In the Forest: Inner Consciousness
Think of a stage, and the caliber of performance possible from a soapbox versus a stadium.
If all we can offer our presence is the space of a tiny, scrappy soapbox, then all the variant colours of our soul's character have to fight for their place, to be seen and heard.
The dominant personalities end up winning out, and worse — when they can’t take the stage they heckle from the crowd.
Meanwhile the strong, subtle quiet types whose wisdom is more delicately understated and are less entertained by all the grandstanding in general — they take their talents elsewhere, and their grand reserves of life's riches along with them.
We must not feel bad about this.
...in this society, where we don’t have much of a concept for what this richness even is. We don’t know real richness until we touch it, and if we keep touching it, allowing our presence to unsparingly expand, eventually we realize we are tapping a teeming well of vivid, endless subtlety.
We have entered the stadium.
We see the performance, so infinitely resourced in a responsive choreography that adjusts to perfectly on the fly it nourishes the unique creative genius of every man, woman and child in that arena.
And just as this intensity hits, the entire breadth of it turns to black, as if wonder itself has blown through all the lights.
This is actually the case.
Without an embodied architecture capable of bearing the experience, the experience overpowers.
So we call ourselves to fear it, denying we were ever witness, recalling the fearful label…
psychosis.
(Which it really does become if we continue ignoring the circuitry.)
We must remember: we are each this stadium.
Holding court to such immensity is branded in our bones.
Keeping our actual wits about us as we open our residence doors is a whole other matter, because it takes breaking open our capacity for reality.
Weaving stadium presence into waking consciousness happens one stitch at a time, and each and every stitch is a very aware choice.
And yet we are so conditioned to the soapbox and its demand for the reigning quarrel, our range to respond with presence just doesn’t feel available from inside its narrow wiring, whether implemented as the fighter or the flighter...
We think they have to change. We think they have to speak up.
We think they have to leave.
We think, well, if the wiring is all faulty why not let the whole block to burn down... that’s how we make room for a stadium is it not?
Not in this neighbourhood — the stadium is already here.
The fighters and flighters are all Actors in the same play. They may be busy discording as renegade hostile agents, trained on soapboxes as they have been, but every one of them has their own angle to nail down; their own chord to fine-tune; their own battle to resolve.
They all deserve our attention, one screaming-ego's plummet at a time.
And as the Master of Ceremonies, we have to know all of our Actors, because each and every one of them holds a piece of our precious wiring.
(But they comprise a whole MOB! HOW is knowing them all POSSIBLE!)
It is really quite simple!
When the wheels of a scene begin to spark and unravel, as the Director, we need to take a breath, return to our office and sit down — and invite the Actors to come to us.
We either notice who is calling, or we notice who we need to call,
and we RECEIVE them or CALL them and together feel the pulse of their part.
Flow and ebb with its melody as it metabolizes in the body...
Returning resilience, returning awareness, returning communion.
No soapbox is necessary with an open door to our heart — a heart of real capacity, because it contains the whole theatre.
Stadium presence doesn’t just take conscious will — it IS conscious will.
We become the space of our situations, remaining open to the balanced course,
and in the humble composure of our own marrow, we take it.
And then sit back and watch as the magic unfolds, with the performance on the grounds rebalancing...
all by itself.
The feat is no less than a land returned to life.