Wear Everyones Shape

From Bluetruth

You are giving others the gift of your openness or the clench of your refusal.

Are you utterly fulfilled, right now? If so, then you are unmoved by stress, and your life unfolds as openness. But if you are not totally fulfilled, then you feel a strange lack. When this “something missing” motivates you, then you create suffering in the world, for everyone you know, and for yourself.

You are probably, to some extent, being moved by this feeling of essential lack: you want more security, more affection, more understanding. Also, to some extent, you are opening as love; your thoughts and actions are spontaneously welling up from your open heart of depth. That is, you are living some percentage of your life as clench and some percentage as gift.

Spiritual growth involves living more and more of your life as an offering of love. As you learn to open as every moment, your life springs from the open love who you are at depth. When you live as love, then you give love to the world, resonating others so they, too, open and begin to live as love.

To the extent that you are closed, you give stress to the world. Your clench ripples outward, resonating others into closure. Even when you try to help others, your clench communicates itself along with your efforts. People may benefit from your actions, but in the process they are also rippled by your clench.

Your service is only entire when your actions arise as love, emerging through a body lived as openness. And the only way to live as openness is to feel as openness. You can practice feeling each moment as it is and open as its form.

For instance, when you are confused, you can practice opening as confusion. You can actually feel the texture of confusion, wear it like a perfectly fitted suit, and relax as its shape, open. Open as you are, you can feel outward to feel and open as the entire moment. No matter how lousy you feel inside, you can open as your shape. Just as you are—confused, clumsy, bewildered—you can practice feeling outward, bit by bit, and open as all.

Opening as this moment is utter fulfillment. You can practice feeling open as all, starting with feeling and opening as the specific shape of your posture, breath, movement, thoughts, emotions, and actions. Alive as openness, every part of you and all of your life is fulfilled—fully experienced as love and fully dissolved as love.

Any aspect of this moment that remains is yours with which to practice. If confusion persists, then you can practice by persisting to wear confusion, feeling its shape, breathing as confusion, moving as confusion, and actually opening as confusion, right now, to feel outward, finally breathing and opening as the entire moment, again and again. You are alive as the breath-action-feeling that is confusion, and you open as its entire shape to feel outward to all, like a soap bubble opening as wide as the sunlight, again and again and again.

Living each moment open, you bless the world. Your openness begets openness. Those around you resonate open, to the extent they are ready. And, just like you, they aren’t always ready for much.

Anything you are not willing to experience and open as, you will repeatedly confront. If you are afraid to feel anger, if you are unwilling to love as anger and dissolve open as anger, then you will continually struggle with anger in yourself and others. If you are afraid to feel, love, and open as insecurity, then you will necessitate threats to your security. Your very recoil will sustain the ripples of that which you fear, necessitating a confrontation with whatever you are unwilling to fully feel, be alive as, and open as.

Suppose you see a fat person on TV who has an eating problem. Can you feel yourself as a fat person with an eating problem? Can you actually become the stress of the eating problem, feel your weight, your craving, your loneliness? Can you feel this shape altogether and open as love while being this shape?

You can open as every form of experience. If you do not—if you close down, pull away, or keep your distance from fully feeling some experience—then you will perpetuate its pattern, its ripples of closure. If you cannot open as love while you “wear” the entire shape of a fat person with an eating problem, then this pattern will continue in isolation, unloved and separate, clenched closed.

And you will feel the same. You are the openness of this entire moment, and you feel every separative tension whether it seems to belong to you or someone else.

As openness, you open as every being. As openness, you are actually responsible for the openness of everyone. Walking down the street, you pass an old man in a wheel chair. Can you feel his shape? Can you breathe his raspy squeak of a breath? Can you feel death nearby, youth behind, and stretched-out days of gurgle, pain, and disintegration? Feeling his entire pattern of being, can you open as this old man? Can you open as love, feeling every nuance of his decrepit form as the basis of your opening?

Until you can open as the form of everyone, your depth—love itself—remains unopen. You will remain deeply unfulfilled, and others will be rippled by the clench of your closure.

First, you can practice opening as your own shape, whatever it is in the moment: anger, joy, confusion, fear, grief, torpor.

After practicing for some time, your openness is, in general, more open than those around you—their clench hurts you more than your own does. Now, you can’t help but to practice opening as their shape. Just as you feel them, you open. If they feel angry, you open as anger. If they feel lustful, you open as lust. You practice fully feeling and opening as every texture you feel. It doesn’t matter if the closure you feel is yours or theirs. Opening is the only response that ceases to perpetuate the clench you feel.

Your life, then, is a constant exercise of opening as the entirety of the moment. Whoever or whatever is part of this moment, you feel as and open as. You practice opening as whatever you feel, within you or around you, in every moment.

Some moments are easier than others. Sometimes you don’t want to open. You may prefer to chew on closure, to perseverate on possibility, to convolute in emotion. These moments are unfulfilling but habitual. Sometimes it seems you can’t help but writhe in the folds of your own tension.

You and all others are exactly the same. You and they are openness, often choosing to stay clenched. It seems that each clench has its own timeline. You can’t force yourself or others to suddenly open all the way and stay open once and for all. Certain parts open easily, while others seem to refuse. Perhaps you can dance as openness or meditate as openness, but when someone criticizes your great work or loses desire for you sexually, then you simply refuse to open. Like a pouting child, you refuse to feel every texture of your shame, hurt, and insecurity; you refuse to open as this shape, to feel outward, to feel others, to feel the entire moment, and open as all.

You are fulfilled in any moment you practice to open, no matter how closed you are tending to be, or whose closure you feel. Practicing to open as the shape of this entire moment is the only response that is true.

You are either living open as love or clenching. You are either living the truth of openness or you are living a lie of closure—and deep down, you can feel it.

Love, or openness, is the gift you are to others. Your capacity to live as openness conveys your depth of love. When you can wear everyone’s closure as the shape of this moment, and when you can open as these contours of refusal, feeling and opening as all, then no residue of unlove remains. Even if clench is redone, its action of fear is well felt, and openness blooms through its form afresh. Every moment reveals open as love. This is your only fulfillment.