A Divine Mess

About ten years ago, I began feeling like a divine mess. I started calling myself that too. It was an apt and quirky way of expressing the reality that I had just undergone a radical shift in consciousness that had stuck around — which was quite wondrous to behold — yet was now sifting through reams of unhealed trauma. Years of abuse and shame and pain were now coming forward to be held in the light of awake awareness. And quite honestly, it was a mess. But a divine mess. 

A recipe of my humanity and my spirit was being cooked up. Too late now! I was on the stove and the flames were hot.

I started a blog by the same name, which I ended up getting locked out of, and so it died; all its posts in one mass grave. If I remember, at the time, it seemed like too much to try and re-post everything, I took it as an act of god — or at least the internet — and focused on other things. By then I felt less like a mess and more like some sort of wholeness was being uncovered; a transmutation of pain which wasn’t exactly a process of eradication or a transcendence, but more like a digestion. An assimilation. 

An integration of my human bits with my beyond-human nature.

Then a deeper and fuller shift took place, which also stuck around, while an unpacking of conditioning continued.

And some of the wounds which had been opened up by waking up were now scars with raised ridges and bumps, but also with smooth patches and places where the newly healed skin had merged with the weathered, mature skin.

There were softened edges, and spots where you might not easily see there had been a deep cut. A primal wounding. But they were still there. Ultimately not real, as what had been found with awakening was beyond such things; yet real as well. Both. Oh, yes, both.

The Divine Mess Show had been born along the way too. 

I took it around to yoga studios, metaphysical shops, spiritual centers. Either by myself or with guests like a great drummer or funny fellow comedians who kept me company.

It was awkward at times. Sometimes the audience would look at me, knowing I was there to guide them through a healing energy meditation at the end, and couldn’t quite reconcile that I was currently up there dropping an f-bomb or talking about very “un-spiritual” or seemingly non-enlightenment related things.

Like how I dance with challenging relationships, the tug of failure, my own doubts about what I’m doing with my damn life. My torrid love affair with coffee. 

And then at the end, I’d switch gears from being a professional comedian and share my mystical side; the depth that had been uncovered and could not be hidden behind jokes. People would sometimes be moved, finding themselves crying, and not know why a comedian had elicited such a response in them with a 15 minute meditation.

Others wouldn’t drop in at all, their arms crossed, concepts clouding their minds. They refused to believe that I had anything to offer after witnessing me sing a string of swear words or talking about the mundane frustrations we all encounter as complex human beings.

I’d get to do the Divine Mess Show in a number of cool places. And people booking me either thought I was just another get-a-Reiki-certification-in-one-weekend-spiritual-enthusiast who really was a stand up comic. And others knew me as a spiritual catalyst which much to offer, but were confused and curious as to why I was still doing comedy. Or if I could even do it at all. I mean, after a radical spiritual shift, didn’t people go live in caves, or become a full time teacher, or at least wear a robe or something?

People didn’t always receive the whole shebang. That I’m an awake human who also has been honing professional comedy and acting skills for three decades and whose earthly joy is performing. How could I be both? All of it?

Didn’t spiritually evolved people stop arguing with their husbands?

Weren’t comedians just light and happy people who always see life as a joke?

Weren’t we all fed the story that the path of enlightenment excludes our very in-the-trenches human experience of emotions, desires, relationships, money, work, and paying for parking tickets we really really did not deserve?

So I more or less kept these two sides of my expression separate. And it’s super weird, when you’ve realized non-separation (from god, from others, from life itself), but you keep separating out parts of you to make people feel more comfortable. 

So as not to confuse people. So as to fit in to a broken world by breaking yourSelf into bits. 

And then a voice shines through the radiant silence and says “Here, my love, is yet another pocket of conditioning where you’ve learned to give people what they want — or at least what they expect — at the expense of your lived, expressed wholeness. They can handle it. Really. You are not five years old anymore in a war zone of an unwelcoming family home. Try it out. There will be those with little dust in their eyes who will receive it and benefit.”

And also, the world has changed in the past decade. Millennials embrace their multi-hyphenate glory while older folks are loosening their grip on staying inside the seemingly proscribed boxes. And Gen Z celebrates individuality while recognizing we are a part of a whole, so they are not strangers to our shared everything-ness.

Was the show ahead of its time? I don’t know. I guess I don't care. My mind can’t seem to work like that anymore.

As the world revs up once more, all of us quite changed, I’ll be taking The Divine Mess Show out again. Audiences seem to want it.

2020 rocked us hard. A lot of our familiar roles and places in society fell away. It became clear just how connected we all are, and how much we affect each other. And the potential for healing and the integration is endless.

And so I feel called — more than ever — to let my creative contributions evolve and open to something else being born, some expression of both my limitless spirit and my limited humanity. To share with you that I, like you, am more than roles that have gone before us.

I have gone beyond, beyond the beyond, and yet here I am. Fully spirit, fully human.

A divine mess. As we all truly are.