To Remember Music and Words by Michele Zehr We2~Women’s Experiential Empowerment

That's the entire point of this human journey you know We are born fully aware of who we are But without a physical organism that can interpret anything but the immediate

This “knowing” doesn’t last for long however We begin to grow like the sapling in a dense forest Being shaped and conditioned by our environment

And we begin to identify with the epic stories as told by our culture, our family, our friends, our enemies, our church, our school, our media, our trauma, our bliss, our everything And this marks the moment of our forgetting

We forget in order to fit in with the rest of society and its “story of the human-doing” Some people find comfort at this point and choose to stay right here for the rest of their lives They do not accept the invitation and for them this is perfect and beautiful As this was their purpose

But for the rest of us, we feel a stirring and we have no choice but to admit that we are restless So we ask in an uncertain tone one day "There has to be more than the 9-5 grind, 2 weeks paid vacation and a 401k…right?"

This question marks the moment we have crossed the threshold and on the other side of this now unlocked door lies a path named “What is my purpose?” We begin to learn that what we always thought was True was never anything but an elaborate, rich, painful, adventurous, and beautifully perfect story A story that paradoxically has absolutely nothing and absolutely everything to do with who we are in the present moment

Then we learn we can separate our awareness from our thoughts as we begin to watch and witness ourselves navigate this human experience And we begin to see just how deeply the rabbit hole goes In fact, it goes so deeply that it is infinite and it is pitch black

We are terrified to jump into this abyss But we now have the wisdom to know that stopping here would be no different than stopping at the 9-5 grind As this is our next invitation

So we jump and it feels like dying We see all that we had not been willing to see and with each new Shadow revealing itself We begin to regret having jumped

But there is no going back The choice to jump was final And we fall through razor wire, we burn in fire, and we feel our insides punching through our outsides

Then like magic, a moment appears when we realize that we are capable of holding all that our blissfully painful life has to offer and in fact We will not be annihilated if we allow ourselves to just feel with our entire Being

We no longer fear or resist feeling anything as we surrender more and more deeply into our bodies… The place where we open ourselves completely to each wave of experience

Finally understanding that we are not the wave, but the capacity to receive the wave No matter how gently or violently it crashes into us We practice receiving and allowing life to move through us without resistance Which is challenging beyond description for most of us at first

Each day we practice, we come closer and closer to the Truth And in a breath, we realize that what we had been seeking all of this time Was never actually outside of us at all

We simply forgot how to "be" all those years ago So we begin to trust and allow the Great Mystery to flow through us As we become conduits in service to the Divine And it is now that we understand

To Remember……. What is my purpose?