The Extreme Vividness of Being Alive

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

The journey of healing can be one of the greatest adventures a person will ever take in a lifetime.  When you open yourself up to the possibility of a life bigger than anything you have ever previously known you might just suddenly find yourself experiencing a world that is both strangely familiar as well as profoundly alien.  I was having one of those moments appreciating the amazing quality of the journey I was on this past Monday evening while eating dinner at Lund’s on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis.

It may sounds strange to express but it sometimes feels as if I have never truly experienced the full quality of sunlight before.  I was sitting eating and was once again virtually awestruck by the incredible variety of light, texture and color that I could see with my eyes.  What’s also funny is that I am struggling to fully remember what I ate just ten minutes ago.  Ah, now I remember.  I developed a deepened appreciation for brussel sprouts while a frequent guest at the Aliveness Project.  So I decided to eat them as part of my meal.  I sat at a table with the evening sunlight falling through the window that gives a view onto the street.  And I found it so amazing just to notice the immense clarity of vision I can now bring to whatever I am looking.  I appreciate the smallest minutia of differences in the shades of a single color.  I even notice the different textures unique to each bite of food.  Should you be a person who reads my blog regularly it might seem as if I am being highly analytical in my every waking moment.  And yet I am not.  At least I am not doing so with much forethought.  I find myself feeling amazed in a moment and I allow myself to really bask in the moment.  I suppose this is what it means to be radically present.

The sun is continuing to ascend in its power as we approach the Summer Solstice in a mere seven weeks.  The world is finally becoming fully awake.  And it is my first Spring being what I believe it must be like when a person is fully awake and conscious of living on planet Earth.  Everything is so vivid.  I feel sometimes like I imagine a painter tripping out on hallucinogens might feel.  The world in its simplicity and beauty is astounding and incredible.  This is apparently what it means to be truly alive.  I seem to have achieved a state of awareness that I have never before consistently experienced in the forty years I have been alive.  In the earlier days of my healing adventure I would often ask myself how it was possible to be undergoing what I was experiencing.  Now I ask the question of why less often and simply enjoy the experience.  And it might sound really far-fetched but I sense that somehow my eyesight is continuing to improve.

The more I write the more I find that I wish to continue to write and document this most unexpected journey I am on.  I wasn’t planning to have a profound awakening at this point in my life but because of the treatment I began last year which featured techniques I had never tried before here I now find myself living in an amazing world that is, as I noted above, familiar and yet alien, comforting and yet shocking, soothing and yet jarring, inspiring and yet…sometimes a bit surreal.

I still remember last year how during my trip to Germany I noticed references to Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, light and darkness.  Sometimes perhaps it seems as if we journey through Hell to discover our own paradise of Heaven.  I feel as if that is what happened in these last ten months of my own life.  It seems the journey out of the shadow-world of muted life that we may find ourselves in after an experience of trauma can be as jarring as the journey to it.

My experience of the passage of time even feels quite different now.  I will have moments of feeling as if time is stretching itself out such that a walk of ten minutes felt as if it lasted half an hour.  Perhaps this is an inevitable side effect of being more radically present in the present moment?

As I plunge deeper and deeper into this journey I am convinced of one thing and one thing only…my life will never be the same again.  Like Neo waking up out of the Matrix I have woken up out of the haze of a trauma impacted brain.  I still carry the grief of having lived as long as I have without seeing the world in such sharp relief but I also carry within me the joy of having awoken to the immense beauty of the world.  Joy and sorrow, excitement and grief…these live within me now.