Turning My Spiritual Journey Upside Down

My normal sequence is to write, meditate, and go to bed, so I get the privilege of meditating and  "sleeping on" whatever bubbled up in my writing.  So it was last night after having written that I'd like "at the very least to allow the spiritual lesson to be to learn to enjoy these wondrous moments."

I really unleashed something. When I was meditating, I "got" that there are spiritual lessons in the good stuff...and I really need to learn them.  A whole list of potential lessons spilled out:  learn to

• Be conscious of all the choices I make during the day
• Be fully present
• Have fun
• Be in joy: enjoy life more
• Find peace in whatever is occurring
• Laugh
• Find humor 
• Love
• Receive love
• Be grateful
• Appreciate

....There were many more. I clearly have a lot of work to do. But, as I continued to meditate, I kept coming back to the first two.  I cannot be conscious of all the choices I make during the day if I am not fully present.  If I am fully present, I will be conscious of all the things I normally do on autopilot and start making those choices consciously. I expect that if I do those two things, the others will take care of themselves.  And, that concept has turned my spiritual journey upside down...in a good way.

Where Am I On my Becoming?

"Where am I on my becoming?"  That question has haunted me nearly since I began this retreat.  I am intrigued, and playing with Rabbi Kula's description of commandments in Yearnings as things to which we are to examine from the inside-out, I continue to play with it as I breathe the question in and out.  (See yesterday's post for the commandment.)

Knowing where I am on my becoming would be much easier if I had been handed a map at birth to which I could look periodically to see how I am doing.  Is my journey one from Portland, Oregon, to Miami, using the Pythagorean route of the shortest distance between two points being a straight line? In which case it would be significantly more helpful in knowing where I am on my becoming if I could see I was in Boise, Denver, or Atlanta...or, dread, in Boston.

But, my route might be from Portland, Maine, to Miami, meandering the Inter-coastal Waterway, or from Seattle to Houston.  It might be the T.S. Eliot route:

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -- T.S. Eliot*

Maybe where I am on my becoming is somewhere between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, knowing it again for the first time.  (Since I haven't been there since high school, and only then rarely, knowing it again for the first time wouldn't be much of a stretch.)

I still have to believe that if we listen and follow what we know in our hearts, they will inevitably take us on the right route, assuming there is a right route. My sense is that our hearts tell us what is True North for us but Kula would probably challenge whether there is a right or wrong route or if it matters. Perhaps dallying in Philadelphia might prove rewarding, even if it is out of the way. At this point, I am so unclear (a good thing, I think,) I am not sure there is a wrong route.  I am, after all, the maven of "not-knowing as a way of life." I am pretty confident that we will know were have gone astray if we aren't truly present to the journey or if a stop sucks the life out of us and we linger there too long. 

As I ponder "Where I am on my becoming," I've had a compelling desire to get on a bus and ride across the country, stopping wherever I feel called to stop. (Alas, I am not free to do that right now, but arrangements could be made to do so soon.)

Like Alice Through the Looking Glass, I am not sure of much.  I could be falling down or up, but I am assured that friends cannot be neglected, and I've probably been doing a bit much of that in recent years. So, where am I on my becoming?  I cannot know for sure, but at about 12:45 this morning I felt like the Universe had flipped my switches and I was more alive than I've been probably since 2000.  Every cell in my body tingled.  I awakened lighter, more joyful, and definitely more hopeful.   So the journey continues...





*Brainy-quote.com"

The Wanderer

Friday evening I invited a younger work colleague for dinner at my apartment.  Her own spiritual journey has been intensifying recently. She has frequently asked me questions about my journey.  Not that any of us are ever an expert on the journey, I do have a few more years in my spiritual journey experience bank.  Since we aren't working together any more, dinner seemed to be a more appropriate solution than attempting to text about the journey, as we have since I changed jobs.

After dinner, we pulled our chairs over to the bookshelf--the one with spiritual titles, not the one with books related to work.  I've been feeling spiritually fidgety for most of the year, but especially since changing jobs. As I shared with her some of my favorite titles, I was learning again for myself. When I pulled out Carol Pearson's The Hero Within, a book explicitly about the spiritual journey described through Jungian archetypes, a diagram fell out.  What immediately jumped to my eye as I glanced at "Three Turns Around the Hero's Wheel," (p. 14) was the archetype of "The Wanderer," whose purpose is to provide clarity to the next stage of life.

