In Chapter 5 of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Elizabeth Lesser tells about her friend, Ram Dass, and his experience with a stoke that he suffered in his 60s. He explained that the stoke created a crack in his ego. His description of the cracked ego provided clarity to the quote of Leonard Cohen, “The crack is where the light gets in,” and of Rumi’s “The wound is where the light enters.” Ram Dass explained that the loss that he experienced as a result of the stroke coincided with grace taking his ego. His perception shifted from ego to soul, where ego caused fear of such things as a stroke. He said, “When you bear the unbearable, something within you dies. My identity flipped over and I said, “so that’s who I am – I’m a soul” I ended up where looking at the world from the soul level is my ordinary everyday state. And that’s grace.” Further, he says, “When you’re secure in your soul, what’s to fear? Since the stroke, I can say to you with an assurance I couldn’t have felt before, that faith and love are stronger than any changes, stronger than aging, and I am very sure, stronger than death.”
The loss of Blake is physical in nature, but not an illness like Ram Dass’s stroke. The day before I listened to these words, a former student and person who has had her own struggles and fought her way back from the depths, wrote to me that she was telling a friend about how I’ve stood up and advocated and shown my soul. She said that I’m a “bright light and soulful person.”
Then I heard and felt the words of Ram Dass. I cannot imagine an event that will break my ego more than the physical death of one of my children. By saying this, I am certainly not challenging the Universe to show me anything different. I know though, that the breaking of my ego allowed the light of my soul to shine brighter.
In the shadow of Blake’s departure from his physical being-ness, I didn’t want to gain anything, no matter what it might be – personal growth, kindness from others, much less anything tangible. It wasn’t for me to decide. I just saw a meme that reflects this. It says, “Darkness gives birth to new light.” The new light comes from the cataclysmic earthquake that knocked my ego off of its comfortable axis, giving birth to more soul presence. With more soul presence, I too feel “faith and love are stronger than any changes, stronger than aging, and. . . stronger than death.”
This is my experience. My first ego shattering event occurred at a tender age, vey early in the development of my ego. Through the years, my feelings about my mother’s abandonment of me have ranged from sadness to anger to bewilderment, but these days, I wonder if it wasn’t a preparation. But for that initial event, I may have just shattered altogether. This primal wound installed the first layers of hard and soft, of courage and soulfulness.
I was listening to Broken Open on Audible while driving, when I heard these words from Ram Dass. Before this section, there were other paragraphs and sentences that got my attention, but when I heard these words, I knew I needed a hard copy of the book immediately so that I could read and re-read as needed. These words literally took my breath away. They are a message from Blake. I stopped the recording after the sentence about faith and love and drove in silence.
If you’ve followed my blog, you know that the words ‘faith’ and ‘love’ were part of the last conversation that Blake and I shared just hours before his fatal overdose. I have written about why he may have chosen to have those words tattooed in prayer hands at his next tattoo appointment.
I believe that addiction took Blake’s ego away, even though this would most often be equated to being a necessary component of recovery. Addiction shattered Blake, and he literally had nothing more to lose. His soul saw the evil all around him – in the desperation of people stealing his clothing, even his underwear, while he was in rehab, the greed of people who illegally coordinated his health insurance and sent him to certain treatment centers, the actions of people who brought substances into the very treatment centers where he was supposed to be finding recovery. He saw it all, and he was relieved from what he saw. He was provided a physical exit from soul searing pain. This was his recovery – the way he was shown fierce grace.
But before his exit, Blake dropped the words ‘faith’ and ‘love’ on me. Yesterday he let me know, through Ram Dass’s words, that “faith and love are stronger than any aging, and . . . stronger than death.” He already knew this. His exit gave me fierce grace.
These words, my soul knows, are truth.