Luminous Darkness by Deborah Eden Tull

Author:Deborah Eden Tull [Tull, Deborah Eden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Turning Obstacles into Spiritual Opportunity without False Optimism

If our purpose here is love and liberation, everything that happens in life is a teacher of love and liberation. Our motivation becomes the benefit of all beings—including our ancestors that came before and future generations that will come after. Understanding our perceived obstacles as opportunities is not false optimism or spiritual bypassing. It does not mean that we should equate spiritual growth with difficult times. It does not mean that we avoid addressing the underlying dysfunctional systems that require our courageous attention. But we can open our hearts to seeing more clearly—with love—through difficult times. We can transform our relationship with the internalized conditioning that often controls our thoughts and actions during adversity.

Consciousness is not always pretty. Sometimes we have to face the fear that we will drown before we let go. Years later, I can say with certainty that Lyme disease was my greatest spiritual teacher. It shattered my sense of self and security rather brutally. At times, I wondered if I would survive. But it called upon all of me—more of me than I had previously brought into wholeness. It evoked a fresh understanding of love. It expanded my embodiment and expression of awakening dramatically, in ways I could not have foreseen.

While I acknowledge that not everyone recovers from Lyme disease, it was my experience with it that set me on a spiritual pilgrimage to facilitate the integration of my whole self. It was the unexpected bite of an arachnid that encouraged me, perhaps through destiny, to turn toward those parts of me that I had failed to recognize and celebrate. Having come to the other side of my journey in healing the Lyme disease that had attacked my body, I see Lyme as the dismemberment I had needed in order to make myself whole. There had previously been a rigidity and single focus in my Zen practice that I had not realized until I experienced greater fluidity and flexibility within my practice. Although this rigidity is in no way inherent to Zen, it existed in my personal interpretation of Zen. I had held monasticism on such a high pedestal that I had attempted to shape myself into something less than the truth of who I am. My efforts to heal the symptoms from the Lyme that had invaded my body made it impossible for me to exist in a false form.

It helped me to move beyond my ideas of liberation toward actual liberation. I was able to release the faulty story that “only one road leads home.” I realized instead that every road leads home if liberation is the goal.

At first, it was difficult for me to control feelings of resentment, resistance, and frustration with my Lyme symptoms. Only later did I understand that I had been given a gift. I needed help to make the shift my heart needed to make. My experience with Lyme invited me to know more of myself and showed me the way. It helped me to open to a spiritual path much greater than I might have otherwise achieved.

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