It has been a bit since I have posted a blog as I am primarily posting via video these days.

There were a few reasons for such a switch. The first is that it had been requested of me for many years to do videos, and the second was that I felt considerable resistance to doing so.

There is an old saying of do what you fear, but in my case it was more of a do what you are resistant to.

In any case, I have enjoyed the immediacy of doing videos. Things can take shape quite quickly energetically, emerge through video, and the whole process is like a tide coming to shore and then going back to sea.

It used to be that my books and teachings were an initiation for me, a way to consolidate a chapter of my life, a death and rebirth. In many ways I find that when I can describe even a complex spiritual or philosophical matter simply, I have truly embodied the essence of what I needed to be taught and could then offer it to others.

In some cases, like my book, Working with Kundalini, it was a fifteen year endeavor. Other books and teachings came more quickly, anywhere from six months to ten years, just depending.

In 2019 I experienced what I know now is a “dropping through”. I had spent a few years fully in the Voids, a state where you are one foot still in one stage of spiritual experience and one foot in the next. This was a place that I had flickered to many times and many years before, but there is a difference between a short visit or even a lengthy vacation and permanently residing somewhere.

This is a state of emptiness, of growing stillness, of primary yin and yang, darkness and light. It is a sort of weigh station of sorts, and a place where many people get stuck because to move forward would mean to fully release an ego-identity that requires mastery, organization, control, superiority, and to remain in the play of the world, looping through individual pain and victimhood, the need to be superior and to know and to claim.

But the Voids are still within the confines of identity, and of binary reality.

The best way I can describe this is to imagine a spaceship circling a black hole. It is deeply fearful of being sucked in, even if it is aware that that is its destination. There is still some aspect of ego hanging on, deeply afraid of the ensuing collapse through a tunnel (I experienced it as a hallway) into a single point.

Said spaceship has long ago left Earth, but it is still in its orbit.

What emerges after that collapse is ineffable, and can only arise out of truly giving up any illusion of control, or in my case, what I was clinging on to the most was a sense of knowledge and completion.

Even the concepts of control, completion, initiation, enlightenment, or any other thought or spiritual organizing map collapse into the black hole, disappearing the further we move into the Voids.

So we get to the other reason why I do not write as much anymore, which is that my ego no longer requires it, as I have dropped the meaning-making process within myself, and what I offer is now solely to help others. It sounds ludicrous to make such a statement, and I would have reacted to that sentence quite poorly at earlier points in my path if another had said it.

So I do hope that the following, which is my clumsy attempt to put into words where I am at recently, is of service to you as you read this, or resonates, or at the very least stokes some mild interest…

From an early age I felt that there was an essential falsehood to reality. When I would peer too closely at this falsehood, the boundaries of self and world that held me so tightly began to dissolve, and I would find myself disappearing into a type of vague nothingness was suffused with a comforting pure light, and felt more real (or just as real) as reality.

People fear the Other because they fear themselves; they fear their own darkness, their own suffering. So they make castles out of sunshine and clouds, the false belief that if they were only enlightened enough that they would be beyond it all.

There have been times in which I have been initiated in some large way by the Other, and in the span of time that such energies were dying and being reborn within me I had little awareness beyond the pause, the sort of tepid space in which nothing yet can form.

It is easy to feel trapped in this space, like you are moving in reverse, or like Sisyphus climbing that mighty hill pushing that boulder yet again.

But at some point a shift occurs, large enough that you are aware that something fundamental within yourself has changed, but not yet the awareness of what.

Our desire for meaning-making is so strong that we wish to constrain such experiences, to bring them out into the light, to make sense of them so that we can move forward, a new sense of self firmly intact.

But eventually, we can let go of even the meaning-making, the desire to create stories that populate our existence. The darkness can remain in the darkness, and what is wild and free and unknown within us can seek refuge and safety in the understanding that we no longer wish to turn our darkness into light, our unknown into known.

If we are able to let go of control, completely and fully, what emerges is a self that is totally free. 

It is in our chaos that we free ourselves, not in any human-based order that we attempt to create. 

There are so many maps, and we are such wonderful mapmakers as humans. 

But it is even more extraordinary to simply be. 

Underneath all of the doing, the meaning-making, the conflicts between self and Other, between self and self that we spend our lifetimes playing out, is a space of pure chaos.

If we are willing to look straight at our suffering, right at and through the suffering of the world, we come to the formless Void, the original chaos that begat us all.

And if we are willing to sit with chaos, with uncertainty, and let go of every single aspect of ourselves that seeks to dominate and control our lives, as well as our spiritual existence, we find ourselves in a place where we have so embodied chaos and darkness that we find stillness and peace.

So many people are looking in the wrong place for this stillness. They are looking in the clouds, towards the light for a guidance that can only come from within, from the dark places, from the hard-fought wisdom that emerges from age and life and messy humanness.

