We all have a donkey part, a part of us that knows, somatically, energetically, intuitively, something that other parts of us do not know or believe.
In the Balaam story, it was the donkey who saw the angel standing in the way and refused to move forward on the path that Balaam was insisting on. When parts of us are recalcitrant and resistant, when they refuse to get with the program, when they stand in the way of what we deem to be “progress,” we often do what Balaam did – we turn self aggressive; we try – like Moshe with the rock in last week’s parsha – to hit this part into submission, striking, through harsh inner language, again and again, harder and harder as we become more and more frustrated with this ornery part.
But the part is trying to tell us something. It knows something; it sees something that the rest of us cannot yet see, and we would do well to stop and be curious about what it is sensing. Because often, what it is sensing, is an angel of the Lord on our path, an angel that has come to point us in the right direction. We think we know better because we “think.” We trust our thoughts and our minds to decipher the truth, and we often ignore, at our own peril, what our more physical “donkey” parts – our embodied experience – is telling us.
But there is an intuitive bodily knowledge of great wisdom inside us. When we stop and pay attention to its pangs and yearnings and stirrings, to its felt sensing and energetic intuiting, we become closer to knowing God and God’s will, to knowing ourselves and our divine essence and to knowing which path is right for us as we go on our way.
Photo by Leon Woods at Pexels
