Is it possible to transcend acceptance and embrace the circumstances of your life? Is it really possible to welcome the circumstances of your life, each moment as a teacher? Is it possible to live in this state of freedom, in this state of love?

A couple of weeks ago my old friend and teacher, MS, has returned. She arrived softly and gently like a gentle fall of snow on Japanese winter morning. First a soft leg collapse on my way to my morning visit to the bathroom, then again as I walk to the kitchen and again…a feeling of hollowness through the right side of my body, once again two halves rather than a whole. The line of demarcation, my spine: on the right a gentle ache through my muscles, weakness and a slight loss of connection to my intention; on the left, life as usual.

Even my head feels like two in one – a CNS inflammatory deal. My whole body map feels fractured, slightly disabled. And yet, there must be some communication between my hemispheres because deep inside my brain I feel whole, like the external layers are halves but the inside is golden and if I can keep my awareness here in the centre I can allow the bipartisan nature of the rest.

So this morning I have welcomed my friend to my table for tea and conversation. I have asked, ‘what is your lesson’?

Today there is no fear, no shame or sympathy for myself, just curiosity. I cannot detect any lurking blocks to my energy flow. My heart feels open and my awareness spacious and calm. What am I going to learn today?

As I write I am realising this is my lesson.

MS has always dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the present moment. Surrender, the deep relaxing into this ‘present moment’, has been goal. Learning to live in this surrender was my sankalpa, my deep intention. Living life in this state of meditation where each moment contains eternity with no reference point to the past or the future.

I have often experienced this surrender in moments, after meditation or during/after yoga or meditation teaching but this morning I have woken in this state of grace and am residing here in the sun. This is what it feels like to live in surrender, to live each moment like it is its own meditation – whole and soft and vast. J I like it.

So my friend has brought me here again, to this place of ‘is’. This was the lesson she came to teach me. I have been spending time in the future of business building, marketing and proposed incomes, or the story of my past and its implications, and she has kindly and gently brought me back to the only place that is actually real, the only place I don’t feel trapped by the external forces of life, the only place I feel free, the only place I can really feel love – the present moment.

My other lesson for today is that my experience is valid as it is, not right or wrong but valid for me and all art – writing, film, drama, music and visual art, even conversation – is self-expression. Sharing one’s truth is an end in itself, neither right nor wrong just ‘is’. I have often felt strangled in my attempts to write or speak, out of fear of being wrong and/or ridiculed. As if another’s opinion or experience of life or the quality of my expression could diminish my experience or worse, my self. My version of writer’s block that has often resulted in life’s block.

So, if you are scoffing, you are welcome to your scoffs and your outrage because this is my experience and therefore may not match yours. My experience is not diminished by presence of difference, and neither is yours.

Today I am learning that it is possible to welcome life as my teacher. It is possible to transcend acceptance to embrace each moment. It is possible to live in love.