To Thine Own Self Be True

As I settle into the final day of my Winter 2017 meditation retreat, two lessons have emerged in countless forms.  The first and most constant has been the question: "Where am I in my becoming?" Interrogating me in almost every thought, its answers have taken me closer and closer to my Truth.   The companion haunt has been the challenge to move away from my viewpoint and explore whatever comes up from every perspective.

I should not be surprised then that in my morning meditation on my last day that they once again present themselves to take me deeper. Most of all, they have distilled to its essence most of the challenges with which I've grappled over these days.

Over the course of this retreat, when I've meditated, I've slowly and deeply breathed in "Where am I in my becoming?"  My exhales have also been slow as I breathed out the name of God.  Today I was surprised that with each exhale what came from my inner voice, "To thine own self be true," Polonius's admonition from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  Polonius continues:

            "And it must follow, as the night the day
            Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Over the last day and a half, I'd been accumulating "material" for a forgiveness exercise that I often facilitated with coaching clients for my Intentional Living Intensives.  Three lists are compiled:

• Those people you need to forgive
• Those people you need to ask for forgiveness
• Things for which you must forgive yourself

I've done the exercise many times with clients and a few times previously with myself.  I've never witnessed a time when the results weren't dramatic.  So, it shouldn't be a surprise that as my theme for yesterday was "Trust and Relationships" that the forgiveness exercise came to mind.  I'd expected to do it last night, but when I did my sundown meditation, my guidance was that the time wasn't yet right. I spent the evening probing other aspects of my consciousness, adding a few more items to my lists along the way.

As I shared in my post of two days ago*, I was chagrined to think how selfish I'd been when I explored the topic of scheduling time from the perspective of those who wanted to schedule. Since then, I've learned something surprising from almost every lesson I've had in front of me when I examined it from different perspectives.

When "Where am I in my becoming?" was coupled with "To thine own self be true," my forgiveness exercise changed dramatically.  Now, my guidance was to look at these lists from the perspective of what my role was in creating every one of these situations.  While I don't think I had much role in eliciting my mother's treatment of the newborn me, every other item on my list, I could have influenced if I'd been true to myself.

There are a companion pair of saws that are often used among self-help practitioners:

• We teach what we need to know
• We write what we need to learn

Over decades, central foci of my work have been to communicate, listen, ask questions, dialogue--learn from each other, and collaborate. Whether I've been facilitating workplace Bickersons, strategic planning, or culture change or writing a book or this blog, these topics have always been central to my work.  When I looked at my forgiveness lists, I could almost always have influenced the outcomes if I'd done just those things...but I hadn't.  I hadn't to my own self been true: I hadn't been true to what I knew in my heart. And, I hadn't be doing what I'd been teaching for decades.

Years ago when I was facilitating an intentional culture creation exercise with a small group of leaders from Hewlett-Packard for their newly created Line of Business, a key player and the person who had hired me for the exercise came to me on the first break.  She asked me, "Do you know what your gift is?"  Duh! I stumbled.  "I guess I don't."  She continued to say, "You are a master at asking questions."

At the time, I thought it was a dumb gift.  Since then, a number of people have made observations about how a single question completely changed how they'd looked a challenge.  I don't think it is such a dumb gift now, but as I revisited my forgiveness lists this morning, the most common failure on my part was the failure to ask questions--before I got into a situation, when I was in it and something didn't feel right, when someone did something that didn't add up.  I've just made assumptions, which often times were incorrect and which eventually resulted in something hurtful occurring.

All of that brings me back to "Where I am in my becoming."  On this mapless journey of spirit, I am at the place of honoring my Truth...honoring what I know in my heart.  When I am present, I can no longer point a finger without recalling there are three more pointing back at me. If I don't ask the questions that will help me know whether the assumptions I am making are accurate ones, who will? In the clear daylight of open communication, I can be true to myself and true to those with whom I am in relationships.

*"Seeking all Sides of a Challenge," 1/3.

Seeking All Sides of a Challenge

On November 11, the Veterans' Day holiday, I had the opportunity to participate in a simulation of The Bigger Game.*  If you imagine a room-size game board that roughly approximates a Tic-Tac-Toe grid, you will get the idea.  On each of the squares is written a word.  At the start of the game, the facilitators instruct participants to survey the words and to choose the one to which they are most called.

I was probably the first to choose, and I moved to "Hunger."  Now while I might have been a little physically hungry, due to oral surgery two days earlier and limited intake of solid food, but that was not the reason I chose "Hunger."  We were told that "Hunger" is that "deep 'fire in my belly' impact that must be satiated."  I felt it in my soul, and I've felt it for a long time as I've increasingly lost myself in my work.  Choosing "Hunger" was a no-brainer.

