Things That Heal Me: The Benevolent Universe

The fabric of our universe is not as neutral or negative as you may think. In this physical world, we are the alchemists of our existence, meaning that we are responsible for creating the tone of our experience based off of our perspective and attitude toward all that we encounter. While we are here to achieve certain fixed destinies, such as crossing paths with those we are meant to intertwine with, falling into the right opportunities, and so much more, the magic of each moment lies in our interpretation of what we are experiencing and why.

The interpretations and judgments we make from our experiences in this life paint our path as it unfolds before us. A blown tire may only mean three things: it happened at random, an unknown force threw me off course with a setback to punish me, or a known and trusted force intervened to serve me. Those are your options for perceiving a simple yet frustrating experience such as blowing a tire on the road and having to deal with it. So I bet you're wondering, how on earth would a blown tire serve me? How would being late, stressed out, and dealing with something so unexpected and urgent be helpful to me in any way? That is where the wisdom lies, my friends! Not in understanding or knowing WHY but in trusting that there is a reason, that that reason is benevolent, and that you don't have to understand for it to serve you. 

You do not have to be aware of every little intricacy of your life experience for it to be exactly what it needs to be. Why you may ask? Because of the benevolent universe, of course! Because there is a divinely perfect intelligence underneath all that is and all that moves. A beautifully spun web of silk that catches you, holds you, supports you, guides you, and connects you to all of the things you are meant to know, be, and experience. This web is part of you and all others, as you are a part of the whole of the universe. The fabric of the universe is this web and this web is all that is: the universe and all it contains!

Wild, right? It will take a lot of time to grasp this and integrate it as it goes against our instinct as human beings. As physical earthlings, we must always remember we are dual beings, and we must ALWAYS honor both parts of our being. With that being said, it may feel very natural to your spirit to believe in and trust the benevolent universe. With tools like meditation and divination, our spiritual parts are able to connect to their home state which is spirit and feel infused by this all-knowing, all-connected benevolence that exists everywhere around us and within us. 

The tricky part is when we ask our human parts to trust in this concept. Our bodies are biologically hardwired to separate ourselves from the world around us and do what must be done to survive. This adds a layer of challenge to our experience as dual beings, as the very instincts that keep us alive also separate us from our true life-force energy: spirit. Our ego is designed to keep us alive and separate, while our spirits are designed to move us and connect us. We need both, but balance is key and so is prioritizing what needs to be our anchor to survive in this world. That is the journey from fear to love, from unknown darkness to blind trust; we must find a way to go against a certain part of our instinctual human being and decide that there is something bigger than us that needs us to step aside and let it lead us. That is the ultimate task for the human/spirit hybrid here on earth! To step off the ledge of what we know instinctually and open up to expand beyond our wildest comprehension. To take leaps of faith and watch ourselves be caught by all that is.

So what does the benevolent universe want for us and why does it bring us such pain, heartbreak, and destruction? That's where we have to take our human caps off as much as possible and see the bigger picture: the hard things are for our highest good. This is a really challenging idea to discuss because how do you tell someone who has endured unthinkable violence and abuse that it was for their highest good? How do you convince a mother who lost her child that it was for the highest good of both her and her child? You don't. Our human hearts and minds, for the most part, aren't going to be able to accept this as universal law because it contradicts our emotions. That is okay! That is part of being human and part of the learning curve of navigating this world from both a human and a spiritual perspective. Part of us may understand, especially later down the road, what was brought to us from certain negative or traumatic experiences, but that still will never justify or satisfy our emotions from the painful experiences themselves. 

This is the paradox of our being! Part of us may always feel like it is unfair and horrible while the other part of us acknowledges this and also knows what it did for us. This paradoxical phenomenon of trying to digest heavy life experiences from both angles is actually what I would call grief. The understanding and holding of both immense pain and suffering, but also incredible love and universal support is grief. The act of trying to process and digest all of these contradicting pieces is the act of grieving. 

