The Subtle Art Of Awakening

My topic for today is the subtle art of awakening.

It was inspired because I was contemplating one day the challenge that I was facing with a teenager of helping him to wake up to his life in many respects,

But literally to physically wake up and get going every day and contemplating all these ways and kind of being shocked at the way the alarm would go off.

And he'd sleep for hours through the alarm and would go down there and the alarm would be,

He lives in the basement,

Would be just going off and he would just sleep right through it and figuring out,

Isn't it interesting how different bodies and body clocks do different things?

And I was thinking about how I tend to like to have the alarm go off a little bit early and then hit the snooze button a few times and sleep in between the snooze buttons.

And my husband Ken tends to have the alarm go off and jump right out of bed and get going for his day.

And then I was thinking about how people are so different with the way that they tend to wake up.

How do we facilitate ourselves in waking up each day?

And as I'm prone to do as a minister,

That led me into,

Well,

Geez,

I wonder if there is a correlation with that and how we wake up to our life,

To our spiritual awareness.

Our spiritual awareness,

Is it the same kind of thing?

And started thinking about,

Do I hit the snooze alarm in my spiritual awakening and want to hit it over and over again with certain things?

And then I remembered this phrase that I heard many years ago that some wise teacher said,

And it was this,

How you do anything is how you do everything.

And it really got me thinking and observing people in life and observing how I feel that in our heart of hearts,

Humanity is and always has been seeking to wake up,

To be in this world and wake up to who we really are at the core of us and live from that awakened state in our life.

And so when I say wake up,

To wake up,

I'm talking about waking up to the spiritual essence that is in us,

Awakening to the light that is within us,

The understanding that this life is a dream that my soul is having.

This life is a dream that my soul is having and that I walk and inhabit this earth and doing all that I'm doing along with other beings who are seeking to wake up.

That the dance of being human seems to be about being birthed into form and then to some degree,

For most of us,

To a large degree,

Experiencing a degree of spiritual amnesia.

A forgetfulness about who we really are in a way appearing to fall asleep to our true nature and that what the evolution of humanity appears to be about is this waking up in the life we're living now.

I often find myself pondering what would it be like to live that fully awakened life in physical form and feel that there are some beings who have shown us the way,

I believe,

That Jesus was one of them and that there have been many other examples of beings who have awakened fully to the spiritual nature that lives within them and then walk this earth as a living example of what that could be like and that all of us are striving towards this.

And so my question today for all of us to consider in our practice in the week ahead,

In the conditions that we're facing in our personal life and certainly the conditions that we face collectively as we witness a shooting in a high school,

As we witness disparity amongst ourselves around politics,

As we witness so much going on in the world,

Are we willing to wake up or are we hitting the snooze alarm?

Are we hitting the snooze button?

Are we falling back to sleep?

Are we waking up to the full experience of living this?

Are you hitting the snooze alarm or are you clapping over there?

I hope you're clapping.

Pounding the snooze alarm.

Oh my God.

Thank you.

And so that's the invitation that I'm inviting us into.

And I want to frame this from a couple of different places.

First of all,

Awakening to the joy of living.

A very important part of awakening.

Dr.

Fred Vogt used to say,

Don't miss the joy.

And it's clear to most of us that the joyful experiences that we have can lead us into this kind of awakening.

And when we wake up to joyful experiences and through the portals of joy,

We find ourselves experiencing our own inner light.

We experience beauty and we experience awe.

And that experience of awe to me is the experience of the awakened self,

The awakened life that I already am.

And so it's pretty easy to see the times that we've experienced joyfulness that have awakened us.

I know that the birth of my son,

His little face,

A joyous awakening for sure,

Huge awakening through that joyous experience.

The joyfulness of awakening to this teaching and finding spirituality in my life.

Huge awakening.

The joyfulness that I feel often in meditation and these heights of awakening that occur within me through that spiritual practice and prayerfulness,

Through friendships and relationships in my life that have brought me great joy and awakening.

The beings that I cherish and that I walk this earth with and feel such joyfulness about.

The beauty of art and music and all the good.

The beauty of our beautiful planet and sunsets that just are stunning,

Especially here in Colorado.

And I say sunsets because my body clock is not a sunrise person for sure,

But I appreciate sunrises but I haven't seen near as many of them.

But appreciating sunsets and the beauty of nature.

All of this leads us to moments of awakenings.

And so we tend to seek them out.

We tend to crave them.

We tend to try to create them so that we can experience that inner joy.

And at the same time,

When life gets really heavy,

When there are big challenges afoot for us in our journey or in the journey we face together,

Sometimes it can feel as though that joyful awakening is not as prevalent.

But it's in times like that that I remind myself intellectually and I remind myself by looking out at the world and seeing that no matter what appears to be going on in the world,

There is more good occurring than not good.

