Finding the Sacred in Daily Life

All the Scriptures, all the true teachers, tell us that Presence, love, is always available if only we can surrender. If we have faith in God, in the teachings, then Grace and blessing will be revealed.  Some part of us knows that it’s all sacred, that the Beloved can only be everything. Yet seldom is this our experience. We often struggle just to be mindful of what’s going on.

How can we directly manifest the truth of the teachings? Recent studies by psychologists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison show mindfulness leads to an increased sense of well-being, not a big surprise. They also found out that if we cultivate compassion as well as mindfulness, this movement toward well being noticably increases. Now So there are two things to do: pay attention and open your heart to any suffering that arises. Paragraph break

I’ve been doing this practice for decades. Let go the narrative, let go of “Why?” And be with “What?”, particularly as experiened in the body. Then get more interested in my relationship with what I’m experiencing. Is it loving and compassionate? As we become more courageous in the face of pain, the heart becomes balanced. We experience the boundless and connected nature of the heart. Our ego structure remains, of course, but it is just one small cloud in the vast sky. We approach life from a sense of fullness and romance rather than a sense of need and inadequacy. The ego is no longer the enemy of freedom. We can gently move toward our pain. Suffering becomes grace.

Finally we can begin to rest in Presence that can only be experienced now, not lost in time. We are with the first moment of perception, having the courage to let go of conceptualization. The next moment can no longer be more significant than now. No room for feelings of the need for self improvement before the Sacred can be experienced. Rather than being preoccupied with the content of our experience or even our relationship with it, we rest in nature of Reality itself – love, Presence, God.  Compassion creates the spaciousness to let God in. Be pulled by intimacy, allowing your self pure desire. Even suffering is then a direct pointing home. Since we no longer believe God is only external, we don’t identify as something lower.

We are directly and intimately touching and being touched by each moment–not using “spirituality” as a means to avoid the messiness of this life. Compassion has birthed a freedom from fear of suffering. Whenever we’re not resting in the flow of grace, we know that only our faulty assumptions are veiling the immediacy of Presence.  The more we rest in this fullness, the more we hunger to be here. We see no distinction between the sacred and the mundane, digesting experience and emotion as just another form of the sacred and essentially being in relationship with the Sacred Feminine. We become conscious that this world is intelligent and alive, densely permeated with Presence.

– Dale Borglum