Heavenly Holydays!

Merry anointed –one sending!  What are you choosing in your journey?  What are you birthing this Christmas?

What makes you come alive?  What gives you energy and playfulness?  It is said in the bible in Mathew 18:3 that unless we become as little children we will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Consider your own set of experiences and your own spiritual path.  Is your personality comprised so much a result of early childhood self-defining moments?  Were respective experiences then shaped by filters that became further and further progressions away from that childlike raw experience of life?

Before you could speak, before you had much thought, was there any anticipation of what was to happen next or was there nothing but the pure and clear experience of life?  Is it possible to incorporate those early brain states in to your current times of being mindful and in the moment and finding incredible glee in the simple joy of just feeling alive?

So this is the experience of the child:  innocent, receptive, experiencing existence in its pure state.

What about this kingdom of heaven then?  I was raised with the Luke:20 verse saying that the kingdom of heaven is within us.  Considering the practice of meditation emptying the mind and being mindful in the moment and the experiences of the moment, and how much meditation can connect soul with the essential and being alive experience; it seems that the child-like state achieved is that which is spoken of when it is only as a child that we can enter this kingdom of heaven.

When we are stripped of any confining beliefs and expectations, we reside in limitless possibilities – essentially a quantum state of superposition where all exists simultaneously.  We connect more with the light of our soul and being light – time becomes infinite. We enter heaven.

Then, where all creativity can happen, what will we bring back in to this physical domain?  What will we bring for 2015?  We are all coming from different places with different narratives and with different talents.  What will we develop and what will we do?  What will this New Year bring for you and for all of us?

Compassion "taking on the sins of others"

“Jesus died for our sins” is taken as a pithy statement in which deeper analysis is often overlooked.

If we consider that Jesus was an enlightened man, then we can see that he understood human behavior and that actions were outgrowths of conditioning and that the true nature of all beings is the stripped down and pure consciousness void of personality and flaw.

When Jesus took our “sins upon him,” I believe it possible that this refers to an experience Jesus might have had that he could have been in an enlightened state and capable of such deep compassion that he not only cognitively understood that much of human suffering was played out from the suffering that spawned that suffering and on backwards, but that he could feel the surge of pain by understanding the blindness of acting out in pain.

The intensity and the darkness of this experience could attract such negativity – especially if he is trying to explain that he is “taking on sins” of others.  When someone is in a lot of pain and hasn't reconciled it nor been able to recognize pain in others, they might have an attitude of “Don’t tell me you know how I feel” when that is probably not what Jesus was getting at at all.

The attraction of negativity could culminate in his crucifixion and his dying would then make him a martyr to those following him.  Now, after a couple of thousand years, I wonder how many followers of Jesus who believe that if they follow the idea of the man being the son of god, and not the practice of becoming more enlightened by meditation and sitting with ones own consciousness,  are following the proverbial road sign instead of the road.

As Jesus said, “I am the light and the way,” it probably was referring to the “I am” that we all are in our infinite and eternal cores.  Jesus probably added something like “believe me,” and it probably got convoluted to “believe in me” cause “I’m what it’s all about.” 

The reason I feel like I can take liberties with these scriptures is because – come on…  they were written by dudes who didn’t know him a few hundred years after his death, and considering translations and the evolution of language and meaning, I think if we consider Jesus an enlightened one, we can certainly try to see at the core of the verbiage.

In seeking enlightenment, one reaches deeper and deeper understanding of the human condition, of compassion, and of how underneath all of our stories and messed up and broken lives, we are shimmering infinite potential with various ways in which to manifest and create new stories.

When we go underneath what created our personalities and how we were formed, we have to acknowledge that although we made a lot of decisions that certainly was major in affecting the outcome of our lives; we also were products of many circumstances.  It is an interaction, and we become what we do and we do who we are.  If we truly look at the tapestry of our lives with the eyes of soul we can see that we are no better nor worse than anyone else.  

I am you, you are me.  We are really the same underneath it all before everything else happened in our lives.  It can provoke such sadness to look in to the dark eyes of someone who has committed a heinous crime.  Their brains might be sick, they may have had circumstance after circumstance that led to this outcome.  I am not excusing, but I can feel the anguish that the interaction of external action and internal choice led to this.  It is sad and painful, and when someone like Jesus can have such an expanded consciousness; I believe that he would have been able to feel the depths of pain that led to such evilness. 

I’d like to see everyone drop their guns, their knives, their axes, and their grudges.  Let’s just stop our yammering on about all the stuff that is impermanent and changing anyway, and get to what is permanent and underneath it all.  Let’s find in the center of our souls that which is light and love, and just leave each other be.  Amen.

What music are you making?

Individual notes come through in chords – some more harmonic than others – spaces between chords vary – spaces between the notes vary. When they are not there is just as important to the piece as when they are.

