Going through the dark to get to the light

 

“There must needs be opposition in all things…” was a scripture from the Book of Mormon quoted to me as a child.  As I got older a spiritual leader of mine Judith Lamb-Lion a master of Surat Shabd Yoga, described it as the earthly plane of existence having polarity that the spiritual planes did not.  She drew a pyramid illustrating that as “word became flesh” or as spirit becomes flesh, we have this opposition.  We need darkness as we need light.  We need darkness in order to find light.

This weekend is the solstice in which the sun is at its lowest point in the south before it starts to move northward and we begin to have longer days.  It is the darkest day for many of us.  Pagans and others celebrate the winter solstice  as it signified a turn in the seasons to hope, a new cycle of life, and light.

Every night we need to return to the dark to cleanse our brain of dangerous toxins that can even lead to Alzheimer’s.  It is important to make our bedrooms as dark as possible for healthy pineal glands and melatonin production for our energy and sleep cycles so this healthy brain cleansing and other important brain activity can happen.

Carl Jung says, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”  I’ve found that on my personal spiritual path it was important for me to get in to the dark recesses of my psyche to bring things to the light.  The path hasn’t always been an easy one and I’m still on it and find dark times.  However, the understanding and self-awareness that past traumas have done to a conditioned earthly “self” have taught me so much about who I’m not and who I am beyond the conditioned self.  The “I” that is taking me on this journey is what others might refer to as the “higher self.”  I don’t refer to it as “God,” because to me “God” is that which is transcends us and includes our combined higher selves in an infinite bubbling life of pure energy consciousness and light.

So on this particular solstice, it is my silent prayer that we quiet ourselves and our minds.  We stop and as said in church today by our wonderful Reverend Diane Dowgiert, the sun pauses as it heads back north, and we too might consider taking a pause to feel our “callings” for what is next in our lives.  It is in silence and rest that we can bring ourselves in to presence of experience.  It is in the presence of experience that we can calm our brains and find transcendence in who we really are and begin the much needed healing of humanity.

At Christmastime we sing songs of Joy to the World and Peace On Earth.  Since I’ve been watching a bunch of Star Trek lately, I’d like to add, “Make it so.”

Blessed be and Amen.

Light stuff.

 

Stuff:  Physical stuff, body stuff, mental stuff.   It’s interesting how many of us are noticing this black Friday craziness and violence to get stuff the day after we celebrated gratitude for already having stuff.

When my mother started getting older I would observe her reactions when people gave her things.  It disturbed me back then that she was less than enthused but tried to express appreciation.  She simply felt that she had too much “stuff.” 

Personally, I feel choked when I have to move around in my house or any physical space with so much stuff.  I feel like I should be able to move better with less weight on my body.  I feel like I could think more clearly if I didn’t have so much clutter in my brain.

I understand and try to achieve the balance of having enough stuff to make life comfortable and beautiful and ending up with too much stuff that just gets in the way.  Now that it is the holidays, it seems like we are so compelled to “buy” each other more stuff whether we really need it or not, and whether or not our budgets can afford it.  What meaningful gifts can we really give each other instead of useless clutter?  How do we keep our body weights at a healthy level?  How do we keep our thoughts uncluttered?

The American culture is well-represented in a documentary I saw a long time ago entitled “Affluenza”.  The striking image is the pig face over America overeating, overdoing, over consuming…  There is also some footage in Ron Fricke’s Samsara that shows our tendency to overdo.

I used to joke about my fat being compiled memories of eating, drinking, and being merry, and while it is true that I have enjoyed “the good life.”  I really didn’t need to eat to such over-indulgence.  I remember sitting down to a few dozen chicken wings.  I’m not vegetarian, but now I feel a little weak in the knees when I think of all the chickens killed for me to sit down to that one binge.  The little life forms being taken for me to eat their wings.  18 little birds in one sitting.  Wow.  The healthful thing in nature is to only take what we truly need and I have been addicted to NOT doing just that.

I think of all the bankers and other people hoarding up their wealth in the Cayman Islands of which they will never be able to physically spend and the money that they do NOT deserve but which some weird lack of regulation and “greed is good” mentality has created a society so sick that they are getting away with it. 

I see in my own house redundant items and I wonder if I should get rid of them.  We’re trying to organize and simplify as we go along, but it is a process and it takes energy.  Not only that, but some things that have sentimental value are just hard to let go.  This is when I want someone else to come in and throw some things away or at least ask me, “Do you really need to keep this?”  “Can’t you remember this person another way instead of having this (fill-in-item-here) having to trip over?”

