I began writing this blog in October of 2013. Even on days that I didn't know what it was going to be when I sat down, the words have always come. At the first of this year, I committed to writing at least 15 minutes each day, and I have reported for duty as promised. The words have been flowing easily every evening...until for the first time last night, the words were not there.
What was the block to my words? The only other time that I have had complete writer's block was for two weeks prior to writing the first draft of Leading from the Heart. I had blocked off two months, and then, like now, the words had always been there. Except they weren't there that day...or the next...or the next. I prayed. I meditated. I saw my therapist three times in a week. I can't say what the block was or what ended it, but suddenly one day, I got up from my meditation, went to the computer, and the words moved through me so fast that I could hardly keep up. They kept coming until the draft was complete.
I said that I would show up every day and write for 15 minutes; I didn't say I would post every day. I wrote...and wrote...and it was all garbage. I spared you. I went to bed disappointed in myself and sad that I may have let down my readers.
Magic worked in my sleep.
Regular readers will recall that I had been in something of a dream desert for the last few years, but since entering my transition and getting a full night's sleep almost every night, the dreams have been back, richly and generously. Almost every night I have remembered at least one dream; most mornings it has been several. One morning I couldn't remember until I sat to meditate, and then I started recalling details, which eventually flowed together. I believe adequate sleep is part of the answer, but I am also confident that the respect that I've been showing the dreams is also a big piece.
Each morning immediately on waking I write whatever I recall, and, as I do, I usually remember more. The volume has been as many as six dreams in a night. This morning I only recollected two but in great detail. I wrote three 8-1/2 x 11-inch pages about the two dreams. Then I go through and note the symbolism of different aspects of the dream. Finally, I journal what the message was to me and what I plan to do about it. The Universe should have no doubt that I am listening.
Over several days, I've received messages that change is occurring now or soon. That shouldn't be a surprise, I am in a conscious period of transition. One of this morning's dreams made clear that I will be going in a totally different direction. Also not a huge leap since I've felt so burned out from my consulting work within the government.
The other persistent theme, which came in spades this morning after last night's block, was the need for more meditation, usually symbolized in dreams by fish. In this dream, I was claiming a message and reached over to buy a very small fish--very small. Get this, I'm trying to get messages, but only putting in a small time for meditation to receive them.
Then I was invited to dinner with someone I met at the message center. He fed me fish that were many times larger that the very small fish I had purchased. Finally, he and a wise old woman invited me for dinner again, and this time she fed me fish that were several times larger than the ones he had fed me.
I would have to be really dense not to get the message here. I need to meditate more.
I am taking a class that demands a lot of time, and I've been trying to get most of the work done in the first 2-1/2 days of the week so that I would have uninterrupted time for the rest of the week. To accomplish that, last night I worked until after midnight. I think that maybe part of the message here is to start my day by asking what I should do, and that might mean stretching the work over several more days.
If that doesn't work, I'll try something else. I am certain that after having had writer's block for only the second time in my life last night that I will listen more often and more intently.
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Breathing in Compassion
Last night I watched the documentary "Happy." It was a marvelous weaving of topics from my Psychology of Happiness certification program and Eric Weiner's book The Geography of Bliss. The movie left me feeling warm inside.
In the day since I watched it there was one part that touched me deeply enough that they have colored my day today. I'd like to share it. Featured in the film was a professor, who has done brain scans on meditators--master, such as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and relative newbies--to see what impact their practice has on their brains.
His research has determined that in as little as two weeks of doing a mindfulness meditation that focuses on love or compassion, newcomers to meditation can reprogram their brains to similar levels as the monk.
For years I did something similar. Back in the late mid-90s, I had a transformational experience. It felt like my body dematerialized into love. To this day, I can close my eyes and breathe in what that experience was like and feel my whole body tingle with the love that connects all of us, as it did in the transcendent experience. I used my memory of that experience as the focus of my mindfulness meditation for years, just breathing the memory in and then breathing it out again.
In no small part due to those meditations, I was totally calm in those years. Nothing ruffled my feathers. Nothing. At that time, I had a dance partner who was a very good dancer and fun to dance with. (Those two things don't always go together.) He had a horrible temper though, and the least little thing would set him into a rage. I never really knew what that anger was about, but I was sure it had nothing to do with the dance.
One time our dance teacher, who had witnessed several of these explosions followed by my compassionate responses, said to me, "How to you do it?" All that would come to me was that these meditations had built such a reservoir of love in me that the anger just floated by.
Then, insisting that no one can learn on their own, someone tried to teach me how to meditate, focusing me on the breathing and a mantra in one case. Another talked through the meditation. I am not sure exactly when I stopped my love-focused mindfulness meditation, but I am certain that I have not achieved anything close to that level of peace since. And, I have also not consciously recalled that experience of being love very often since then either.
In recent years the technology of brain-scanning and the exploding field of neuroscience has demonstrated just how "plastic"--neuroscience-speak for we can change fairly quickly--our brains actually are. While watching this documentary, and listening to the scientist describe the impact of mindfulness meditation focusing on love and compassion, the memory of my old style of meditation before I knew how "to do it right" triggered.
I wonder, I thought, after all these years, could I call that back? Well, my beautifully plastic brain confirmed that I could. I did my old-style-before-someone-taught-me-to-do-it-right meditation last night, this morning, and again this evening. I can already tell a profound impact. I've been totally at ease today, ticking off things on my list that normally might have been agitating. I was just calm. I have had the sense that I have been smiling all day.
"Happy" describes a psychological phenomenon called "hedonic adaptation." As we pursue, and then get, more material satisfaction, recognition, or whatever flips our personal switches, initially we are happier, but quickly we adjust to that level of gratification. To be happy again, we need to notch it up a level: we continue adapting and needing more and more gratification to produce shorter and shorter periods of happiness.
With today's little experiment, I've been able to be happy all day, even during a rather contentious business meeting, with no external gratification. I came home and cleaned my house--not my favorite thing to do--and I was consciously aware that I was relaxed and happy while I was doing it. I expect that the many years that I did this kind of meditation made it quicker for me to plug into the part of my brain that still remembers it, but the research would indicate that anyone could do it in two weeks. We don't need the hedonic pleasures. Happiness lies within us. It is there for the cost of just loving.
In the day since I watched it there was one part that touched me deeply enough that they have colored my day today. I'd like to share it. Featured in the film was a professor, who has done brain scans on meditators--master, such as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and relative newbies--to see what impact their practice has on their brains.
His research has determined that in as little as two weeks of doing a mindfulness meditation that focuses on love or compassion, newcomers to meditation can reprogram their brains to similar levels as the monk.
For years I did something similar. Back in the late mid-90s, I had a transformational experience. It felt like my body dematerialized into love. To this day, I can close my eyes and breathe in what that experience was like and feel my whole body tingle with the love that connects all of us, as it did in the transcendent experience. I used my memory of that experience as the focus of my mindfulness meditation for years, just breathing the memory in and then breathing it out again.
