Refracted Selves

 

Do you ever feel beat up by life events?  This last week was a little rough as I had my most critical database still having problems from the prior week, and a class I’m taking being very difficult for me, so I was feeling pretty stupid.  Friday after the day was spent in some final repair of database issues and trying to use the software at work to write my program for school (which kept failing on me); I had a little wine on the patio with my text book to try to grasp how I was going to write this program by understanding the concepts, the syntax, and the flow required.  Things were not only more clear, but the air was cool and yummy to my skin, my boyfriend was working in the house preparing for a visit from his mom and her boyfriend, the cats were chilling outside with me, and I realized that I still was indeed very happy.  Life wasn’t so bad after all.  There was a lot to be grateful for.  I had many wonderful blessings.  I had simply allowed things to get to me and activate my old “conditioned self.”

 

The Christian evangelist Joyce Meyer is always talking about “your do” vs. “your who.”  She talks about how important it is to know “who you are in God.”  This is essentially the same thing as the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness” as I see it in that it refers to understanding who you truly are underneath all of your ego states, and behaviors.  This allows us to become very aware of our actions and they become less of reaction and more of chosen and creative responses.  Ram Dass talks about the power of meditation training your mind so that you can become more and more aware of thoughts and the spaces between the thoughts.  Slowing down allows for more creative potential because instead of being caught up in what would be reactions buffeted by outside forces, we can make choices.  In that space of being able to make choices, we can have more input to our individual and shared destinies.  David Bohm talks about the nature of Dialogue and the importance of coming together by dropping our “tacit understandings” – of course our conditioned selves, and slowing the conversation and really listening to each other. 

Imagine a world where we want to sit down and listen to each other in this fashion.

 

So how do we get to who we really are underneath all of our behaviors, experiences, and prejudices?  I suppose that’s why they call it “the practice.”  The concept is simple, the challenge is difficult.  Personally, I have a hard time with this.  I have to tell myself a lot inside my head to keep quiet and listen.  Sometimes then I get angry that I have so much overhead to have to try to fight negativity from my conditioned self so I get caught in the anger and then miss a lot of what is happening anyway.  However, I experience more that way than if I had opened my mouth and disturbed things in an outward sense.  I heard someone on Audio Dharma say that someone else said “when you’re in the company of others, watch your mouth and when you’re in the company of self, watch your mind.”  (not sure of exact verbiage on that quote)

 

 

Adult children have a little extra work to do in that it is difficult to attend and heal unmet needs while trying to mature those needs up and not perpetuate bad habits.  However, here are some practical guidelines I’ve learned and am using:

1.       REALIZE the divine you at your core.  The behaviors are from living your samsara.  Bad behavior can come from conditioning and lies, and you don’t have to believe badly about yourself.  Much ugly stuff comes from pain, so grieve and nurture, but don’t get lost in the pity party and move on because life is to be relished and enjoyed.  Love and forgive yourself and others.

2.       Silence.  Breathe.  Slow down the thinking, projecting, speculating, and judging mind.  Stop and be receptive to what the real experience is.

3.        HALT – this is used in AA groups and refers to not letting yourself get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. My therapist added an S at the end to refer to taking care of yourself when you are sick.

4.       Nutrition, exercise, and meditation.  Your body and mind need to be in tip top shape for personal revolution.

5.       Focus on the positive such as loving relationships, beauty in the world and others, kindness, and positive changes.  Express gratitude as often as possible.  Use affirmations in any technique possible.  Watch your mind experience life as you are a soul having a human experience and not a human having spiritual experiences.

 

Remember that personality is really soul on brain-stuff.  Our primal soul-stuff light bubbles forth in various manifestations of refracted light.  We are not our past.  The past is gone so to use the present verb “are” is a lie.  We are the eternal aspect underneath.  That is something that is still there.  As we tune in to our eternal light selves, we can be more positive and make more positive change.  As we forgive our foibles and mistakes, let’s let that light shine through all of our little cracks and defects as we choose to creatively manifest our better selves.  Have fun!

