Unexpected Happenings: The Gateway to Awakening

Unexpected Happenings: The Gateway to Awakening
  
This is the second article in what is unexpectedly turning into a whole series of articles. The Gateway to Awakening series. If you'd like to read the first one, you can find it on my website http://LiveYourAliveLife.com under the Blog section.
 
In reflecting on what would be "THE" gateway to awakening or even "A" gateway to awakening, so many ideas came to mind and will likely follow in future blogs.
 
I realized one of my favourite, most fun gateways or openings to awakening is Unexpected Happenings. They are always out of the blue, synchronistic feelings, sometimes things I like and sometimes things I don't like, and never, never what I would expect to happen. They lead to adventures, new things I've never done before and a deeper feeling of life moving through me.
 
First, though, I'd like to say a bit about: What do I mean by awakening?
 
There's a deeper aspect to ourselves and to life that, when we wake up to the fact of it, life gets really fun and much easier. We begin to enjoy each moment for itself without judgement. Life becomes rich with feeling. We can live from a feeling of peace and wellbeing rather than busy overwhelm, in all circumstances.
 
Awakening is being aware of and feeling the deeper foundational being of yourself and of life itself.
 
And Now! Unexpected Happenings! And how they are gateways to awakening to a deeper, richer experience of life.
 
The foundation of life is peace. It's a feeling of being well. It's beyond and before our tendency to be present with our own thinking and judgements.
 
One of my favourite poems from Rumi, the Sufi mystic, speaks to this foundation of life beyond our habits of judgement.
 
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.
 
I would often go from moment to moment in a day, caught up in my thinking about things, about what was happening, about others, judgements about what I would prefer rather than being present with what actually is. All the ideas about rightdoing and wrongdoing.
 
This way of being feels expected. It feels habitual. It can feel safe. It can feel known.
 
It gets boring as hell.
 
We then look for drama. TV, movies, workplace politics, gossip, the news, OMG I can't believe what that guy said! Again!
 
And around and around we all go.
 
Until!
 
Something truly unexpected happens.
 
It jolts us out of our moving from moment to moment in our thinking that we know what is going to happen next.
 
We have an opportunity to see life differently. To see life without our thinking. Beyond and before our thinking.
 
And life really is a glorious adventure!

Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

I had a flight disruption on a recent trip, where at 4 am I got an email that my flight had been cancelled and thank you for being a customer. Goodbye.
 
WHAAT!?! I want to get home! But when I paused a minute from my forming panic over imagined futures of being stranded with my daughter in Eastern Europe, I became very present.
 
Everything I was expecting about how that day was going to go was gone. All I had was now. And what to do next.
 
Next was obvious because there was an Uber waiting outside the hotel to take us to the airport for the first leg of the trip that was still happening, and so we got in.
 
It turned out that the airline had switched us to a different airline on an earlier direct flight out of Heathrow, and so we got home 4 hours earlier than our original booking that went through Reykjavik. This was very unexpected.
 
It was completely out of the blue, and at first looked like I had no way home.
 
Why is this a gateway to awakening, again? And not an annoying, bad, dangerous situation that we have to complain about, loudly?
 
Unexpected Things that come our way jolt us into the present moment, rip us out of our habitual thinking and stop us in our ingrained tracks.
 
They are love letters from life itself. The Universe grabs us by the scruff of the neck and throws us onto a different track. A push onto a new timeline.
 
Or just a quiet nudge out of what we are used to and into an unknown adventure of daring.
 
Because, in reality, we actually don't know what is going to happen next in our lives. We only think we do. We get so caught up in our habitual thoughts that then create our habitual feelings, and we call it our habitual stress, that we don't notice the peace and wellbeing that runs underneath and alongside us, holding our hands in every moment. We don't notice how taken care of we really are.
 
There is a whole wide world outside of our thinking. And at its foundation is peace.
 
Unexpected happenings throw us into the deep end of the pool. Now we have the opportunity to see what is actually there beyond our habits of being. We have to let life in and let our wisdom in the moment guide us. We are forced to let life itself take care of us.
 
My daughter and I ended up having an adventure changing terminals at Heathrow, collecting our bags, getting on the train, having a proper full English breakfast at a random restaurant, going back in through security and then another train. We contemplated a very large selection of variations of Cadbury's Flake products. I had no idea there was more than one. We stood in pure amazement at all the flaky, chocolatey options. And so, got on our direct flight to Toronto full of a proper breakfast with multiple flaky Cadbury's treats. And home in time for an early dinner.
 
In the last month, I've had so so many delightful unexpected happenings. I've made a game out of spotting them.  Some end in ways that are "good" and others "bad", but they are all fun and bring me out of any habits of thinking I may be in. It's becoming the norm that I don't know what will happen next. There is so much freedom in not having to know everything that will happen in every moment. Life can flow and bring all kinds of adventures, fun things and new experiences.
 
I've had unexpected money come my way, unexpected expenses, unexpected love, unexpected exploding hot burning chicken in my face, unexpected joy in the middle of grief, unexpected beauty and unexpected grace.
 
I am starting to see that ALL of life itself aims to bring us back to ourselves in each and every moment.
 
The energy of life itself that we are made of brings us back to our foundational peace, back to our wellbeing, back to ourselves over and over again all day long.
 
In the most unexpected ways.

With Love, 

Sara Joy