In no small part due to those meditations, I was totally calm in those years. Nothing ruffled my feathers. Nothing. At that time, I had a dance partner who was a very good dancer and fun to dance with. (Those two things don't always go together.) He had a horrible temper though, and the least little thing would set him into a rage. I never really knew what that anger was about, but I was sure it had nothing to do with the dance.
One time our dance teacher, who had witnessed several of these explosions followed by my compassionate responses, said to me, "How to you do it?" All that would come to me was that these meditations had built such a reservoir of love in me that the anger just floated by.
Then, insisting that no one can learn on their own, someone tried to teach me how to meditate, focusing me on the breathing and a mantra in one case. Another talked through the meditation. I am not sure exactly when I stopped my love-focused mindfulness meditation, but I am certain that I have not achieved anything close to that level of peace since. And, I have also not consciously recalled that experience of being love very often since then either.
In recent years the technology of brain-scanning and the exploding field of neuroscience has demonstrated just how "plastic"--neuroscience-speak for we can change fairly quickly--our brains actually are. While watching this documentary, and listening to the scientist describe the impact of mindfulness meditation focusing on love and compassion, the memory of my old style of meditation before I knew how "to do it right" triggered.
I wonder, I thought, after all these years, could I call that back? Well, my beautifully plastic brain confirmed that I could. I did my old-style-before-someone-taught-me-to-do-it-right meditation last night, this morning, and again this evening. I can already tell a profound impact. I've been totally at ease today, ticking off things on my list that normally might have been agitating. I was just calm. I have had the sense that I have been smiling all day.
"Happy" describes a psychological phenomenon called "hedonic adaptation." As we pursue, and then get, more material satisfaction, recognition, or whatever flips our personal switches, initially we are happier, but quickly we adjust to that level of gratification. To be happy again, we need to notch it up a level: we continue adapting and needing more and more gratification to produce shorter and shorter periods of happiness.
With today's little experiment, I've been able to be happy all day, even during a rather contentious business meeting, with no external gratification. I came home and cleaned my house--not my favorite thing to do--and I was consciously aware that I was relaxed and happy while I was doing it. I expect that the many years that I did this kind of meditation made it quicker for me to plug into the part of my brain that still remembers it, but the research would indicate that anyone could do it in two weeks. We don't need the hedonic pleasures. Happiness lies within us. It is there for the cost of just loving.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Just Keep Showing Up
I wrote yesterday's post--90% is just showing up"--immediately before going to bed, as I often do. You might say I slept on it. In this morning's meditation, it came that there is no where that "just showing up" is more important than prayer and meditation.
Spiritual teacher Caroline Myss has spoken about our "prayer bank accounts." My understanding of this concept is that we show up every day (preferably at the same time) to either pray or meditate, or some combination. We show up even when we have nothing to pray for or about. We just do it. Day in, day out. The term "practice" is often applied to our spiritual development because like a sport or a musical instrument that we are learning, we do it every day to get better at it. We develop spiritual "muscle" that we can call on when we least expect it.
Myss says that if we make these daily deposits to our "bank accounts," then some day, when we really need to pray for or about something, we have a relationship with whatever we call the listener on the other end of the line when we commune in that way. We don't need the kind of small talk that we usually use to get to know someone; we already have an intimate relationship. We can go deep...fast.
In my meditation this morning what kept coming up was that I haven't been so good in recent years about that regular practice. As I sat, I pictured myself in a workshop years ago when we stopped and meditated. Afterward, the leader said that she'd been doing that for years, and she'd never seen anyone settle into their meditation as quickly as I did. At the time, I'd been writing Leading from the Heart, and I began each day by meditating at least an hour a day and sometimes up to three. I'd meditate until I was inspired to write; then I'd get up and let the words flow through me. The point is that the practice I'd been building paid off in the workshop.
In recent years, there have been many days when I neither prayed nor meditated. Other days I fell asleep as I tried to meditate. Some days my prayers were one-liners: "Please guide my work today to the Higher Good." My prayer muscles have gone soft. But every day this year--all 12 of them, and twice a day since my retreat started. I've taken time to sit with God.
In the beginning I was very fidgety. Sometimes I'd think I had been sitting a while, only to open my eyes and discover that only three or four minutes had passed. I started setting the timer on my iPhone for 20 minutes. When I would think I'd been at the practice forever and the timer hadn't gone off, I'd look to see if I'd forgotten to start it. I had.
This week, I've noticed that the flow is much easier. I actually pray and meditate for the full 20 minutes, and the timer goes off before I look. Yeah! I notice the breathing is more natural, and I easily get insights like the one today about just showing up for spiritual practice. Floating in gently like a feather, totally without the labor I experienced even two weeks ago. I believe Myss would say that I am making deposits to my prayer bank account.
I fully understand that it is the beginning of a new year, and many people start new things as resolutions. I haven't been one of them. I have usually taken some time at the New Year to reflect and assess how I'm doing at moving toward my intentions. Then, I've made the effort to course correct. I'd like to think that is what I am doing now. I've shown up to write this blog every day. I've exercised at least 15 minutes, and today, thanks to a social event away from the Metro, I hoofed 75 minutes on a springlike January day in Washington. And, I've shown up for spiritual practice every day. Each of these things are getting easier each day that I do them.
When I am back to work, I understand that it will be harder, but now that I think about it, I am sure that these three practices are more important than anything else I could do for myself. Maybe that's been part of my problem in the past: I have thought that showing up for others was more important than showing up for things I do for myself. (That sounds like another post.) Not something I've been good about in the past, but it is a new year, and each is a new day in which I can just keep showing up.
Spiritual teacher Caroline Myss has spoken about our "prayer bank accounts." My understanding of this concept is that we show up every day (preferably at the same time) to either pray or meditate, or some combination. We show up even when we have nothing to pray for or about. We just do it. Day in, day out. The term "practice" is often applied to our spiritual development because like a sport or a musical instrument that we are learning, we do it every day to get better at it. We develop spiritual "muscle" that we can call on when we least expect it.
Myss says that if we make these daily deposits to our "bank accounts," then some day, when we really need to pray for or about something, we have a relationship with whatever we call the listener on the other end of the line when we commune in that way. We don't need the kind of small talk that we usually use to get to know someone; we already have an intimate relationship. We can go deep...fast.
In my meditation this morning what kept coming up was that I haven't been so good in recent years about that regular practice. As I sat, I pictured myself in a workshop years ago when we stopped and meditated. Afterward, the leader said that she'd been doing that for years, and she'd never seen anyone settle into their meditation as quickly as I did. At the time, I'd been writing Leading from the Heart, and I began each day by meditating at least an hour a day and sometimes up to three. I'd meditate until I was inspired to write; then I'd get up and let the words flow through me. The point is that the practice I'd been building paid off in the workshop.