Light Happens

How can one inspire oneself?  With aggravations at work, challenges in school, things to do to take care of the house, yard, and debts, realizing that age is creeping forth with yet so many adventures and fun things to do…  Life happens but yes…  LIFE HAPPENS!  Life is going to do its thing wherever it can, whenever it can, and in the most extreme of situations.  People, animals, and plants go through amazing challenges and still make it.  Even at the tiniest level, extremophiles thrive. 

It is a good thing to listen to your body.  Personally, I’ve been suffering from some non-descript issue in my leg and butt but because both legs hurt so badly I had begun to wonder if I had some horrible degenerative disease.  (Part of being an “adult child” as John Bradshaw describes it is “catastrophizing” – as it’s part of my PTSD and so I have to talk myself down a lot and use the Occam’s Razor line of reasoning.)  I quit such strenuous workouts at the gym thinking maybe I had overdone it since that was the most reasonable cause.  I asked my body and really listened to it this time since at one time my body answered after first saying to me “you’re not listening if you expect to hear the same thing.”  My body said to not use weights on my legs and just do the treadmill at a slow place to retrain how I walk.  It’s been a meditative process to focus so heavily on my stride and walk to avoid the pain.  My walk is moving from being so heavy on the fronts of the thighs to engaging more muscles in the backs of the legs and the butt.  It is a new walk that will sustain me for the last half of my life and I will be stronger as a result.

My boyfriends elbow strangely inflamed this past week and he has been icing it and taking aspiring and communicating with it:  checking in with it by touch and attention.  It is a good thing to listen to our bodies.  My sister has been put on new medication and has more energy and is responding to that energy by engaging herself more in activity.  Others are having body “life happens” experiences too.  Some are more serious than others.

My nephew is fighting a huge battle with Lymphona.  After 9 rounds of chemo and radiation, he just had a stem cell transplant from his youngest brother.  He has an amazing attitude with a loving family and friends for support.  Although his prognosis is a challenging one, we all believe he can make it.  Life does happen, after all.  There are opposites, life is energy, energy is wave forms, and all wave forms have a complement.  Death happens too. 

 

The earth is not flat.  We do not sail to the end and then fly off in to the abyss.  To reason that just because we don’t know what is beyond life to mean that there is no beyond is actually faulty reasoning to me.  If we look at the fractal nature of reality and that patterns repeat from high to low and low to high levels, we can argue that the universe goes on and on and on.  Someone could still argue that this is just “physical” reality.  What is “physical” anyway?  Is it just what we can experience with our senses and our instruments?  If so, then we are limiting ourselves because our instruments and our senses just seem to be getting more acute and be discovering more physical reality.  Only on August 31, yet another new element was discovered.  Ununpentium.  Does this mean that it didn’t exist before just because we didn’t know it was there?

In life, what type of energy is it that is causing the moving forward, propelling life to happen, and to happen at such sophistication?  What kind of forces can create things such as physical brains and minds that can contemplate consciousness and the consciousness of itself, and consciousness expanded beyond the confines of self? 

So to “inspire oneself” as inspire means “to fill with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence” – one can truly contemplate this such that “life happens” business.  To me, experientially, viscerally, and in reason, it makes perfect sense that when we part from our loved ones and we don’t know what is on the other side, we can rest assured that it is something, but something beyond our current comprehension and scope of knowledge.

We are school children in this consciousness thing and can’t even come to agreement on what we believe the definition of consciousness is not to mention what causes it, so how can we claim that it is gone just because the brain is dead?  I believe that personality is soul on brain-stuff.  Sure, to me, soul can have a physical component that is not measurable in this realm with our instruments of body or technology. 

