Quote Spotlight: “I’ll Meet You There”

One of the most powerful quotes that guided my spiritual exploration & healing journey was:

“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field - I'll meet you there.” - Rumi

I was raised in a religion & culture that was chock-full of rules, claims of what was right and what was wrong, and touted that being a good person was so based on following these rules of right and wrong action…

I wanted to be a good and loving person.

I have always wanted that.

And so, I got duped into believing, for many years, that being kind and loving was based on what I did, as well as thinking and believing in an extremely tight and limited way… 

A way that claimed that the way everyone else thought or acted was wrong, bad, sinful.

THERE WERE SO MANY RULES!!!!

And within them, SO MUCH CONTRADICTION!!!!

Hypocrisy - judgment - intolerance - and shunning of those that “sinned.”

But it’s the way our human brains work that often, what you are told is true as a child, is what you believe to be true about yourself, the world, and the universe.

Until you have the ability or opportunity to be exposed to new ways of thinking & choose to have an open mind, to tune into your own inner heart & intuition, and realize that YOU GET TO DECIDE WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE FOR YOU.

:)

Looking back, I know that the intense childhood trauma I experienced & repressed much of, is what surfaced in my late teens & in a way, forced me on a healing journey in my early young adult years.

I did not know at the time I began that journey, that it would become a spiritual exploration journey that led me to leaving the religion I was raised in, and embark upon a quest to understand myself & reality on a deep, soul-searching level.

One of the things that led me to start having queries about the religion I was raised in, is when I realized how fractured my mind & self felt - how much I had had to contort myself into rigid ways of believing right and wrong and judging that which was “wrong.”

As I started to learn about mindfulness and practice meditation, I began to experience in a visceral way, how my true BEING was BELOW all thought, all emotion - I simply WAS.

Reality simply WAS.

And, in my experience, REALITY WAS LOVE.

All that ever was is LOVE.

Love is infinite.

Love is eternal.

Love is the very fabric of life, of reality, of the universe.

AND INFINITE REALITY IS BEYOND TEMPORARY HUMAN ASPECTS LIKE OUR MINDS.

When I resided in that space of unending, ever-present reality of LOVE that I discovered - I could experience at ANY time - it was ALWAYS within me - I began to learn the TRUE NATURE of love. I began to become a more truly LOVING person…

I thought I had been raised to be a loving person.

That’s what the religion had taught me.

But when I first started to actually experience REAL love - UNCONDITIONAL love - I realized how false & limited & CONDITIONAL this “love” was that I had been raised to believe was true, was how god loved, etc….

Nonetheless, at first I did still try to be a “good person” in the ways I was raised, to be the best person I could according to the rules of the religion I was taught. 

But after experiencing the VAST, SPACIOUS, AND ALL-ENCOMPASSING experience of the true LOVE reality - 

It was clear REAL fast, that judgment - ideas of right & wrong - trying to mentally contort myself to justify these rules - was the very opposite of LOVE.

I could feel it!!!

I could feel it in my mind, in my body -

That shift - that separation - that fracturing of mind, the feeling of being separate from love, once I chose to engage in thoughts of judgment, right/wrong, and one group of people being more right or good or worthy or loving than another…

And so, like the intentional and intellectual person I can be - 

I began to sift through the religion.

Separating the core teachings from fear - from judgment (because, I learned, judgment almost always originates from a feeling of FEAR) - from rejection & conditional love.

I tried to find if the religion was actually based upon love.

I tried to see if I could separate all the non-loving parts and still find true, deep, unconditional love, at its core.

After a few years of this methodical, heart-first approach, I found:

I COULD NOT.

Without fear, judgment, or right/wrong ideas, it all collapsed.

It all fell apart.

Love was NOT its core.

Love was honestly, barely a part of it - real, unconditional love at least.

AND YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE I FOUND, THAT HELPED TO SAVE MY LIFE?????

As I journeyed along this quest, I continued meditation & mindfulness & experiencing more & more real, unconditional love.

I chose to surrender more, and more, and more of the fear-based, judgmental, right/wrong ideas I had been raised with…

And damn, did that feel good.

I literally felt my mind opening, my energy more spacious, my body WAY more at peace.

My experience of anxiety rapidly declined.

The intense fear from childhood trauma eased on all levels of my being.

And, ironically, I actually began to feel the things that that religion claimed to teach the pathway to:

PEACE.

SECURITY.

LOVE.

HOME.

WHOLE.

THIS IS WHY THIS QUOTE BY RUMI IS SO POTENT & MEANINGFUL FOR ME: 

“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field - I'll meet you there.”

Because, over the span of several years, I viscerally felt the shift of coming from strict ideas of right-doing & wrong-doing, to that of living BEYOND these ideas… to LIVING what love truly is.

AND LET ME TELL YOU:

This field is everything.

This field is love.

This field is who we truly are.

<3

Much love,

Jenna