In recent years, there have been many days when I neither prayed nor meditated. Other days I fell asleep as I tried to meditate. Some days my prayers were one-liners: "Please guide my work today to the Higher Good." My prayer muscles have gone soft. But every day this year--all 12 of them, and twice a day since my retreat started. I've taken time to sit with God.
In the beginning I was very fidgety. Sometimes I'd think I had been sitting a while, only to open my eyes and discover that only three or four minutes had passed. I started setting the timer on my iPhone for 20 minutes. When I would think I'd been at the practice forever and the timer hadn't gone off, I'd look to see if I'd forgotten to start it. I had.
This week, I've noticed that the flow is much easier. I actually pray and meditate for the full 20 minutes, and the timer goes off before I look. Yeah! I notice the breathing is more natural, and I easily get insights like the one today about just showing up for spiritual practice. Floating in gently like a feather, totally without the labor I experienced even two weeks ago. I believe Myss would say that I am making deposits to my prayer bank account.
I fully understand that it is the beginning of a new year, and many people start new things as resolutions. I haven't been one of them. I have usually taken some time at the New Year to reflect and assess how I'm doing at moving toward my intentions. Then, I've made the effort to course correct. I'd like to think that is what I am doing now. I've shown up to write this blog every day. I've exercised at least 15 minutes, and today, thanks to a social event away from the Metro, I hoofed 75 minutes on a springlike January day in Washington. And, I've shown up for spiritual practice every day. Each of these things are getting easier each day that I do them.
When I am back to work, I understand that it will be harder, but now that I think about it, I am sure that these three practices are more important than anything else I could do for myself. Maybe that's been part of my problem in the past: I have thought that showing up for others was more important than showing up for things I do for myself. (That sounds like another post.) Not something I've been good about in the past, but it is a new year, and each is a new day in which I can just keep showing up.
Thursday, January 5, 2017
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
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.)
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.)
Friday, December 2, 2016
No! Not that!!
Sometime in 1993, I think it was, that I loaded the trunk of my car with five or six (maybe more) bankers boxes and drove two hours from Eugene to Portland, Oregon. I was delivering a professional treasure trove to a friend from graduate school.
Before going to graduate school I'd been a human resource (HR) director and employment manager. Actually, since I started working on my 16th birthday, I'd been working in HR. I developed skills and experience as a teenager that many of my peers wouldn't have for a decade. Because I had the experience, I ended up working my way through college in HR jobs. Then, that was where I got jobs afterward. I never even considered if I enjoyed these jobs, they were pretty good jobs in a small city that didn't have many good jobs. So, I did them.
Although I had the distinct intention when I returned to grad school that I would work in organization development (OD) when I finished, when I actually did finish and started my business, what I knew how to market was HR. So, not surprisingly, people hired me to do HR. Within a week of starting my business, I was booked three months in advance--what every new business owner hopes to happen. However, 18 months into the business, I realized that most of my projects had been the work I'd done before grad school and that I'd hoped to leave behind, rather than OD work that I had hoped to do.
I recall a crystallizing moment when I sat at my desk and knew I just couldn't/wouldn't do that work anymore.
In typical fashion, the Universe very shortly sent me two tests. I got two opportunities for work that were HR opportunities that I had just pledged not to do, and one of the projects was with a company I'd been trying to get work from since I'd hung out my shingle. I nicely declined, and I put each in touch with someone I knew who would do a good job for them.
Gulp! I hadn't turned work away before. Then, crickets....for about two weeks. I stood my ground and waited.
Finally, the calls started. Two nice OD jobs landed in the same week, and each would be four- to six-month assignments. I had turned the corner. During that quiet two weeks the temptation to go out and market had been great, but I stayed true to what my heart was telling me.
All that is the background for my trip to Portland. My friend did want to do HR consulting, but had only been working in the field since we graduated. I called her and said I wasn't going to take anymore HR projects. I had a lot of books, articles, and other resources. Did she want them? She was delighted. In that two-hour road trip, I separated from my HR umbilical cord.
Last Sunday afternoon I sat on the floor of my bedroom closet, trying to figure out what did and what did not feel like it was part of my future. I was able to throw away about a box and half of stuff that I would never have packed up if I'd had taken time to sort before packing. (See Endings/ Beginnings, 11/25/16.) There were things that left me stone cold, like the four-inch thick federal procurement manual. Definitely not feeling it in my future. And, there were a very few items, like the book Awakening the Heroes Within by Carol Pearson, that I would have loved to sit and devour in the moment. Definite save those.
In the zone somewhere between "definitely go" and "definitely stay," was a box into which I put the gray zone items. I just didn't know...or at least I didn't think I knew.
As gently as the moment 23 years ago, when I knew in an instant that I could no longer take HR projects, I knew "No! Not that!! None of it...." None of what was in the gray zone is part of my future. I will continue to go through boxes to make sure there are no "definitely stay" items, but I expect that almost none of it will stay.
I don't like to throw things away...especially books, but this time I have no one that I can pass my resources on to like I did my grad school friend. To just throw things away will really be an exercise for me, but I know there is no turning back. I have less clarity about what will be in my life after December 21 than I do what won't, but 23 years ago, I had to sit and wait for two weeks...and then I did know what I wanted my future would be.
For at least a year I've been saying that I felt pregnant. Now I've never been pregnant, so I am not sure how I know what the feels like, but it does feel like something is gestating deep inside me, and it wants to be born. I just don't know what.
I've written that our hearts are the compass to our lives and written on the backs for each of us is what is our true north--what is exactly right for us. The only thing I have clarity about right now is that I need to clear out the static which keeps me from hearing what is next.
Earlier this week I was doing an exercise in the workplace setting where a colleague and I were supposed to interview each other. The first question she asked was, "What are you hungry for?" I didn't think even a split second before saying, "Time, sleep, exercise, meditation..." Those were not thoughts; that was truth, completely skipping my brain and spewing forth without thought. I just knew. Like I just know what isn't in my future.
Every item on my "hungry" list was an activity that help me hear where the compass on the back side of my heart is pointing me--helping me connect with whatever is gestating.
I will continue cleaning out, even knowing that I will throw good stuff out to just remove it from my energy field. When December 21 arrives, I want to send a very clear message to my heart that I am getting rid of static. Then, I will bring in the static-clearing activities that I shared with my interview partner. That is my future.
Before going to graduate school I'd been a human resource (HR) director and employment manager. Actually, since I started working on my 16th birthday, I'd been working in HR. I developed skills and experience as a teenager that many of my peers wouldn't have for a decade. Because I had the experience, I ended up working my way through college in HR jobs. Then, that was where I got jobs afterward. I never even considered if I enjoyed these jobs, they were pretty good jobs in a small city that didn't have many good jobs. So, I did them.
