Whenever we care passionately about something, it’s always personal. That intensity of feeling has a deeply personal quality. It has a rawness, an authenticity, a fierceness of something demanding to be heard. The raw “I am here.” Feeling fully and honestly, without suppression or denial. Out of thousands of things we could love or hate or care passionately about, an intensity of feeling came up for this particular thing, in this particular situation.
It could be intense loneliness or intense delight. It could be intense joy or intense emotional pain. The subject varies. The situation varies. Yet the quality of feeling with your whole self is the same, and when we extract the feeling aspect from the situation, it is the same feeling that is known by every person who ever felt loneliness, joy, delight, grief, or all the other feelings and passions that are part of the human experience.
When you feel with your whole self, when you are truly passionate about something, it feels as if nothing could be more personal. It is totally, authentically personal. It’s so personal it goes to the very center of your being and involves all of you. But that very quality of the totally personal is an experience that we all know something about.
The deeply personal is the universal. The universal aspect is not the details of the content of the situation, the story of its context, or the sequence of events. The universal aspect is the deeply personal itself. The vulnerability of it, the authenticity of it, the depth of it.
And deep within us, deeper than our stories, deeper than our descriptions of ourselves, is a tender point that feels like it is the most personal point of all. It’s a place deeper than words, deeper than our strategies and paradigms of how things work, prior to all our constructs, where we don’t know the answers, we don’t have a plan, and where it’s clear we’re not in control of what might happen in the very next moment. In that place our ever-present mortality is laid bare and our essential vulnerability is inescapable.
This deeply personal place is a source of humility, compassion, and a recognition that what is personal in us is also universal. It’s a place from which we can recognize our oneness with every human being who has ever walked the earth. The personal is common to all of us.
When you choose to engage with what you care about, when you bring your deeply personal feelings and energies to bear, you are aligning what is chosen in your life with the deepest parts of yourself. You don’t need to know why you feel a passion for a particular activity, a certain type of music or art, a profession, or a particular subject, but these stirrings are important, they arise from something much deeper. In following them even a little, your life becomes more aligned with the depths of who you are, and the deepest part of you finds expression and gives its gifts to the world. And as you bring the deepest part of yourself out into the world, the inner unites with the outer and the personal unites with the universal.
© 2022 Shanti Natania Grace
Photo: Iron Filings
The chooser’s happiness lies in his congruence with the chosen,
The peace of iron filings, obedient to the forces of the magnetic field –
Calm is the soul that is emptied of all self,
In the eternal moment of co-inherence.
A happiness within you – but not yours.
– Dag Hammarskjöld
from Markings