It takes a lot of courage, a lot of self-love, and a lot of existential juggling to be able to hold both aspects of your experience. It may often feel as though you are swinging back and forth between the two. Immense anger and pain from your experiences may slip into moments of understanding and gratitude for what it has brought you spiritually, without invalidating any of the heartbreak or denial that you are experiencing. You can understand what a loss has brought to you spiritually without forcing yourself to accept your loss in the first place. The heart can take its time to process loss, while our spirit feels antsy to understand it. You can feel gratitude for the perspective and the redirection loss brings without feeling grateful for what it has taken from you. You can also understand that the benevolent universe's job is not to please you 24/7 but to guide you forward, sometimes into and through excruciating experiences. The benevolent universe's job is ultimately to be a loving but helpful spiritual parent to us, walking us through existence, however beautiful and devastating it may be. The benevolent universe isn't benevolent because it protects us from what hurts us, but rather because it surrounds us with love and all we will ever need, it takes our hand, looks us in the eye, and says "you are not alone. You will be okay again and I know how you get there."

When it comes to the benevolent universe, it's all about learning to trust that it serves your highest good, from a place filled solely with pure love. The benevolent universe is not an authoritarian man, it is not the final judgment or the decider of all deeds, nor is it the backdrop for what is right or wrong. The benevolent universe is simply an intelligent love that seeks to bring us closer and closer to its rose-colored hues. The benevolent universe is a guide, not a decider. We are the deciders, the creators, and the alchemists of our experience and the universe is the biggest, most powerful tool we will ever have at our disposal! We decide everything about our life path, destiny, and experience. The universe simply helps us find our way once we incarnate and lose our conscious awareness (for the most part). The universe is our reminder that we are on a mission, one that we have crafted entirely of ourselves, for ourselves. One that is rooted completely in love. It remembers each twist and turn on our path plan, every tear and laugh, and especially the times we will need its guidance the most. 

The benevolent universe intends for us to grow. In our capacity to be ourselves authentically, express ourselves, feel and experience love, intimacy, creativity, joy, play, pleasure, and all that exists. The benevolent universe intends only for us to become more and more conscious and expressive through the energy of love. Beneath all that we experience and endure, is the intention to open us to more love. Therefore, beneath all that the benevolent universe holds and all of the webs it helps us spin and sustain, there is only love. Only the desire for us to become more of it. The benevolent universe has only one intention and that intention is for us to heal ourselves until we can feel all the love possible for our sweet human bodies to feel! 

The intention behind all that is and all that happens is divine love. Give your human parts the space they need to grasp this without invalidating the pain and suffering endured, but know that everything is ultimately pointing you toward the direction of love. You don't have to see it or understand it to benefit from it, but there is one thing I hope for with all of my heart...

At the very least, amongst all the pain and suffering you endure in this world, I hope that you feel it. 

Photo by Alexander Andrews via Unsplash

La Petite Mort: The Emotional Orgasm

 There is a French saying that is used to describe a few different things. La Petite Mort is translated into "The Little Death". One of my favorite translations of this expression is in reference to the orgasm. Although this expression actually is referring to the liminal space post-orgasm as compared to the peaceful slumber of death, it makes more sense to me when used to describe the orgasm itself!

I can't think of a single thing in life, other than death and orgasms, that requires us humans to surrender so wholly and completely. Think about it! We can accept life and surrender to how things are, but when it comes to our physical body and the sensations we experience (physically and emotionally) when do we surrender entirely to our experience more than when we are letting go? Letting go of our body and letting go of our control over it.  

When we die, we fully surrender our body and the identity we have attached to it. We leave this plane of existence and transcend this dimension. We must surrender entirely to the sensations of leaving our body and leaving our world behind. When we orgasm, we fully surrender our body and our control. We let go of controlling our muscles, our reflexes, and sometimes even what we exclaim or the sounds we let out. We surrender to the sensations and experience entirely; so much so that our body shutters and vibrates with pleasure. 

