Taking the Less Traveled Road by Elektra Porzel
How many years have you been on a Spiritual search? How many years have you felt some Being or group of Beings pushing you in some direction? How many times have you been obsessed with reading something and listening to some teacher, only to find that that obsession ends quickly as something in your system has gotten what it needs? How many years and in how many directions have you searched?
The spiritual path is like Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. We all have choice points in our search for the meaning of our lives. In my 20’s and early 30’s, there were numerous times when I had stepped up and stuck my toe in the ‘spiritual field’ and had stepped back. Finally, there came a point where I decided that I was going to plunge into a spiritual search, and I remember thinking that I ‘could always come back to here’. And the truth is there is no going back, just as in Robert Frost’s poem “Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” So with each choice, when we take the road less traveled by, we take another path and only learn later what a difference that choice made to our lives.
When I chose to take the plunge into the spiritual search, I didn’t know where my path would take me for I hadn’t walked it before. Neither did you. There has been no degree path of courses to take, no map to follow. It is a unique path for each of us to create and follow, sometimes with a sense of why we are taking this or that path, or maybe only the internal knowing that we must go this way or that – with no language to explain to ourself or others. I was an early EST participant and volunteer; then I was attracted to Native American spirituality, then to Chi Kung and Taoism, to Goddesses and earth ceremonies, to community, to massage and energy work, to Cranial Sacral Therapy, to Sound Healing, and now to the Language of Creation and Tantra Maat. How each led to the other is obvious to me now, but it wasn’t then. Again, and again, I took the ‘road less traveled,’ and heard that it wasn’t sensible or it was weird. And I still took the less traveled road. What I now know was that each of those choices really did make all the difference in the richness of my life. I don’t know where I would be now if I hadn’t chosen to take the plunge into spiritual work or decided not to learn deeply about each of these practices and wisdom fields. After 40 years, all these choices have brought me to the Institute and to work with Tantra Maat. Looking back, I understand the progression. What is unknown now is where my life will be in ten, twenty, thirty years. For now, I know my commitment to myself, to the Institute, to humanity and to the earth.
What is this search for each of us? Why do we do it? Something seems to be reminding us that there is something else than the life that this culture tells us to live. It always seemed to me that some Beings were pushing me to pay attention or to move in one direction or another. In the beginning, my listening skills were not well honed, and it probably needed a lot of pressure to get my attention. As I learned to listen to my body and then client’s bodies, I also learned to listen to unseen forces, to sense energies running through me, to listen to my own Spirit and to my own Being. Everything has been well worth it. Spirit has guided me and supported me even when I thought I was alone. My Being is with me now as I step back into some of the healing practices that were part of my life many years ago. My Being is with me as I write, when I sit in meditation and when I am being with others. I am now more ‘me – whom I came here to be’ than my historic personality.
What about you? What is the road ‘less traveled’ that you took? Did you have support or pressure to enter this great adventure of figuring out ‘whom you came here to be’? These questions intrigue me as I live in the changing dynamic of Spirit and Flesh, Energy and Matter, Alchemical and Biochemical. The great news for me is that I am still experimenting with and experiencing these field changes and I am opening to more. I figure I have about 30 years left to play in this world and I intend to keep taking the road less traveled because I know that it will make all the difference in my life and in the lives of humans that I touch through writing, speaking, healing and just plain loving to be here. What about you?
The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
