Of late, there has been one major situation that I have been dealing with in my personal life and that is my application for a green card. It has been a long and difficult path filled with bureaucracy and red tape. I would say that it has taken me away from my spiritual purpose , but that is not strictly true. The last obstacle my wife and I encountered has brought me to somewhat of an epiphany. Without this seeming roadblock I doubt I would have come to the point I am at right now. It has returned to me a sense of life and purpose I feared was lost in the past.
Without going into great detail, it seemed that the last obstruction in our application seemed insurmountable. But we have been able to find a narrow legal avenue to pursue and to pin our hopes to. Of course, this is where the problem lies. During this last month, the stress and worry of this has caused my wife to lose her appetite for writing (at least during the current phase of the application). I also suffered a great deal of stress and anxiety over whether or not the application will be approved or denied.
But in the midst of this chaos and worry I have found an element of peace. Many years ago such an obstruction would not have phased me and I would have continued to follow on my path regardless (or at least that is how it seems to me in hindsight). Whether a bureaucratic system gave me sanction would have seemed irrelevant to my life path. Now, being apparantly older and wiser..it gives me pause. I have lost much and suffered greatlyin the intervening years and the thought of going off road once again fills me with trepidation.
Many years ago, in a different circumstance I did exactly that. A situation forced me to fly against the bureaucratic rules and regulations, since the choice to not take that route was morally wrong. Once I did what was right..both for me and in the situation I felt a great sense of relief and liberation. I took my own power into myself, rather than projecting that authority onto a faceless set of regulations.
Now it seems I am facing that same energy and seeing that I had lost that inner freedom I once possessed. I realised that I could not live in a state of stress and worry, because my power was in another’s hands. This has led me to a point of acceptance. That I will live with my own authority regardless of the decisions of that body. Accepting that “death” gives me freedom, a freedom that I would not find otherwise. Whether or not the decision is affirming or not, I am free from its harm. I am no longer attached to it.
Of course, I will still continue the process, to do so would be silly. But it ceases to have the same terrifying intensity. I can trust in the universe once again and feel within the flow.
The night after this epiphany I had a dream in which I was stressing at work and had to help my family make prepare for a party. As I went back outside to pick up the remaining bottles, I saw a large truck trying to back up and turn around. The road was covered in ice and on an incline. In the drivers cab was a bearded gentleman, about my age with long hair. I hopped up into the cab with him and he said the road through town was blocked. So, we drove off road, through the trees and ended up driving along a mountain stream. He explained this was a short cut that was only open a few times a year. We weaved in and around the rocks in the stream and eventually were able to bypass the bloackage this way.
I saw this as a metaphor for being okay with having to go off-road and that it was a short cut around an obstruction and that I was back within the flow. Which was certainly how I felt about this situation.
Imagine my surprise when today a man stopped by the hostel who looked exactly like the figure in my dream. He had been hitchhiking, but could not get a ride through town and had decided to stop and get a bed instead. I decided to tell him about the dream and he said that a few nights back, he had also had a dream in which he was backing up a large van on a road. We talked for several hours and I felt like I had met him before. There were a great deal on synchronicites in our situations and he had just come back from Alberquerque where he was learning the same lesson from his Tibetan meditation teacher and only when he has let go was he granted the lesson. While we talked, he managed to find a ride back out west and I got a call from my wife that all the paperwork we needed had finally arrived!
This situation has also unearthed another deep seated fragment, but I will have to talk about that another day.
Tags: Change, consciousness, dreams, learning, Lessons, Life, manifestation, Meditation, Spirituality, stress, work