Also, there are local economies that it is good to support.  I recently bought a pair of earrings in New Mexico for personal symbolic reasons as well as an acknowledgement that it was good to support that Zuni economy.  It is a balance and while I’m trying to get out of this unreasonable debt, I still want to treasure life where some adventures cost money and money should go for local economies.  I like David Korten’s book on Agenda for a New Economy where he talks about a move away from Wall Street to Main Street.  I am craving more community and public places and beauty instead of parking lots with litter and the threat of being robbed or hurt.

Then I think of the desperate people – someone just robbed a local head shop and a comment was that someone else went to high school with the guy and she was shocked.  It seemed so out of character for him.   Desperate situations I believe are making people do atypical desperate things.  None of us like this.  How can there be so much “stuff?” while so many are struggling with trying to have homes, good food, health, education, artistic endeavor, and even …  water?  We all have to pay for water.  Everything that even sustains us is a commodity.  I suppose that beats having to kill and eat our own food, but it seems we have overdone it all yet again.

We inundate ourselves with information and mental busyness.  There is so much out there that is interesting, but when can we let our minds rest?  I know of so many people including myself who are seeking ways to get more restful sleep.  The day of information and technology leaves our houses with hums, buzzes, and light-emitting diodes.  The streets are full of bass boosting cars, noisy neighbors, and emergency vehicles attending to crimes and medical crises.

Why do we overdo?  Are we lacking something else?  Are we lacking passion and joy for simplicity and every day delights?  Do we feel that we need to go outside of ourselves to fulfill?  Is it because we feel we might not have enough in the future?  Are we concerned that someone has something or is experiencing something we’re not? 

How do we lighten up?  This is what I’m starting to do in these three dimensions of my life:

Physical stuff:  Before I buy, I ask: do I really need this or do I have something already that does the job to serve me?  I ask, just how much/many of this do I need?  Will I use it all?  Am I trying to satisfy some emotional need by this?  Is there a different way to satisfy that emotional need?  Is it something that I can buy an electronic copy of so as to not create more clutter?  Is there some way I can produce this myself and if I need to buy, is there some local place that has it?  Shifting to local businesses needs to be done gradually so as to not cause mass layoffs with the big guys.

Body stuff:  Checking back in with my body.  I’ve been working on listening to my body and one thing it said was, “you’re not listening if you expect to hear the same thing.”  What does my body really NEED?  Does it need rest?  Does it need exercise but not to be bullied at the gym?  Does it need light stretching?  Also, not just listening, but talking to my body.  Giving it loving encouragement as it is the soul’s vehicle.  Re-reading Zen-Body-Being by Peter Ralston.

Mind stuff:  Learning new things, but letting a nap happen to consolidate the new information.  Not beating myself up for not knowing something in the first place or having wasted my younger school years not learning or remembering.  Understanding that the fabulous brain is also faulty and responsive.  Feeding the brain high quality content.  Lovingly shifting my attention to old constricted negative recursions in to a focus of what creates joy, peace, and love.

I’m thinking these plans will make me feel a little more “light.”  Blessed be.

 

 

Ambivalence of experience: gratitude, grief, and greatness

It is common that at this time of year we think about gratitude.  We count our blessings and our comforts and that is a good thing because gratitude is a healthful attitude. 

How about gratitude for the yucky things that have happened to us? 

I have a friend who was in her 30’s and had been a stripper who was doing drugs, drinking too much and had ended up with an infection in the hospital.  She had a reaction to the antibiotic and stroked out and ended up wheelchair-bound to this day.  She has gratitude for the experience.  She says if that hadn't happened she would have been in a worse state.  She is a happy and productive person.

I've had other people tell me stories of hardship for which they eventually became grateful for.  I know that when I went back to school for my Masters Degree and my financial status took a turn for the worse and I ended up broken with weird life crisis after crisis, I had been hating life at that time.   Now that it is in the past, I love what it has done for my character.  I also find that relationships are enriched when other individuals open up and share their past hardships with me.  Not drowning in the negativity, but acknowledging it and having grown past it deepens character and relationship.  There is always that proverbial bug story where the bug is in the bit of milk and swims and swims and swims until the milk drop is churned to butter and then he walks off.  Meanwhile, his little legs are stronger.