Although I had the distinct intention when I returned to grad school that I would work in organization development (OD) when I finished, when I actually did finish and started my business, what I knew how to market was HR. So, not surprisingly, people hired me to do HR. Within a week of starting my business, I was booked three months in advance--what every new business owner hopes to happen. However, 18 months into the business, I realized that most of my projects had been the work I'd done before grad school and that I'd hoped to leave behind, rather than OD work that I had hoped to do.
I recall a crystallizing moment when I sat at my desk and knew I just couldn't/wouldn't do that work anymore.
In typical fashion, the Universe very shortly sent me two tests. I got two opportunities for work that were HR opportunities that I had just pledged not to do, and one of the projects was with a company I'd been trying to get work from since I'd hung out my shingle. I nicely declined, and I put each in touch with someone I knew who would do a good job for them.
Gulp! I hadn't turned work away before. Then, crickets....for about two weeks. I stood my ground and waited.
Finally, the calls started. Two nice OD jobs landed in the same week, and each would be four- to six-month assignments. I had turned the corner. During that quiet two weeks the temptation to go out and market had been great, but I stayed true to what my heart was telling me.
All that is the background for my trip to Portland. My friend did want to do HR consulting, but had only been working in the field since we graduated. I called her and said I wasn't going to take anymore HR projects. I had a lot of books, articles, and other resources. Did she want them? She was delighted. In that two-hour road trip, I separated from my HR umbilical cord.
Last Sunday afternoon I sat on the floor of my bedroom closet, trying to figure out what did and what did not feel like it was part of my future. I was able to throw away about a box and half of stuff that I would never have packed up if I'd had taken time to sort before packing. (See Endings/ Beginnings, 11/25/16.) There were things that left me stone cold, like the four-inch thick federal procurement manual. Definitely not feeling it in my future. And, there were a very few items, like the book Awakening the Heroes Within by Carol Pearson, that I would have loved to sit and devour in the moment. Definite save those.
In the zone somewhere between "definitely go" and "definitely stay," was a box into which I put the gray zone items. I just didn't know...or at least I didn't think I knew.
As gently as the moment 23 years ago, when I knew in an instant that I could no longer take HR projects, I knew "No! Not that!! None of it...." None of what was in the gray zone is part of my future. I will continue to go through boxes to make sure there are no "definitely stay" items, but I expect that almost none of it will stay.
I don't like to throw things away...especially books, but this time I have no one that I can pass my resources on to like I did my grad school friend. To just throw things away will really be an exercise for me, but I know there is no turning back. I have less clarity about what will be in my life after December 21 than I do what won't, but 23 years ago, I had to sit and wait for two weeks...and then I did know what I wanted my future would be.
For at least a year I've been saying that I felt pregnant. Now I've never been pregnant, so I am not sure how I know what the feels like, but it does feel like something is gestating deep inside me, and it wants to be born. I just don't know what.
I've written that our hearts are the compass to our lives and written on the backs for each of us is what is our true north--what is exactly right for us. The only thing I have clarity about right now is that I need to clear out the static which keeps me from hearing what is next.
Earlier this week I was doing an exercise in the workplace setting where a colleague and I were supposed to interview each other. The first question she asked was, "What are you hungry for?" I didn't think even a split second before saying, "Time, sleep, exercise, meditation..." Those were not thoughts; that was truth, completely skipping my brain and spewing forth without thought. I just knew. Like I just know what isn't in my future.
Every item on my "hungry" list was an activity that help me hear where the compass on the back side of my heart is pointing me--helping me connect with whatever is gestating.
I will continue cleaning out, even knowing that I will throw good stuff out to just remove it from my energy field. When December 21 arrives, I want to send a very clear message to my heart that I am getting rid of static. Then, I will bring in the static-clearing activities that I shared with my interview partner. That is my future.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Not being who I thought I was...really...
In my March 12 post, I wrote about converging forces, demanding that I know more about who I am. ("What's Going On With Me?") I shared how while watching the "Finding Your Roots" television series with Harvard professor Louis Henry Gates in parallel with the "Outlander" series, set in Scotland, a place from whence many of my ancestors embarked upon their journeys to North America, I suddenly became extremely curious about my own ancestry. So, I swabbed my mouth and sent it off for information about my DNA.
A couple weeks ago, the results arrived. I was shocked. I felt like that man in the commercial, who had spent his whole life thinking his ancestors were German. He had learned German customs and dances and even acquired traditional German costumes. Then, his DNA determined that he was Scottish.
My results weren't quite that different. I have a very Irish name, and quite accurately, I knew that I was Scottish and Irish with a little Dutch and French. The DNA tests confirmed all that with a bit more broad representation from the British Isles.
I also learned that I have 7% ancestry from Northern Spain, a place that I've gravitated to over the last half dozen years, and I've said many times that I could retire to Barcelona in a heartbeat. Walking the riverfront in Bilbao on a Sunday afternoon three years ago felt like home. Who knew that there might have been an ancestral attraction to the region? Certainly not me. Perhaps even more shocking was the 7% from the bridge between Finland and Russia and Scandinavia. Really? Never heard anything about that before.
The real shocker, however, was not in these surprise pieces that are part of my ancestry, but in what is not in my ancestry...at all.
For generations of my family, the mythology has been about my Native American great-great-grandmother. I have been curious about it since I was a little girl. One of my favorite dolls as a child was a Native squaw with a papoose strapped to her back. As I matured, my grandmother told me how I had the Native cheekbones of her grandmother, as did my father. When sorting through photographs after my father's death, I asked my great-aunt (my grandmother's sister) who the woman was in a very old photograph. She reported it was her Native great-grandmother.
As I grew older, I have been intrigued in learning about Native customs and have even incorporated some in my coaching and consulting practice. On occasion, I've made a traditional Indian pudding, and I've loved reading and occasionally presenting on the foods of the first Thanksgiving. I've even had going to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian to work with their genealogists to learn more about my Native ancestry on my to-do list for several years.
Fiction. All fiction. Like the guy, who needed to trade in his lederhosen for a kilt, my DNA proves that our family mythology was complete fiction. Zero percent. I am more than a little curious about how such a story could have passed along for several generations, even through those like my great-aunt and grandmother, who actually knew this mystery woman. But, I can't dispute the science.
This shocking news arrives at a time when I am really trying to figure out who I am on a more existential level, The combination has left me feeling like I am in the midst of a hurricane with everything I've believed about myself spinning around me, and most of it blowing away.
For most of three decades, I have either been passionate about preparing for or having a career in organization development (OD) and coaching. OD is a broad enough field that my career has morphed in a number of directions since finishing graduate school: putting together a joint-venture in China, taking a corporation global, leading communication and change management for a project across the whole federal government, leading a culture change that dramatically improved satisfaction in the organization, and even facilitating a 20-year roadmap for an organization. I particularly enjoyed several years during which I helped executives as they sought to spiritually align the work lives and businesses with their spiritual purpose.
My coaching work has gone in as many directions as the people I've coached. Writing has provided a rich means for processing what I've learned about myself and others along the way. How could I not love this work that made the lives of people at work so much more satisfying?
