Humanity, Divinity, And Everything In Between
What's at stake when we don't honor our humanity and our divinity
For the good part of my twenties and thirties, I walked around with little awareness of my inner divinity. I was mostly identified with my personality, beliefs, ideas, and world-view. So often I felt like a hapless feather swirling through the storms of life.
Born and raised in a somewhat conservative Hindu family in Southern India, I was taught from a very young age that gods and goddesses lived in a tiny puja room. We worshipped the deities there, performed our rituals with incense and flowers, and then went on with our lives.
Only in my mid-forties did the understanding dawn on me that the divine abides within us. And all that exists in the universe is infused with divine energy. How did I know this? No booming voice that proclaimed it. I didn’t have a profound out-of-body experience, either.
My sixty-eight-year-old mother died within a year of her cancer diagnosis and that single tragic event exploded something inside of me.
That she was diagnosed weeks after my husband, teenage daughter, and I relocated from Chennai to a Chicago suburb was its own horror story.
Questions flooded my mind. Self-inquiry deepened. The mysteries of life, death, and the afterlife fascinated me. The teachings that found me, the mentors who opened doors for me, and the guides who handed me the keys to my inner kingdom finally led me to the truth.
I am divine. You are divine. My neighbor is divine. The checkout clerk who snapped at me for no reason is divine. So is the German landlady who robbed us of every precious penny of our rental deposit when we left the country.
Yet, people don’t “act” from that place of divine recognition. Often they haven’t done the work of self-inquiry. They don’t know their origin story other than this earthly life.
Such people trigger us. Our very human response to their meanness, rudeness, or insensitivity boils to the surface. This confused me. Why, when I know that I’m so much more than this bag of blood and bones, do I still get upset, feel sad or guilty? Why can’t I just let stuff go?
Those who identify as sensitives and empaths struggle with this, the idea that they’re not supposed to feel anything that feels bad.
Sitting with this conundrum awakened me. We’re both human and divine. We’re meant to honor our humanity and our divinity.
What happens when we don’t
When we journey through life only believing and trusting in what our five senses perceive—the human experience—we feel constantly threatened. We’re at the mercy of an unforgiving, uncontrollable world that can attack, destroy, and upend our lives.
And so we place guardrails around every aspect of our lives. We want to control the romantic relationship. We don’t allow ourselves to feel. We’re deeply identified with our roles at work. It’s all about looking good on the outside, whether we feel good on the inside or not.
When we believe we’re divine and all the world is a grand illusion, we engage in spiritual bypassing. We believe in spirituality as the ultimate salve. We walk around spouting scripture out of context and become armored in a different way.
This is when folks say stuff like: He didn’t die because he was never born. He is spirit and he lives on. Which is so excruciating when your throat is clogged with hot tears and your breath feels trapped in your lungs because you’re grieving the loss of your beloved cousin who died too young.
We need to straddle both identities
We walk round in a human body and we are a soul.
This human life is messy, chaotic, confusing, senseless, and deeply mystifying. We’re angry, bitter, happy, terrified, inspired, and distressed—all in the matter of a single day.
The world is so hard to live in AND it’s such a privilege to be a human.
This body, our body is also where the divine abides, whether you choose to call that energy, god/goddess/universe/higher self/soul or spirit. We have access to deep peace and contentment. We’re here to embody divine qualities like compassion, caring, and connection.
We know we contain everything within us AND we get to enjoy all the sensual pleasures this life affords us.
When we know how to be okay with our humanness and also carry the knowing that we’re home to the sacred, we navigate the world with more ease and fluidity.
Love, Uma
Thank you for this beautiful message Uma!
It’s supporting as I work through what appears to be rifts in some family relationships. 💗