It seems that we all need a little eustress.  Too much pain can kill us though.  How much is right for us?  Everyone is different, and human resiliency stories have taught us much about the strength of the human spirit.  Here it is Thanksgiving and I’m thinking about the Philippino’s and having to sort through their broken lives and lost loved ones from the hurricane.  I wonder about their strength and I wonder if the Kardashians or the Hiltons could handle that kind of challenge.  I suspect that the hard working proletariat is actually stronger in character and physical ability than the 1%.   

I’m very ambivalent about hard experiences as I’m sure we all are.  On one hand, they can develop us, but they could break us.  Without them, we can develop in new and rich ways creatively, but sometimes without them we don’t have the complexity of character to develop in those creative ways.  Everybody is different.  I struggle with my own set of challenges trying to find the good in them while I grieve them and it is a balance to try to come out on the higher side to find peace and joy.  Some of my own personal challenges have ultimately gifted me with the deepest insights and joys. 

Perhaps this is why in Buddhist teachings the concept of greeting experience with equanimity is so important as to avoid suffering.  There is a Taoist story of the equanimity of events being “good” or “bad” where a farmer’s son couldn’t go to work because of a broken leg.

Not all of our “hardships” are that extreme however, and sometimes we experience things as more challenging as they are and not really life-threatening or safety-threatening. 

Finding spirituality in the physical domain when one is alone or with other like minded people is easy.  However, I think that sometimes it is a tricky thing to find spirituality when dealing with unkind personalities or strange pressures that bring forth undesirable states of mind from whatever histories we have had.  How does one be meditative and mindful and not get locked in to “stories” or “memories” or “biases” at times like these?

Here are some tidbits from a book I just checked out from our library system www.library.pima.gov called Ordinary Magic – Everyday Life as Spiritual Path.

“Only awareness can free us from our thoughts.  In the moment we become aware that our thoughts are just thoughts, rather than reality itself, we can wake up from their spell and can return to presence.”  John Wellwood    I have noticed that when I was having problems at work with some databases that keep records for engineering changes that serve to make wealthy people comfortable at the same time my nephew, a young father in his 30’s was fighting for his life, I realized I didn’t have to get as upset as I was.  I’m learning more and more to remain calm in the stress and keep perspective.

“The music or art that affects us most deeply is never just happy or sad, but always combines these two qualities.”  I loved playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for my mother because although our words were never enough for each other, I found that I could fully express all my emotions at that time through this piece of music for her.  I know she received the message.  Recently a painting that grabbed my attention and spoke to me more than any other painting I’d ever seen was John Biggers Shotgun Third Ward at the Albuquerque Art Museum a few weeks ago.  The first thing was that I felt the rain and moisture, the 2^nd thing I felt a sense of strength through adversity, the third thing I noticed was the dancing of the children in the water while the adults looked on past them.  The 4^th thing I noticed was the burning building.  I felt sad while I felt the triumphant spirits whom I knew would move on, survive, thrive, and grow.  This painting portrayed one of the churches being burned during a terrible time in Houston with racial unrest and the subsequent Black Panther movement.

“Opposition between good and bad is often compared to light and dark, but if we look at it in a different way, we will see that when light shines, darkness does not disappear.  It doesn’t leave; it merges with the light.  It becomes the light.”  Notice how gradual morning light meets your space?  Is there one threshold where the dark is no longer the light?

And finally, in summary:  “If you can be willing to feel fully and to acknowledge continually your own sadness and the sadness of life, but at the same time not be drowned in it, because you also remember the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun,  you experience balance and completeness, joining heaven and earth, joining vision and practicality.”

My personal remarks in a poem:

Cleaving

the perceived misshapen

sever of life, of what “should” not be there

Sawing,

Repetitive pain

Finally sending pure awareness of experience

From explosive pain after pain

To unconsciousness

Cutting,

Fine tuning to

“fit” in to the dysfunction that was

No longer the natural shape

Polishing,

Clearing through clutter of mis-perceptions

Feeling buffed by having to see/feel/experience clarity

Light -

Shining and reflecting,

Refracting and glimmering,

Not, the stone, but the light throughout the stone.

The stone only shows the light because the light is there.

The light only shows because the stone is there.

Does a diamond feel so much pain?

Recognizing our TRUE selves

Some time ago I had an amazing experience that at the time saved me, and the memory of it transforms me and sustains me.

