Cycles, Cycles Everywhere: Seeking Liberation & God/Self Love

Ahh, the bare.....  
Ahh, the prickly.....    

   I feel you, my tree friends....
I've been experiencing the sharp, dry, unfruitful..

Its part of the cycle-- to die, or feel dead that is-- right?
To be stripped..
to feel hollow...
to ache for rebirth.

We are talking about Hinduism currently in World Religions.
Its a beautiful thing.
Samsara --the cycle of life, death and rebirth-- was one of our topics this week, appropriately enough. No matter your stance on reincarnation, how often do we replay destructive, stagnant and revitalizing stages in this life?

Here lies my current struggle.

The last few months, I've been finding myself  living old attitudes, habits, mindsets and, all in all, a  lifestyle I thought I had --for at least a decent amount of time-- overcome.

My shower water yesterday evening well represented my current state...

No matter how evenly I placed the handles to find a fitting temperature, I found myself being scorched or frozen--only for the first minutes though (lets hope that relatively short amount of time is representative of a short lived lapse of judgement/character). What better picture for my life, God! One of my cycles is living in on the extremes. Its an attempting to find balance, but converged into a more macro span of time of unbalanced living:
feast/famine
social butterfly/total solitude
homework junky/procrastinator supreme
completely confident self/completely insecure self
passion heavy/mehhhh....
absolute self love/crippling self loathing
(well, the self love is a little trimmer on that scale most of the time, sadly!)

I can see the campaign now: "Extremes for Balance!" sensible, right?! ::sarcasm:: ;] ?
Neither burning or freezing feels very good...
These are just one of my many spinning entrapments....

There is hope though,
there always is...
even if for now the hope is in the rebirth-or-sustained-life-two-thirds-of-the-whole cycle, if not the complete liberation from the cycle itself
(the complete liberation is known as moksha, by the way).

A friend counseled me some today, and mentioned how states of balance--while can be found & is a nice little breathing space from time to time--is a state properly short lived. The lessons we need come from  the awareness of imbalance & practicing the acts towards balancing...

Like one of my new soul sisters & I spoke of a few week ago,
the cycle sometimes is less of a circle than it is an upwards spiral.
We live these lessons over, but with greater understanding then then the former. And we usually relive them, because we have not learned what to do differently to set ourselves free yet, but we are a step closer.

"There is nothing that does not come from him. Of everything he is the inmost Self. He is the truth; he is the Self supreme...It is everywhere, though we see it not. Just so, dear one, the Self is everywhere, within all things, although we see him not... You are that..you are that." 
- Chandogya Upanishad

Another aspect of liberation of the soul for Hindus is the realization we are
not separate from God,
Spirit,
Brahman.

Thinking of God as part of the cycle, and that we ourselves are part of God, makes it more palatable for me to accept the versions of Samsara in my life and the versions of myself I find within them.

So, my friends, tree and beyond,
I hope to ingrain into my life practice the reality that the degree in which I love and take care of myself, is the degree in which I love and take care of God and all others.

No matter how dead our leaves,or externally brittle we might feel,
may we remember we are not separated from the keeper of our hope.

So cheers to the breaking of cycles!!!--or breaking through the stages of the cycles with grace and personal evolution-- or just having an awareness of the chaotic upward mobility...

In the words of the lovely Robin Pecknold,
"I'll come back to you someday soon my[S]elf"...

xo

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