The Rising of Humanity is the promise of Easter. But this is not some fluffy mindfulness trick that can firmly root us in the Divine Realms.

From Jeff Foster:

There’s a comforting myth about healing, isn’t there – that it means “rising above” our vulnerable human hearts.

Spiritual awakening is often seen as some kind of “shedding” of our humanity, a realm of untouchable stillness.

But this story is a lie.

And this is what I’ve discovered, the hard way: 

Peace is not the absence of deep feeling.

Strength is not the absence of trembling.

In our rush to “transcend” and “rise”, we silence our anger in the name of kindness, mask our grief with spiritual smiles. We dismiss our fear as an illusion, our wounded hearts as the ego’s noise. And we call it all… love.

We follow gurus who claim to have ended suffering. Lost their egos. Transcended their pain.

“I never get angry”, they say.

“I only have loving thoughts”.

“My ego vanished in March 1964”.

In chasing enlightenment like this, we abandon the messy truth of our own aliveness.

But what we suppress does not disappear. It lodges within us, as trauma, in the ache of our chests, the tension in our shoulders, the restless beat of our hearts. The shadows we deny grow louder and darker.

The pain we avoid festers in the deep.

The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.

True healing is not an escape from this mess of earth and sweat and trembling, but the courage to step into it all. 

Not a rising above, but a rooting down:

To touch the fire of grief.

To liberate the roar of anger.

To stand in the trembling truth.

From Sydney Lynn Lok:

From there we can feel the trauma. From there we can begin to understand this ancient, inherited pain. From there we can process and begin to release it and the misplaced shame that comes with it. From there we can purge it as we hug this orphan back into the wholeness of our hearts.

From there we can make amends for the mistakes we made in the throws of humanity’s amnesia.

From there we can begin the authentic process of forgiving ourselves and forgiving others.

Forgiveness was the ultimate teaching of Christ.

I personally believe that this world, this fractured world is not an illusion but if it is just a dream, it still bleeds and in so doing grows in all of us a deep, FEELING knowing that we are not alone in our suffering. And this course we decided on before we were born… to come into the world with amnesia, awaken, then climb out of the trauma of numbness, then feel our way back into Oneness with God, this is the promise of not only returning to Heaven but finding Heaven on Earth.