Being Held and Transformed in the Formless

Are you, like me, more and more often feeling a depth of grief seeing ways that we humans are relating to each other and to this beautiful living Earth? As we stare into the abyss, what can give us the strength and courage to hold the enormity of the pain and conflict, and transform it into life-giving and sustaining relationship? 

For me, it is to feel held, even for a moment, in the formless. Pain and conflict communicate through forms of mind and body, continually appearing, changing, and disappearing. The difficulty and suffering of the world can feel so intense, staggeringly intense, heartbreaking, unbearable. But what does all this communication appear in, that doesn’t have form and doesn’t change, that is aware and knows and feels but isn’t what happens?

This mystery of the formless  holding of our experience endlessly fascinates and enchants me, calls to me like a secret beloved. Sitting in the beauty of the back garden, it is in the sound of birdsong, and in the gentle caress of a cool-warm breeze on my face. It is in the bright energy and aliveness of my body. I fall into its unfathomable vastness. My sense of self relaxes, opens, wide and expansive, and I am one with the universal, the mystery we’re all part of and come from. It’s the same universal as when I dive deeply into the language of formless human needs and needs of all life on the planet. 

In this consciousness of unity there are feelings of universal wellbeing, benevolence, and good will. Loving action flows from this place. The unbearable becomes bearable, the suffering is transfigured into deep healing sorrow, is transformed into unexpected grace and new life-giving possibilities.