How could I not, indeed? But like my mythical Native ancestry, when I work in OD these days, it feels like I've put on someone else's clothes that neither fit nor suit me anymore. While I still love to write, and when I have the bandwidth, I love writing this blog, I no longer have no passion for writing books. I have at least eight or nine that I've started over the years, and I can't even muster the interest to finish an hour's work that would be needed to finish publishing The Game Called Life electronically. One hour! And it has been on my desk for 18 months awaiting a handful of edits.
It is a very dark and rainy day in Washington, so I decided to skip church this morning and have an extended time of prayer and meditation about what's next. To say the things that floated through my meditations were all over the map is an understatement. Working on a political campaign, working with a non-governmental organization (NGO), especially with refugees, doing something artistic, developing gluten-free foods...
The next wave took me deeper in my core existence. I wrote: feels like home, service, positive, helpful, resourceful, solution-focused, learning, solid relationships, and using my significant experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. In many ways, the shocking DNA results seem like a message to me to just give up anything I've thought before and just make myself available--like stripping away everything I've thought about work and making myself available for what God wants me to do next.
I've been in similar situations before, and one time I packed my house and moved across the country. What followed over the next few years was amazing--totally in flow with the divine. Another time, I dillied and dallied for 30 months. Eventually the transition has worked out, but not nearly as easily. I've often wondered what would have happened if I'd followed 30 months earlier. That is a mystery of time.
I truly hope that this transition will not require a move--I love my home and Washington. However, I do know that I will be available when and where I am guided. I will let God be God.
A couple weeks ago, the results arrived. I was shocked. I felt like that man in the commercial, who had spent his whole life thinking his ancestors were German. He had learned German customs and dances and even acquired traditional German costumes. Then, his DNA determined that he was Scottish.
My results weren't quite that different. I have a very Irish name, and quite accurately, I knew that I was Scottish and Irish with a little Dutch and French. The DNA tests confirmed all that with a bit more broad representation from the British Isles.
I also learned that I have 7% ancestry from Northern Spain, a place that I've gravitated to over the last half dozen years, and I've said many times that I could retire to Barcelona in a heartbeat. Walking the riverfront in Bilbao on a Sunday afternoon three years ago felt like home. Who knew that there might have been an ancestral attraction to the region? Certainly not me. Perhaps even more shocking was the 7% from the bridge between Finland and Russia and Scandinavia. Really? Never heard anything about that before.
The real shocker, however, was not in these surprise pieces that are part of my ancestry, but in what is not in my ancestry...at all.
For generations of my family, the mythology has been about my Native American great-great-grandmother. I have been curious about it since I was a little girl. One of my favorite dolls as a child was a Native squaw with a papoose strapped to her back. As I matured, my grandmother told me how I had the Native cheekbones of her grandmother, as did my father. When sorting through photographs after my father's death, I asked my great-aunt (my grandmother's sister) who the woman was in a very old photograph. She reported it was her Native great-grandmother.
As I grew older, I have been intrigued in learning about Native customs and have even incorporated some in my coaching and consulting practice. On occasion, I've made a traditional Indian pudding, and I've loved reading and occasionally presenting on the foods of the first Thanksgiving. I've even had going to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian to work with their genealogists to learn more about my Native ancestry on my to-do list for several years.
Fiction. All fiction. Like the guy, who needed to trade in his lederhosen for a kilt, my DNA proves that our family mythology was complete fiction. Zero percent. I am more than a little curious about how such a story could have passed along for several generations, even through those like my great-aunt and grandmother, who actually knew this mystery woman. But, I can't dispute the science.
This shocking news arrives at a time when I am really trying to figure out who I am on a more existential level, The combination has left me feeling like I am in the midst of a hurricane with everything I've believed about myself spinning around me, and most of it blowing away.
For most of three decades, I have either been passionate about preparing for or having a career in organization development (OD) and coaching. OD is a broad enough field that my career has morphed in a number of directions since finishing graduate school: putting together a joint-venture in China, taking a corporation global, leading communication and change management for a project across the whole federal government, leading a culture change that dramatically improved satisfaction in the organization, and even facilitating a 20-year roadmap for an organization. I particularly enjoyed several years during which I helped executives as they sought to spiritually align the work lives and businesses with their spiritual purpose.
My coaching work has gone in as many directions as the people I've coached. Writing has provided a rich means for processing what I've learned about myself and others along the way. How could I not love this work that made the lives of people at work so much more satisfying?
How could I not, indeed? But like my mythical Native ancestry, when I work in OD these days, it feels like I've put on someone else's clothes that neither fit nor suit me anymore. While I still love to write, and when I have the bandwidth, I love writing this blog, I no longer have no passion for writing books. I have at least eight or nine that I've started over the years, and I can't even muster the interest to finish an hour's work that would be needed to finish publishing The Game Called Life electronically. One hour! And it has been on my desk for 18 months awaiting a handful of edits.
It is a very dark and rainy day in Washington, so I decided to skip church this morning and have an extended time of prayer and meditation about what's next. To say the things that floated through my meditations were all over the map is an understatement. Working on a political campaign, working with a non-governmental organization (NGO), especially with refugees, doing something artistic, developing gluten-free foods...
The next wave took me deeper in my core existence. I wrote: feels like home, service, positive, helpful, resourceful, solution-focused, learning, solid relationships, and using my significant experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. In many ways, the shocking DNA results seem like a message to me to just give up anything I've thought before and just make myself available--like stripping away everything I've thought about work and making myself available for what God wants me to do next.
I've been in similar situations before, and one time I packed my house and moved across the country. What followed over the next few years was amazing--totally in flow with the divine. Another time, I dillied and dallied for 30 months. Eventually the transition has worked out, but not nearly as easily. I've often wondered what would have happened if I'd followed 30 months earlier. That is a mystery of time.
I truly hope that this transition will not require a move--I love my home and Washington. However, I do know that I will be available when and where I am guided. I will let God be God.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
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.
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.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
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...
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
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...
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Preparing for the Plunge
For many years I took a four-day silent retreat twice a year. Recently, I realized that I haven't done one for at least 24 months. I made that discovery because I was feeling scattered and without clear direction, spiritually exhausted. I plan to take a Staycation for the week before the Fourth of July, and while I really want to get outdoors and have some fun, I know that I must devote some of that time to looking inward and soul searching. I decided I will meditate for the first two days.
I believe I started doing these retreats in about 1990, and what I continue to be amazed at is how reliable the Universe is in getting things stirred up as my retreat approaches. Since we are now a week out, I've had books thrown on my path, events in the news, job prospects that take me in different directions, and even a "flower reading" which was a Christmas gift that finally just occurred yesterday.
"Consider the vastness of possibilities," reader Robin Masiewicz had said at one point. Funny that she said that because I've increasingly felt boxed in by the possibilities my life seems to hold. That, you see, is why I need these retreats: they seem to open new and vast possibilities that I miss when sucked into my day-to-day routine.
