The Day My Buddha Burned - part 13

I should mention again that I didn’t dress God. It didn’t look like anything. It was everything, deep inside all things, but it didn’t have substance in itself. God didn’t look like Jesus to me. Actually, if anything, I distrusted these images. Like many Westerners searching for spiritual support, I looked towards the less familiar and less criticized East for role models and images that were not tainted by the Church’s stories of greed, power and corruption.

I had no tradition. I didn’t come from a religion. And the first great visitation I had was a great thick dark snake like being that came in the night.

Release and surrender are only words until you apply them. I remember lying on my bed with the sensation of this huge being wrapped around my legs and moving in deep inside my spirit body. I was terrified. I felt pinned to the bed. But, I could feel it was not threatening me. I had never been consciously entered into in this way before. I concentrated on my breathing. I relaxed as much as I could. I prayed to God for protection, if I needed it, and all I knew was the need to surrender to this entity. As I began to relax my muscles and to breathe at a slower rate, I noticed a sensation deep down near my tailbone. And I lay there stunned. She was cleaning me. Licking my spiritual body like a lioness washing her cub. I felt shock, gratitude, humility in a flash and I continued to breathe as calmly as I could. The next day I felt my root chakra for the first time in meditation. I didn’t need a group, or a country or a family to stimulate it. What I had was an emissary of the earth mother herself to call my root into consciousness. I was at home when I connected consciously to the earth, no matter where I was in the world. I was a blessed, root active nomad who could lay her roots where she chose. I felt blessed, loved, chosen. Chosen for what? Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

Of course, how do you talk about giant snakes coming out of the earth and licking your root chakra awake? I sounded bonkers, even to myself. I had to surrender the last piece of concern I had about what ‘they’ might say or think about me. It was time to fully embrace the knowledge that I was being given. For a reason I don’t know, I was being called upon to wake up and to be true to that process. To engage with it and to speak my truth when the time was appropriate.

I remember sitting with my mother and step father, my partner and my son and finally speaking about how I felt about God, what I saw, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and trying to be as honest as possible. It was difficult to speak these things out loud.  But I did it, and much to their credit, they all supported me with a smile and wished me well for the future. I haven’t looked back since.

I gave up pretending to be ‘normal’ or caring about what ‘normal’ was. I gave up lying to myself and to others. I spoke the truth, when asked or propelled and I didn’t consider the consequences to my future, to my relationship or to other’s opinions. I surrendered to my self to the path that was chosen for me.