Tag: Journey

A Dark Night, A Dawning

Yvet Youssef

Once, in a tense room, palpable dark energy, gloom and suffering surrounding us. Turmoil like a storm that just refused to pass. A room I had made for rest and sweetness, suddenly so heavy.

And in that unbearable weight I looked around me in disbelief. Looked at a person I loved more than I had ever loved anyone as the whirlwind of chaos seemed to spring from the ground beneath his feet. And the only words that I could speak: “This is not my frequency. This isn’t mine. This is not my frequency.”

He told me to leave. And at a certain point you just have to listen even if it’s not making any sense. At a certain point you just have to believe the frequency.

I took a long path down to the bottom of everything. I took my time. And all the way down there, what had appeared to be a solid impermeable ending turned out to be liquid. I stuck my hand through like they do at strange portals in sci-fi movies, baffled. On the other side was an open space, a receptacle of Everything that’s ever been and ever will be, and it was all Love. Just Love. So I began laughing through the tears. There isn’t anything to fear here.

That relief, like a secret, found in the depths of pain; it has forever changed me. You have to let your heart break first. You have to be willing to lose everything. Surrender to it. As the Sufi mystics say: You have to burn down your house, chop off your head, lose your mind. And then: Freedom. And there: Love. One has to chuckle at the simplicity of it all, and how torturous the path towards it can be.

I create from my experience. I take the tuning forks to my heart until I reach a clarity. This is my work. My only real work: To eradicate all barriers that prevent me from experiencing and expressing Love. It’s an ongoing journey. I don’t delude myself with thoughts about arriving somewhere. That’s not the point right now. My objective is growth. Evolution. That’s the frequency I want to harmonize with. To move. To keep my heart wide open and dance with whatever arises.

There is healing to be found in this world. I just have to release the palms of my hands from the tight grips of control to be able to receive it. There isn’t anything to fear here. Breathe easy for a moment. This moment. Plant a flag here. Mark it with highlighter and neon post-its and fairy lights. Adorn it with flower and song. Remember this.

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Speaking Words of Wisdom Without Having to Die First

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We tend to gobble up wisdom from dead 13th century poets. From deceased men we call philosophers whose work is nestled safely in the stone strata of our human history. We celebrate the wise sages who can no longer speak back. We like our wisdom antiquated, with a layer of dust that we can feel proud to wipe away before somebody else did. “Look what I found; a profound word, it’s so old!”

But wisdom, spoken from living mouths, feminine, passionate, creative, poetic, loud and confident, sensual and vital, alive – iiieeekkkkk oooh nononono… suddenly wise words evoke staggering, heals in sand, stubborn arms crossed, scorn, ridicule and judgement.

“Don’t you think you are a little arrogant for saying that?”
“You sound so sure of yourself, you think you’re all that?”
“I don’t like it when people speak like they know some sort of truth.”
“It’s not that you are wrong, it’s just that you think you are right that’s problematic.”
“Ugh, you sound so teacherly, it’s really annoying.”
“I am just so allergic to those vague spiritual terms.”

And so we float around in pools of ad hominem fallacies. The grand orchestra of silencing the living, so that they refrain from shining too brightly, too confidently, too much empowered. “Nobody shall at any point here think they have something of real value to add to the conversation,” as we raise our hands and take an oath of mediocre superficiality for the sake of all things mundane and undisturbed.

I suppose a dead poet’s words of wisdom have transcended the chains of personality, of character flaw; their words now live on their own in a timeless vacuum of abstracted knowledge. But, they arose in a living human, a real person just like you and me. Not a saint, not an exclusive-collector’s-item-edition of the human form, not a special rarity: A real person. A poet is a living being. A mystic is a living being. A philosopher is a living being. They are not separate from us.

Wisdom is not something anyone can own. It is something we can choose to tap into, to cultivate a relationship with, to grow towards. What name do you want to give it? Awareness, Consciousness, Presence, Loving-Kindness, Divinity, Spirit, Unconditional Love? Whatever word you want to use, it is never dispensed for the sake of personal gain… not if it’s true wisdom (because, again, nobody owns it!) That is not to say that people cannot earn a living from sharing wisdom, or that all philosophers, witches, sages, truth-tellers and mystics should live in destitute poverty in order to be taken seriously. Nah, that’s an old-school myth rooted in a paradigm of scarcity and lack. It’s time to move on.

