In 2002 I was the recipient of the UK’s Kindred Spirit award for my work in the field of personal transformation. It happened at a personally challenging period of my life that brought home to me how important it is to never draw a line under our own journey of awakening and healing. This is some of what I wrote after the award ceremony in the spring of 2003: it is about the gap between personality and being. Yesterday, 11 years later, I found myself unknowingly writing on the same theme: this time around, not so much exploring the gap as describing how to bridge it. I will publish that here as Part 2 next week.
April 11, 2003: “For 30 years I have been teaching that which I am devoted to learning and living – to honour and celebrate the gift of being. It is how we are all supposed to be living – vibrantly alive, trustful of our nature, infused with the spirit of the eternal and open-heartedly present! Were it not for the gap, it would be so. The gap is the distance between living our being (this is love in action) and holding ourselves within the confines of our personality (this is fear in action). For 30 years my life and my work have been devoted to closing the gap, and I have again and again had to watch its re-opening in myself in those times when I fell back into old fears. It is so for all of us. As long as we live in fear, we have to endure the gap. Only when we live in love does the gap close.
“When we are in our essence there is no gap. We are our heart-and-soul being, transparent, loving, in touch with the infinite spirit, and brilliantly present. Cloaking this essence is the costume of our personality. Because we have almost all grown up learning some fear, some mistrust and some lack of feeling, our personality costume always incorporates the survival strategies that we have manufactured to protect ourselves from whatever it is that we fear and mistrust. Closing the gap does not mean that we have to deny the personality. It has its gifts too, and in any case we need our personality; it is how we relate with others, it is how we play and work in our daily lives. But we do have to own and feel and know our personality, from its light to its deepest dark, so that it is not disconnected from our heart-and-soul being. For then we can heal its wounds and calm its fears with the light and love of our real consciousness. Then there is no gap.
“There is nothing I could choose that puts me more in the face of the gap than this life of teaching the art of being. It is my way of learning. I have never stopped knowing this. It has and continues to be my own path of personal transformation and spiritual awakening.”