The Day My Buddha Burned - part fifteen

On the subject of ‘Thy Will’

For years I prayed ‘Thy Will be done’.  I prayed in a kind of repentance. Through the years I had lost sight of what I was doing here on this earth. My judgments came back in, my personality in all it’s glory flared up and took over. There were obvious changes in my life that could be directly linked to my first deep spiritual consciously spiritual experience, but I had diverged.

Ten years after my initial experience, I started praying. I started asking for guidance and I promised I would surrender. Life opened up to me in many wonderful ways and I trusted the life process.

About 3 years later I started getting little snipbits of guidance. Little images came to mind, as if adding depth to understanding. I started seeing things  in several layers. Nothing seemed one dimentional. Not just in a knowing in my mind, but a feeling in my body. As I began to listen and take notice to all of the information revealing itself to me, life started to speed up. It’s like the voltage of my experience doubled and extended way past my known parameters.

Sometime I didn’t listen. Sometimes I felt I couldn’t. And then one day I learnt my lesson.

I was in a Jesuit Church, about ten minutes walk from my apartment. I ‘m not sure how or why I was there. I just popped in and began to pray in the chapel. I remember a statue of Jesus  there but it didn’t matter really what was there, it was a place where I could pray and not be disturbed. I prayed, dear God, dear God, please show me the way. Please please please Thy will be done. I throw myself down and I let Your goodness shine in me.’ Something along these lines. I prayed so that I cried and felt emptied out and full of my own goodness.

I passed a gypsy woman begging at the steps and I smiled at her. I felt great. Full of myself. And not more than ten steps later, I saw a woman shaking her little girl. The girl was about 3 years old. The mother had obviously lost all reason and was verging on hysteria. The girl’s head was being thrown about and the mother was shouting at her. And I heard the voice ‘Go and pick up the little girl’.

Every part of me recoiled. I glanced around the park. There were about 8 people there, all ignoring the mother and daughter. I looked back at the scene. ‘I can’t.’ ‘Go and pick up the girl.’ At this stage the little girl was on the ground crying and the mother was yelling at her.  All I could feel was deep humiliation at the thought of interfering. I even said ‘why are you doing this to me? How can I, I who can not touch another human without bracing myself, how can I go and touch a stranger in the midst of their confusion?’

And then I heard ‘if you don’t go you will regret it’. It was not a threat. It was a statement. The voice was emotionless. It was just a voice.  I recalled that not more than two minutes ago I was on my knees in a Church praying for guidance and here I was, saying no to a direct command.

I was ashamed of myself and my weakness and my will hardened enough to pluck up the courage to go over there. In actual fact, the thought of it was much worse than the actual doing.

I walked over and picked the little girl up off the floor. She stopped crying instantly. The woman spoke in Spanish, and I could only understand part of her story, but it didn’t matter in the least. I wasn’t judging her. I wasn’t there to tell her or teach her anything. I was purely there because I had to be there. Nothing else. I had no personal agenda, no motivation, no reason to be there. And it was perfect as it was. I don’t know what happened to the family afterwards, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. If I was helpful or not is beside the point of just being where you are suppose to be, when you are suppose to be there. Simple.

Now, we are so afraid of ‘blindly following’, and I don’t mean that at all. There is choice in any given moment. But what is your choice based on? Fear? Shame? Desire? What will they think?

This deep surrender truly takes practice. It’s a way to know yourself deeply, to know what you are afraid of in this world, and to help you answer the question Myss puts to us ‘what is competing with God?’

In this instance my resistance was within my physical body. I recognized my dislike of touch.  I have never really enjoyed hugging or touching others and like many an empath, I have spent a lot of time alone, purely to be away from the maddening crowd. It’s just too much information, and when you are young and inexperienced empaths tend to confuse the information they are picking up from others as their own turmoil, often leading to instability.

My physical body recoiled from the idea of touching a screaming stranger. Of inserting myself into a scene that I have always avoided like it was the plague. I was going to break a social norm. Generally speaking it is not encouraged to come between a mother and her child. I don’t think I have ever seen it before. I was shy. To follow the will of God, and yes, the voice was indifferent, emotionless and held the weight of ‘sure knowing’ that rung with the truth of Divine Guidance, I would have to break my comfort zone, I would have to break a social norm and I would have to do it all without concern for the people in the park staring at us. And it was horrible and liberating and humbling. Thy will really did know better than mine. I walked away, not full of myself, not feeling joy and greatness, I walked away feeling crushed, humble and in a space of not knowing.