Essays

Snowflakes and Rainbows: A True Story of Self Realization
By Kristin Kirk

One magical day during my 20s, in the silence after a particularly decadent New England snowfall, something extraordinary happened. Brilliantly covering daily life in stillness, the seamless pure blanket beckoned me to roam freely through road, forest and field by revealing their inherent inseparability and accessibility. Awestruck, I wandered in the brilliant sunlit wonderland of deep scintillating fluff. 

The last of the intricate crystalline flakes were making their finishing touches to life’s masterpiece arriving from their heavenly descent emanating the magnificence of their maker for the human eye to see. Sparkles above and below, and at every angle imaginable, immersed me in living luminosity. 

Endless weavings of heavily laced trees and untouched pristine stretches of hidden roads and fields emanated embodied rapture. Frequent windy gusts would toss rainbow light into extended flight turning empty space into ecstasy. Every single surface of life was scintillating pure light. And each and every fractalling surface spun a thousand translucent rainbow sprays in every direction, rendering me speechless in wonder.

My life was altered. The beauty was so immense, it penetrated through to a depth I had not known. It penetrated so deep it found a small hidden unbearable truth and illuminated it for me to see. In that moment, while sustained in bliss, the healing wonderland revealed an inner edge that inhibited me from being able to fully embrace and meet the infinite before me. The expounding beauty all around surpassed my capacity to experience it. I simultaneously saw that the same inner edge not only limited how much beauty I could behold, it limited how much joy I was allowing myself to feel in my life. I had wandered deep into the blessings of unbearable beauty.

It wasn’t that I was not happy, or did not have great joy in my life. I loved my inner and outer life. My Zen Shiatsu training from the lineage of Suzuki Roshi’s personal private Zen Shiatsu practitioner and Japanese monk, Rueho Yamada, was already enfolded within and had stimulated past life kinesthetic memory of lifetimes of Tibetan Buddhist monk-hood, Zen Buddhism, and martial art mastery. I was empty and present in the moment and in love with all life. 

So it was not that I was consciously blocking life. It was that there were old wounds and conditioning that had been subconsciously internalized to “protect me” and “keep me safe”  from feeling and Being that extraordinary myself. Those inner programs and unresolved traumas seemed to be limiting how big I allowed myself to be, how expansive my joy could be, and how much of the boundless beauty of life I would allow myself to experience within Oneness. I had not even known a limiting edge was within me.

In the grace of divine beauty, I recognized those inner programs as false and recognized the innate power of Beauty itself. As best I could, I invited Beauty to open me. Compassionately, I also recognized the compacted nature of all the inner limitations and gently allowed the insight to rest with the extraordinary beauty, and the longevity of the contractions. With gentle curiosity the contractions were allowed to be, without superimposing judgment.

It was not until my awakening, nearly a decade later, that those contracted edges finally met the level of truth, love and willingness they needed in order to let go and surrender to Beauty. Those inner edges that limited my expansion were discovered to be ancient wounds, karma, collective trauma and distorted paradigms of cultures embedded in my psyche, soul memory and body. The wounded aspects of my identity had not been able to bear witness to that mighty wonderland of scintillating beauty and truth that was so dearly longed for underneath, that seemed to have been “lost” somewhere long ago.

The self-effacing thoughts and beliefs were too deep to have surfaced in the conscious mind to find their way to healing and remained in the shadows, influencing my life in profound and subtle ways. Life gives us opportunities. The penetrating beauty that winter day was an opportunity that could have illuminated all, had I been able to fully surrender.

Ultimately, it was the commitment to truth that pierced the veil for me. And it was through the initial years of my awakening purification process that all those tucked away contracted moments began surfacing and surrendering into The Unnameable. Through grace, deep focus and intense willingness, I spent three hours every morning in bed for about four years meeting every single wound and karmic story that created the inner edge that had been hiding from the face of Beauty. I surrendered through one tender moment after another of pain and suffering on all sides of the stories from lifetime after lifetime of unresolved experience. I thought of Buddha under the Bodhi tree and wondered how long he sat there.

Each frozen moment in time, released back into the ever present infinite wholeness that had long been forgotten through the compelling and illusory power of experience. Strategies for survival in a living dualistic dream realm with “dominate or be dominated” ruling the game were broken down from each conditioned moment leading to the inner dissolving of whole cultural paradigms and the dismantling of the energetic architecture of collective distortion. Multidimensional geometric distortions of heart and mind in mandala like patterns reconfigured in consciousness back to pristine snowflake symmetry and pure untouched perfection. 

Every frozen fractal of a moment experienced in time released, transformed and evaporated into divine empty stillness, leaving behind the radiance of glistening wisdom, enduring beauty, love emanating and pure joy of Being. Experiential empty/full wholeness was restored in embodied presence. Duality dissolved into itself revealing the unnameable truth of existence. And the scintillating fractalling rainbow light of our very Being is no less breathtakingly stunning than that magical day in winter. The extraordinary unspeakable beauty of our infinite magnificence is only unbearable if we try to hold together an idea of who and what we think we are.

Bio

Kristin Kirk is an international spiritual teacher and healer whose awakening gifted her with unusual and extraordinary healing capacities and vision. She offers individual and group healing sessions, teaching and retreats for those on the path to enlightenment. Her awakening began during a Zen Shiatsu session as she realized her treatment plans never once came from her intellect or training, but always had arisen on their own out of emptiness. She began seeing pictures coming out of her client’s bodies revealing the roots of suffering and the capacity to reestablish awakened consciousness. Her remembered lifetimes as a Buddhist Tibetan monk and Zen martial artist influence the detail and precision of her healing and teaching. The story of Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree gave her the understanding and perseverance to continue sitting. After years of service and solitude, she is stepping out into the public arena and writing a number of books on awakening and the enlightenment process, and welcomes healing, teaching and speaking invitations.