There is more good occurring.

Right?

And in that acknowledgement comes an awakening.

And through the joyful experiences that we have,

I believe that we seek them out and we claim them when we look for them because there's a part of us,

This inner being within us that is seeking expression through us that knows that the evolutionary trajectory of humanity is the manifestation of heaven on earth.

That's what it is to be living in an awakened state,

Whether one of us and all of us attains that in this lifetime or not,

That is heaven on earth that we can feel and sense and that teachers have talked to us about and the opportunity is here for us.

We have to take it.

We have to claim it.

We have to walk through the door of it.

It reminds me of a cartoon that I've seen over the years and it's this two doorways into an auditorium.

And over one door it says,

Lecture on heaven and there's this long line.

And over the other door it says,

Heaven and no one's in line.

So it's understanding that we don't walk through the door of talking about it.

We walk through the door of the experience and that we are in the midst of it and it is in the midst of us.

My wonderful husband Ken has told me a story that he's heard over the years that theorizes the possibility of upon our transition into this next life experience,

What if we're met by a being who simply asks,

How was heaven?

Yeah,

Pretty profound.

And I think about that often,

Inviting myself to wake up,

Wake up to heaven on earth,

Wake up to it within me,

Around me and through me and allow the joyous experiences of my life to be awakening points,

Recognizing that my essence,

My soul seeks out that joyous experience for a recognition of itself.

But here then comes the next part,

Awakening through the challenges.

Now this becomes sometimes what appears to be a more challenging or arduous journey,

Mostly because of some of the myths that we have told ourselves about challenges.

For example,

We have sometimes fallen into beliefs consciously or even at a deeper level that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.

And so when something that appears to be bad or challenging happens to a good person,

Or even to ourselves and we perceive that we're good,

We can fall into a false erroneous belief that something out there is out to get us,

To push us down,

To keep us from our good,

That we're being punished,

That we've done something wrong.

We here in this teaching might think,

Well,

I must have horrible consciousness that this horrible thing happened to me.

And that's where we go,

Even if we're not playing that other game.

And so I have noticed,

However,

In my personal life and in the life of most other humans that I know,

We have tended to grow into heaven and into our experience and awareness of heaven more profoundly through our challenges.

Doesn't mean that we have to do it that way because our joys,

The joy of the authentic self is hugely powerful.

But how we get there often is through the contrast,

Through the contrast of our experiences.

And so what happens is that in order to awaken to the challenges,

We must firstly come to find some welcoming and understanding in our heart that every challenge we face individually and collectively is a call.

Imagine it like an alarm going off.

And it's an alarm that says,

Pay attention,

Wake up.

And to hit the snooze alarm is to fall into victimhood.

To hit the snooze alarm is to fall into woe is me or woe is us.

To hit the snooze alarm is to just become numb to it all.

To hit the snooze alarm is to feel helpless.

But to stand fully in the challenges and to bring the light that we are,

That is the holy sacred work of the authentic self.

We are having a wonderful speaker here next month,

Janet Mock.

And she's a transgender woman of color who's very public.

She's been a broadcaster and she's written a book.

And she says,

Owning who we are is power.

Today I no longer deny or hide.

I own my story.

I enter spaces without leaving parts of myself behind.

As much as I own that story,

I also own the fact that for many years I evaded and avoided my truth.

And so part of heaven on earth is being fully present even in the challenges that we face and finding the gifts of them.

This past week as I was thinking about this,

I encountered a video that was likely going viral on Facebook.

You might have seen it yourself about a gentleman named Nick Vujicic.

Nick was born in 1982 with no limbs,

No arms,

And no legs.

And it was very challenging for his parents,

Especially his mother at first.

But over his first year or so as they kind of got used to having this differently abled being in their life,

They came to love him and accept him.

And Nick faced the challenges that were in front of him with his physical body being radically different than most people's.

And he had a little toe that is part of his,

The lower part of his body,

And he learned to write with it and went to school.

But in school,

He was bullied and made fun of because he was so different,

And that was very painful for him.

At 10 years old,

He attempted to take his life.

And at that time,

He said,

I felt I had no value,

And I thought I would always be a burden to my parents and never get married.

His parents at that time suggested to him that the reality was that he didn't even know what he could do until he tried.

And that really rang true to Nick.

And so he began to encounter life through his challenges and obstacles in a very profound way.

And in this video,

We see him learning to swim.

We see him learning to snowboard,

To surf.

He learned to fish.

He learned to play golf.

He plays the drums.

He attaches the drumsticks with tape to his shoulders and plays the drums and is just smiling and joyful as he's doing it.

He went skydiving.

He overcame obstacle after obstacle after obstacle.

And as he got into his older teen years,

He ran into another boy who'd been born in the same physical form as him,

And he felt inspired to help this boy.