The diagram is like a pie with each of five pieces devoted to one of five archetypes.  The inner wedge of each piece/archetype describes the lessons for the first journey around the wheel.  Pearson explains that we go through the journey several times each life and with each we have a different lessons to learn on each archetype.  (I attempted to find a reproduction of the diagram online, but most are much more complicated than the simple-yet-clear version on yellowed pages that I have.  Markings on my own render it useless to others.)

The progression of archetypes that we go through starts with "orphan," where we learn "trust."  You might think about this as disappointment that things aren't as you might have thought they were but learning trust in an emerging, but not at all yet clear, world view. "Orphan" is followed by "Wanderer" where the lesson is "clarity."  This is how the "not at all yet clear world view" gets clarity--we listen and learn about the next evolution of how things really are.  You might also think about this as the time in the desert, demonstrated in many spiritual stories, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, involve time spent alone in reflection.

After we have clarity, we move to the "Warrior," where we might have to fight for what we've received spiritual clarity about. Embarking on the lessons in order is critical; otherwise, we might be fighting for the wrong things.  The warrior is about learning and claiming "power."  The lesson after "Warrior" is that of "Martyr," where we learn about "love" and giving our lives to the Universe. The last of the five archetypes is the "Magician."  The lesson of the "Magician" is "joy."  Then we are ready to be "Orphans" again.

So what does this have to do with me...now?

I've spent a lot of time stuck in "Orphan."  Instead of learning the lesson of "trust," the long stall there exposed me to repeated examples where I couldn't/didn't let go of the expectations I had and move on to wander and figure things out.  My experience with this transition is that it requires a leap of faith, but each time I've had the courage to take it, everything has worked out perfectly.  For example, when I chose to leave Oregon, buy a house in North Carolina as I'd been guided to do, and drive across the country without a job or even knowing anyone, I was taken care of.  Work fell into may path within a week, but I had to wander first.

I've also spent way too much time in "Warrior" in recent years where I was fighting to survive rather than fighting for the spiritual truth I should have learned in "Wanderer."  When I've made the journey successfully before, I have found my inner power, the power that comes from connection with the divine and knowing if I do what is right and true, I will be OK.  When I've fought to survive, I've tried to control or manipulate things to assure I'd be taken care of rather than taking the leap of faith knowing I would be OK.

While the move to North Carolina worked out splendidly, there have been times when I have been "invited" into the desert, and I didn't follow, and it hasn't worked out so well.  On February 4, 2004, I received a clear message that I should move to Washington, D.C.  Depleted of resources from the dot.com bust and without a job in D.C., my reply was "I will do it when I have a job." I looked but didn't find one. Of course, that is not how this is supposed to work.  Leap of faith occurs first and then it works out.

One of the scripture readings in church today was about Jacob wrestling with the angel or God.  Our pastor said he always thought this passage was about our internal struggles.  Do I do what I want or do I do what God wants?  For the 28 months between my message to move to Washington and when I actually did move, almost everything of value was taken from me.  Yet, I struggled to control the transition by insisting on having a job first.  I should have wandered.

Last March when I told my old boss that I would leave my job at the end of the summer, I think what the Universe heard was that finally I had relented to go into the desert and find the next manifestation of me and my spiritual truth.  As the end of the summer approached, I was totally at peace.  I had accumulated vacation pay, and my financial planner and I had figured out how I could get by for several months after that.  Then, the job offers started coming--three of them, and they were good ones.  So I took the bait.  I could leave my job, go to a new one, and I wouldn't have to take the leap of faith, I thought to myself.  And, I also wouldn't learn the lesson of wandering.

When the diagram fell onto the floor Friday evening, in a flash I realized I had robbed myself of my season in the desert.  While it isn't exactly the bold leap of faith that leaving my old job without a new one would have been, I leave on Tuesday for a meandering trip to the Midwest, reconnecting with old friends and one of my few remaining relatives.  The wedding of the son of a dear friend lies at the end of the journey, but in the stillness of my road trip, I expect that I will find passages into my truth.