It was a day back in February where I was struggling to keep my sanity as I was dealing with memories and realizations.  I didn’t want to be in that emotional state, but the memories and realizations made sense of why I was the way I was and so in that sense I was living more deeply and authentically to myself.  I had been more present with the thready bits of myself than ever before.  When I accepted the truths, I was less dissociative than when I tried to deny them.  However, being present with truths caused a considerable amount of pain that is so hard to describe.  It was tangible and I could feel it in my brain.  The discomfort was terrifying and I was afraid that I would end up yet again in a mental institution but this time never able to return to society.

My boss and my workmates knew that I was going through this and were more than cooperative.  They were compassionate and let me come to work and recluse to my work in the strange form I was.  I go for walks at lunch time and end with a stretch and a short meditation in an area between some buildings where there are benches and trees.

On this particular February day, I was laying back on the benches looking up in to the bare trees trying not to focus on this ominous darkness in my head but recognizing the experiences I had as I knew I couldn’t repress nor deny them anymore.  There was an echo memory of some talk I’d heard where someone was saying something that as bare as trees looked in the winter, there was busyiness in the roots and the branches out of vision where sap was stirring to produce buds and leaves – LIFE.  Having the 2 thought patterns simultaneously:  that of my feeling crazy, and that of the life producing the buds and leaves made me realize that I was identifying with buds and leaves instead of the life that produces the buds and leaves. 

Brain and body are manifestations of me – not the REAL me.  I am the manifestor, not the manifested.  As soon as I realized this something very tangible and physical happened.  I would love to know what an fMRI would have looked like.  It was like I could feel who I was (brain wise and soul wise) –- change places.  It was like I was sitting in a seat opposite of myself inside of myself.  I was at the core instead of the periphery.  My entire body tingled and I had a flood of relaxation.  I went from feeling tense and anxious to one of complete bliss and calm.  For several weeks after that time changed.  It was infinitely and deliciously slow.  I didn’t pay attention to what time it was because it was irrelevant.  Things took as long as they took.  I was more present with people.  I got feedback that I was more “soft” and gentle and it made me more attractive.

Unfortunately, the experience didn’t stay with me and I’ve had some rough times since.  However, remembering that helps put me back to that state from time to time. 

Realizing that energy is REAL, and that consciousness is real, makes me feel that that my core persists.  I was thinking of this the other day when I walked past a mirror in my bathroom, and I caught my own glance.  It was beautiful because I recognized me more than I ever have in my life.  Having had dissociative disorder, mirrors have always been challenging to me because I simply quite often have not recognized the person looking back at me.  Some times were worse than others because my own image faded and distorted and would be completely unrecognizable.  However, on that day, I KNEW myself.  I had a deep under-the-brain memory of myself.

So, the other day when I had a couple of PTSD triggers, and spiraled and tried to fight the spiral down, I kept having memories of the experiences of feeling this genuine self in contrast to this yuckiness that I was experiencing with the triggers.  I kept thinking to myself, “How can I feel so yucky when I know that I am something deeper and more pure than this emotional baggage?”  Yet, I knew that I was a person with emotions and that denying feelings didn’t serve me well either.  I did the basic “trigger treatment” that the books and the experts tell you to do:  rest, sit with the emotion and try to understand it, journal...  I could also feel that my mother would be telling me, “Get some water, some vitamins, and some sunshine.”  So, I did. 

The most significant realization came from understanding that the person who delivered the triggers was perceived as an “enemy” and that the real “enemies” were dead.  I knew that the person who inadvertently triggered me didn’t realize the complexity of the statements in how the emotional cascade could cause such a nexus of reaction.  I knew that this person was not my enemy as my enemies did not exist anymore.  I sat in the breeze and breathed and closed my eyes and repeated to myself over and over again, “My enemies are no longer – essentially dead.  My enemies are dead.  My enemies are dead.” 

Between the rest, water, good nutrition, vitamins and good old Vitamin D, and the emotional release through realization, I was able to pull myself out of this spiral faster than when I used to have them.  I am so blessed to have all the ingredients I need for successful healing and I pray for everyone else in their pain to have such wonderful ingredients for health.  Above, all, remembering who we really are, as I do believe that personalities are souls on brains, can promote such deep and beautiful healing.