So, I am being very intentional about embracing all the things on my path that I know will fertilize the meditation process, knowing that vastness is out there somewhere and soon will be in me.
I believe I started doing these retreats in about 1990, and what I continue to be amazed at is how reliable the Universe is in getting things stirred up as my retreat approaches. Since we are now a week out, I've had books thrown on my path, events in the news, job prospects that take me in different directions, and even a "flower reading" which was a Christmas gift that finally just occurred yesterday.
"Consider the vastness of possibilities," reader Robin Masiewicz had said at one point. Funny that she said that because I've increasingly felt boxed in by the possibilities my life seems to hold. That, you see, is why I need these retreats: they seem to open new and vast possibilities that I miss when sucked into my day-to-day routine.
So, I am being very intentional about embracing all the things on my path that I know will fertilize the meditation process, knowing that vastness is out there somewhere and soon will be in me.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Finding My Center
As those of you who are regular readers know, I've been struggling to get back to my center--where I know I am love and where I know I am being who I am in my heart. I had lots of things I should be doing today, but when I awakened, I knew the most important of those was to find my way home.
Even as I was first becoming conscious, my heart was racing with panic. As all the things I have to do this week chased their ways into my psyche, every bit of me went into overdrive...and I was hardly awake. I recall thing it was like playing tennis against 20 people, each volleying something my way.
"I am love," I said to myself. Usually that brings me down, but not today.
I sat up cross-legged in bed and attempted to meditate. Even concentrating on my breathing was a challenge because it was shallow and fast. Pulling my attention to my diaphragm, I focused on slowing and deepening my breathing. I could not make it work. My fallback position for meditation is to visualize Paulina Spring in Central Oregon. (See "The Headwaters," 5/1/14) That will be the answer, I thought. My heart continued to race. My breathing erratically speeded. What was I to do?
What I would have given to be able to jump into sweats and race over to the Spring and be lulled into the peace amidst the chaotic spring waters. That is it, I thought. Jumping out of bed, I grabbed my iPhone and spun through my tunes. There it was: "Babbling Brook," by Joe Baker. I had downloaded it a couple years ago for just such a time. Popping in my ear buds, I straightened up in meditation posture again.
Slowly, the sounds of nature brought me home. It's almost as if God knew that we were going to need babbling brooks when the world was created. The gift of nature for times when we need to be still and can't quite find our way home. When I felt myself breathing calmly again, I opened my eyes. Just 20 minutes but yet a whole different experience of the world about me. Not a thought about all the things I have to do this week, and mostly they stayed at bay all day.
I did almost nothing I needed to do today, and it was perfect. I just listened to my center and did what I needed to do to "stay home." A walk on a late summer's day, followed by an ice coffee and frozen yogurt. A nap. Reading for my vacation. Time playing in the kitchen, creating healthy foods to support my intention to refocus on health this week.
I've written before about the term "sin," originally an archery term, which means that we aimed, missed, and need to adjust the aim. We express an intention, we head in that direction, and when we fall short, we adjust our aim back to the core intention. Whatever this reaiming process in which I now find myself ends up being, it must include finding my center every day. My babbling brook will help me start my day tomorrow, and it will be with me on my desk during the day. I will use the gift of nature to keep me home.
Even as I was first becoming conscious, my heart was racing with panic. As all the things I have to do this week chased their ways into my psyche, every bit of me went into overdrive...and I was hardly awake. I recall thing it was like playing tennis against 20 people, each volleying something my way.
"I am love," I said to myself. Usually that brings me down, but not today.
I sat up cross-legged in bed and attempted to meditate. Even concentrating on my breathing was a challenge because it was shallow and fast. Pulling my attention to my diaphragm, I focused on slowing and deepening my breathing. I could not make it work. My fallback position for meditation is to visualize Paulina Spring in Central Oregon. (See "The Headwaters," 5/1/14) That will be the answer, I thought. My heart continued to race. My breathing erratically speeded. What was I to do?
What I would have given to be able to jump into sweats and race over to the Spring and be lulled into the peace amidst the chaotic spring waters. That is it, I thought. Jumping out of bed, I grabbed my iPhone and spun through my tunes. There it was: "Babbling Brook," by Joe Baker. I had downloaded it a couple years ago for just such a time. Popping in my ear buds, I straightened up in meditation posture again.
Slowly, the sounds of nature brought me home. It's almost as if God knew that we were going to need babbling brooks when the world was created. The gift of nature for times when we need to be still and can't quite find our way home. When I felt myself breathing calmly again, I opened my eyes. Just 20 minutes but yet a whole different experience of the world about me. Not a thought about all the things I have to do this week, and mostly they stayed at bay all day.
I did almost nothing I needed to do today, and it was perfect. I just listened to my center and did what I needed to do to "stay home." A walk on a late summer's day, followed by an ice coffee and frozen yogurt. A nap. Reading for my vacation. Time playing in the kitchen, creating healthy foods to support my intention to refocus on health this week.
I've written before about the term "sin," originally an archery term, which means that we aimed, missed, and need to adjust the aim. We express an intention, we head in that direction, and when we fall short, we adjust our aim back to the core intention. Whatever this reaiming process in which I now find myself ends up being, it must include finding my center every day. My babbling brook will help me start my day tomorrow, and it will be with me on my desk during the day. I will use the gift of nature to keep me home.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Giving Thanks
In the United States tomorrow afternoon or evening begins what for many is a four-day Thanksgiving holiday. The roots of this holiday, one of the biggest of the year in the States, go back to the earliest days of the settling of North America. Marked by family traditions of food, the two things that are common to most menus are roast turkey and dressing. Almost as much a part of standard Thanksgiving fare in recent years has been football on television and the onset of holiday shopping season on "Black Friday," the day when most merchants move into the "black"-- profit column -- for the year.
Other countries have holidays of gratitude, such as a similar one in October in Canada. In some countries, such as Germany's Erntedankfest, the holiday is more driven by local and regional custom. But for most, the holiday comes at the end of the harvest season, when the larders are full, and the bounty of the year is most apparent.
For at least a dozen years, maybe longer, amidst the food, football, and shopping, I have turned to a practice that reminds me of the reason for this holiday. My custom of Thanksgiving (or the day or two before) has been to have a gratitude meditation. In that meditation, I go through every single day of the year in my mind's eye and feel gratitude. A stroll through my calendar beforehand is helpful, but it is amazing how much comes to memory as I mentally stroll, day by day, through the whole year.
My gratitude meditation is something of a condensed version of the gratitude practice I wrote about earlier. (Gratitude, 9/24/13) Complaints don't exist: everything is a gift. As I go through my days one by one, I feel gratitude. A new client, an interesting piece of work, or perhaps a new friend...I feel in my body and my soul those experiences. I literally let my heart run over with joy and gratitude.