The intention of sharing wisdom is always loving. Have teachers and gurus abused their power? Yes. Remove them from their pedestals. Obliterate hierarchies with a spirit of Radical Equality. That means you do not place anyone above or below you; it means you do not place yourself above or below anyone. That’s not to say we cannot point out when shit is messed up. Compassion is not coddling or infantilizing. It just means we recognize and respect the inherent worth of life in all its forms. Learn what you can from those who offer their teachings to you. Don’t dwell for too long in resentment around the wrongdoings perpetrated by human suffering. Inquire into the nature of that suffering, look it in the eye, see where it is coming from. Recognize that same pain within you so that you can make the choice not to pass it unwittingly along to others. The most honorable job in the world and, I believe, our greatest responsibility.

Understand that the age of esoteric exclusivity is over. You don’t need some sort of membership to an elusive secret society shrouded in mysterious shadows to know a thing or two about the grand scheme of things. No. The field of mystic knowledge is wide and open, and anyone can at all times choose to walk around there to touch its vibrant dancing grasses. We all have access to wisdom. It’s the very same source those deceased mystics and poets tapped from: A collective consciousness, a Universal Truth, simple, clear, all-encompassing: Love. That’s it. Do blockages to this Love exist within us? Yes. Do we sometimes stubbornly refuse to feel it? Oh, hell yes. Do we still have access to it if we are willing to open the window a little bit? Absolutely.

The reason why these living mouths, these luscious humans, these blood-pumping-sweet-hearts would even dare to speak words of wisdom, is to further the human cause. It’s for the sake of Evolution. It’s for the sake of Everything and Everyone. We need each other to grow and heal and evolve. That’s what I know I came here to do. And I want your heart-glowing-sparkling-wisdom, sweet one. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Let us infuse each other’s wise words, weave ourselves into the fabric of our shared existence. So we can Love each other and ourselves as fully and deeply as we can muster in courageous tenderness. I am not asking for much; just everything you are, just your soul-fire, just your reasons for Being. Thank you very much.

Evolving Consciousness

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I am not perfect. I get stuck and hooked and I trip over myself plenty. I don’t know everything. I do not have all the answers. There have been times I’ve felt shame around this. How can I be whole without being perfect? There are still moments where I think I should not speak my truth before it is perfected. Who am I to use my voice? To write about the Sacred? To point out the wounds of our world?

Then something in me goes: Wait a minute, that sounds like a tune that you picked up from our cultural command of unworthiness: “Don’t you dare think yourself worthy because it will mess with a system predicated on your perpetual sense of insecurity!”

But, dear one, worthiness already lives inside of us. It is a birthright, no matter how much our societies have tried to oppress or obscure it. Our work is to re-claim our worth, to stop hiding from it, to stop rejecting it, to stop repressing it. What are we so afraid of?

We are evolutionary creatures. Everything we do is a path, not towards a perfect destination, but towards growth. Beyond what we can now imagine as some type of destination lies still more path and still more possibilities for expansion of consciousness. My only job here is to commit to that path with reverence, gratitude and conscious presence as an evolutionary being who is always learning. That is how I serve the whole. That is the place from where I can legitimately speak. Not because I claim to have all the answers, but because we are all in this together, like links in a chain, connected. We grow towards healing together and we evolve together. When I stretch out my hand to reach for you and pull you up, you may accept it, just like I rely on the pointed finger of someone else to guide the way onward. We build ladders and throw out ropes and make signposts along the way because we need each other, and, quite frankly, this whole experience is a lot more fun with loving company.

On Meditating Through the Mess

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I am living the cliché: The newly separated woman in her early 30’s seeking guidance from the realms of spirituality and psychology in order to make sense of the chaos that has become her life. You know, the woman who has just lost such large chunks of the identity she had eagerly been building for about 8 years of marriage and step-motherhood in a different country that she now – after being unceremoniously rejected by her partner – simply doesn’t know how to set one foot in front of the other. I have always been deep diving into philosophical quandaries and explorations of consciousness, so this is not new territory to me, it’s just all that’s left now. During this transition phase, I rapidly chartered the help of a Jungian psychologist; I regularly visit spiritual websites trying to find some solace for the godawful, heart wrenching pain I experience every single day; I visit stores that sell self-help books and chakra colored candles to inspire some kind of healing in this wreckage of a human heart. Needless to say: I’ve been having a really shitty time. As a diligent seeker of wellbeing I, of course, have been pointed to the power of meditation repeatedly by every single person who has had anything to say about helping oneself recover after such heartbreak.