Although self differentiates through experience and manifests itself through same, self is NOT the set of experiences.  Self is the EXPERIENCER.  Self is not the manifested, it is the MANIFESTOR.  Therefore, self is DIVINE.  Self persists in various forms and dances samsara in the cosmos, living in dukkha, seeking nirvana. 

 

Seed Light

 

Seeds.

Seeds are amazing.  They are intelligent little nuggets that provide nutrition in perfect balance of protein and carbohydrate, fiber, iron, omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids…  Not only that, but think of it.  A seed has the intelligence in its tiny little life form to reproduce life that grows and produces even more seeds.  A seed continues to give life.  When I eat seeds, I feel like I’m having a truly spiritual experience.  It’s like this intelligent little organized cluster of cells is coming in to my body to talk to other intelligent little clusters of cells.  They cross communicate and teach other about light.  Phototaxis, using light to move,  is being looked at with algae and considering how neurons communicate with each other.  This discovery has created the discipline of Optogenetics in which conditions such as Parkinson’s, anxiety, PTSD, etc. can be treated by “turning on and off” circuits in our brains using light.  Seeds rely on light just as do we.  I believe eating seeds is Holy Communion.  I’m glad our local library system actually is expanding the “stacks” and now has a seed library.

Making a logical connection between seeds, brain circuitry, and spirituality is easy for me.  The way I understand this physical domain is that it is a coarser manifestation of primal source of vibration in light and sound.  We experience this reality of wave forms through the limited senses we have evolved. 

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We use the word “seeds” in metaphorical expressions for the “non-physical.”  I was recently talking with a friend about human relationships and how in some relationships and contexts the “seeds” that came out in conversation have caused damage.  I don’t have the relationship with my siblings that could be more beneficial for all parties.  Seeds have been planted from long ago that caused developmental issues, and seeds have been planted in recent times to sever relationship.  My friend used the term “responsible healing” and I really like that.  It is not my goal to cause any pain, but how can one heal without bringing some things in to the light?  If one comes to understand how early trauma changed the forming brain and needs to heal, and in that healing, one goes through stages of anger and grief, how does one do that without occasional clumsiness? 

Anyway, I’m happy to be in the stage where I have love, forgiveness, and compassion towards those who harmed me and their awakening process to have to reckon with past actions.  When I’ve hurt others it had come from a place of pain and I suspect the same is true of others.  A touching documentary I recommend is Dhamma Brothers – in which prisoners are doing Vipassana meditation and they are having to come to terms with their lives and actions.

The healing process - and we are all healing I believe, can be treated with good seeds.

 

Decades ago, when I began the first PTSD pre-psychotic episode, I was put on heavy drugs including Thorazine which even at that time was rarely used.  I wasn’t ready to deal with the full ordeal yet.  However, at the time a book that helped me heal significantly was Shad Helmstetters “What do you say when you talk to yourself?”  The thought-seeds for the subconscious can be re-written.  Daniel Amen says that you don’t have to live the brain you were born with.

During the healing process, it has been challenging for me to get stuck in old hurts and pathologies and identify too much with the sickness when the truth is that although I’ve had the early beginnings I did, my life for the most part has been pretty damn amazing.  True, my perspective wouldn’t have been so skewed and I would have experienced things differently, but it doesn’t serve me well to be stuck in what could have been.  It puts me in a place of pain and I leave the present moment where there is so much joy and perfection with all the things I have to be grateful for.  Staying out of the negative and moving to the positive requires tender selection and loving placement of thought-seeds. 

The subconscious is so vast and powerful and will run with what we feed it.  The relationship we have with our subconscious is important and as Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”  It is important to understand what gets thrown forth from the unconscious and to deal with it by transforming it in creative and productive ways.  The conscious and subconscious have a reciprocating relationship. 

It takes a lot of discipline to keep watch over the thoughts we let come in to our minds.  I will write more on this in a future blog about the challenges a damaged brain has to heal itself.  Sometimes serious intervention is required because the organ required to cause healing is the organ itself that is so sick.  However, past the threshold of complete breakdown and in to healing, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and deep trance work does wonders.

I love how Joyce Meyer says, “you don’t have to think every thought that comes in to your brain.”  It’s a good idea to take long walks with intentional thoughts of how you are going to spend your thinking day so that your subconscious can follow suit.

Here’s a seed: 

Imagine, put a little “magic” in, and put a mental picture to… your life as complete and peaceful and abundant.  All of our lives as complete, peaceful, and abundant.  How would we live if we weren’t afraid of being victimized?  Would we be a little more kind to each other by behavior just as simple as fair treatment by offering decent wages and health care?  What does that world look like?

