If you follow me (Jordanna!) on social media, you’ve probably heard by now that I am writing my very first book. (If not, now you know!)
It’s funny how when you have a dream to do something – like write a book – you cannot wait to get there.
Yet it’s so easy to get lost in the details or in the process of completing the journey that we forget to take in each moment of the journey.
As a thank you to you, in gratitude for witnessing every moment I experience, I wanted to share an excerpt from the book with you. Just in time for American Thanksgiving, this excerpt touches on the sensations and experience of duality – one of our favorite topics here at MDS.
Whether you’re getting ready to cook homemade turkey and mashed potatoes or heading into a normal day of work – this will help you lean into your experience with a little more gratitude and love for each step along the way!
Grab your favorite hot beverage (or cold, if it’s warm where you are) and enjoy!
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We live in a world where there is extreme joy and extreme pain at our fingertips in practically every moment. The light and the dark intermingle in ways that our minds can’t always fathom.
It wasn’t long before I was confronted with the beliefs of others that bad people existed, and that the pain and fear I could see in the world was simply a “fact of life” that you had to “suck up and deal with.”
But to me, it wasn’t a fact of life, but rather the way life was showing up that I knew all along didn’t have to be that way. And the thought of sucking it up was one I couldn’t bring myself to do — because to ignore my deep knowing meant death inside myself; a death of what moved me, a death of what felt right. So I held strong to my insistence that life was not that mean, and none of us deserved to be labeled as “bad.”
On a certain level I always knew it was not that simple, and that it could be more simple than that.
The biggest aspects of our deep knowing hold both a simplicity within us that is the feeling, and a complexity within it that are the plethora of thoughts that make up the feeling. On one level we know it just is, and on another level we know the vastness of dynamics that must change in order to create that “isness” on our planet today.
And then the planet, as it is and appears today, overtakes what we know and feel, and we are shown a further complexity than we can even fathom.
For me that looked like an appearance that pain is something that comes from an existence of evil in this world. That evil exists and no matter what we do we can’t avoid its pain. For a child who knew better, that only led to confusion that wouldn’t let up, and a confusion that led to a pushing down and away of what she knew to be true, so that she could live within the confines of society.
Feelings of extreme joy always seemed to be followed by extreme sadness and pain – sometimes long after, other times more immediate. In fact, the more I’ve gotten to know this thing, the more the presence of polarities has shown itself within minutes of each other. I can be on the “light” side of the spectrum one moment, and witness or experience the “dark” the next.
The more I’ve been able to experience it all as a feeling, the easier it has become. In the simplicity of the feeling itself, darkness is just an experience, no better or worse than any other. It is something we get to experience in our bodies in visceral sensation.
When it comes down to the core of our experience, if we weren’t able to experience sensation in our body, imagine how blah and boring that would be. If sensation were taken away, it would rip the juice out of the human experience.
And yet we are so fearful of “negative” sensation and darkness. We avoid the pain and seek pleasure.
Even from a young age I was both fascinated and troubled by this.
Duality haunted me. Because I already knew subconsciously that the more of one end of the spectrum of polarity I could experience, the more access to the other end of the experience I had, as well.
This wasn’t something I could describe, but the feeling of the vastness within the pain and the joy haunted me.
Each side felt so big. The pain, when I allowed myself to truly feel it, was as big as the pain of the world. And the joy, when I allowed myself to truly feel it, was also as big as the pain of the world.
Like all humans, I craved the joy. But I feared it, as well. Because I knew intuitively, deep down, that the more I allowed myself to experience it, the closer I got to the pain.
And I would do anything to avoid the pain.
Consciously I thought I could handle it. I was “strong,” and I was courageous. In fact, no one would have disputed my courage. It’s because of my signature courage I’ve made it through to the other side to be writing about the depths of the experience in pain and joy today.
Our natural inclination to run from it all still runs rampant in our society — even amongst the courageous.
Because it’s in our blood. It’s in our instinct. Humans are wired to avoid death — and therefore, we are also wired to avoid pain. That’s why we have fear.
And yet, from the day I could remember, I had a fascination with duality that had me knowing deep down that none of this was bad. My instincts may have been to avoid fear and pain (and boy did they still have their hold on me — numbing with food, holding myself back from some of the adventure I craved from a very young age, not acting on some of the things I yearned to do for no real reason except that I never “got around to it) but that knowing deep inside of me kept peeking in and showing itself.
The more I allowed the knowing beyond the instinct to guide me – the true courage that would pull me deeper into the experience and beyond the traditional realm of expectation and “normal” experience – the more I would get to experience the vastness of the “happy” end of duality, and the expansiveness of possibility in my veins, my heart, and the finite realm of my human experience.
In a way, it was like a drug. I wanted to expand. I wanted to know and experience and BE more. But every time I delved into the more, I found myself accessing and sometimes drowning in the other end of the spectrum — the inevitable darkness of duality.
There are those things that you can feel in your bones, but take years of exploration in the human realm to put your finger on what that thing you can feel actually is. For all of us, those things themselves are our biggest gifts. And because they are our biggest gifts, that’s also where the vastness is — when we delve into the knowing that is ours to access, explore, and use in this life we find a wide open space of everything-ness that will both bring us home, and get us lost if we’re not cautious.
For me, duality was one of those things. The more I went in, the more I got lost in the abyss of darkness. But for some reason I kept going. I knew I had to, even if it hurt.
Until something began to shift…