Into Me See

I often prepare for my semi-annual meditation retreats by choosing a book to read in the days before that will focus my intentions for the days of reflection.  Almost 15 years ago, I picked a book in which the author talked at length about intimacy.  (Sorry, I looked for the reference, and I can't find it.)  What really stood out in my mind was how intimacy was described as "into me see."  I recall the description of creating intimacy as allowing oneself to be seen, unvarnished, by others.

As my meditation began, everything that I'd ever done in my life that I wasn't particularly proud, even going back into childhood, drifted into my meditation, forcing me to make peace with it, and then letting it drift away.  After about 18 hours, I felt clean and clear.  The remaining days of my retreat were remarkable--truly an otherworldly experience. 

After that, I began sharing some of the less pretty parts of my history--things that I would have been concerned that others would learn--in speeches and in writing.  My life literally became an open book.  An interesting thing began to happen.  Every time I shared a story, it got smaller and smaller, until it just disappeared. 

The things that we harbor as guilt, blame, shame, or embarrassment become a increasingly heavy burden that we drag through life. The spiritual journey is challenging enough without doing it with the burden of the past, holding us back.  I wrote about perfectionism in Leading from the Heart. It is a damaging tendency and one with which I have struggled.

Since first writing about how to do the journey, I felt like I had to do it perfectly to be authentic.  How silly!  No one is perfect, least of all me. In face of a lifelong struggle with perfectionism, the inevitability and purposefulness of imperfection on our journeys had been a challenge for me. I now understand that what is important isn't doing it perfectly, but having the intention to keep moving forward in spite of setbacks...even when that may feel like two steps forward and one back many days.

In the early days of this blog, one reader remarked that it was intensely personal.  That was my intention--no varnish.  Sharing my challenges and imperfection in this blog has felt to me a bit like the early days of that retreat years ago.  Although I don't even know who you are, the intimacy and trust I feel with my readers have lightened my burdens and have drawn me ever closer to who I want to be.

What a difference a day makes

When I wrote my post yesterday morning, the reality of being without job and paycheck during the government shutdown was just sinking in.  Treating this experience as a gift, I set out to focus my intentions on three things that I have wanted to increase in my life.  I wanted more exercise and healthier eating, more meditation, and to e-publish at least one of my books--The Game Called Life.

I am already feeling even better than usual.  Maybe eating healthfully is a bit like riding a bike: our bodies remember.  As soon as I passed up sugar a couple times, I found myself craving certain vegetables that I haven't bought for a while.  When I wanted a mid-afternoon snack, raw nuts came to mind for the first time in months.  Yet, this is a journey.  I would be less than honest if I didn't say that when I sat down for dinner, I did miss my glass of red wine, abandoned because alcohol contains sugar, but having brewed a pitcher of fresh iced tea in the afternoon, wine was quickly out of mind.

Skipping the train, I walked 70 minutes while running errands on foot yesterday and 40 today so far. The chemicals that our brains release when we exercise kicked in right away, and by the time I was back, I was energized and joyful to get to work on my e-book. 

After working a while, I took a meditation break.  For over 20 years, I've meditated, and for much of that time, it was 20 minutes a day.  In 2008 my life seemed to be thrust into fast-forward with many travel days ending with me falling asleep on my computer.  Most of that time I still meditated 20 minutes a day, but at some point the exhaustion got the better part of me.  I'd regularly fall asleep during my meditation, so I started staying in bed another 15 minutes.  I'd still take 5 minutes to center myself before leaving my hotel room.  The schedules and reasons have changed over the last 5 years, but the pace has not.

Occasionally, meditation has slipped, but most of the time it has been more like taking 5 or 10 minutes before I raced off to work.  Yesterday, I took my full 20 minutes.  Like taking a hot soak at the end of a hard day, I was enveloped in the warmth of Love from All That Is.  How could I ever have imagined that skipping this was serving me?  Only some kind of warped rationality could have convinced me that abandoning this in the middle of the craziness was a good idea.

