I’m writing this down – despite the uncomfort – because I keep waiting for the grand revelation; the lightning bolt, the sudden parting of clouds, the moment where everything clicks into serene perfection. But that’s not what’s happening.
What’s happening is grief.
When you set out on a spiritual path, you secretly expect the universe to rearrange itself into comfort. You expect fear to soften, distance to shrink, and the beloved to move closer in perfect synchronicity. That was my expectation. The truth, however, is far less cooperative – and far more honest.
Instead of peace, I am drowning in the surfacing of everything I thought I’d transcended.
Deep attachments are rising like drowned bodies from the bottom of the lake. Feelings of loss I didn’t even know I was carrying are weeping through my bones. And there is this urgency – a raw, almost feral need to close the space between me and the one I love, as if proximity alone could save me from this ache.
But here is the knife’s edge of today’s realization:
In the background of all this panic, I catch fleeting glimpses of something devastating. I was already with the beloved! Not in some poetic, metaphysical metaphor, but literally. Right here. In the mundane moments I rushed past so ignorantly. In the quiet mornings, noons and nights I took for granted. In the presence I was too busy chasing to actually inhabit.
I wanted a future version of closeness, not realizing the closeness was already happening. I wanted a guarantee, not realizing the guarantee was the very breath we were sharing.
And now, feeling the distance acutely, I see what I had. The urgency I feel to close the gap is merely the pain of waking up to a gift I had already opened but failed to notice.
So here is the brutal teaching of Day 9: The path does not give you what you expect. It gives you the exact medicine for your specific delusion.
My delusion was that awakening meant escaping attachment. The truth is, awakening means feeling attachment so wholly, so viscerally, that it burns away the illusion of separation.
You don’t lose the beloved; you realize you never possessed them in the first place, and yet, they were never truly absent.
The urgency is not a call to cling harder. It is a call to wake up to what is already here, before it slips into memory again.
I am sitting in the ache. I am not fixing it. I am letting it teach me.
The beloved is not out there. The beloved is the very space in which this ache is arising.
Day 9: I expected a light. I got a fire. And it is burning away everything. And I’m finding my own company intolerable; and I wish the fire burns be down first instead of this world I had built and curated. Watching it turn to ash is unpleasant to say the least.