 

Personalities die.  We become different people not only through re-creation of our cells, but of our personalities.  I’m glad I don’t have the personality that I had years ago.  I’ll probably be glad – or some other state of being – when I lose my current personality when I die.  When we all were younger we couldn’t even begin to conceive of what we would know, understand, experience…  how we would be living today.  I suspect the same continues as we part from our corporeal selves.

It is a good thing to contemplate death sometimes.  It gives us the contrast to consider that we bury the old and sprout the new.  Life is precious and valuable.  It is a sacred experience as LIFE HAPPENS.

p.s.  There is an organization with a local chapter with speakers who speak of their near death experiences.  Also, I just recently got the Eben Alexander book entitled “Proof of Heaven.” I heard him speak at our local IANDS and it is an amazing story.  He’s a neurosurgeon who had an NDE and brain images show that his experience was NOT brain based.

 

Return to Undifferentiated Light

My boyfriends’ dog died on Labor Day.  He was old.  He had a pretty good life.  He was a happy dog and lived in good health up to the last day with yummy food, company with the cats, comfort in the house and yard, and walkabouts.  In his youth he took travels with his humans to forests, streams, and ocean.  He didn’t have to have long suffering nor did my boyfriend have to make hard and costly decisions.  Ollie even died on a holiday when John didn’t have to go to work.  It was just like that dog not to want to inconvenience anyone.

My mother used to say as she aged that she would never become a burden to her children.  She died 13 years ago from strangulated hernia operation complications and died true to her desire – she did not become a burden to any of her children by living as a disabled person with any of them.

There is still dog food in the fridge and pantry.  There is still a dog collar with poop bags in the closet.  His bed still hasn’t been put away.

My mother painted and I have some of her oil paintings.  One of my favorite hangs in a respected spot in the living room.  It is incomplete.  She had decided to add another tree to the forest and had blocked in a distant trunk behind the foreground trees. 

It is interesting that it seems that it wasn’t too long ago that she died.   Yet considering that Ollie lived a good long life, and that he was born after my mother died, and then lived out the span of his life; what is a “complete” life span anyway?  We are living longer than we used to.  We have longer life spans in this country than in third world countries.   When is a “life” ever “complete?” 

Mystics talk about the essence of our being having timelessness.  Stripped away from the “physical” form, we are the continuing force in the patterns that connect us all.  What I love about the tree in the background of my mother’s painting is that it is only a strip of blocked out light.  It is where a tree was going to be and could be, but it is not a tree.  It is suggestive of a tree.  It is a tree in potentia. 

All of us, stripped of our outwardness, have seeds connected to the universal life force and patterns that are in potentia.  The implicit order from our explicate selves that is deep in the core of our souls still exist there as undifferentiated light.

Addendum:  Later the day I wrote this I got word that a dear friend’s mother died.  She had Alzheimer’s and went peacefully in her sleep. 

Dougies Light

Last week I visited a friend of mine in the hospital.  I used to work with him only a few years ago.  I became friends with his wife and she used to do my taxes.  I became friends with his daughter and she used to give me massages.  Doug or Dougie as I like to call him, used to help me with a physics course I was taking.  He was Mensa and not only does he have a brilliant mind, but a vital spirit.  We had begun a dining club at work we called IDC “International Dining Club” that still meets regularly with different attendees.

Dougle’s fairly recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s is not really Parkinson’s.  It’s Multiple System Atrophy, a degenerating neurological condition with no cure.   He can hardly move anything anymore, and can hardly speak.  Before I went, I was praying that I could say the right things, do the right things…  I’m so awkward in cases like this as I suspect we all are.  I grabbed my book “Fear of Physics” to take as a conversation piece.

I was happy to see Marcelle there.  She is a tall beautiful and strong woman, whose nurturance had left her a little worn looking and slightly bent over.  The two of them, still very much in love, maintained a healthy banter with kindness and humor.  The first words out of my mouth were an honest observation, “Dougie, it is so good to see the light in your eyes.”  In spite of his situation, he still had that inner light – the pure essence at the core of all of us, and he let it shine.

