By Amaya Gayle Gregory
I felt unworthy and ached for inclusion but was unwilling to include those parts of myself I saw as undeserving. Inwardly, I could not honor my own path, my own way of being in the world, the turns and twists my life had taken. They were too painful, too deadly, too much. Rejecting myself and rejecting others always walks hand in hand although it often looked like submission not rejection. Self-exclusion must ripple outward organically and takes many surprising forms.
Everything I did was an attempt to erase myself, to wipe my current experience from the blackboard of life: spiritual practices, purist eating habits, holistic healing techniques, even my walks in the woods. They all had purpose – one – to exchange this life for a better one, to eradicate the experience of not being whole in all its forms from my story.
Was it right? Was it wrong? Neither. It simply was. It was part of the long and winding path, the incredible journey, the discovery process, the divinely human experiential called My Life and it could not have been different. Life is what it is. It is always unfolding in perfection, like it or not.
It seems funny now, in a sweet and precious way, like looking at children arguing just before they hug.
The fact that I was actively working against my wholeness was largely unconscious and yet part of a grander design. I had glimpses of the discrepancies, of how my lived experience deviated from what I mentally, emotionally and spiritually knew to be true but that wisdom hadn’t fully integrated balls to the bones, deep into the physical, so I couldn’t see, didn’t feel the contradiction.
It wasn’t time to see yet. The idea of control hadn’t quite run its course so my story still had a chapter or two to go before the heroine could own who she was.
Opening chapter, book two of the eternal love story –- Clearly seeing the futility, all hope died, every last speck of it, and with nothing left to do, I settled into my brokenness, content with life as it is. That’s what we fear, not death, not fear itself, but our brokenness. We are afraid that we will never be whole, that we will leave this life broken and alone. I’d heard rumors of genuine, full and absolute surrender, of people who surrendered it all, brokenness included, but before that exquisite moment it was all hearsay.
Surrender isn’t something I do. It is something, actually a no-thing that happens to the one you thought of as you. When it occurs, it doesn’t just wipe out the struggle, the resistance to life as it is, it takes with it all concepts of the one who does anything, erasing it like the chalk boards of my youth.
And now … life simply IS what it has always been: delightful playful precious heartbreaking comical beautiful messy life.
According to Amaya, there is no appropriate bio for Amaya Gayle. She doesn’t exist other than as an expression of Consciousness Itself. Talking about her in biographical terms is a disservice to the truth and to anyone who might be led to believe in such nonsense. None of us exist, not in the way we think. Ideas spring into words. Words flow onto paper and yet no one writes them. They simply appear fully formed. Looking at her you would swear this is a lie. She’s there after all, but honestly, she’s not. Bios normally wax on about accomplishments and beliefs, happenings in time and space. She has never accomplished anything, has no beliefs and like you was never born and will never die. Engage with Amaya at your own risk. www.amayagayle.com