Yesterday, after my post, I went to my over-flowing bookcase filled with unread books.  I usually like to start one of my retreats with inspirational reading, and I was immediately drawn to Yearnings, by Rabbi Irwin Kula.  The book was copyrighted in 2006 and the pages were yellowed.  Like many of my unread books, I am not sure how long I'd had it.  Yearnings seemed to follow nicely my call to "Hunger" in The Bigger Game.

I am not sure that Yearnings ended up being exactly what I expected, but as always occurs when I allow myself to be led, it has nudged me in places that I needed to explore.  Although the book makes references to several faith traditions and some non-religious traditions, the rabbi leans heavily on stories from the Abrahamic faith traditions.

In explaining the creation "poem," as he calls it, he relates that the phrase that is most often translated into "Where are you?" in English at the point when God comes to the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge might more accurately be translated as "Where are you in your becoming?"  Rather than asking a question with a one word answer, God is asking those he has created a question about where they are in their process of knowing themselves.  I was quite moved by this question, and I have used it several times to guide meditations in my retreat.

Later in the book, Kula talks about the Ten Commandments in a different way than I've generally heard them discussed.  Rather than being edicts, we are encouraged to explore our actions around each of the 10 topics fully and completely: to look at them inside-out, if you will, and really understand the ramifications of what is being asked from each "edict."

"Where are you in your becoming?" is particularly poignant for me as I have thought about a number of questions with which I've openly wrestled in this blog.  When coupled with exploring every side of a topic, my meditations have predictably taken me to places I'd rather not see in myself, like arrogance, Narcissism, and even selfishness.

The two topics with which I've often grappled in this post that kept coming up in my meditations when enlightened by these new perspectives were those of getting "stuff" I didn't want and scheduling time with people rather than being spontaneous.  I realized that there is a major flaw in my understanding about what to do with divine guidance that we receive.  Is that perhaps, I've asked myself, why Choice Point, my long unsold book on the topic of walking moment-by-moment as we are guided, still gathers dust on my shelf?

What moved me as I explored each of these topics more fully was what the people who want to schedule and want to give me stuff must feel.  My spontaneous approach is fine for a single person with little family, but when I think of one friend with a very busy job involving travel, two grown kids and a husband to keep up with, and an art interest she is growing, I thought how terribly selfish of me. I should want to work with her to find a time when she can be available.  When I only thought about my relationship with God and where I was to follow, I totally neglected her needs.  I am so sorry!

Similarly, when I thought about the people who persist in giving me stuff, I recalled how as children we had a special aunt and uncle who refused gifts.  They were younger than I am now, but I am sure that not unlike me, they were at that stage in life where they really wanted to live smaller.  When they were not much older, they sold their larger home in Ohio and moved to a smaller one in Florida. From my current perspective, I totally understand their desire to avoid adding "stuff," but I really didn't when I was 9.  I really don't want stuff, but looking at the concern from different perspectives has been humbling.

Now, back to the question about "Where am I in my becoming?" For today, I am certainly becoming more humble, and I have new perspectives to bring to what seem like easy questions to me. In The Alchemy of Fear I wrote about who we are becoming as a solid endpoint.  "Becoming" as a process offers me much more opportunity to grow and fewer excuses to not get moving.

In the bigger Universe of "Where am I in my becoming?" I have a still-unwinding, albeit very different, perspective on what it means to follow guidance.

I am reminded of an image I used to create on stage when I was delivering a speech.  It would start with a single heart (Valentine kind.)  Then I'd draw another...and another...and another.  Finally, I would connect them with a ribbon and say that every person in the world is connected through that ribbon, heart to heart to heart.  That image now takes on new meaning.  Rather than a one dimensional relationship to divine guidance, I now see a complex, multi-dimensional relationship in which we are all supporting each other in who we are becoming and how we will change the world.




*The Bigger Game: www.biggergame.com. Our game was facilitated by David Andrews (davidtoddandrews@gmail.com) and Catherine Allen (catherine@allenimpactgroup.com.)

Dark Nights, Extraordinary Grace, and Humility

I have just completed one of my silent meditation retreats.  I used to take four days, two times a year, for these retreats.  I am not sure how it happened but in recent years they've been more sporadic and often shorter.  This time I took three days.

For many years I would choose a book around a theme I intended to explore in my meditations and read it in the few days before I began my retreat.  Occasionally, I would finish it on the first day of the retreat.  About 10 days before I started this withdrawal for reflection, I got a message about Choice Point, a book that I first drafted in 1997 and which I continued to revise until about 2000.  I hadn't read it since about 2009, so revisiting it seemed in order.  While I didn't have time to read the book prior to my retreat, I did bring it with me and I read about half of it in bits and pieces over the three days.

