I was speaking with a really wonderful author the other day named Neal Allen (who recently wrote an important, helpful new book called Better Days)—and he shared something with me from his recent travels that rather took me aback. It was something he observed during his visits to the Buddhist temples: that the Buddhism in the temples is not rife with the metaphysical, as perhaps many Westerns would expect. Rather, he reports that the temple-goers are there with a common denominator we see across many, if not most, faiths: giving offerings and donations to the priests and the deities, asking for luck, for guidance, for miracles.
I was struck by the detail that it is common for Buddhists to ask for luck, which was quickly replaced by my surprise in myself over being surprised by this. I had connected Buddhism rather one-dimensionally with the north star of letting go of desire, which I’d say more specifically means letting go of the desire for things to be different than they are. Thus, in my imagination, Buddhists in temple would be reciting verse, meditating, and perhaps giving offerings, yes, but not really asking for anything. Ha!
But of course even Buddhists appeal for benevolence and luck. We are all human. Whatever our north star, we all need miracles. We all, eventually, ask for a little help.
Life is hard. Not hard like a substance, but hard like a mandatory class you have just got to get through. Usually, I prefer to use the word challenging and really rebuke the word hard to describe a pervasive experience of life, but how can we look around the world today with all that’s going on and offer a word as suggestive as challenging?
For those of us for whom life is challenging, we are privileged. For very many, life is hard. Thus, miracles, and our need to remember them as the basic blueprint of reality—for how did any of this come to be, the birds and the trees, our soft skin and kind eyes, if not from Creator’s inherent thrust that is, at its most basic, a miracle?
We are born of miracle and we will die of miracle. As my teacher Carmen Vicente says (originally in Spanish), “death is only the beginning of a new verse in the eternal poem.” This eternal poem that we live is a crystalline wave of mysterious miracle, and its essence is the most fundamental thing that inhabits us. It is the central vibration of our every atom.
Things happen and we accumulate all sorts of garb, (from beliefs to the many things we identify with), and this very natural normal human conglomeration tends to mute out, (or deafen us to), our sense of our truest identity as being a Miracle. Often, our human decor clumsily, accidentally stuffs up that otherwise clear line we have to our own miraculousness, and thus, we find it easier to listen to what’s closer to the surface (our decor/what’s in plain sight) than hear our deepest, more invisible, most basic hardwiring & thrust of inner-power and possibility.
This is the simple architecture of Miracles: It is a primordial glowing force, our most basic essence, that lives inside of everyone and everything. The more we listen carefully and orient to see it eye-to-eye, the more vital it gets within us, and the more it can serve us. Because life is hard, (life is challenging), and no matter where we come from or what we believe, most of us would agree that we could often use a little assistance. We’re co-creative in that way, able—lo, DESIGNED—to communicate with Existence, to articulate ourselves in a way that is coherent with our intentions, desires, and paths.
We are always in continuous dialogue with Existence (Creator, the Divine, God, whatever is resonant for you). We may not get to control the story or how it turns out, but somehow, in some mysterious but undeniable way, we participate in its creation. Through our focus, through our attention, through the mustering up or the excavation of a deep inner-knowing in our relation to the Divine—(which can happen in all different paces, ways, and timelines)—through our deep, vital insistence to fine-tune our line to that which is the most eternal, true, creative, and kind—
we may find ourselves in clearer relation to the possibility of miracles, appealing to its vibration, enlivening it, embroidering it into the fabric of our lives.
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Sky Eiko, the author of this piece, is a writer and a healing facilitator, helping others discover a deeply-connected way of relating to themselves and life that feels healthy, coherent, thriving, and true. She also generously offers donation-based support via a new, novel little hotline. For more, (including to book a session or buy one of her books), visit www.skyeiko.com.