Persisting in Life
I can’t tell you how to get there.
I can only promise you that somewhere beyond knowing you know.
And that Time, while a difficult partner is your friend,
Until she delivers you to the Timelessness beyond Time.
When you’ve lost the thirst to know, you will know.
Remember that suffering is just a distraction, though a difficult one.
Let it bring you to your knees.
And always have the welcome mat out for joy
Which is both constant and unexpected.
~Alysson
In this book, Tracey Alysson, Ph.D., acclaimed author of Dying and Living in the Arms of Love: One Woman’s Journey around Mount Kailash, invites you on an illuminating exploration of joy’s enduring essence.
This captivating narrative weaves together the threads of wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of seeking and finding, of deep loss, and of the kind of love that transcends the very concept of time. Alysson’s poetic musings beckon us to recognize the fleeting nature of our earthly struggles and to open our hearts to the timeless joy that awaits beyond the realm of knowledge.
Persisting in Life: Foundations of Joy is not just a book; it is a journey—a journey that promises to shift your perspective, soften your heartaches, and invite joy into the most unexpected corners of your life. Let Tracey Alysson be your guide to discovering the joy that exists, not in the absence of suffering, but in its very midst. This is your invitation to transform your relationship with life itself. Welcome joy, welcome life.
Excerpts from persisting in life
This is a planet of feeling. Feeling is the refinement of sensation and emotion. Feeling is the heartfelt experience. It is not the experience of something out there. Feeling feels the experience in here. It does not identify with the experience, and it does not vicariously live what is happening elsewhere. It leaves the experience unmanipulated, as it is, but it does not keep oneself separate from it. In feeling the moment, the experience, there is no separation. No mental processing, labeling, evaluating, explaining, resisting, or embracing. Feeling is with the experience. It is undefended available human presence. Not just presence, not just undefended, not just energetic or spiritual or physical but human, all the dimensions of me, available in the experience that is arising in the moment. Doing, fixing, and helping are, in essence, defenses. One of the hardest states for a human being is that of helplessness, being a witness to something that we cannot change. We just must helplessly watch it happen. If we stay and be with the experience of what is happening, all there is to do is feel, feel without separation. This takes enormous courage. This takes enormous love.
~From A Love Song in 9 Verses: With Maturity
I have been resisting the pain of the world. Nothing will change until I stand face-to-face and open without reservation to the pain in the world. Further, this must be done in silence. The pain of the world is not to be commented on and it is not to be changed. I am to meet it, as it meets me, both of us undefended. Teachings and commentary are for something else. They are for growth. They are to illuminate possible paths. The pain is only to be met. Nothing really will happen in this world until I can do that.
I have blamed the world for being in pain. I have blamed the world for harboring pain, and so I have had trouble living. As long as I have to hide from something, my life force is hobbled. Meet everything, absolutely everything, with unconditional love. Don’t save it, don’t fix it, don’t explain it. Let my beingness, which is beyond explanation, meet its beingness, which is beyond explanation. In silence, there is no separation. Pain asks me to have no separation.
~From The Song of Pain
It is not easy to open our hearts to feel ourselves without judgment. Life is messy and unknown and complicated. We need to feel all of ourselves making our way through life. I need to feel all the things I do when I’m scared, the lies I tell and the ways I hide and the ways I lash out. These reactions do not make me a bad person. They just make me a person. But until I have the love to be aware of all these experiences, big and little, then they will remain separate from me, split off from my awareness, and not a part of my truth about who I am. Not my judgment of who I am, but my truth.
We think that loving the flaws and the missteps and the reactions is what is hard. I think that loving our beauty and wisdom and kindness is even harder. But either way, working with the dark or with the light, there is nothing to do. There is just feeling that awareness of that aspect of ourselves and not judging it or changing it in any way. If we truly stay present in openhearted love as these awarenesses arise, our evolution will move forward by itself. No effort required. That is what I meant when I said that I require infinite forgiveness, and… I have within me infinite forgiveness. I have the capacity to love the self that I am in each moment, feeling and receiving that love with no effort, no reaction, no evaluation, no regret, no punishment, no matter how many times I learn that lesson.
~From Forgiveness
The heart of being an adult, and the real challenge and invitation of it, is that we are alive in this moment without controlling it, without defining it, and without making it bigger or smaller than it is. In my experience, I only get to be an adult by being willing to have all the excuses and lies and avoidances about who I think I am exposed, first by the kindness of my teacher to show me these blindspots, and as I grow in perception and courage (love), I expose them myself. All these things are exposed not to humiliate me but to free me from all the time and energy I spend in hiding from my inherent worthiness by denying my dark side.
~From Becoming An Adult
In a way, we are each a tiny universe, evolving. I can cultivate an awareness of when I am resistant. This takes a fierce commitment to truth, to what is my truth in the moment. It takes a commitment to honesty with myself, and this hurts. One day, while praying a prayer I had sincerely prayed for years, I felt a subtle withholding. I suddenly realized that I had never included my parents in that prayer. I became aware of a quiet grudge that I was still holding against them from our history together. As I felt and admitted this refusal of love, I felt pain at admitting my spitefulness. My heart opened and I could, finally, without effort, hold them in my prayer with no reservations. Honesty hurts. Honesty about my cruelty, honesty about my generous heart – both hurt as I opened to receive the awareness, the truth that was arising to consciousness. On the level of my body, or on the level of my true self which lives deep within, how willing am I to bear this hurt, to keep listening for their feedback? How often do we override what our bodies are telling us, or what our intuition is whispering, regarding food and sleep, regarding how we participate in relationships, how we deal with emotions, how we look at our lives through the lens of history rather than through the lens of the present? Remember: If you are reading this, you have survived until now. You have done a magnificent job, just by staying alive. Don’t be afraid of more unconsciousness coming to consciousness, even though it will feel like cauterizing a wound, because it is. We are here to reclaim the contents of our unconscious.
~From Dancing with the World
True safety is found within oneself. It is found within the self which is responsible for its choices and its experiences. It is found in the profound commitment to loving oneself within an honest search for the truth.
~From Safety
Truth is a very individual thing. I do not mean that it is relative or subjective or malleable. It is decidedly not any of those. But it is personal, and it is only personal. No one else can decide your truth in any moment, and you yourself cannot lie about it. One task of my life is that my truth is mine and mine alone to discern and to bear the consequences of. Standing in my truth, I can look in the mirror and be one with who I see there. Truth is incontrovertible…
Truth is not about getting it right. Truth is about authenticity, which is not a fixed quality, something that we achieve or master and then have at our disposal. Truth is about owning that who I am in this moment is all of who I am. It’s not me on my way to improvement. It’s not me deficient and wanting. It’s not me better than you or better than what I used to be. Truth says I stand in this moment as I am and I let you see who I am.
~From Truth
I don’t know why we humans lie so much. Perhaps it is because we so desperately need to feel that we are good people, and so we deny our mistakes, that is, we deny where our faults, our darkness, is showing. No one ever taught us that we are good, we are inherently good, and so we see our missteps and panic that we will be found out as imperfect creatures. So we lie, we cover up and defend rather than just allowing the new moment to arise. Every moment is a new chance, a fresh start.
~From Ageing