I made good progress on the e-book yesterday and this morning.  As a "project," it is definitely a success, but I am most certain that thinking it is a project is only an illusion.  I write spiritual books--books that are written to help readers get back on their paths and to stay on them.  I couldn't have imagined the impact of being up close and personal with this book--I have to touch every single word--that I've read at least 8-10 times since I wrote it would have on me.

There is a joke about turning one's life over to God.  It goes something like this:  When you turn your life over to God, the first thing you hear is, "Thank you!"  The second thing that you hear is "Hold on!"

I am in "Hold on!" right now.  Every page seems to give me a lesson that I need to re-member--to make a conscious part of me again.  Perhaps most important right now is that The Game Called Life is a game and the point of the game is spiritual growth.  Every thing that happens in our lives is an opportunity to grow, including furloughs, and every person that passes through, even for a brief time, is a spiritual learning partner, even trying bosses.  I must have been spiritually comatose to have forgotten that when the busyness of my life distracted me from the things that matter most in my life--health, mediation, writing and spiritual growth.  These are things that I truly know in my heart, but I've just not been listening enough lately.

The Game Called Life will continue to jar me from "the sleeping state that men call waking."  (The Upanishads) And, I am holding on to see what other changes will be wrought in my life during this unplanned spiritual adventure.

The Truth Will Set Me Free

This post is longer than usual, but spiritual wrestling matches are rarely short and sweet.  I hope you will ride this one with me.

Several religious traditions have some concept of God as mystery.  I have written and spoken at length about "Not-Knowing" as a place where we know we don't know but we are consciously seeking the Truth. Ambiguity reigns.  I've called "Not-Knowing" the most quintessentially spiritual state that we can hold.  These ponderings--and they truly are ponderings--come from that place of "Not-Knowing," where I know two things that appear to contradict each other.  AND, I have not yet reached a higher level of Truth where I can see how both are true.

Two or three times a year I adopt a few spiritual statements to guide my growth over the next few months. I recently adopted seven new ones.  Four I can get my head around, but I am still learning to live them.  Three are really stretching me:

• I am Love.
• The Truth is: We are all Love.
• The Truth will set me free.

I have written and spoken at length about the first two, yet when I really "sit" with them now, incongruities have been bubbling up.  I truly believe that "I am Love" and that "We are all Love," and I believe my purpose is to help people to live from conscious connection between the "Love" that each of us is with the "Love We All Are."  I've called it the ribbon of love that winds from heart to heart connecting all of us. 

I believe it was the I Ching that first said, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."  Apparently, this student must be ready, because before the ink was dry on my affirmations, my Socratic teacher began presenting questions. Three big questions have presented me with the opportunity (translate that as hard spiritual work) to discover the Truth that will set me free.  Lest you think I've gotten there, spirituality is a journey, and right now I have no idea where this one is going.

I've often had people ask me after an address or presentation, "How can you say that someone like Adolf Hitler is Love?  How can you say that we should want to connect with him?"  Twenty years ago I hadn't really "gotten" exactly how complex and ambiguous the Mystery could be.  I would often reply that what Hitler did was horrible.  However, because things were so horrible, we now had the United Nations where we could work things out and hold dictators accountable over a conference table instead of a battleground.  (OK.  I admit that was naïve even in the mid-90s when we thought that global transformation was right around the corner.)

Now, I ponder.  There are people who do evil things.  Genocide does still exist.  Dictators continue to kill their own people.  One ethnic group kills another on a massive scale over and again.  On a smaller scale, individuals walk in with guns and regularly shoot a dozen others (or more) before they are stopped.  Individuals steal pensions or homes from hard-working individuals.  Other individuals lie, cheat, and steal to intentionally harm others.  Can they and I both be Love?

In my as-yet unpublished book Choice Point--Seven Keys to Living with Intention I quote columnist Tom Ehrich from his "On the Journey" newsletter:

"...As Hannah Arent wrote in her disturbing study of Nazi German, that evil empire could not proceed unless evil became banal, or common.  For something obviously wrong to proceed, multiple consciences must stop working.  Entire communities must grow numb and choose not to see any connection between abusive behavior and oneself."