Ekhart Tolle describes the process of death as a separation from that which is physical but the eternal goes on.  It is a disidentification from form.  If we are identified with form upon death, our consciousness will gradually awaken in to its formless state in a real we cannot even conceive of.  He offers advice and consolation.

 

The pain that Marcelle is experiencing grieving the future of what could have been in their lives together and seeing someone she loves so deeply become further and further disabled and seemingly wither away is real, intense, and runs deep.  I feel so sad for her and Dougie and the family and all their friends.  I feel sad for me.  Although I hadn’t kept up with him on a consistent basis, I care deeply for him and his family.

We are all mortal and we all will die.  However, the opposite of death is birth according to Tolle, and I believe that as we shed our earthly personas, we connect with our inner light that is our prime mover and we identify more with the “manifestor” of ourselves.  The personality is the soul on brain and its respective chemicals and experiences.  Shed the brain and such, and we are pure innocent light awaiting, manifesting self and experiencing raw unfiltered reality.  Tied to this physical realm, we are embryos of the universe.

 

Visiting Dougie and Marcelle was difficult, beautiful, painful, and a blessing to me.  I am honored to have such wonderful people who have touched me and given me so much.  I pray for them to have peace, strength, and as much joy and happiness as is possible in this tortuous transit

Update:  I visited again with my friend Rhia last night. His condition has worsened, but his soul is still precious, sweet, and a joy.  Marcelle is still staying strong and beautiful and full of poise and grace in such a horrible period.

Where this blog got its title

This morning was another morning where I had to use a mantra that has been helpful for me from an amazing experience I had back in February.  I’m currently restructuring myself and rewiring my brain and learning to deal with emotions in a normal manner that I never completed and now plan to complete as an adult child.  I recommend John Bradshaw for those of us who haven’t yet dealt with childhood injuries and traumas.  This morning I got overwhelmed and angry and had to learn to calm myself down.  I started to feel that weird spiral that a sick brain can do when if latches on to darkness.

I spent over an hour on a drive trying to process, mature up my emotions, and rediscover the light inside of myself.  21 years on an antidepressant to mask emotions and now almost 4 years off so I’m still a fledgling.

This past difficult winter of PTSD and all its related crud had taken such a toll on my brain health that I cannot even describe the sensation, but it was physical and visceral inside my head.  I went through this without psychiatric medication.  I was very much aware of ill health in my brain and it felt dead and empty and dark.  There were additional sensations that there are no words for but it was uncomfortable and scary and I was fighting and afraid that I would never come back to a semi-sane state.  It felt like there was a dark storm in there that was nearing some type of cliff or abyss.   

I had used my phone in the winter months for various affirmations such as people can and do heal and that healing was inevitable along with other words of encouragement and reminders to myself.   I would imagine how this abscess that my cat had that was about 2 inches in diameter had healed with time and cleaning and nurturance.  Bodies heal and I had a good healing team and support from my sweetheart and friends and other people who had gone through similar experiences.  I had to hold on to that optimism that I would heal also.  The scary part was that the trauma started at such an early age that I was afraid that the very structure that needed to heal me was the very structure that was too sick to do the healing that it needed to do on itself.  This process has taken a lot of faith and patience on my part.

So last February as I had been suffering barely surviving the days to get through I had taken myself on a walk at lunchtime from work.  I had an intense “spiritual” experience that had a physical result while lying back on a cement bench looking up in to the budding trees above.  As I was thinking of life, awareness, experience, and dendritic spines, I realized that my focus on the experiences themselves as being “me” was an incorrect view of self.  The tree was not the buds nor the leaves nor the branches as much as it was energy of tree making the tree.  It was that life force pushing through the buds to prompt them to open and receive the blessing of sunlight.

Although self differentiates through experience and manifests itself through same, self is NOT the experiences.  Self is the experiencer.  Self is NOT the manifested, self is the manifestor.  There, self is divinity.