Now for most people there are three kinds of days: really good or pretty good ones, ones that we would prefer not to live through again, and nondescript days, which kind of blend together. In the 365 days that make the year, most of us have a fair distribution of all three types. The intention of the gratitude meditation is to find something to be truly grateful for each and every day.
Those days that I would prefer to not think about force me to remember that everything is a gift and to find the gift. The first cold that I'd had in over 20 years knocked me flat for almost three weeks: my over-tired body got rested, and I read a book that had been on my nightstand for weeks. The eye surgery that didn't go so well: I am so grateful that the other eye works and has learned to compensate. You get the idea.
Now, what about those unremarkable days? I think they are the very best. When I meditate on those days, they make me realize how truly blessed I am. A rainy day? I am so grateful I have an umbrella. The garbage truck that awakened me early on my day off? The sun coming up over the trees in the woods behind my apartment was spectacular.
On one of those ordinary days I received a LinkedIn message from a man in Pakistan. He'd bought a used copy of The Alchemy of Fear a decade ago from a street vendor for a penny: he said it changed his life. I was so delighted that I had tears in my eyes walking down the street, reading the message on my iPhone.
Maybe I just remember that I have a roof over my head, and I've had food in my belly every day for the year. This year, I will definitely remember how grateful I am to be writing this blog, to have had time to work on the electronic version of The Game Called Life, and for the government shutdown that made those things possible.
The gratitude meditation has never failed to transform me. One holiday when I was traveling, I did the gratitude meditation on an airplane, and I was certain I would levitate right out into the clouds. This discipline puts everything in order, and I know what is really important. As I write about it, I am so looking forward to this year's reflections. I have something else to be grateful for: I get off early tomorrow, which means I have a perfect hole in my holiday calendar to do my gratitude mediation.
For those in the United States: Happy Thanksgiving!
For others: Happy Giving Thanks!
Other countries have holidays of gratitude, such as a similar one in October in Canada. In some countries, such as Germany's Erntedankfest, the holiday is more driven by local and regional custom. But for most, the holiday comes at the end of the harvest season, when the larders are full, and the bounty of the year is most apparent.
For at least a dozen years, maybe longer, amidst the food, football, and shopping, I have turned to a practice that reminds me of the reason for this holiday. My custom of Thanksgiving (or the day or two before) has been to have a gratitude meditation. In that meditation, I go through every single day of the year in my mind's eye and feel gratitude. A stroll through my calendar beforehand is helpful, but it is amazing how much comes to memory as I mentally stroll, day by day, through the whole year.
My gratitude meditation is something of a condensed version of the gratitude practice I wrote about earlier. (Gratitude, 9/24/13) Complaints don't exist: everything is a gift. As I go through my days one by one, I feel gratitude. A new client, an interesting piece of work, or perhaps a new friend...I feel in my body and my soul those experiences. I literally let my heart run over with joy and gratitude.
Now for most people there are three kinds of days: really good or pretty good ones, ones that we would prefer not to live through again, and nondescript days, which kind of blend together. In the 365 days that make the year, most of us have a fair distribution of all three types. The intention of the gratitude meditation is to find something to be truly grateful for each and every day.
Those days that I would prefer to not think about force me to remember that everything is a gift and to find the gift. The first cold that I'd had in over 20 years knocked me flat for almost three weeks: my over-tired body got rested, and I read a book that had been on my nightstand for weeks. The eye surgery that didn't go so well: I am so grateful that the other eye works and has learned to compensate. You get the idea.
Now, what about those unremarkable days? I think they are the very best. When I meditate on those days, they make me realize how truly blessed I am. A rainy day? I am so grateful I have an umbrella. The garbage truck that awakened me early on my day off? The sun coming up over the trees in the woods behind my apartment was spectacular.
On one of those ordinary days I received a LinkedIn message from a man in Pakistan. He'd bought a used copy of The Alchemy of Fear a decade ago from a street vendor for a penny: he said it changed his life. I was so delighted that I had tears in my eyes walking down the street, reading the message on my iPhone.
Maybe I just remember that I have a roof over my head, and I've had food in my belly every day for the year. This year, I will definitely remember how grateful I am to be writing this blog, to have had time to work on the electronic version of The Game Called Life, and for the government shutdown that made those things possible.
The gratitude meditation has never failed to transform me. One holiday when I was traveling, I did the gratitude meditation on an airplane, and I was certain I would levitate right out into the clouds. This discipline puts everything in order, and I know what is really important. As I write about it, I am so looking forward to this year's reflections. I have something else to be grateful for: I get off early tomorrow, which means I have a perfect hole in my holiday calendar to do my gratitude mediation.
For those in the United States: Happy Thanksgiving!
For others: Happy Giving Thanks!
Sunday, November 3, 2013
God's paintbrush
When I looked out my living room window this morning, the view just took my breath away. I am fortunate enough to have a national park as my backdoor neighbor. In the last few days the fall color has burst out in its full glory. Closest to me are shades of orange and russet, but a cluster of brilliant yellow trees stands right in the middle of my panorama. Earlier today the sky was dark and brooding in the background, but a bright shaft of sunlight spotlighted that grove.
As the morning has progressed, the sky has brightened to a beautiful robin's egg blue with puffy white clouds, providing a perfect frame for the oranges closest to me. The wind blowing through the trees brings with it a similar tranquility to listening to the surf at the beach.
In the spring I have been equally taken with the tender lime greens of new leaves, interspersed with the violets of the native redbud trees. What a wonder! And, especially after a long and hard winter, what a blast of hope predicting an unending progression of color that will follow all spring and summer...leading up to the beauty that grabbed me today. Only God's paintbrush could have created such wonders.
How is it that we have been blessed with such wonder? It is certainly a gift and one that always lifts my heart when I am alert to that blessing. This morning I believe I experienced still a different purposefulness of nature's beauty.
I start each day by taking a few moments (occasionally it takes more than a few) to connect with the vibrational feeling in my heart that I believe is my connection to Love or to God...or probably they are the same. From what I have been able to tell, I can only do this when I am totally present. If my mind is drifting to yesterday or last week or jumping ahead to later today or tomorrow, I cannot get that feeling. So it was this morning that my mind seemed obsessed with something that happened in the past that I need to deal with tomorrow. Like a tennis match, my mind bounced from the past to the future back to the past...and so on...inconveniently skipping right over the "net" that is the present.
Determined not to start my day without being present and connected, I tried everything I could to will myself present. I tried for a very long time. I couldn't do it. Then I remembered to pray for help, and almost as I did, a snapshot of the landscape in the park flashed across my mind's eye. ("Remembering to Pray" 10/30/2013) Even in my imagining it was so beautiful that I gasped, and the moment I did, I felt the connection in my heart. After struggling for nearly an hour to connect, the beauty of God's paintbrush brought me into the present moment instantly. And...I have stayed there all day.
