Belly of the Beast
Belly of the Beast:
A Meditation on Loving the Ugly
How much of your ugly pain can you accept? The pain that seems petty, jealous, inept, immature. All of it? The pain that is so many pains tied together in a sticky seemingly unresolvable knot. How much of your feeling of lack can you accept when you know you “should” feel, “should” be, grateful for the abundance of your life though it seems out-of-reach? How much disconnection from this gratitude? How much slithering want, desire, neediness, hurt, grief? All of it? How is it possible to accept the huge or the unaccountably heavy and seemingly small but insidious suffering? How to love yourself in the face of your inability to change, shift, release in this moment?
What about the countless mistakes, seemingly never-ending and constantly repeated? Can you love those? When you feel so far from grace, when your disconnection feels total and your pain overwhelming, messy and unclear. This is where acceptance is tested. Not before. Acceptance of self as it is right now. Acceptance of the universe as it is right now in all it’s perceived ugliness. Let your pettiness be big! Epic. The grand mal of hopeless despair. No one can do your suffering the way you can.
Go into the belly of the beast and see how necessary shadow is, even as it tricks you into believing things are different than they truly are. Sometimes you can’t see anything and like quicksand, the best thing to do is not to struggle to get out fast because you will only sink deeper and quicker, but to let go. Even if you can’t remember what light is in that moment, know that the dark is woven into the fabric of everything. Congratulations! That is true dark. Allow yourself to naturally navigate, to map by feel in a state of pure experience. Scream from inside, “This hurts!” And let yourself be screamed to right back, “I know!” Know that the light and the dark exist simultaneously even when only one is apparent. The sun radiates ceaselessly during your night, the moon glows relentlessly during your day.
Your putrid turns are beautiful to me. It means we have something in common. We are not alone in our shame and we can laugh about it sometime, maybe a lot later, but sometime. Because it is funny too. How much we can hurt. It is a ridiculous amount. The silly walk of feelings. Acute and monstrously oversized, yet somehow exactly fitting. Make it count. Even when you shift slightly left or slightly right and feel the hooks dig deeper. Love yourself when it sticks around too long, forgive yourself when you blow things up. When you don’t know what to do. When it is unbearable, love the expression that is. Can you? It is hard beyond belief at times. Do it anyway. For just one moment accept what is—the unclear, the deep, the unhealed, the shameful, the bloody conglomerate.