After the realization of how my conditioned existence had been born and shaped from early trauma, I went through a period of being very self-centered in my grieving process.  I hated that I could explain my personality in so much of what had come out of what had been done to me and my response to that.  Although I reminded myself that everyone was like that; that we all have experiences that can further bias future perception and experience, I still felt alone in that I do not want to talk about the biggest ugliest secret of where it all started.  Acknowledging this all made me feel alone and like my life had been a big joke.

As I healed and heard other peoples stories of their lives and responses to life stuff and coming to terms with it – if fortunate enough to live long enough, I realized that my story – my song – was superficial.  My spiritual practices kept bringing me back to the true self – the inner raw, eternal self that was before all of the buildups of my character.  A blessing from remembering the biggest trauma is that I remember pre-verbal states where my child self was so innocent and receptive and unbiased to experience.

Thandie Newton, talks about times that she changes herself and comes to question how many times would it take for her “self” to die before she realized it wasn't ever real in the first place.  This is not to diminuate our life symphonies and the meanings of our lives experiences, because I believe that we take these forth to evolve consciousness.  However, I think that we can identify too much with what we manifest instead of who we are and become disconnected to source.

Our symphonies are for us to play out.  It is how we creatively manifest.  Not everyone can have every experience; can be in everyone’s life, all the time.  Loved ones come and go; things have to happen in order for anything to exist.  Existence is change and flux and flow and movement.

Sometimes our symphonies and songs play with others, sometimes not- sometimes in harmony, sometimes not.  However, we've all got songs and symphonies to play out.  May yours be one you find peace with.

Blessed be.

Energy is Mass(*light squared)

“Energy is mass,” were the words coming at me from Neil deGrasse Tyson this morning while I was wondering what I should write my blog on this week.  So, here are some of my thoughts:

I’m in to this whole thought is energy and physicality is consciousness incarnate idea.  I’m a fan of many of our leaders in evolving thought such as Louise Hay, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Alan Watts, and others.

As I’ve been working on my healing as an adult child and my boundaries, I’ve been developing a new relationship with my body.  You see because of my dissociative identity disorder, it’s only been in the past few years that I began to really feel like I was inside of my body.  So much healing has begun, but when I went through a real bad period with the PTSD, the stress on my body had taken its toll.  All of the memories, figuring stuff out, dealing with grieving and wounds, had caused some physical illness.  I had also discovered that for my entire life, my body had been in a state of being “braced.”  The tension can take its toll. 

I know I’m not the only one who has had to deal with pain and we all have pain and battles, so I want to share some strategies that have started to become powerful for me in moving thought to physicality while I ameliorate my relationship with my body.

Repeat "I love and am loved."  Repeat it by placing the stress on a different word each time you say it.  This can be done anytime, anywhere.  Your body will love you for it. 

Do morning stretches and light aerobics with joyful music while paying attention to your body.

Feel your stomach and the rest of you while you eat and drink.  I had been ignoring my stomach screaming, “I’ve had enough!” while my mind had been trying to fulfill a “fun” need by food just cause it still tasted good.  Or had an extra drink when I didn't need one.

Don’t bully yourself at the gym.  Don’t beat up your body, love it and strengthen it so you don’t injure yourself.

Periodically check in to feel if you are bracing yourself and feel your breath soften, deepen, and breathe your body as in mini-meditations.

Do regular meditations.

Allow yourself what kind and how much sensory stimulation will be healthful for you.

Do lunchtime walks and stretches and get out and see a little bit of nature like a few birds and trees and such.

Do evening stretches and feel gratitude for the day’s events and people who have blessed your day while you plan and anticipate the next day and days to come.

Tell yourself you will sleep well, and that your subconscious will allow you to continue sleeping, healing, and breathing deeply.  Make your room dark and give yourself plenty of sleep.

Love your body enough to take good care of it.  The love energy will transfer to physical health, and the choices you make regarding nutrition, activity, rest,

The challenge of Mother's day

To many, mother’s day is a real challenge.  For you women who have not had children, Mother’s Day is NOT your day.  It is not the day where you are praised for your parental abilities, your children fix you breakfast, give you cards, and tell you how happy they are that you are their mother.

Perhaps it is a weird day for mothers who have had children in not such lovely circumstances such as “my son the serial killer” or “my daughter the crack whore.”  Perhaps you are a mother grieving the loss of a child.  Perhaps you are a child who had an abusive and sick mother.  Perhaps you never had children because of deep psychological issues.  Perhaps you wanted children and couldn't.  Perhaps you are gay and the state wouldn't let you adopt.  It doesn't seem that the greeting card companies address all the flavors of what mother’s day would mean to everyone.  What kind of card would say something lie, “Geez mom, we are so different and although I suspect you secretly don’t want me to be happy living outside of your paradigm, I understand you’re struggling and well, let’s try to get along and respect each other as much as we can anyway.”  To many others including men, it is a weird and challenging day for other reasons.