He knew he could help this boy in his journey,

And it was in that moment through the challenges and obstacles that he'd faced his whole life that Nick became a motivational speaker at 19 years old.

He says,

I have a choice to be angry at God for what I don't have or be thankful for what I do have.

And out of that was born a whole new life for him.

He became married to the love of his life at 30 years old.

They have four children that he joyfully parents,

And they have videos of him with his kids.

It's just beautiful.

He goes around speaking.

He's visited more than 57 countries.

He's given over 3,

000 talks,

Giving hope to everyone no matter how they were born.

And now he has a foundation that's called Life Without Limbs.

He says,

I wish many things were different in my life,

But knowing I can be a miracle for someone else makes my life worth living.

You see,

Yeah,

Isn't that a great story?

Oh my gosh,

It gives me chills.

As I looked at his story this week that touched me every time I'd watch the video,

Brought me to tears,

I asked myself,

Michelle,

Where are you hitting the snooze button?

Where are you continuing to sleep?

Because you just don't want to face the challenge of the apparent obstacle.

Where is it that you've told yourself that you're not strong enough or that you can't really make a difference or you can't participate in the life that we live together on earth in a way that could really impact people in a powerful way like Nick?

And I realized that none of my excuses were anywhere near valid after hearing his story.

They just weren't.

And that part of what allowed him to shift from this very challenging life was to see his challenge as a gift.

And the minute he could see the challenge as a gift and say,

How could I take this gift that I've been given and become triumphant in it and inspire others through it,

His life changed forever.

And that's a huge part of what is going on for each one of us as we face life together with the challenges that we face as we walk this journey of awakening,

As we allow ourselves to give up our amnesia even in the most challenging moment of our life,

We find that this inner guidance system,

We haven't drawn challenges to ourselves because we're defective or something is wrong with us or we're being punished.

We have drawn challenges to ourselves because we are here to wake up and life meets us where we are and says,

Wake up.

Can you wake up in this?

Can you wake up in that?

And our inner soul says,

Yes,

Absolutely,

While our human life goes,

Well,

I don't know,

Maybe I can't.

But all the while,

This deep,

Deep aspect of us,

That is what is going on in the collective experience,

Constant,

Constant wake up calls.

And we need to stop hitting our own snooze alarm and wake up and move boldly and triumphantly forward.

And then what begins to happen as we do this is a part of Nick's story that is so powerful is that we get to participate in the awakening of humanity.

A part of this collective dream we are sharing is not that we are just here for our own journey.

We belong to each other and we are here for each other,

Not just those of us at Mile High Church,

But for every human being.

And as the song that Jennifer and the choir sang,

Every time there's a challenge that we see on the world scene,

We will rise up.

We will rise up.

We will not fall down.

We will rise up a thousand times over and over again.

That is the spiritual fortitude that life is calling us to right now,

Right now.

And part of how we do that is we understand that we have a stake,

Each one of us,

A part to play in the transcendence of humanity,

In the evolution of humanity.

Our part is to wake up in our own journey,

In our own dream,

And then to emanate that wakefulness like others have shown us.

I love it.

Nick is a great example and I love it when we bring that beautiful teacher,

Edwene Gaines here.

And Edwene will stand on our stage and claim herself to be a woman of power who is here to transform the consciousness of financial and prosperity on planet earth.

That's a big,

Bold statement.

And that woman,

That's what she's doing and that's what she's done all her life.

And it's powerful.

It's magnificent to watch.

And that master teacher,

Jesus,

Yeshua,

Came here and walked this earth and said through what we see in the gospels time and time again,

I am here to awaken you.

I am here to be an example of an awakened being in all that I am and all that I do.

You do too.

You must do.

It's not just all on Yeshua's shoulders.

We are in this together,

To awaken together and allow the continued evolution of our own awakening to become the reality of who we are as a human family on this planet.

That's what we're here to do.

In other words,

We all have a ministry.

It's not just those of us who stand up here and talk and teach and spout.

Every one of us has a ministry of awakening.

And when we choose to say yes to that,

Everywhere we go in every relationship,

In our family,

Our friendships,

Our workplace,

Wherever we go on this planet as we travel,

As we choose to step up and participate in different things,

Not only do we bring what we do,

Actually what we do and move around in the world,

Is far inferior to who we are and how we show up in that,

In that energetic and allow this awakened presence to impact all that we're about on this planet.

It takes a willingness to take on this big vision to be a beneficial,

Loving,

Transformative presence to humanity.

Jimmy says it like this,

That beautiful poet,

Though we seem to be sleeping,

There is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream and will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.

I know that in my own life and in the life we share,

Sometimes I get pretty startled.

But I know now that that startling is as startling as that alarm is in the morning when I wake up and that that alarm is an invitation to get up,

Move out into my world and be awakened,

Be about the art of awakening.