My entire neural substrates began a shift and I felt my energy moving as if from one seat to its opposite.  You know when you have that sudden shift of awareness when you experience an optical illusion of figure and ground?  Imagine that happening with not just your eyes and your awareness, but your entire brain and body.  The resulting shift moved me from anxiety to a state of intense peace and bliss.  My body actually tingled as I felt some kind of release.  I was no longer trying to find God, I was a piece of God, in Godness, in Energy, the Looker, the Energy at Source, having human experience and peeking through human form.  I had been stuck in the dance of the cosmos instead of the dance coming through me.

Afterwards, I was very calm for several weeks—without fear, without anxiety, having more compassion, having more quiet joy and internal giggles over the smallest pleasures and my experiences were in richer depths.    Time changed.  Instead of time feeling fast when I felt good or slow when I was uncomfortable; it shifted in to feeling eternal but irrelevant, and everything slowed to a delicious savory relationship with other entities in the physical domain.

So life does its thing and we get trapped in negativity and old patterns.  I had gone there this morning and remembered my mantra that has helped me so many times the past few months to find that state of peace and bliss.  The mantra is “find the light and be the light.”  It is that mantra that gives me strength to go inside myself, find that light, find ways to make myself happy, find that shift in which I become the light.  I’m not as overwhelmed now.  I think it’s time to do what needs to get done as I can, and make this day beautiful.

 

 

 

Cracked Heart

I wanted to drive down to the water at Tulalip Bay in Washington but I couldn’t get to the beach since it was the private property of the indigenous folks.  I wanted to step outside of the car and see the water, so I pulled up on to a hillside where there was a graveyard.  It was slightly reminiscent of the graveyard where my parents and brothers are buried except for this one was more green, and the Beaver Dam graveyard was quite arid with fields of wheat that rolled in the breeze.  I could remember the smell of the dusty sweet wheat being dried by the sun mixing with country pasture air with flies buzzing about.

The last winter had been tough for me because I was at a passage in my life where I had to deal with old unresolved and traumatic childhood issues.  I had been going through an unveiling of sorts where after coming in to some truths; it felt that so much of the way I had been experiencing life had been lies.  I had given many things a negative skew and then overcompensated as I could by being overly cheerful and a people pleaser.  So much of how I had moved through life seemed artificial and I was in the beginning stages of the process of reconstructing myself with all of my new discoveries.

The relationship I’d had with my parents was a bit strained.  I tried to be a good Mormon girl and it was I who started to say “I love you” to them first.  It was because I remember hearing that I should do that when I was in primary school at church.  My growing years as I tried to figure myself out had struggles as I knew I couldn’t be Mormon, I was bisexual, and I had to deal with my complicated sense of self (dissociative identity disorder).  These issues gave me struggles in my parental relationships.  My father died of cancer at my current age, and my mother died in 2000 as I was headed back to graduate school.

I was recalling a past visit to my mother’s grave.  You see, some time previously, a friend had given me a heart shaped sugilite stone in which the bluish color changes with wear and environment.  It had started to create a white glow in the center when I lost it gardening one year.  The next year after a hard winter I had been double-digging my garden and washing off the patio with high pressure; I saw a bluish glisten.  It was the stone that had been re-found.  The white center had widened and expanded throughout the stone.  The heart had returned in a different form.  When I visited my mother’s grave, I opened the earth above her body and pushed the stone in with a prayer that life brings renewal, transformation, return of different form.

Many of the graves in Tulalip also had various tokens and mementos.  I stepped from graveside to graveside in contemplation.  When I walked towards my car along the road, I stumbled on something so I glanced down.    There was a red glass heart under my shoe.  My immediate response was, “Oh I need to return this to the graveside, but whose is it?”  I could feel a common spirit in the wind as though voices from the graves were telling me that it was mine.  I accepted it.  As I looked at it closer, I could see a crack in the heart where the light was shining through.  Rumi says, "The wound is the place where the light enters you."