you are God in drag
I know that the notion of our inherent goodness or divinehuman nature (yes, we are both!) might be difficult for some of us to wrap our hearts around. Looking at the world also makes it all the more confusing given the levels of perosnal and collective suffering and conflict. I invite you to be curious and verify this gnosis for yourself by pausing in open-awareness and asking your true nature to reveal itself to you. Below the waves and rivulets of thought, emotion, and sensation lies a great reality, le point vièrge, the virgin point or ground of being, your essence/Self. May we meet each other there!
Hello dear humans,
Firstly, i am back from vacation -- seven days away in Sarasota and Longboat Key, the four of us (ahhh!! I still can’t believe it’s the four of us now, and A. having just turned nine months which solidifies it) traveling like this for the first time, just us, hours on the road, many days away from home comforts and familiarity.
It was unabashed joy, a crucible, a wild learning experience.
Before we left, my husband convinced me to unplug completely, aka not bring my laptop with me (hence why the practice included in this letter is a week late – turns out you cannot post an essay in Substack from one’s smart phone) and release all work for the time being. Essentially, put my money where my mouth is, since i talk about the Feminine quite a bit and the energy/ the wisdom of the Feminine, which is deeply connected to rest and the intuitive tracking of the body’s language made known through needs and nervous system rhythms.
I noticed how hard it was to leave it all behind --the work, the sense of being connected at all times, and for my particular inclination, the sense of not missing out. When i listened to the part of me that felt this way, her distress around stopping nearly overwhelmed me. It was an interesting energetic compulsion The fear of irrelevance, of losing readers or followers, all the work coming to nothing. You might notice the catastrophic language, which tells me that i am accessing a part (a little i) that is an adaptive system of survival and bears trauma. Noticing this is a helpful tool of engaging with it, because it provides me with enough distance to gently unblend from it, so that i can both offer it spaciousness, compassion, and care, as well as not be overtaken by its narrative and start making decisions based on its distress.
Unblending (which is a term from Internal Family Systems, the primary and exquisite modality in which i work with my clients) or dis/non-identifying from it allows me to feel into the larger container of being, into a space i call the true Self, while also witnessing the part. It is a place of such freedom and wild love that when my consciousness falls into it, i am astonished that this is me. It’s not how i experience that sense of “I” most of the time, and my practice is to return here again and again and again throughout the day, and anchor in.
In IFS, a part like i just described to you eventually and through a delicate and intuitive process is reconnected back to the Whole, the true Self, and receives healing and animating energy that allows it to fulfill its true purpose in the system of our being. We will perhaps get into this more as the weeks and months unfold, but i wanted to give you this tiny glimpse of the inner work that is possible when we treat our being as an intricate system made of parts longing to return to Whole Being or authentic Self. These parts are not disposable, but like orphaned children, are meant to come home to that central place of goodness and divinity within.
What an astonishing and freeing truth – that we are intrinsically and inherently good and that the deep gnosis (intimate knowing) of this goodness requires not a going out somewhere to acquire something we don’t already possess. It is a gentle and continuous turn inward toward that divine + human essence, navigating our private terrain, observing our thoughts, feeling our emotions, and getting into the tectonic plates of being. Allowing. Resting.
How many of us get sorted out quite easily when space and presence without agenda is offered? I certainly do, though it may seem counterintuitive at times. True rest doesn’t come from denying something difficult, or that habit of suppressing and calling it enlightenment. It comes when all is allowed to be just as it is. When curiosity and compassion enlarge the field of vision. When the compulsion to force a change is gently soothed inside that larger field. Interesting, right? There is a muscularity here in the act of allowing. The opposite of passivity or acquiescence. Rather, a wit(h)ness.
My entrance into true rest came first in encountering this scared part that was afraid. A part addicted to work, to finishing projects, to chasing a new project as soon as (or even before) one is done. This part was indoctrinated into the system of domination we have named patriarchy – a system that favors the masculine way of being which is action and accomplishment oriented. And when that orientation is out of balance with its feminine counterpart of receptivity, presence, and vision, we are harmed and cause harm.
Listening to that voice of distress and allowing myself to feel its fear, anxiety, and compulsion to act, witnessing the loop of thoughts and arguments that presented themselves, eventually brought quiet. It brought acceptance and tenderness. Instead of judging myself (hello, growth!) for still struggling with some of these narratives (i often think i’ve received integration into every layer of this struggle to perform, and then surprise! a new layer emerges), i see now the imprint is deep, perhaps to the level of a core wound. It reaches into my relationship with time, and with the commodification of body and soul, all wrapped into the pretty package of purpose.
What i mean is that this notion of purpose has been sold to us as something grand(iose) and synonymous with notoriety and material wealth, so that anything anonymous, gentle, private, and small smarts of failure. I don’t mean that an abundance of attention or money is a bad thing, however, equating them with true flourishing is a problem.
On the way back home, i had a respiratory attack that landed me in the ER. I am still recovering from it and find it hard to articulate the experience in any meaningful way, beyond what i will share here. Some time ago I was diagnosed with adult onset asthma after one of these attacks, and because they are so rare, i forget they are a lurking possibility. In the aftermath i walk around numb for a few days as my body completes the trauma cycle of near asphyxiation. At least, it seems so from the outside. On the inside, i am having an unchosen, but grudgingly wiling to embrace, awakening. More tectonic plates shifting.
I try to speak some of this to my husband when he checks again how i am doing as i stare into space for long stretches of time, but the only thing that comes is the Hafiz poem, “The Sun in Drag.”
You are the sun in drag. You are God hiding from yourself. Remove all the “mine”—that is the veil. Why ever worry about Anything? Listen to what your friend Hafiz Knows for certain: The appearance of this world Is a Magi’s brilliant trick, though its affairs are Nothing into nothing. You are a divine elephant with amnesia Trying to live in an ant Hole. Sweetheart, O sweetheart You are God in Drag!
Beautiful human, you perhaps know something of this. That all the things we worry about, purpose, money, projects, looking sexy etc. are accessories. Drag. Our souls are the untamed Divine Being poured out into gorgeous, unrepeatable forms. It’s disorienting and also ecstatic to feel like none of it matters, knowing that of course, paradoxically, it does but only in light of this larger truth:
You, sweetheart, are God in drag!
May you know it and may you play with the trappings of the external – relishing them deeply, yet never being owned by them. Then, your soul will know rest.
I also leave you with a somatic meditative practice of divine connection, rest, and oxytocin.
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