I am reading a great book , a true story called Dying to be Me. To make a lovely long story extremely short, this woman had a near-death experience (NDE). One of her insights there was this:

I understood that I owed it to myself, to everyone I met, and to life itself to always be an expression of my own unique essence…Being inauthentic also deprives the universe of who I came here to be and what I came here to express.

She writes about the ultimate perfection of everything. She was given a choice: If she chose to die, for instance, her husband would soon follow her, and that would be perfect! On the other hand, if she chose to go back, she and her husband would work together on their passion, and that too would be perfect!

I look at Joseph and I wonder about the perfection of his autism…and the perfection of being his mother. This week has not felt like perfection. Blue Eyes just started a new building job and has been absent until bedtime, school has been doing STAR testing so the routine’s been totally different, and the teachers are trying to make up for it by plying their students with wheat and sugar. In other words, I’ve been single-mothering an off-balance, artificially hyped-up kid who, this week, melts down regularly and can hardly put two sentences together in a coherent fashion.

In meditative fashion, there is the part of me who objectively watches myself fall apart. “Huh! Interesting!” It observes. “She can’t keep it together even though she knows it’s not for real — even though she’s practiced for years staying calm on the inside no matter what’s going on externally.”

The other part of me, hooked-in emotionally, despairs for today and tomorrow. Not only tomorrow tomorrow, where he probably will once again wake up way too early and I won’t get my meditation time and he will be tired and crabby and a royal pain in the butt. I refer also to the other tomorrow: you know, fellow autism parents — the one where your grown-up autistic kid is alone, isolated, lonely, impoverished, homeless, and terribly mistreated by his/her fellow man. Yeah, that tomorrow.

Not my idea of ultimate perfection.

Anita Moorjani, the author of Dying to be Me, was living a life consumed by fear when she got cancer. After four years of fear and struggle she succumbs to death, where her “deceased” father and “deceased” best friend tell her to go back and live her life fearlessly.

I have wondered about people who have amazing NDEs: Do they ever have a bad day afterward? Anita says she has times where she feels disconnected:

When we live completely from the mind over a period of time, we lose touch with the infinite self, and then we begin to feel lost. This happens when we’re in doing mode all the time, rather than being. The latter means living from the soul and is a state of allowing. It means letting ourselves be who and what we are without judgment. Being…means that our actions stem from following our emotions and feelings while staying present in the moment.

Oh yeah. I can stop and just breathe for a moment. I tell my yoga students that one of the great things about the breath is that it’s always present — so, the moment you tune into it, you too are present. That gets you out of your crazy mind for a blessed moment, which can create a gateway into more moments of realizing our connection with the Universe — and, oh yes, even the ultimate perfection of it all.

Ram Dass talks about how we are all sandpaper for each other, smoothing out each other’s rough edges. Well, this week Joseph has been one hell of a sandpaper for me, and having my rough edges worked on has not been comfortable.

But those who get more than a glimpse of the other side come back and tell us to get out of the comfort zone. Live your life fearlessly! They say. Be totally authentic! Know that you are deeply loved and cherished, simply because you are you!

Breathing this in. Somewhere in my soul I know this is the truth. I know my son is just perfect and so is this life of mine, which gives me endless opportunities to practice profound teachings in the cold light of day.

Endless opportunities to open to the perfection of this moment. Endless opportunities to let go of fear and embrace the gift instead. To go forward in faith and security, loving and feeling loved.

Amen.