Re: spirit is a way to be one with all

Letting go of the story liberates the spirit 

In many recovery programs you are asked to share your story on a regular basis.

This sharing of my story was a very important tool of liberation. This is what it did for me.

After recounting my story a few times I began to listen to myself and hear myself speak. I soon found that my story was quite different every time I told it. In fact it turned out that it was impossible to tell the same story twice even though I thought I was talking about me and my life, the only thing I thought I knew really well.

Eventually I saw that the story changed according to my feelings and attitudes of the moment and according to my intention deriving from my momentary internal situation. There was no me as my story, there was only my attempt to express a part of my truth, which wasn't very true at all.

This opened me up to letting go of my story, so that when I heard Pema Choedron say, that you can do without your story, because you're o.k. the way you are, it was easy to drop the story and recognize the freedom that lies beyond the limits of defining myself by a few experiences that were exciting or traumatic enough to remember. I became open to stop identifying with the analyzing part of mind and to begin to see myself as something bigger, beyond words, something called open mind, knowingness, or spirit.

Eventually I could see that the story is only a means of separating myself from others, to create the illusion that I am different, better, or smarter, but after learning to let go of judgments it became clear that there really is no difference at all. That it is only my fear of inferiority that tends to create these differences in order to give me the illusion of being better, while in fact everybody is just doing the same thing: trying to feel better with wrong or insufficient means.

 After a few more years I became able to stick with the idea that I am spirit and know that as spirits we are all the same, yes, not only exactly the same, but one universal mind expressing itself through humans as love, intelligence, knowing, creativity, truth, peace and beauty, something we might call “the goodness within.” The rest is fearful thinking.