put your oppositional thumbs to work! (classic post)

Once again demonstrating there’s only this Now, here’s one
from the archives. This post first appeared in May 2010.

Fact is, folks, the moment is upon you, the necessary pieces are in place, and the trains are ready to leave the station. Pardon the mixed metaphors, but if you continue to resist bringing your hard-earned lessons of higher awareness down through your physical body and out to the hands and feet that mark your movement in the world, you’re going to miss the boat.

It’s not really a game, you know. It’s an evolutionary imperative, and either you put your oppositional thumbs to work or you dinosaur-walk yourself right off the map. For some, that may be the appropriate decision: just be certain that you choose a life path rather than have one handed to you in default mode.

Your mind alone will not carry you. Your open heart alone will not facilitate your creation of an empowered life. Waiting in a dull haze for the bliss train to stop at your front door is insufficient: Have you bought your ticket, shined your traveling shoes, and dragged your lazy behind up to the platform?

Reading about, thinking about, or spouting platitudes regarding your quest for greater consciousness and a more fully lived existence are poor excuses for actually picking up your tools of creation and self-knowing and putting them to work. Watching Oprah isn’t enough. You can leaf through every gardening magazine that arrives in your mailbox — but when all is said and done, what ancient, gnarly roots have you dug up, what soil have you prepared, what new seeds of becoming are you planting and nurturing in every moment?

Circling the roundhouse of doubt and indecision is a ride that will take you nowhere but right back to where you started — dizzy, disoriented, and nauseous, to boot. Doing naught but waiting for the signs and directions from out there or up there or over there is a feeble approach to generating a life of purpose and meaning. Birth is neither timid nor gentle. it requires exquisite attunement to the physical body as well as honoring the timing and intention of that which yearns to be born. And yes, sometimes you need to push hard and long and grunt and scream and entertain doubts that you have what it takes to complete the job.

If the volcano of your soul wants to erupt, let ‘er blow! If you feel the tremors of inner earthquakes rippling through your belly, ride them out rather than attempt to hold them at bay. Upheaval can uncover precious gems hidden below the surface for eons and bring about life-altering, tectonic shifts and reordering at deep foundational levels of existence. Return your feet to the earth and your wings to the sky, and exhilarate in the potent integration of all that lies in between.

You have untold gifts to proffer and new worlds to create, and it does not behoove you to remain on the sidelines any longer! You serve no one (including yourself) if you continue to treat life as a purely intellectual or purely spiritual or purely physical exercise. You are here, now, in a body because your soul chose to be. Living a human experience means that you have the opportunity to feel the outer limits of pain and joy, to love whomever you choose, to transform your visions into reality, to create, to germinate, to express in myriad tones and hues and forms.

The time is now. Allow yourself to reach out, to engage with others who may at first glance appear to be absolute polar opposites of who you believe yourself to be. Offer yourself up in all your frailties and vulnerabilities, disconnect from prehistoric strictures that have repressed or oppressed you on the road to fulfillment and joy, and step resolutely into the promise of a new day.

Or, of course, you may choose to cling desperately to one facet of your existence or another; to sacrifice wholly your art for your intellect; your innate humanness for your spirituality; your grand and glorious heart for the intractable workings of your mind.

And if you do, you just may segregate, compartmentalize, disconnect and quarantine yourself out of existence, leaving the world a smaller, sorrier place in your absence. This is not a threat; not designed to instill fear or indecision: simply a reminder that you can choose, beginning today, to embody and integrate all the facets of your limitless being. Or not.

(You may also wish to click here for the piece, The World Needs You Now.)