 

What other seeds do you have?  Seeds for yourself?  Seeds for others?  Seeds for the world?

 

 

 

Love Light from one little thought

It all started with one tiny little thought.

First, a little background:  For a while, I had been realizing that so much of my thinking and perspectives had been negatively skewed from early childhood experiences.  There had been a considerable amount of grief in that what I had seen and experienced was often in not such a positive light.  Underneath years of smiles and friendliness, there had been an undercurrent of low self-esteem, judgment of myself and others, and perceived judgments that I felt from others.  Although I have had a fabulous life and am still having one, I would occasionally have deep spirals of depression triggered from PTSD and the PTSD triggers themselves.

The freedom and beauty in this is that now I know it.  I can re-write my mental history.  There isn’t much I can do to change the actual historical events, and even the terrifying ones I cannot undo.  However, I am fortunate enough to be able to recall what shaped my mental life from early beginnings and from that I can change my perspectives of subsequent events from that point.  The PTSD triggers after that that caused so much pain and anguish now can be viewed in more tenderness, gentleness, and compassion.

We are not that personality so much as who or what is beneath that personality.  If I focus on what I am not, the feeling is very painful, but if I focus on the me who is doing the focusing anyway, then I feel a boundless and eternal something.

However, throughout my life I’ve never truly felt loved.  I’ve felt that I was loved, but I didn’t feel love coming in to the space of the being that comprises me.  I didn’t actually feel love for others until I was in my mid 20’s.  I used to tell my parents I loved them but that’s because that’s what I was taught to do.  As I grew older and older, I actually did feel a love for them.   Learning to love came later in life for me. 

Actually writing this is painful for me as I realize it sounds like I was a very unloving person and perhaps I was – but early trauma can alter brain formation drastically.  It can cause developmental issues that make one that way and the interactions they have with others.   I loved but in a cerebral way – not in an authentically emotional way.  How can you love when you have divided and lost threads of yourself?  I was an anxious, depressed, play-acting child parading for the right responses.  I wanted to fit in.  As I grew older, I learned to love more and more emotionally, but I never actually felt loved emotionally – only cognitively.  I believed that I was loved, but never felt the love.

So, the thought:  I told myself, that it was entirely possible that I had been loved more than I realized.  My parents might have loved me more than I knew or felt:  my siblings, my friends, my lovers.  Simple enough of a thought, right?

Oh, the beautiful unfolding of such a thought!  My boyfriend John says he loves me all the time.  I love him and I feel it.  I feel love for others.   I feel love for my cats.  One night while I was holding my cat in bed, the neighbors set off a fire cracker.  Gaia was startled, and I held her and settled her down.  I could feel how she relaxed in to my embrace and it seemed that she felt protected and safe and loved.  It felt so good.  Although I had learned to feel love for others, I hadn’t learned how to feel the love they had for me.

 

The thing that started this whole awareness of “feeling loved” is this book I’m reading by Dr. Eben Alexander entitled “Proof of Heaven.”  In it he describes how loved he felt in the nether world.  It struck me that I hadn’t really had that feeling: receiving love.

So I decided to look at the possibility that I was not opening myself to that feeling because I know now I’d been bracing myself in various levels my whole life in my responses and interactions. 

Last weekend with headache issues, I was resting on the couch and John held my head and “kissed me and hugged me and I could actually FEEL his love.  It was intensely exquisite and I felt a little dizzy and a tiny bit nauseated, but warm and good.  After this huge chemical rush, I felt light turn on inside of me. 

Since then, I’ve been experiencing life differently.  I’ve actually felt love coming from friends more intensely and I’ve felt more love towards them.  I’ve felt more resilient.  I’ve belt better “in my head” and I’ve wondered how many of us need more of this and less antidepressants.  I’m walking stronger and taller.  I’m not skewing things towards the negative as much.  I’m more playful.  I am lighter on my feet.  This new channel of receiving “felt love” hasn’t been open constantly, as neural networks don’t change overnight.  However, I can mindfully choose to re-open it time and time again and I’ve been doing this practice as I feel that it is just as important to allow the feeling of love coming in as it is to feel the love going out.

 

So my question to you is:  what little thought will you have today?  It is possible that…  ?

 

Best of luck with love and light.  Blessed BE.

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.