Essence & Desire: A Soul-Making Rasa

More of You

I want more of you. Yes, you.

I want to strike the tuning fork in your chest, louder, purer. I want to hammer the gong in your gut until the vibration of You washes away every other pattern stuck in the lattice of you.

I want the choiceless flame inside you to grow.

I want you brave, I want you unapologetic. I want you to see and feel, with painful clarity, everything that isn’t You that you’ve invited into your body, that you’ve kept gunked up in your heart, in your mind. All the commands and blockages and shames that were dripped into your organs like hot wax as a child. All the clumsy munificence of people with different lives trying to share with you what was never yours to carry.

I want the shockwave of your Soul-psalm to savage the adhesions of cultural bullshit in your fascia. I want the tectonic plates of the Vow you took before you were born to crush every impulse that puts you outside of yourself. I want the light that pulses through you to burn away whatever constricts your spirit’s range of motion.

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This has always been in me, this desire for More of the people I encounter, More of the people I love, More of mySelf. There have been a lot of different expressions of it, some of them more wounded and immature, others more clean and developed, but it's always been there. It seems to be part of my Vow, my Mission, the thing my Soul decided to do with this life.

In my more wounded expressions, this urge has looked like a lot of neediness, a lot of grabbiness. A lot of very literal "I want more of you, please come closer, please stay longer, please go deeper with me." I pull at people, I want more of their time and attention and energy.

As I've mended those wounded expressions, more mature expressions have taken their place.

These expressions were there all along, but have taken on more force. There's a greater sense of wanting to create environments, spaces, relationships where people can have both the safety and the courage to let go of what isn't them and step into what is.

I meet the people in my life, and I feel this urge, this pull, this desire that's hard to put words to, but comes closest to "I want you to exist more, I want more of your essence in the world, I want greater density of the Your flavor."

Sometimes this means encouraging my friends to write their thoughts and put them out there more widely. Sometimes it means bringing to their attention ways that I perceive them to be acting from Not-Them — habits or unconscious patterns that take them out of themselves. Sometimes it means loving them in those patterns more deeply when they assure me that the patterns are in fact a True part of them. It means discovering the shape of them again and again as they discover their own shape again and again.

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I want more of You in you.

And then I want more of more-of-You-in-you in the world.

I want the scent of you to carry on the wind. I want to wander the markets of Istanbul and catch a faint taste of your rasa rising up from the cobblestones. I want the breath of everyone I love to surround me. I want the One Life we share to move between us, pumped by all of our hearts in tandem, circulating Life and Life and Life into the capillaries of the space between us.

I don’t want a clear channel, I want a channel that is pigmented and alive with the indelible pattern of you. I want the world to be stained an indestructible color whenever you’re near. Whenever I remember your existence.

I want to remember your existence again and again.

I want to recognize you in the leaves of trees and the iridescence of fallen feathers. I want to watch a mountain erupt and recognize you in its force. I want you streaked in the ashes of everything that wasn’t You. I want the stink of your You rubbed against trees like a wildcat kneading its jaw and throat against bark.

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This is part of how I see the practice of Soul-Making.

There are currents and energies inside of you that want to be expressed. There are Missions that want to be carried out. There are Vows you took before you were born. There is an Essence of you that can flow unimpeded through every moment of your life, every cell of your heart, every gesture of your body. Soul-Making is, in large part, the discovery of, immersion into, and clear expression of that Mission, that Vow, that Essence.

In Soul-Making practice, you live the Life inside you more and more fully. You become increasingly sensitive to the ways that you suppress the Life inside you, the ways that you try to re-direct your Life Force in directions that are more convenient, more tightly controlled, more appealing to the people around you. You stop ignoring the fact that all of this deadens you.

Wherever you aren't living the Life that wants to Live You, you are Dead.

Soul is a dynamic essence of the Life you're here to live. Or I might say that Soul is the infrastructure that expresses that dynamic essence, that allows and supports the expression of that dynamic essence.

Whatever blocks the expression of that essence, whatever desensitizes you to it or convinces you that there's something else you should be prioritizing — that's what Soul-Making will make obsolete.

The practice is ruthless that way, and it makes you ruthless that way.

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I want you to stop being a coward. I want you to step the fuck up and stop with the excuses. I want you to feel the jagged weight of a lie in your chest, the acrid savor in your mouth when you speak from anything less than You.

I want you to vomit when you taste lifeless words.

I want you bedridden for days when you deny your Life force.

I want you to do it wholeheartedly, all of it. I want you palpably dissatisfied when you have sex without moving from love, aliveness, presence. I want you unable to ignore the sourness of bread you baked absentmindedly, without your attention on nourishment, care, growth. I want you to be on-mission, and I want every distraction to become so noticeable that denial becomes impossible. Sleepwalking becomes impossible.

You are either acting from soul or you aren’t. You are either speaking from the subtle vibration of the place the universe spat you out, or your lips are still. You are either dwelling beyond the far shore or you are desperately homesick.

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Don't be confused by the pronouns and byline, I'm talking to River here as much as I am to any of you. River's soul longs to be unearthed and expressed. That's what all of this soul-making is about, what all of this somatic work is about, what all this deity yoga is about, what all this imaginal unfolding is about.

No essence is fully expressed until all essences are fully expressed. We can only do this together, we can only do this interdependently, from a place of both autonomy and intimacy; a place of deep freedom and deep connection; a place of evolutionary aliveness and generative limitation.

"For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" — this line comes to my mind, and I go look up Whitman's poem to make sure I have it right. Reading through it again, it becomes clear that everything I write is obsolete. He already said it, what am I even doing here?

As soon as I think this, I read him again, "Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world." Yes, right, the urge will always keep moving, we will always keep writing, keep singing, keep painting and kissing and cooking and dancing. We will always keep returning to the procreant urge of the world.

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I want you to live from the Pattern, even when it’s impossible. I want you to do the impossible over and over again until you remember that all of this is impossible, has always been impossible, and we are always only ever doing the impossible again and again.

I want you to choicelessly choose better impossibilities.

I want you to conquer convenience without losing the ability to marinate in ease. I want you to discern between what is difficult and what is merely impossible. Impossibilities are effortless, difficulties drain you. Anything that is difficult can be a breakthrough into an effortless impossibility.

What did he mean by this.

We are clouds drifting across the sky, you and I. We’re a misty veil clung to a living stone. We are the gossamer fog at the edge of all galaxies. We are the subtle organs of the gods, and the gods are the subtle organs of God, and I don’t know what any of this means but I know that I love you and I want more of You and that this has always been my Mission, is to urge more of You, more of You, more of You.

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