#11 Emptying and Filling.

Dear friends. It is curious that as the days get shorter and the nights longer that the shopping, lighting up, eating frenzy increases. So what is going on? Sure capitalism has taken over and appropriated this sacred time of the year. Catalogues arrive daily in the mail and online, with tempting images of good cheer and beauty, and Christmas music accompanies us everywhere. This tradition of gift giving at Christmas began during the Victorian era, when the merchants saw the opportunity to cash in. Nothing wrong with gift giving. It is fun and generous. But something has gotten out of hand. The spirit has been replaced with a kind of compulsive ritual every year. And in January the bills come due and followed by the crash.

We began talking about emptiness on Monday. We all know someplace inside that feels hollow, like something is missing. It feels like a place where we are cut off. We don't know what we are cut off from but there is nagging sense that this hole, at the very center of our being,  must be filled. Mostly we don't get close to the actual emptiness, the nothingness. We experience all kinds of reactions. There may be intense agitation, addictive filling ( spending, shopping, eating, drinking, using drugs, gambling, over working...). Of we withdraw from the possibility of being disappointed, giving up and sinking into despair or a lazy collapse. Netflix is the perfect companion into the couch! Or we may engage in endless social activity fearing being lonely. Or we simply keep ourselves constantly busy. Or we our bodies freeze up in fear. What is your favorite way to reaction to the hole of emptiness.

So what is it about this time of year that seems to exacerbate this agitation, this filling up? The darkness of these long nights invites the soul into a kind of interiority. The darkness pulls the soul into a kind of silence or stillness. And this pull takes us closer to this place that feels like nothing, like a dull deficiency, that feels empty and cutoff. And the closer we get unconsciously we begin to resist this pull and we are off on the hamster wheel. We see what a culture does with this pull. Earlier and earlier each year, the lights go up, the jingles start. "Buy, buy, buy! Busy, busy, busy! Keep filling this hole." This is the implicit and explicit message.

The tragedy is that this nothingness, this place of cutoff-- where we unconsciously, by necessity, and through the normal and healthy development of ego,-- is actually the doorway to our divine nature, our presence. What you may discover as you befriend this emptiness, as you bring your practice of presence to it, that this empty hole, this disconnection is simply a kind of empty spaciousness, an opening, that allows what is deeper and truer to arise. If we are caught up in all the reactions we believe that this emptiness is a kind of annihilation, an intolerable meaningless, a place of terror and we never actually let ourselves land in the nothing to discover that it is simply an opening, a portal. 

Years ago I was in the Southern Hemisphere and Christmas was in the height of summer. Of course Santa on slays in blazing heat was all wrong. But more importantly there was so little darkness. My soul could not find the tug to go inward. Back then I did not understand what this pull was but at some intuitive level I could feel that some kind of deep dark gravity was missing.

So I invite you to go out at night. Let the darkness in. Next time we will focus on the Blackness of these nights.

Blessings to you all, Alison