I have certainly had the experience of awe and wonder in the mountains, the Grand Canyon, and countless other places in nature. Today, I wonder if the purpose of those wonders is to call us present and to remind us of the omnipresence and timelessness of God's love for us, always there just for the price of recognizing it.
As the morning has progressed, the sky has brightened to a beautiful robin's egg blue with puffy white clouds, providing a perfect frame for the oranges closest to me. The wind blowing through the trees brings with it a similar tranquility to listening to the surf at the beach.
In the spring I have been equally taken with the tender lime greens of new leaves, interspersed with the violets of the native redbud trees. What a wonder! And, especially after a long and hard winter, what a blast of hope predicting an unending progression of color that will follow all spring and summer...leading up to the beauty that grabbed me today. Only God's paintbrush could have created such wonders.
How is it that we have been blessed with such wonder? It is certainly a gift and one that always lifts my heart when I am alert to that blessing. This morning I believe I experienced still a different purposefulness of nature's beauty.
I start each day by taking a few moments (occasionally it takes more than a few) to connect with the vibrational feeling in my heart that I believe is my connection to Love or to God...or probably they are the same. From what I have been able to tell, I can only do this when I am totally present. If my mind is drifting to yesterday or last week or jumping ahead to later today or tomorrow, I cannot get that feeling. So it was this morning that my mind seemed obsessed with something that happened in the past that I need to deal with tomorrow. Like a tennis match, my mind bounced from the past to the future back to the past...and so on...inconveniently skipping right over the "net" that is the present.
Determined not to start my day without being present and connected, I tried everything I could to will myself present. I tried for a very long time. I couldn't do it. Then I remembered to pray for help, and almost as I did, a snapshot of the landscape in the park flashed across my mind's eye. ("Remembering to Pray" 10/30/2013) Even in my imagining it was so beautiful that I gasped, and the moment I did, I felt the connection in my heart. After struggling for nearly an hour to connect, the beauty of God's paintbrush brought me into the present moment instantly. And...I have stayed there all day.
I have certainly had the experience of awe and wonder in the mountains, the Grand Canyon, and countless other places in nature. Today, I wonder if the purpose of those wonders is to call us present and to remind us of the omnipresence and timelessness of God's love for us, always there just for the price of recognizing it.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
The Peace That Passes All Understanding
As I was making myself something for dinner this evening, I began to think about what I might write in my blog tonight. Well, of course, that is all wrong. There I go thinking again: my writing is supposed to come from my heart and not my head.
Nonetheless, almost like an earworm, for the last 90 minutes, the phrase from the Christian New Testament of Philippians "the peace that passes all understanding" has been playing over and over again, echoing behind cooking sounds, the radio, the TV, and even as I ran water to wash my face and brush my teeth.
"The peace that passes all understanding." I thought it was a topic. Now, my heart knows it is a process. Just allow myself to sink into peace and let the words flow through me. Why the repetition? It was almost as if my soul was meditating me instead of me meditating. I've often talked with coaching clients about letting their prayers pray them. Like a mantra, the phrase "the peace that passes all understanding" meditated me.
The point of letting prayers pray us is to just listen deeply to what our soul wants to pray and to let go of the clutter with which our brains would clutter our communication channels. When I've prayed this way with clients, it is very slow, and the words just gently float out. Mostly what floats out are words of gratitude, and gratitude for such little things that most of us would never think to include in our prayers. It has been such a long time since I've let my prayers pray me. I think it is time. Our souls are so wise.
Nonetheless, almost like an earworm, for the last 90 minutes, the phrase from the Christian New Testament of Philippians "the peace that passes all understanding" has been playing over and over again, echoing behind cooking sounds, the radio, the TV, and even as I ran water to wash my face and brush my teeth.
"The peace that passes all understanding." I thought it was a topic. Now, my heart knows it is a process. Just allow myself to sink into peace and let the words flow through me. Why the repetition? It was almost as if my soul was meditating me instead of me meditating. I've often talked with coaching clients about letting their prayers pray them. Like a mantra, the phrase "the peace that passes all understanding" meditated me.
The point of letting prayers pray us is to just listen deeply to what our soul wants to pray and to let go of the clutter with which our brains would clutter our communication channels. When I've prayed this way with clients, it is very slow, and the words just gently float out. Mostly what floats out are words of gratitude, and gratitude for such little things that most of us would never think to include in our prayers. It has been such a long time since I've let my prayers pray me. I think it is time. Our souls are so wise.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Feeling My Heart
In less than a minute, I can transform my world. All I need to do is to close my eyes, concentrate on my heart space, and "breathe into my heart." I can't really explain how I "breathe into my heart." I understand the physiology of breathing which involves nose, mouth, windpipe, bronchial tubes, lungs, and diaphragm. There may be other parts, but I am fairly confident that the heart isn't one of them.
Yet, as I concentrate on my heart while I am breathing, something magical happens, my heart seems to get bigger and "vibrates"--a warm and wonderful sensation that defies description. Even more remarkable is when I imagine the breath coming through the front of my body directly into my heart. All I need to do is 3-5 of these "heart breaths" while saying "I AM." It reminds me that I am here to reflect God.
Every bit of tension melts from my body, my jaw relaxes, and suddenly I am able to be present only to what is in front of me.
What is really remarkable, other than a part of my body that isn't supposed to be involved in respiration actually "breathing" is that I don't do this more often during the day. I am back to work again today, and as much as I had pledged to stay present--to reflect God and receive God from others--I quickly slipped into autopilot. I was nearly home when I noticed the tension in my shoulders reminding me to breathe into my heart. Almost as fast as I had the thought and started to breathe, the magic happened, as it always does.
This should be a no-brainer, but clearly the only "no brain" part of it for me is no brain between my ears engaged in remembering how simple it is to connect. Another choice point for me--that time and place when I become conscious, recognize that I have a choice, and choose differently...in this moment. For this moment, I am choosing differently.
Yet, as I concentrate on my heart while I am breathing, something magical happens, my heart seems to get bigger and "vibrates"--a warm and wonderful sensation that defies description. Even more remarkable is when I imagine the breath coming through the front of my body directly into my heart. All I need to do is 3-5 of these "heart breaths" while saying "I AM." It reminds me that I am here to reflect God.
Every bit of tension melts from my body, my jaw relaxes, and suddenly I am able to be present only to what is in front of me.
What is really remarkable, other than a part of my body that isn't supposed to be involved in respiration actually "breathing" is that I don't do this more often during the day. I am back to work again today, and as much as I had pledged to stay present--to reflect God and receive God from others--I quickly slipped into autopilot. I was nearly home when I noticed the tension in my shoulders reminding me to breathe into my heart. Almost as fast as I had the thought and started to breathe, the magic happened, as it always does.
This should be a no-brainer, but clearly the only "no brain" part of it for me is no brain between my ears engaged in remembering how simple it is to connect. Another choice point for me--that time and place when I become conscious, recognize that I have a choice, and choose differently...in this moment. For this moment, I am choosing differently.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
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.
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.
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