Awakening with Mary O’Malley

The other day I had a few moments of pure unconsciousness.  There are a number of reasons why I would like to tell how this came about, but I get ahead of myself.  Let us go to the scene of this visitation from the fear and anger that are a huge part of all of our storytellers – the voice in our heads that is talking all day long!

At 8:28 AM I slipped into the pool at my gym for my half hour swim.  There was a water aerobics class that began at 9:00, which left just enough time for me to complete my swim.  At around 8:55 a number of people had jumped into the first lane and were chatting before the class.  I was in the second lane and a man was in the third.  At 8:56 I started my last lap which takes a little over a minute.  After I had made the final turn, just a few strokes before I ran into her, I noticed a woman who had come under the floating lane barriers and was standing right in the middle of my lane.  These lanes are big enough for two people to do laps, so she could easily have stood at the side of the lane to let me pass.  But because she was in the middle, there was barely enough room to squeeze by her, and as I did, she hit me with her arm.

Can you imagine what my storyteller was doing?  It was affronted.  Anger came roaring through me, accompanied with the feeling of being right and making her wrong!  The stories in my head were saying:  “The class starts at 9:00!  This is mylane until 9:00. How dare she!”  As I got into the shower, awareness kicked in and saw what the storyteller was doing.  Rather than falling into it or being ashamed of it, I asked this angry part of the storyteller to tell me about what it was experiencing.  The story calmed down as I listened, but arose again two more times while I was in the shower. Each time I listened to it, it calmed down a bit more and my heart opened up again.

I could see that this is how wars are started, and I didn’t want to allow that level of unconsciousness to take me over!  I could also recognize that many times in my life I had played the role of the woman in my lane and felt great compassion for that part of me.  And finally my heart opened to the woman.  I don’t know what caused her to act as she did, but I didn’t have to put her out of my heart!

There are 3 reason why I wanted to share this with you:

First:  We have this strange idea that peace will come when we get rid of the parts we don’t like and hold onto the ones we do!  That only brings continual struggle inside.  Instead, awakening is about getting to know all the various parts of our storyteller.  The more you can see its fears, judgments and despairs, the more you don’t take it personally.  And when something very deep has been triggered, its visit will become much shorter, and rather than you getting caught in more struggle, it will wake up the wondrous healing of your own heart (both for yourself and for others!).

Second:  In this world that is so aligned with the good/bad, right/wrong view of the world that is at the heart of each of our storytellers, there is nothing inside of you to be ashamed of!  We all have these parts.  We are just very good at pretending that we don’t – both to ourselves and to others! And these parts deserve kindness just like you do when you have had a difficult day.

Third:  The core flavor of my childhood was invasion, and so my storyteller was built with a huge amount of fear about being overtaken by life.  I have, over the years, brought my attention to this part to the extent that it is very quiet most of the time.  But there evidently was still some vestige of this old fear, so life put me in a situation to bring it up – not to disturb me, or punish me – but so I could see it more clearly without identifying with it and bring it into the healing of my heart.

In my new book, What’s in the Way IS the Way, there is a wonderful saying that reminds us that even the challenges of our life are for us:  Life is set up, to bring up, what has been bound up, so it can open up, to be freed up, so you can show up for life!  What this is saying is that we don’t have to fight with ourselves when we get caught in reaction.  We also don’t have to judge ourselves or make others responsible for our experience.  Instead, we can use those times as an opportunity to see more clearly all the parts of our fear based storyteller so that it will finally be tucked into our heart.  Then our minds can be used for the wonderful tools they are rather than being lost in reaction a good deal of the time.

So the next time you are caught in reaction, become curious about what your storyteller is doing.  Life is giving you these situations so you can see more clearly and thus unhook more cleanly from the storyteller’s world of judgment and fear.

Be light, Mary

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Mary’s New Book is titled What’s in the Way Is the Way

Mary O’Malley invites you on a journey back to yourself and to a trust-filled connection with life. On this journey, you will discover how to bring every part of yourself into your own heart to be healed so that you can know the joy of being fully here for life. This book is filled with teachings, stories and exercises that will guide you every step of the way. It is a book to enjoy, to work with, and to keep by your favorite reading chair for times when you need to be reminded of its timeless truths. Foreword by Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations With God.

The following is an excerpt from the last chapter of What’s In the Way IS the Way entitled “Awakening for Life”. It alludes to the core metaphor this book is created around – that we lived in full connection with life when we were young and slowly, as we grew up, clouds began to settle around our heads (the storyteller inside of each one of us that struggles with life):

EXCERPT

Everything we have been exploring together…is opening you again to the creative flow of Life. This is about saying “Yes” to Life. That doesn’t mean that you sit down by the side of the road and let it run you over. It means that at your core you know that everything in your life is for you: it is not just a random series of events. Life is an intelligent process. It knows what it is doing and it is safe to open to it.

This brings you into full engagement with what is happening rather than staying caught in a conversation about Life. We could call it ‘surrender,’ but this doesn’t mean being defeated. It is about finally giving up your war with what Life is bringing you! We could also call it ‘humility,’ but the dictionary misses its full meaning when it defines it as “lowliness, meekness, submissiveness.” True humility is a state of great availability. From this kind of openness, you finally realize how smart Life is. This fosters a shift from the mind that tries to control to the heart that connects.

Can Life be trusted? Alan Watts, the celebrated philosopher, author and teacher once said, “…it appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right, as to need no explanation or justification, beyond what it simply is.” In other words, it is safe to open to Life!

To open to the way things actually are, rather than always trying to make Life be what you think it should be, is the most courageous and healing thing you can do. When you see through the game of struggle enough so that the veils between you and this living moment – this miraculous, incandescent moment –lift, you become a healing presence in the world. Moments of full connection with Life matter. In fact, they matter more than you can possibly know. They are what will heal our world! ~Published by Awaken Publications