After the recent gassing of 1300 people in Syria, I was incredulous that polls showed that most Americans could see no reason for our involvement.  We could only have grown numb and chosen not to see any connection between the chemical attacks and ourselves.  (I am delighted that a diplomatic alternative to military action emerged.  My issue is that a large percentage of people--70 to 80 percent-- were unable to connect the dots between what was happening in Syria and the harm we were allowing to ourselves as part of the larger human community.)

I am a pacifist by nature, and I have opposed most military actions of this government in my life time.  I think there can almost always be a better way to resolve a problem than war.  Solving violence with more violence has never made sense to me on either a micro or macro level. Violence is self-destructive. From my ribbon of love perspective, violence injures what connects us.  When we hurt others, we hurt ourselves. Yet I have been horrified as I have watched several genocides where the world saw fit to do nothing. What are we to do?

The more immediate questions that my teacher has presented are much more personal.  The second troubling question was presented almost as quickly when one more mentally ill man who had acquired a gun shot a large number people and did so not very far from where I work and live.  It is much easier for me to have compassion for someone with mental illness than it is for all the people that crossed his life (or those of several before him over the last few years) and chose not to show him the compassion to insist he get help.  I have to go back to what Arent said.  Have all of our consciences stopped working that it is easier to turn the other way than to insist than to get help for someone?  And perhaps the bigger question is why it is so difficult to get help for someone before they commit massive acts of violence.  If the Truth will set me free, what am I to do with this?

On a much more micro level, the third question my teacher has presented to me is how to relate to a person with whom I must interact almost daily who engages in behaviors which are destructive to others.  I am keenly aware of the consequences in saying something: the history and career trajectory of whistleblowers is ugly.  Yet the consequences of not saying something is even uglier: think of all the people who lost everything in scandals like Enron and the 2008 financial melt-down.

I am grateful that I have been blessed with extremely high integrity bosses and those business owners that patronized my business were almost always scrupulous about doing the right thing.  I don't know if I had just been lucky in the past or if things have changed, but clearly some of the people around me in recent years have been aiming lower. 

A few years ago I sat in a meeting and listened to my boss lie to a client.  When we walked out of that meeting, she literally looked at my colleague and me and said, "It isn't ever going to happen."  When I probed more, "Everyone does it," was the answer.  I wrestled with what the right thing to do was, but about that time the client retired and I was offered a different assignment.  I started to write that it was easy to just forget.  That is not the Truth.  I never forgot.  That I did nothing and didn't know what to do still eats at my soul.

Just a few months later, the same boss was misrepresenting what we could and would do to my new client.  I knew I couldn't continue to work in that environment.  I was just beginning to recover from the havoc the dot.com bust had wreaked in my life: I needed the job.  I began praying for a door to open, and at warp-speed one did.  Within an hour, I had a job offer, and they wanted me as soon as possible.  I was able to get out of the situation, but once again the fact that I didn't do anything has eaten at my soul--pinpricks in my integrity is what I called this in The Game Called Life.  In both situations  people and organizations were hurt.  I am certain that I couldn't have stopped the behavior in either case.  If I am Love, and my clients are Love, how could I do nothing?  A few months later I contacted the second client, met him for lunch, and apologized.  He said that he knew it wasn't me.  That felt a little better.  But I am back to Arent's proposition that multiple consciences have stopped working for us to get to the point that doing bad things is OK if everyone else is doing it.

Once again I am in a situation in which I am witness to bad behavior, don't know in advance to stop it, and observe deaf ears from those who could and should stop it.   Ugly personal consequences to me resulted when I attempted to stop it.  I could live with those consequences if something changed, but they didn't.  Things got worse instead of better.

Thank you, teacher.  I am really grateful for this lesson.  ;-)  How do I act from love and compassion, how do I avoid injury to others including the perpetrator, and how do I feed the ribbon of love in this situation?  I am certain the Truth will set me free.  Sooner would be nice. 

What I know in my heart today is that knowing the right thing to do isn't always apparent or easy, but staying in the Mystery to allow a Higher Level of Truth to become clear will set me free.