If we are willing to ground ourselves in this, to feel rather than to know, we find ourselves in this place of immense stillness.

This is like being at the bottom of the ocean, where the experiences of life, of suffering, of the ups and downs of existence still occur, but they are the currents, the waves, and we are no longer caught up in each rising and falling wave or every ocean current.

There are so many who seek bliss because they no longer wish to be human. 

Bliss only arises when we accept that it is fleeting, it is not able to be captured and controlled any more than fear, than envy, or than anger.

It is no better or worse than anything else that we experience. All things, even our desires for enlightenment, for a static bliss, for anything that will prevent us from experiencing the pain of being human, are measures of control.

They are the desperate soul, seeking to control fate and life and forces that go far beyond the individual human capacity to control.

If we are able to let things simply arise and fall away, to take pleasure in their impermanence– whether they be great rage or indescribable bliss– we will have found ourselves at the bottom of that ocean, looking up.

It is only when we allow for these much greater forces to flow through us that we can let go of our illusions of knowing, control, and mastery.

It is only then that we can drop through, that we can let all things fall away to the extent that only a divine pulsation remains.

The spiritual heart can open, and it releases all else. The chakra system collapses, the self and identity and physical form and emotions all rise and fall like tides. 

All flows through the heart, and the experience is certainly a unity, but it is also a complete cycle.

That cycle is one of returning to birth. As we were in utero we were in the womb of our mother, feeling her heartbeat as pulsation.

As we return, as we end the cycle, we again return to that place of the womb, that pulsation.

This time it is the pulsation of the divine mother, of being held and nurtured and loved by the cosmos as if we were yet again an infant, a seed, a cell within all that is.

It is strange- in a place where everything falls away, where the world returns to luminosity and a primitive pulsation, the beauty and precious notion of each ephemeral moment in this world emerges.

In earlier states we may condemn, criticize, or deride the world, seeking to be above and beyond it.

In later states we discover that such condemnation is little more than our desire to be something other than human, something other than a human that lives and dies and suffers mightily under the weight of that humanity.

We often only learn such things with maturity, when death becomes a force that we can no longer hide from, no longer push away or deny the existence of.

Death can in fact become an ally, even as we are aware that it is an omnipresent force that visits each and every person we love, replacing physical presence with grief, shifting holidays and family structures and ways of being with memories.

In such moments that we feel ourselves most closely aligned with Death, we can find the wellspring of life.

All that is beautiful and innocent and vivid and tasty in this world comes from the eternal force of Death.

When we close our eyes to it, when we fear it, we deny our very existence.

As I grow older I appreciate stillness more. When I was younger I did what I see so many do, looking for charisma and bold claims and energy that drew all eyes to that person.

It was first in marial arts movies that I saw that the person with the most power and skill didn’t need to announce themselves. They no longer needed to prove themselves. They could be human, ordinary, even as they possessed immense skill or strength.

It is such an interesting spiral of a path that spiritual awakening ultimately leads us to the discovery that we are all ordinary human beings.

Every wounded ego-fueled part of ourselves wishes otherwise, and lead us down paths that glitter and offer such substantial rewards if we only venture down them.

Such paths may teach us something, but ultimately we will always emerge from them disappointed.

We have not yet discovered that the path of broken gravel, of unpaved road, is the one to follow… not the one of gold.

There is such immense relief in solidly becoming who you always were, in healing the past, resolving the future, and in dropping the stories and desires to be anything other than who we are already.

If we were only thinner, richer, funnier, better, more charismatic, had more people see us and hear us, if we only didn’t have the childhood we had. It only we were perfect, or perfected. All are stories, and many must be navigated in order to release, but ultimately they all lead us to a point where we are willing to venture into insignificance.

It is a hard fight– magic and stories speak of cheating death, of immortality– convey our deep fear of our very human inadequacy, as we so wish to control what is beyond our ability to control, to be certain of what we can never be certain of.

If we completely and totally let reality, let death, let fear, let anger, let uncertainty, let our own awareness of our lack of control flow through us (instead of clenching onto such things with closed fists and clenched teeth) we can finally, and forever, be free.

All gives way to silence, to emptiness, and then to a brimming light that can only be described as pulsatory divinity. We can feel this in our chest, or at times feel ourselves embraced by it through our ears and our auras, but we cannot fully grasp it mentally.

But if we are willing to let go of the maps, the programs, the systems that offer us designs of significance, of our individual and collective meaning and purpose, we will find our days quite free.

We will also then, and only then, find our mind, body, and soul quite free.

Mary Mueller Shutan is a spiritual teacher and author of nine books, including The Spiritual Awakening Guide, The Body Deva, and Shadow Work for the Soul.