Sacred Shit

In each of us dwells the whole human story. We are filled with enough characters, impulses and counter-impulses to populate a planet. The task of our sacred self is to manage the internal landscape of our being. Allied with the Divine, the higher self brings our parts together for the good of the whole.

This is not an easy task. Think about it. We have wounds and joys. Those wounds and joys live within us as voices with deep, deep feeings attached to them. To further complicate the situation, voice and feelings are attached to a narrative. We have stories of what happened to us, what our mother did or didn't do in a particular moment. What our father was like. And those voices are different in memories from different periods of our life.

For example, the voice of my six-year-old period is sad, shocked, and afraid. My six-year-old lived through a moment when her mother showed her true colors, showed that whatever happened to the six year old girl was only valuable to the extent it hurt or reflected well upon the mother. Another, happier voice is that of the three year old. "I want to go," it says confidently, running towards the lake, towards people, towards the woods, towards friends, Confident, laughing, this little girl owns the world and knows nothing can hurt her ever. A third voice is the voice of the adolescent. This young woman is embarassed to smile, afraid to flirt, immensely intellectual, a geekish, awkward thing. She has no mother to teach her or model for her how to grow up. She has begun having menstrual cycles without any idea of what's happening. She thinks maybe the blood means she's dying. She hides a rage big enough to blow up a building.

And then there is what has come to be known as the Adult-Child. The adult body that houses all these memories and voices. That A-C goes to work, to job interviews, gets married, has children, and grows old. It just never grows up. It has six, and three, and 15 year old reactions to adult situations. Chaos lives within the Adult-Child.

This is the essence of sacred shit. Many of us never know life beyond it. Many of us never know that sacred shit is compost and makes things grow better than anything else. It is the job of the higher self, the uber gardener, to work the shit into compost and plant the seeds of our spiritual natures.

Sometimes, the voice of the higher self is compromised or drowned out by the clamoring of old memories, of excruciating feelings that are walled away within those memories. The higher self has to excavate, journey into the underworld, find those children, pull them into the light of day. Bring those memories into reality, open up the feelings and let them flow out bringing the caged creativity of the soul with them.

There are two hard questons here: (1) How do we develop the higher self; and (2) How do we get at the underworld, the sacred shit rotting away, barren?

The higher self emerges when we are silent and waiting for it. As part of spiritual practice, we need to make silent times when we simply wait, empty ourselves of all the voices and shit and see what comes to us. Another way to help it emerge is to give it a name and ask a question. When I started this blog, my higher self was called the "Big Dude;" today, I call it "GG" which is short for "Good God" as opposed to the punitive god that was forced upon me as a child. Sometime I sit and say something like, "GG, why do I feel so miserable in the early morning?" I wait and GG replies either with a kind of parable or with a therapeutic question like: "Tell me more about that misery stuff." Often, that surfaces one of the children inside and unlocks some of the hidden feelings.

Either way, I strengthen the voice of the higher self every time I practice with it. Remember that the higher self is that part of you or me that is allied with the Divine. It sees a bigger picture for me or you and sets things in motion with that in mind.

And, if we seem to fail, and live forever mired in our own sacred shit, remember this. The higher self and the Divine live in us whether we notice it or not. They love us whether we feel it or not. We cannot really fail. We cannot really fail. All of our voices and impulses, all of the sacred shit, the memories and stored feelings are of God, graces waiting to be released. A dance awaiting the music. We cannot fail. We can feel miserable every morning. Sacred shit, that's all it is. Roxie