This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

This is the cusp I actually stand on at every moment of my life. Every moment of my life, I am utterly powerless and infinitely powerful. Every moment of my life, I am inescapably hammered into place by everything that has ever happened since the creation of the universe, and every moment I am free to act in a way that will alter the course of that

No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed in this illusion.

Only the entire body can know what it felt like to be pushed from a place of dire constriction and into a wilderness, a spacious, open world. Only the body can know what it felt like to be born. Only the body can know the fullness of joy, and this is a commandment that can only be fulfilled with joy.

when we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion

This is the overwhelming, senseless gratitude we feel when we are finally fully awake. And it makes no difference what we awaken to, whether it is to pain or to pleasure, to life or to death; it is all of a piece, all the ground of a deep joy when fully inhabited, when wholly attended to.

And there is a joy in this, a joy born of the realization that nothing can protect us. Nothing can save us from death, so it’s no use defending ourselves. We may as well give up, and there is a wonderful release in this giving up.

Our behavior is still out there, and will always be, but we are no longer attached to it.

We cut ourselves off from the world’s suffering, because we fear it will undermine or destroy our own happiness. But if there are homeless

if we seek the answers now, we can act in the coming year to bring ourselves closer to our core.