How To Unfold Your Own Seekers Path

Discussing how a spiritual path for someone who seeks it is not process of pure discovery, but instead of co-creation where the Seeker is creating their path while being created in return.  The Tor: https://youtu.be/zddxTBAkIUw

Transcript

How To Unfold Your Own Seeker's Path

There are as many paths in this life as there are people. Some paths are governed by a passion which both defines and constrains the person's life, demanding everything while guaranteeing nothing. Others lead down a crazy quilt pattern of adventures which are beautiful in their randomness, their creativeness, and their richness of experience which accumulates into wisdom. For many people the path's they travel, like road trips, go through wild and winding terrain for a time, then travel straight ahead for seemingly endless miles which gives the illusion the trip will never end, never vary, never be anything more than this.

However things do change. Somewhere along the way, along the long stretch of sameness something awakens. It's not just a need for something more, something to alleviate the boredom, it's a sense there is something more than this to life. There has to be. Something we are meant to do and be more. If the person dwells on this for long enough, allowing the feeling to stretch and take up space inside them, they will be able to hear their soul speak. Our soul is always communicating to us through emotions, through intuition and synchronicities, through the inexplicable draw to do this or go there without any logic or conscious motivation. However, it speaks softly and so is easily drowned out by the day-to-day routine, the needs of others, the clamor of external influences, and most often by our own thoughts. Hearing/feeling it directly can be confusing or even a bit frightening at first. Unexpected new experiences often are.

This is why so few people actually heed this sense of something more. When we become adults without the safety net of parents to support us, we learn to fear new things or sudden changes because they could be painful, they could take away something we have worked hard to achieve and there is no one to make it all right other than ourselves. We trade our adventurous selves for safety and control even at the expense of our soul's desires.

For those few who, no matter when, turn their attention to this sense, to the song their soul is singing to them of what could be, the path moves from a straightforward highway to a journey of co-creation. They stop driving forward and turn themselves into Seekers.

Seekers, in the beginning, seem an awful lot like those living a crazy quilt existence. With only a longing for a life which could be more, they begin exploring the various and sundry ways in which others say they have found this illusive path. They try this type of work, that energy practice, this retreat, those diets, this physical dedication and the other meditation. Like buying a chocolate sampler without a description of what it contains, they take small bites of everything finding some things they like, some they don't, some they can't stand, and finish tasting the entire box with the knowledge: "Nope, these aren't it." 

As the Seeker moves beyond the beginning, sampling more and more, finding nothing which works, nothing that quite satisfies, nothing which clicks, they can get frustrated enough to try to make something work. As they are usually choosing from options which are healthy and useful to the world, what they do causes no harm, however, it doesn't take long for them to realize what they have done is buy a pair of shoes which, while practical, do not fit. It is not uncommon at this juncture for Seekers to rationalize why they should stay in the job/practice/modality which they have chosen, trying to find some spiritual mandate which requires them to stay and some lesson which they are being required to learn from their discomfort and discontent.

All the while their soul is still gently communicating about the fact there is something out there, something more. Many lessons get learned this way, of this there is no doubt. However they are not lessons which are required, but are the consequences of our choices.

Those who become a Seeker are blessed with the gift that their soul, having been attended to once, will refuse to return to its quiet ways. Its voice, the yearning it creates in us, will no longer be silenced. Like a bell, it can never be unrung.

It is at the point of deep frustration where the path begins in earnest for the Seeker. Frustration, like fire, burns away the extraneous. Things such as the notion there is an elusive passion which they have not yet discovered or something outside themselves will become an authority over them taking responsibility for their path and leading the way. Frustration burns these out leaving only the essence, the purified aching self behind. It is in this ache, in this clearness that the knowing comes.

Most people don't realize they have achieved this knowing as they are too focused backwards on all the frustration and efforts which have brought them to this place. However, in the quiet ashes they can locate the knowing. It's something I help my clients do all the time. If I ask them what it is they have been seeking all along and prompt them to talk past generic labels, they can name it, not in general, but in great amounts of detail. All the sampling has allowed them to sort through the possibilities. All the striving has given them the beginnings of a sense of their true self. They know, not just guess or believe, what they want.

This is where the co-creation of a path begins.

Unlike the straight and narrow where we follow what has been laid before us or the passion path which dictates what we will become and how we will become it, in essence making us into the path which It (passion) follows, the Seeker's path is like that of the artist simultaneously making and being made. The knowing points in a direction but gives no guidance as to how the goal is to be achieved. It is up to the Seeker to have learned from their sampling and frustration not to look for prepackaged answers, logical next steps, or other's experiences as a guide, but instead to address the world around them in a new way. To see around them the raw materials from which to create the next step towards their goal.

What is most difficult for Seekers is to unlearn what they have spent a lifetime learning, which is to understand something or decide something with the mind, then feel their way through the doing of it, evaluating the results, and then using the mind to choose or decide what is to be done next. In Seeking, it is the soul intelligence which should choose what is to be done, the feelings which should evaluate the results, and the mind used in between to help us successfully accomplish what it is we have chosen. This allows us to feel the rightness in each step along the way, that each is good in its own right, deserving of our presence and attention, and removes the drive to succeed, achieve, and arrive at a destination in order to feel fulfilled or validated.

It is not uncommon for any Seeker to arrive at steps which seem like detours or disruptions, even back sliding. In co-creating a path with the world, we are called to heal what has been injured, challenged to confront our fears, and to expand our sense of self in order to allow new aspects of ourselves to grow and unfold. These moments seem to stop our forward motion, take us into feelings or behaviors which we thought long since done, or transport us to places and experiences we had no idea existed nor that we needed. Like Alice falling down a rabbit hole we can find ourselves in a world which is familiar and yet completely new and in so doing discover we too have changed. We have become more. This leads us to realize there is more ahead of us.

And so the dance continues, the Seeker creating their path and being created in return. What most find is eventually they become the goal which their spiritual knowing was pointing towards. This doesn't stop them from co-creating the next step on their path, which is a blessing for all the rest of us as well as them.

To get a sense of what this process entails, I have a meditation video on my YouTube channel entitled The Tor. The journey is a passage from Ancestors of Avalon by Diana Paxon and the footage is of Maryhill Stonehenge in Goldendale, WA. The heroine is a priestess who has dedicated her life to a prescribed path and yet is reminded time and again how she doesn't fit with its needs and strictures. Her mind sets herself a task to achieve, but the road to achieving it takes her somewhere completely different and in so doing cracks her identity, her knowingness wide open. She is then confronted with answers she was seeking, but also a new understanding of the world and of herself which opens doors. Nothing indicates to her what door to choose, however. The next move is hers.

Places such as Maryhill's Stonehenge are conduits for Akashic energy. For those who work with the Akashics, I highly recommend visiting to get a feel for Akasha residing outside of your personal physical form. It can also be enlightening and eye opening to do Akashic meditations while on the premises. Just make sure to ground before you start and you're sufficiently in your body to drive home safely after. :)