Now, I am not an avid meditator. My biggest barrier during the slew of meditation and sound-healing classes that I have taken part in over the years has been my body. If I have to sit cross-legged, straight up, on a hard pillow for an hour, I get so distracted by the aching pain in my lower back that emptying the mind is virtually impossible. Yes, I hear you: Yoga, right? That’s what yoga is for, to train the body for meditation! Well, it is not trained for meditation, and it’ll take some years to fix that. So, in the meantime, I have been laying in bed with my headphones on, listening to a variety of YouTube’s guided-meditation-videos where the soothing voices of strangers lead me through imagined landscapes of lights and colors and energies, through the body and into the Universe. I don’t know if they help, but I can’t afford skepticism right now.

When my psychologist also implored me to meditate to clearly distinguish between my consciousness and the drama that unfolds around me in the shape of my life, I figured I should try to graduate from the kindergarten of mediation, to, well, let’s say 1st grade. (Not dissing the YouTube variety, I love everyone who invests time in making solid meditation videos – especially if they also manage to keep the notifications from their phones silent during the recordings!) So, I got the sage out that I had recently bought in one of those spiritual bookstores, I wrapped myself up in scarfs and blankets, and in the thick sage-smudge that filled my brother’s apartment, (which I reside in when he’s away because I am homeless – in the sense that I don’t have a home of my own anymore/as of yet) I closed my eyes and began to meditate.

Breathing in and breathing out slowly. Letting the thoughts arise as they may, and – without judgement – releasing them. After a couple of minutes of unhooking my mind from solid thoughts I marveled at the astounding variable density of thinking. As in; there are a lot of very obvious robust thoughts, but there also also very elusive thoughts that make themselves so thin and sheer that it almost seems as though they are not there. However, upon deepening your awareness, they sure are there, almost transparent, trying to have their moment! Sneaky bastards! There are bison thoughts, unapologetically barging in. There are mice thoughts, scurrying around in corners, difficult to catch. And there are chameleon thoughts, blending in with the backdrop of your mind so well you have to look very hard to recognize them. So, I sit there for a while clearing away these thoughts, and after some time of stillness I hear myself thinking: “This is going pretty well, I think I am not that bad at meditating” – and suddenly I begin laughing really hard.

I can’t stop laughing for a while and think: “Why the hell do you need to be good at meditating right away? Who is keeping score? What are you trying to prove?” Suddenly all these identities come rushing by, and this need to be “good”. I wanted to be the “good” daughter, never really rebelling, and always being home 10 minutes before curfew. I wanted to be the “good” student, even when basically impossible, I read all the assigned articles in graduate school – all of them – way, way, way too many of them. I wanted to be the “good” wife, making sure I had coffee and dinner ready for my partner exactly after he awoke, right before he had to leave for night shift, hoping to ease his stress, and hoping to connect with him in the unsustainable schedule we had involuntarily acquired. I wanted to be the “good” stepmom, so even when my stepson was pushing my buttons by arguing every single sentence that came out of my mouth relentlessly, I cleaned up his room so he could feel comfortable and at home. Fuck, I even wanted to be the “good” “other woman” to my husband’s ex by watching my stepson whenever she needed it during her scheduled days (nope, didn’t work!) And when I go to an institute for intuition and energy healing in yet another attempt to find some meaning in all of this mess, I get nervous, because what if I don’t have a “good enough” aura? Haha! What?!

As I am laughing at myself, I feel this surge of warmth rise up from my heart and I hear myself quietly whispering: “It’s OK, I already love you” – and tears start rolling down my face.

There is nothing wrong with acts of service, with care, with being responsible, and treating others with kindness and respect as much as possible. Those are wonderful qualities. But there is nothing to win there, there’s no approval to gain, no appreciation to distill from the hearts of others in an attempt to feel safe or accepted. The amount of love others are able to give is simply a reflection of the love they are able to give themselves. Therein lies our true work; to love ourselves. I am an amateur meditation practitioner who is probably going to fall asleep to another one of YouTube’s “guided meditations for empaths” or something along those lines. And each day, as a practice, I am going to love this sweet heart of mine so warmly that it will slowly heal, so that it will be able to meet others along the way with sincere love and kindness. And I will try a bit more “grown-up” meditation tomorrow, because, they keep saying it can lead to some real insights about yourself…

A Journey Begins and Ends and Begins Again

Yvet Youssef2 Comments

I have begun and deleted many blogs over time.

This one has my name on it. I sense that I have an ever-increasing and indisputable commitment to excavating my truest essence through writing and making art in general. I can’t think of a name more suitable for that journey than the one given to me at birth.

I have been writing and sharing photographs on an Instagram account with my name on it (@yvet_youssef) for a year now and I will continue to do so. It’s a space that I love and one that’s been exceptionally helpful to me. Now it’s time for this accompanying sister-space where I get to write beyond the caption limitation of Instagram, into the verbose blogosphere.

Thank you for visiting. It is my privilege to greet you here.