To Jimenez writing a poem…has ecstasy, that is the difference between poetry and prose. Living as a poet means feeling ecstasy every day of your life, every hour if possible. – Robert Bly
As we rush from work to the grocery store to all the action of home life ecstasy is not something that comes to mind. A pale ecstasy may come when we finally get something we’ve been wanting, or avoid getting caught in rush-hour traffic. But what Robert Bly is talking about is a living and breathing connection to a state of being that can’t be purchased, it’s about something greater than our ego and all of its demands. It’s about how we can channel more joy and live in alignment with our inherent nature. The big question is how. Poets pick a small happening and enter into it more deeply, we become a poet of life in the same manner. The trick is in opening to the small moments of our daily round. Sitting under a full moon, drinking a glass of wine in front of a fire, listening to the rustle of the leaves before a storm, or dancing to our favorite song. We find the things that create a channel to experience a glimmer of what’s within but often overlooked, ecstasy. In the end ecstasy resides in our approach to living, it’s our wonder and awe at what we normally take for granted. To live our ecstatic being is learning to see with the soul.
This way of living feels all but forgotten. What we are use to is a life centered around money and things and how much of both we can accumulate. As if what’s hidden in the material hoarding is more beautiful than anything we could ever hope to become, as if it holds the key to our inner fulfillment. If we are honest we know that it isn’t money or things that bring happiness, contentment, or inner peace. It’s going to be our choice about how deep we are willing to live, whether we will slow down long enough to let ecstasy catch up with us and accept the offering of the moment. What we’re so desperately searching for isn’t material, it’s energetic.
All of life has one thing in common, energy. The energy of the sun, the earth, people, plants, animals. We have high energy, low energy, deflated energy, relaxed energy, angry energy. There are millions of gradations of the energy we possess and imbibe, and all of this energy dictates our moods and feelings, how we approach the day, our lives, and the ones we love. It’s not something we can see, we have to be quiet enough to feel it, still enough to make it’s acquaintance. What’s been forgotten is how to contact this real, rooted, ecstatic energy. It’s easy to confuse it with other things, like accumulating possessions or sexual energy. And although acquiring something we desire and intimacy can absolutely have it’s ecstatic moments they can’t be maintained over time. They ebb and flow and require money or another participant, which can be a diversion, not to mention exhausting. Ecstatic energy doesn’t need to be created, it already exists, it just needs to be tapped into. It’s a spiritual energy that’s a vehicle for transformation and is what mystics have been talking about for thousands of years. This is the kind of energy that changes the course of our lives, that infuses a new way of thinking and being into our stale routine. But it requires hard work on our part, we have to search it out and change the way we think and behave in order to accommodate this energy. It requires us to surrender, we have to open completely in order to live in connection with ecstasy.
Daily routine and relationship can trigger the ecstatic if we are attuned to the present moment. People have lived this way and we are still touched by their words and wisdom. I think of Rumi, Kabir, and Hafiz living their lives swimming in this ecstatic energy that infused their every action and thought. It’s about living the everyday with a mystical mindset, which means living with a greater respect for the unknown. This energy lets us dare to become something more than just our safe selves, this is a place where we find another gear of living. We don’t have to look far to see that an ecstatic union with the mystery has faded behind our glazed-over existing and coveting of other’s lives. We wonder and worry about everything that in the end doesn’t matter, while the real mysteries elude our detection. We’ve lost ourselves in a sea of meaningless information, and we’re the poorer for it.
The answer isn’t giving away everything we own and living in an ashram. We don’t have to wander the streets. But we do have to live in our body, with our choices, and forge our own authentic life. We are all seeking a bigger connection whose path is unknown. Our clue is our longing. If we can follow what excites and enlivens us we are closer to living ecstatically. There are no wrong answers here, there is only what feeds our soul and our searching for more of that. It’s connecting to the juiciest parts of our life and living there. When we can answer these questions we will be on our way to experiencing more moments of ecstasy in our daily lives.
Engaging the ecstatic is about waking up to what holds magic and meaning for us.
kb
