane music so bad?  Why do we have to have music on the airplane anyway?  Is it really soothing anyone that is scared?  It’s just there to piss me off.  What’s wrong with no music?  Although most of the day went smoothly, I found everything to be either stressful or annoying.  Apparently, I was not letting go and forgiving yesterday.

Today was the first day of my China tour and it was wonderful.  I’ll cover the details of that in another blog.  But as I sit here tonight trying to put “forgive” into words that will make sense, I can feel it happening.  I feel a lightness in my body kind of like being light headed, but over the whole body.  It feels like the cells on the outside of my body are slowly breaking apart and floating away.  They are shiny and glass like, but have no weight.  It feels like disintegration.  So, now I’m heading off to sleep or disintegrate or both.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

 

 

Whoo Whoo Awakening Stuff

On By rrainefioreIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

So, as I mentioned in the previous blog, I spent the whole day wandering around Hanoi sick trying to resolve the computer problems.  At some point I no longer cared that I had to walk in traffic just to get around.  I remember thinking that it didn’t matter if I got hit by a bus.  If I die, then I won’t have to deal with feeling so sick anymore.  Maybe that would be ok.  Don’t freak out, that’s just how you feel when you are sick and exhausted.  It did make it easier to get around and life seemed to go around me with no problem.

I know it’s more than just being sick, tired and dirty.  Something big is happening.  By the time I got back to the hotel I decided I was done with life.  I know this isn’t a truth the way you see it, but a process that needs to be kicked, cried and worked out physically.  I tried to sleep, but processed a lot about how exhausted I am in life.  I’m tired of fighting life.  Then fear of death came up.  It was a back and forth of just wanting to die and fear.  It felt very obvious that my identification of who I am no longer works.  It has been disintegrating for months now.  It’s not that I want to die, but that life as that identification is no longer worth fighting for, it’s too painful and too exhausting.  But I don’t know how to let go and fear or “I don’t want to” comes up.  I felt so sick that I wasn’t really sure if I was dying.  So, I cried and prayed for death.  Either way felt fine – death of the ego or the body, it didn’t matter as long as someone would die.  I know it’s not something I can “do”, but  I don’t know how to not “do”.  I had huge dread.  I felt like I hated Hanoi and Vietnam and I couldn’t possibly finish my vacation here.  I felt like there is no way I can go back to work as a teacher in May.  I won’t survive it.  I want to go home, but I have no home to go to.  I could go somewhere else, but where and how?  Why am I here?  This isn’t what I want.  But what I want doesn’t exist.  Then I thought of my mom in Wisconsin who is 86 and trying to take care of a sick husband.  Should I be in Wisconsin?  I’m still not clear if this part of the process was some sort of direction that I should be moving to Wisconsin or if it’s a trick of the ego to try to hold onto “the mom” or am I processing some of what she is experiencing right now?   That night nothing resolved and I finally fell asleep.  Even though it sounds dire, I get it that it that this is all process and is part of that false identification trying to disintegrate.  I don’t take it literally, and I’m just explaining how it feels so if anyone else ever experiences this or something similar, maybe you can have room for the thought that it is just an experience, not a reality.  It feels like the letting go of identification with story and body is at a point of critical mass where I can’t stop it if I tried.  It’s going to happen even if it makes me sick to get me to slow down. This is what I came here for.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore

Spiritual Stuff

On By rrainefioreIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

As I’m adjusting to life in Thailand, changes in how I see the world and myself in it are happening.  These changes started long before Thailand.  These are results of many many years of hard work and investigation into what is real.  So the rest of this blog is going to be about things that are spiritual in nature and difficult to explain because they can only be experienced.  So, if this is not your cup of tea, this blog post is not for you.

I’ve been talking about foggy brain since I got to Thailand.  After a session with my teacher and a friend confirming what I was suspecting, I don’t think it’s just too much sugar or too much rice although those things might contribute.  I think things are rewiring in my brain.  I’ve spent my whole life thinking the world worked a certain way and that things I was taught were true, things we were all taught were true.  My childhood helped me create an ego, a story of how life is and I believed it completely.  I’ve spent a long time digging into those stories and finding how believing the world is unsafe makes it unsafe and it’s a story not a truth.  Finding that I’m my own biggest judge and the judgments are not true, but I believed that’s who I was.  But, if I’m not who I thought I was, if I’m not my ego story, who am I?  Sorry to tell you, I don’t have that answer quite yet.  I have glimpses of it, but it’s still presenting itself and the ego is still trying to put it in terms it understands and make it fit in the old story.  But, it appears to me that a lot of the foggy brain is my ego dissolving.  Up to now, I had just been able to expose the lies and discover the truth.  I became healthier and changed my posture and continue to see life with very little judgement, but some of my identity remained with my story. Now enough of my story has been proven wrong and the rest is just dissolving without me having to work through it.  My brain doesn’t know what to do without the story so it just goes blank and fuzzy.  In a place that is so foreign, where I’m lost and alone, the ego is having trouble finding familiar things to hold on to and it’s grip on my identity was already severely undermined with all the years of investigation.

I had someone make the comment that how can I have gone through this much work and graduated from Awakening to Presence class and still be suffering so much.  I immediately was confused by the question.  I don’t feel like I’m suffering.  So, I thought maybe others reading my blog don’t see the fine differentiation that seems to not be there, but in reality is giant.  Most of what I’m experiencing is challenging and entertaining, but not suffering.  It’s not suffering because I chose this and because I’m not believing it should be another way.  The travel from the US to Thailand were suffering, I’ll give you that.  The challenges here have brought up feelings of wanting to go home, being overwhelmed and other stresses.  Most of that is culture shock and I know that so I’m just holding on waiting for it to work it’s way through.  Just because I’ve done all this spiritual work doesn’t make me immune to culture shock any more than it makes me immune to feeling horrible when I’m sick.  I think maybe I haven’t portrayed that well in my blogs.  I don’t think awakening means bliss, peacefulness and lack of discomfort for the rest of your life.  Sorry to those of you who are seeking that. That is why I signed up for Awakening to Presence class 9 years ago.  And when I finally fully got it that it was impossible, I was crushed.   I also think that spiritual leaders that are portraying their lives as without challenge are not telling you the whole story.  Then again, if I had gotten that in the beginning, I might not have signed up.  But on this side I understand fully that Truth is what I want, not perfect happy all the time.

I have written this blog and many others several times.  Half way through my thoughts no longer can be put in words and gibberish comes out of the keyboard as I realize that this is so hard to explain because it has to be experienced.  So, I ask in the future that if you read a blog and think I’m suffering or “poor Rraine”, ask yourself if that is your story.  Can you see it from a different angle, one with humor and lack of the thought it should be different.  Discomfort, pain, exhaustion, crying and other feelings still exist, but if I don’t judge them as “it shouldn’t be” they are just feelings that come and go.  If I judge them, it isn’t for long before I realize I’m doing it and then I can let the judgement go.  I will try to paint this side of the picture more clearly.

(c) all rights reserved Kimberly Fiore