This is how I think about spiritual work. This is what I think happens to me when I pray, meditate and participate in my own recovery. Something happens that causes the internal parts of me to be shifted around, rearranged into something different than I was before.
Sometimes I go through this process willingly. It is easy, the internal mechanisms in need of repair or change, easily slide into place. It is painless and over quickly.
Other times, probably more frequently than I would like to admit, it is not unlike turning on an old printing press, rusted and stiff from lack of use, Divine assistance is needed along with copious amounts of oil to get me moving. There is not enough lubrication though that will make the parts slide easily into place, the internal parts so rusted and affix inside me, that it takes a lot of time and finesse to get me internally shifted.
Right now I am in the later one. I can feel the internal shift occurring. I can feel the grinding change occurring but I know it is far from over. It is far from distant. There is this hard pushing to change from the inside out and it is painful.
I feel like the intimate parts of my psyche are being cajoled into movement after years of rusty sedentariness. The parts baulk at moving at all. More comfortably affixed in their current position. Locked and loaded to endure my lifetime in their current status. And while this would be far easier to maintain, the shift is happening anyway. Movement, ever so slight movement, is occurring inside, leverage being applied internally that is causing the mechanisms of me to be moved, shifted and propelled into action despite years of fixed positioning.
I wish that it felt more like a spoon in a glass, a gentle stirring that could easily guide the parts that need shifting into action. But that is not my lot. I am not that person. I am not liquidity. I am metal scrap. Heavy. Weighted. Rusted out over time. Not easily moved and even when properly functioning, more grindy than flowing.
I guess the most important part is that I can feel any internal shifting at all. Things are starting to be brought to life, grinding through the rust and decay, tiny discards of metal scrap being sloughed off, always accompanied by the melody of metal pinging metal.
My hope is that whatever long forgotten place within my soul, as it is awaken and called into service, rust shed and gears engaged, will bring me to a place that is more loving. That is more honorable. That is more honest. That is my truest hope and desire.
Internal rearrangement, for me, is never fun and always painful. Me preferring to remain locked in place, unchanged, static and whatever benevolent force exists capable of producing internal realignment, prefers me to be much more fluid, dynamic and changeable.
So it is that we are always at odds, and, at the same time, unified, the ying and yang of all existence, me clinging tightly to those parts of me that would be so much better released. And the universe never failing to stir me sufficiently to cause the internal rotation needed for me to see my life with new perspective, new love and new joy...repeatedly.
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