Normal Gets You Nowhere by Kelly Cutrone (ereader for android .txt) 📕

retreat. I knew it was going to be a big day, just like it had been a big night. I had barely gotten through the front door when the voice came back.

Now, this is important, are you listening? I want you to feel MY response to the suffering, it said.

All of a sudden, in my hands, my shoulders, and every other part of my being, especially my heart and eyes, I was overwhelmed—drowned, consumed—by love and compassion. Standing inside this unremarkable Sheraton in Canada, all I could see was beauty all around me. If this had been a sci-fi movie, my eyes would’ve been shooting laser love beams that instantly disintegrated people’s pain. It was such an intense feeling that my mortal body, which is not in a state of pure love and compassion, had a hard time physically accommodating it. I ran into a fellow devotee who had come to see Amma with his wife, and their love was palpable.

“You seem like you love each other so much,” I said.

He nodded. “She’s my goddess. I even bathe her feet in milk and ghee.” (FYI, that’s the way Amma’s swamis bathe her feet.)

I thought to myself, This is true Divine love. For the second time in two days, I started crying hysterically, overwhelmed to see there were people still living like this in what often seemed like a hopeless world. As I made my way into the hall, I was vibrating with so much love and compassion that I physically ached.

I looked around furiously for somewhere to disappear and meditate or at least calm down and sit quietly in a corner, away from where Amma was holding court. I was forced to dive underneath a folding table where devotees were lining up to sign up to work at one of Amma’s soup kitchens. Actually, the table was being manned by a friend of mine from northern California. She looked down at me with big, knowing eyes.

“It’s okay. Hide under here,” she whispered. “I know that feeling. Amma’s done it to me too.”

Once tucked away, I resumed my tears. I’ve learned that when these things happen, you can’t try to figure them out. You just have to go along with them. Because once the mind gets involved in trying to process everything, it gets in the way. So there I sat, Amma’s erstwhile branding specialist and a total blithering idiot, sobbing underneath a folding table at the Sheraton in Toronto in a complete state of love and compassion. At first I thought it was an altered state—but now I’m thinking maybe it was my true state, and I’ve just chosen to live the rest of the time in an altered reality. I’m not yet sure.

After a while, my swami—the one who had originally asked me two years ago to work with him and Amma—ducked under the table.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m just so filled with love and compassion,” I replied.

“When was the last time you had a chai latte?” he inquired. “Get up. Let’s take a chai.”

We took a chai, and then he took me in to see Amma for darshan. In stark contrast to what she’d put me through the night before, she was—and is—this incredibly smiley, beatific being. Most people who come to see her ask for help with something specific—their ego, or buying a new house, or their health. But I put my head in her lap and screamed silently, Make it stop!! End this teaching! I’m exhausted already!

She picked me up, stared straight at me, and put her third eye to mine, almost laughing.

I knew then that I was no longer living in the world that had brought me here—that I’d been given a new one. Of course, this is what all the best, most profound teachings do. They kill you. I knew I’d never look at other human beings quite the same way again, nor would I return to my former ignorance. I was suddenly full of a new urgency to help myself and others become stronger, better, more profound. I knew I’d still battle the same slothlike human laziness that is totally resistant to change and growth—sometimes I just want to chill out, as you probably do too—but I’d also been shown, or made to feel, that there is so much work still to be done on this earth.

The Divine is demanding we become proactive to stop the suffering of humanity.

To do this, we don’t have to go away for a spiritual weekend, book a ticket to an ashram, or even visit Val-Kill to learn about Eleanor Roosevelt. The tools you need are already inside of you, just waiting for you to call on them. Ruthlessness, fierceness, strength, love, compassion, and courage exist within all women—and all men too! We live in a society where our ancient powers of the feminine are still marginalized, where women are programmed to shut up and show up as arm candy for men, and where the lessons of beings like Eleanor Roosevelt have not caught on. (I guarantee that most women can name three famous supermodels, though.) We are being summoned to change over to a new way of being feminine. It’s time for us to follow the example of women like Eleanor, The Mother, and Amma and unleash our Divine Motherhood into the world.

The feminine needs to represent itself accurately, integrally, and completely. Because the quicker we get into owning our innate powers of ruthlessness, fierceness, compassion, and sweetness, being truly honest and equal, speaking up for ourselves, and doing good for the world (and having great sex!), the faster the planet will heal, and the faster we’ll all be able to get the hell out of here! We need to make “love” and “compassion” into active verbs, and we all need to embrace our Universal Motherhood—which, luckily, male or female, we can all do easily! As Amma has said, “The essence of motherhood is not inherent in women who have given birth. It is inherent in