When I last read the book in 2009, I recognized that it was badly dated, and that was even more apparent this time.  However, the thing that I noticed most was what I can only describe as my arrogance in tone.  I can assure you that was not my intention.  In the mid- to late-1990s, my life worked extraordinarily well spiritually, and I just assumed that was "normal."  The years in between have demonstrated to me that my experience was not in any way "normal," but instead was extraordinary grace.  My failure to recognize that was arrogant.

Choice Point is a guide to listening for our inner voice or divine voice or whatever it is that guides us on a spiritual path.  For 8-9 years in the 1990s,  my inner guidance system worked extremely well. All I had to do was ask a question, and the answer was there.  I moved across the country, worked globally, designed a new home, and wrote several books on that guidance.  So, it should not be surprising that the book I wrote about that intention process carried a "just do it!" attitude, implying that if we express the intention, the communication will just flow.

Sometime, and I can't really say precisely when it was, I stopped being able to get that guidance.  I struggled to get anything.  I would like to say that as the regularity of my meditation time waned that my guidance did as well because, if that were the case, fixing the problem would be easy.  I'd just have to start meditating regularly again.  I actually think just the opposite was the case.  I think my failure to get guidance precipitated my willingness to meditate less frequently.

Several saints from the Roman Catholic tradition have written about their inability to receive guidance after rich periods of regular communication with the divine.*  A book released after her death revealed that Mother Teresa had struggled for decades with the inability to communicate directly, as she had done quite regularly in her younger years.  The most common term for that absence of communication is "the dark night of the soul," and the period of non-communication--often for the rest of life--usually follows a rich period of dialogue with the divine.  While I haven't experienced the depression that many described, I have keenly felt the lack of communication which characterizes the "dark night of the soul."

My just-completed three days of sitting continued the lack of communication.  Even exercises that I've used to jump-start the flow failed me repeatedly.  So, I mostly sat.  Occasionally, I picked up Choice Point to read a chapter.  Taking time from the fast-paced life I find myself living for personal reflection is reward in and of itself, but I am definitely not stepping out with the feeling of personal enlightenment that I used to experience.

I have learned that the 8-9 years of constant dialogue with the divine that I used to experience as "normal" was instead extraordinary grace.  The communication vacuum, which has dominated my life for 15 years, has taught me what a gift I received for the preceding years.  If I revisit Choice Point again for rewrite, it will be from true humility as I will bring the understanding of what a gift it was.


*I believe this is true of other traditions as well, but I am less well read on them.

Bathed in Love

Day One of my retreat is complete. I have been taking several days in personal reflection for 25 years, and while I will be the first to say there is no "normal," I have certainly experienced patterns.

Generally, I read something introspective in the days before or even on Day One, as I did part of today. Most of the time lessons are thrown on my path in the days before just to stir things up a bit. Almost always I do a lot of journaling, which, more often than not, leads to some emoting--I cry because I recognize a flaw in me that I don't like. (News bulletin: I am human.)

Sometime on the third or fourth day, after I have looked at my ugliness, I have usually had an almost other-worldly experience of feeling God's love and light move through me. The experiences have always been extraordinary.

Three or four hours into my reflections today, a recurring image presented itself. A large opulent round room with 12 to 14-foot high ceilings and gold silk moire wallpaper has popped into my meditations off and on for at least a dozen years. The particularly interesting feature is that all the way around the room are almost equally tall doors...without door knobs. There I stand in the middle of this beautiful room with no apparent way out.

Over the years what happens next has varied, but today as I stood in the middle, slowly pondering my plight, suddenly one door swung open inward, then another and another. As the did, what each revealed was what I can only describe as looking like golden walls of water as it opened. While I instinctively braced myself for a force that I expected could knock me over, as the forces moved toward me in all directions, they were as warm and gentle as the first morning's light as they embraced me. I was literally being bathed in the light of God's love. This was what I "normally" would have expected in the final days of my retreat, not the first.

Hmm. I felt so loved, safe and warm, like there was absolutely nothing in my life that wasn't perfect. Well, I thought, where do I go from here?

I have to fall back on a garden metaphor to describe my retreat experiences. When I pick up rocks in the garden, more often than not, creepy, crawly things await me underneath. Not exactly scary but also not pleasant either. Depending on what I find, sometimes I just put it right down and try to ignore it. So it is with lessons I need to learn. Sometimes there's scary stuff that reveals itself when I begin turning over the rocks of my life.

Over the years I've dispensed with a lot of those metaphorical rocks. Others are life lessons that I have explored over and again, just in different manifestations.

I believe my experience of being bathed in God's love so early in my retreat this time was to give me courage to turn over those really scary rocks and to know that it would be okay. No matter what I find, I will always be safe with God beside me.

The journey continues...

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