If you have ever experienced sexual or emotional trauma in a way that inhibits you from intimacy (be it physical, emotional, or both) you may understand the opposite of what I am saying. You may understand the frustration of not being able to get to orgasm, no matter how hard you try or what you do. You may understand the sensations of being so close yet so aggressively blocked from the release that you can nearly taste it but your body remains stiff, contracted, and eventually, you give up or accept a less pleasurable experience. It may feel as though there is something missing there. Something aggravated or irritated, like an itch you just cannot scratch.

To orgasm powerfully and sensationally requires a certain degree of surrender. It requires that you let go entirely of attempting to control or restrain your body and the energy that courses through it during this experience. It requires you to opt out of being in physical control and to give that control up to something other than your own mind and body; to an experience and sensation that is bigger than you. It feels helpless and powerless, and for those of us who have endured sexual trauma, it can feel like there is an instinct engraved deep in our body and mind to not let go of control. One that may take a lot of time and conscious practice to release.

So that's why I like to refer to the orgasm as La Petite Mort: The Little Death. We are essentially dying and leaving our bodies without actually doing so, letting go of all control and letting whatever electric currents swim through our body do so organically and powerfully. We take a step back and we just let it happen. We relax our bodies and we welcome the pleasure and the experience of release. That is exactly how I imagine dying to feel. Or rather, the process of leaving your body as your physical body dies.

Now that you understand La Petite Mort, I would like to stretch this idea just a hair further and tie in emotions and our physical experiences of feeling and processing emotionally charged energies (feelings). When emotional energy is triggered and begins to move through our body, it has a path, a course, and a plan. This plan involves us giving certain pathways permission to open. The energy moves through the body and bounces around until we feel it and open our pathways up. Feelings are energies created within us from our thoughts and experiences that are essentially energy in motion. E-motion! 

When we feel an emotion, such as grief or pain in our heart space, that emotional energy begins to move and bounce around because it wants to leave our body. It was brought to the surface or created by our systems to alert us to whatever triggered us (a person, a thought, a situation, etc.) and once it is created in our body, it needs to move through it and be released. It has served its purpose by communicating to us that something inside of our being says, "Hold up! Wait! There is information here for me to examine, something needs to be known to me." But after we feel the emotion stirring and we are alerted to something within us or in our experience/interaction that is calling for our attention, we don't need to keep that emotion around anymore. It is moving and fluttering and beating on the inside of your body because it wants to leave. It has served its purpose and directed us to the information we needed. 

A lot of people miss this next crucial step in feeling and processing emotions. It's the part where you, you know, actually feel it!! This idea of "feeling emotion" has always been so abstract to me. I have always approached my emotional experiences through the lens of intellect. That was my way to cope with emotions and how I tried to understand what they were telling me. But I was never truly feeling them, at least not in my body, not all the way. So they were never really going anywhere, they just kinda bounced around, creating anxious energy in my body until they could be stored in my physical tissue (dis-ease).

When my first love died and I was suddenly drowning in grief, I relied on sad music and old memories, pictures, and videos to awaken me to feeling my pain and move this energy out of me. I found that if I listened to Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb (specifically the 2nd guitar solo) I could move an immense amount of emotional energy and pain out of my body. Something about the instruments and the sounds of the electric guitar helped me to surrender and allow the emotions to run their course.

Now, I do want to say a quick note on grief and heavy emotions/pain before continuing. I fully believe that the human experience delivers us more emotional triggers and pain than our physical bodies are capable of processing in a single moment or even a season of time. I believe that things happen to us and we experience things in this world that are just plain too big to move through and process at once. I believe that many emotions we have are stored away in our bodies until we are emotionally and physically ready to move them, feel them, and release them. 

With that being said, not all emotions will be ready to move in the moment in which you feel them. In fact, I pretty much store all of the emotional energies that are triggered and created within me while I am out in the world interacting with others and I move through them and process them once I am in a safe space, alone and able to allow them to fully wash over me. I believe that certain types of emotional trauma such as neglect or abuse can also cause us to feel the need to obscure our emotional reactions and feel emotions in private spaces. 

