Outsourcing Source

In our gut, we can find a bottomless pit. We look to the outside to fill that hole. It’s very common and even if we aren’t aware of it, we are driven to find solace and fill it. 

This can look like drugs or alcohol, cannabis or food. Or Instagram, TV, porn or the news. While I never want to encourage people to not connect to others or be in relationship, it can also look like merging relationships, where we outsource our emotional needs. 

To make maters more difficult, when we sit with this pit in our stomach, it can seem to grow and deepen. By looking at it and putting our attention on it, it blossoms and can feel overwhelming, insatiable. 

But in that pit, is a center. In that depth, is our own depth. Within it, we actually can find a center, our center. 

And within that depth we can also find Source. The Ground of Being. Our True Self. The paradox is that the emptiness we run from, we fear, is our core, our essence. Every atom we are made of is mostly empty space. The solidity of physicality is at its core, empty. This is a primary tenet of Buddhism. 

But emptiness is filled with Life Force. Chi. Prajna. It is energy. It is potentiality. That bottomless pit doesn’t need to be filled, it wants to be cultivated, opened; opened so it can show its true nature. 

This true nature is the essence of the divine. That empty space, while seemingly empty, is pure potential. It is the creative force of possibility. And ironically, we can finding grounding in it. If we are still enough, patient enough, we can find our center, our ground. It may seem bottomless, it may seem unending, but when we stop resisting it and just BE with it, something in us settles. Instead of looking outside for the fix, we can find the antidote within us. 

Because in the end, when we look to the outside to complete us, we are outsourcing Source. Yet Source is within. 

I believe this all stems from the trauma of duality. The undeniable cleavage that occurs when we are born, when we are separated from the mother. What was once one, one body, completely contained now becomes two: you are outside of the mother, separate from the source of nourishment and containment. You are differentiated and now separate. 

I would posit that the separation happens even earlier. When our essence, our energetic core, our soul, is separated from the Divine Source and we separate and move towards the womb of the mother to incarnate. This is the original separation. Perhaps we don’t feel that so strongly because our consciousness hasn’t developed enough to perceive or we in a state of consciousness that allows us to remain connected. 

But regardless, we experience our selves as separate and distinct and something seems to be missing. We tune into a pit of emptiness because of this separation. It seems endless. It seems bottomless. We know that wholeness is possible. And so we search. We look outside to find that source of wholeness. But everything we find is temporary. Something changes, the pit returns. And eventually, hopefully, we turn inward. To the source of emptiness to find Source. 

This is the backwards step of introspection and meditation. To settle into the moment. Settle into the dark. To harness enough resolve and resilience to face it. To be with empty darkness, to encounter the Void. To be with ourselves in such a way we can find our ground of being. To transform that bottomless pit into an infinite source that actually can fill us, return us to our wholeness, our center, our knowing. So we can experience the fact that we were never separated. We are  forever ensconced within Source. We are forever within One Body. Because we are the One Body. We are the Source. We are It.