Ninety-Nine And Forty-Four One Hundredths Percent Pure

I am a bar of Ivory Soap…99 and 44/100% pure.

This morning after settling into my newly accepted emptiness in meditation, I heard a voice say, “It’s not emptiness. It’s purity.” What? Wait a minute. We’re talking about me here. Pure? Me?...Yes. At this moment in my life, my nothingness, my absolute 100% nothingness, is a return to my soul on the day I was created.

I felt “dry” yesterday because I have (at least for the time being) transformed into roomy and airy, porous, receptive, and empty of what has been bloating me.

I was the “Blurter Truth Teller,” the “Emotional Sponge” in my family. In addition to carrying my own emotions, I learned to absorb the sadness, the unspoken bitterness, and the disappointment of my mother, and the fear, the rage, and the humiliation of my brothers. I absorbed every ounce of emotion that was energetically alive in my home in an effort to remove the threat of verbal assaults to myself and my mom and my brothers.

I learned early that I could “fight back” at the source. When my emotional sponge was full to overflowing, I could yell as loud as my father. I could be as verbally abusive as my father. I could take what was thrown at me, magnify it and deflect back its verbal ugliness.

My little girl body felt such force behind my counter-assault to his volcanic rage that, as I spewed back, my insides wrung out and twisted like a sponge. All the accumulated familial emotions in one little redheaded sponge pitted against the hot and all-consuming lava of Mr. Mt. Vesuvius Dad.

Talk about some kind of wild and crazy dysfunctional David and Goliath story. However, in this version, David never ever felt that she could win, but maybe she could protect for a few minutes.

On some level in those clash-of-the-titans moments, I thought my internal wringing out was ex-sponging me of the hurt, the disappointment, the sadness, the anger, the humiliation and the fear, but we all know it wasn’t. Once I was dry, the cycle began again. I filled up and waited for an opportunity to wring myself dry.

Please understand, I mean absolutely no blame nor do I feel victimized here. It is simply the way it was or, at least, the way it lodged in my mind, heart, and body. My point is that I have continued to chose to be an emotional sponge with all the bloating, the filling full to overflowing, the weighing down, and, eventually, the pulling under the surface.

That’s why I am so grateful for the vision I had yesterday. Sailing through the turbulent wake of the motor boat and feeling the experience of the conflict, but not letting it overturn me, or bloat me full of toxins like some cheap brand of soap that eventually weighs itself down and sinks to the bottom of the tub.

I have been experiencing something exciting and new. In the face of conflict, I have maintained enough purity to remain buoyant and stay afloat in my oceanic Self.

Who knew?

Me and a bar of Ivory Soap, 99 and 44/100% pure.