The guiding embrace of presence

Image: Martin Davies

In so many ways, suffering – when allowed – looks like love. Our cry of suffering is the cry for reunion: it is the calling toward home and the awakening of our True Nature. Georgi Johnson, Non-dual Therapy: The Psychology of Awakening

I have hidden myself through fear of rejection, fear of hurt. I hid myself through conformity, through alcohol, through performing, through self-deprecating humour. There had been no profit in standing out at the schools I attended, although some had the courage to do so. Looking back there is a sense of shame in this gradual conformity to the status quo that typified my adolescence and early adulthood. The desire to be popular and liked overpowered the desire to be creative and independent. That overpowered desire eventually became covered up by the shifting sands of my life.

There is a remembered feeling of fear arising out of the darkness, fear of the night. Acknowledging and feeling this fear unfolded that unpleasantness into an expanding light, an anticipation and vitality. The here-and-now memory of that creative and solitary child’ s surroundings brings me back to the place where that creative urge was first remembered. To an image that is no longer a memory, but a re-living, I am seeing everything again through that boys eyes and feel the beckoning arm of life. A life that has already been lived in one way, but stands to be lived by this boy again. Lived not as a recurrence but a re-imagined, reunited return to the guiding embrace of presence.