So, once you are in a space where you feel safe and open to feeling your emotional energies (or you are in the moment and feeling those emotions organically) it is time for La Petite Mort. This is where I love using that expression to describe the orgasm because what would happen if we relaxed our body and received the flow of emotional energy as it moves and exits our body, just as we receive orgasmic pleasure and let it organically move through our nerves and muscles and reflexes? 

What if we compared the orgasm to feeling emotions? Sure, it may not be as pleasurable and it might actually feel painful or uncomfortable to our physical body, but if the point of emotional energy is to give in to the sensations and feel them in order to release the energy, isn't that what we do when we orgasm? We give in to the energy and the pleasure that moves through our body and then it leaves us. Just like emotions. Different motivations are required however I am here to argue that the sensations left in our body once we let the emotions out and we calm down physically are not disimilar to the sensations we may feel post-orgasm. A strange calmness, a lack of thoughts, words, or detailed expressions, an inclination to avoid forming complex ideas or thinking too much. Some might call this "relaxation" after sex. Feeling grounded in the body and present in the moment. When it comes to emotions, however, I experience a similar version of this phenomenon after release as well. To me, it is a form of homeostasis or balance. A moment where the physical body has purged itself of the emotional energy and stillness within can be found once more. 

In my perspective, I see emotional energy move through the body in the same way that orgasmic energy moves through the body. My theory here is that if we were to greet emotional energy the same way we greet orgasmic energy, with a certain openness and willingness to surrender to the process and sensations (knowing that we are safe and open to it) then we would be doing exactly what the emotional energy needs us to do: feeling it. Without hesitation, without inhibition, without turning it down or numbing it out. We would essentially be surrendering to riding the waves of emotion just as we would ride the crest of a wave on a surfboard. We would ride the wave of emotional energy as it moves through us and then it would leave our body and we would find stillness once more. We would be accepting our emotional energy and giving it what it needs to be felt and released from our being entirely. 

Of course, for most, being able to surrender to something entirely means needing to be able to trust the process you are surrendering into. Perhaps some humans (me) have a difficult time surrendering to this process of feeling and processing the emotional energies in the body because we feel unsafe or unsure during that process. This ability to surrender entirely to our emotions as they move through our bodies means that we need to understand what is happening in our bodies during this process. We need to build trust in this process and know that we will be okay when it is over. 

Personally, I began building that trust by finding ways to feel safe and try it anyway. Sometimes it meant wrapping myself up in a fuzzy blanket like a swaddle. Sometimes it meant whispering to myself that I am safe in my body, over and over. Sometimes it meant praying for an Angel or two to stand by my side and wrap me in their love. Sometimes it meant asking a friend to sit by my side and hold my hand. However you get there is unique to you. Whatever you need to do to build trust in your physical body and in the emotional sensations that you feel, whatever you need to do to feel safe in your body as you surrender to these emotions, do that. Do it over and over again until one day, you feel an emotional energy charging through your body and you trust. You know that you will be okay so you let go and you surrender entirely.

The next time you feel emotions rising up within you, think of La Petite Mort, the little death. Surrender your entire body to the sensations you feel moving through you like waves, with strength and trust that you are physically safe and will find equilibrium very soon. Treat your emotional energies like an orgasm moving up your body and out through your throat, for that is the path that the energy takes and that is all your emotions want to do: move up and out. Surrender your muscles, your nerves, your reflexes, and your entire being to these energies, and know that within moments they will leave your body. Within moments you will find a whole new sensation! The sensation of relief, of calmness. 

Let yourself die a little and give in to the emotional energies that move through you. Let them run their course and exit your body and know that even the heavy, gigantic ones can be released. They may require more time, more patience, and more trust but they will eventually move up and out of your body for good, creating the space necessary for integration and growth. 

Emotions serve a very important purpose in our body, just as the orgasm does. Both seek to release us energetically and create space in our bodies for more life to expand and more things to grow. Channel La Petite Mort the next time you are feeling emotional energy in your body and see what happens. Let your emotions wash over your body like a warm, intense orgasm. Surrender your body to the experience and let that energy run its course. Feel yourself. Free yourself. Repeat.