Rose, Garden of the Sun
by Pastor Audrey
I attended a spiritual formation retreat this past weekend through Hole in the Rock Ministries. The topic was on the mind of Christ and non-dual seeing. Non-dual seeing? I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. In a nutshell, non-dual seeing is about learning to see everything within us and everything in the entire cosmos as being united in Christ through love. Put another way, it’s about learning to resist the urge to categorize everything into binary, either/or, black/white compartments. This kind of thinking is all about comparing, contrasting, labeling, and judging. This kind of thinking isn’t “bad” in and of itself. It’s actually necessary for interfacing with the world. The problem is when this system of thinking leads us to see ourselves as separate – separate from God and separate from others. That illusion of separation from love is at the root of all of our pain.
So far, so good. This retreat was helping me to find the words to articulate some things that I felt I already understood intuitively. The next part was substantially harder: the path to healing and seeing with the mind of Christ – that all things are united in love in God. We’re all on different paths toward the same center.
Here I found the Enneagram to be helpful. The Enneagram is an ancient tool for spiritual growth. One of the things I most appreciate about the Enneagram is that for each type (there are 9 types), there is an entire spectrum with possibilities for varying degrees of health and unhealth, along which we might flight throughout the day. We all have all 9 types within us; one type just tends to describe our experience more fully than the others.
I’m an 8 on the Enneagram. And for me, the path to wholeness and healing is through open-heartedness, vulnerability. Of course, I do not like this. Being vulnerable means I could be more easily hurt, right. Not really. I’m still going to get hurt. Trying to mitigate against pain doesn’t prevent it. What’s more, the unintended consequence of trying to protect myself from pain is walling myself off from love.
So what’s the antidote or path to healing? I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t as I feared, sudden over-exposure or all-out risk, but play. Through play, we can experiment with ways to open ourselves, ever-so-gently, in non-threatening ways. We can tip-toe our way into opening to surprise, delight, joy, and innocence. And love.
The path to wholeness and healing doesn’t need to be like trying to take a drink of water out of a firehose. Maybe it can be more like a child running through the sprinklers in the grass, occasionally stopping and letting droplets of water fall on her face with delight.
This poem was read at the start of the retreat. Something in me knew that it contained everything I need to learn:
“How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its Being.
Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened”
― Hafez