So many things come in to our lives that make us have kids or not have kids.  Some are choices and some are not.  It does not make someone a better person to have kids, although many have reported that the experience has made them a better person.  Others have gotten strange and psychotic after having children.  Let’s face it – life is so full of so many possible experiences that we all can’t be lumped in to the same box and expected to follow the same procreative path.  Many have learned to be better people by not having children and by having other experiences.

To those mothers on mother’s day:  happy mother’s day.  To those mothers who took the job seriously as stewardship of a person, I laud you.  To those non-mothers who decided they wouldn't be a good mother and didn't have kids, I laud you.  To those accidental mothers who did the best they could, I laud you.  To the mothers who did lousy jobs and are working to repair the damage, I laud you. 

But on this mother’s day, I’m still thinking about the importance of nurturing.  Although not everyone is a biological mother, everyone including men is a mother in the role of nurturer.  Whether or not we choose to nurture or not is our call.  We have opportunity after opportunity every day.

A downhearted friend, a child who needs a smile, subordinates who need encouragement, a boss who needs compassion – all these are tiny moments of opportunity to nurture. 

In a world where we are realizing more and more that our current trajectory has not been a sustainable one, we can find ways to step away from the abuse of which we have been given stewardship.  We can be fair and just – pay our employees decent wages.  We can consider our actions of over-use of resources.  For those with scientific minds, we can create more industries of nurturing that come out of environmental science.  For the politicians, we can consider the needs of our constituents instead of taking the corporate handouts.  For the businesses, we can consider the lives of our employees over the greed of the shareholders. 

Every action can be an action of healing and nurturing or one of abuse and evil.  We can choose.

Happy Mother’s day everyone.

Ego, Spirituality, and Free Will

Years ago I used to visit and have Satsang with a Surat Shabd Yoga Master who first introduced me to the truth that the ego is not the thing that is permanent and as we have spiritual struggles; oftentimes it is because we are hooked in to thinking that we are those ego selves and we were best served by not listening to the demands of the ego too much.    Her sister once said in conversation that many who believe in reincarnation get confused because they believe it is the personality that reincarnates when it is not.  That was decades ago, so I've had a little bit of time to think about that.

In my personal spiritual growth and amazing experiences, I've come to experience who I am underneath the personality / ego / mind stuff /brain from time to time.  It waxes and wanes with my meditative practice.  I and you are that eternal light and consciousness that propels physical form forth.

What hasn't been elaborated enough for me in my circles is the value of the ego / brain stuff in this physical explicit nature of reality.  However, Alan Watts talks of music and the strings of a harp and how if all the strings would be played at once, it is muddy but if none are played, it is silence.  We and the universe need to be a combination of sound and silence to make a song.  Even though I am understanding the illusory states that we are all engaged in, I am convinced that our ego selves and the way we live our lives in temporal existence is just as important as the intelligent consciousness of the primal stuff that bore us.  Why would this implicate order of intelligence manifest in to explicate and coarser reality that is comprised of matter and brain to produce thoughts, awareness, and choice?

Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist wrote a book entitled “Freedom Evolves” in which he addresses that free will is a human thing and required evolution in order for it happen.  It makes sense.  We see in everyday situations where some people whom we know could make things happen and don’t believe they have the ability just might not have found the way to exercise that free will.  It is true that money does unfortunately buy freedoms that those without money do not get.  I believe this is changing.  I believe people are waking up.  I believe that it is in the waking up that we are able to gain more awareness and it is in that awareness that we realize more of our free will for ourselves, others and the planet.

This morning I was half awake half asleep enjoying a hypnagogic dream.  An aspect of this hypnagogic dream was there were parallel thoughts running in comparison and relationship to each other.  I was watching a tree branch with leaves bud forth and older leaves dying out and thinking of life as shared, self-replicating, but improved as more evolved and having new intelligence.  The new life was clean and clear with unadulterated perspectives to experience life fresh and from where they had burst.   The energy from the old was moving through to the outer like sap, and generations of people and improvement upon self similar entities in evolution – and the shared spirit / consciousness behind feels like it does the same thing – grows and does more miraculous living within the implicate  “spirit” world.  It was the same shared energy source and I was feeling this sense of reincarnation in that nothing and nobody is a discrete personality or ego which moves on into a next life, but a purified blend of fresh knowledge and intelligence received from previous lives without the biases that ego would have. 

The laws of Karma, I don’t know.  Perhaps if you make some doo doo in your spiritual stream, then you have to deal with it down your own pathway.  HA! 

So the answer to my question of why have ego anyway, is I believe it is to experience life, and to beautifully be the stuff outside that moves the stuff inside along.  The explicate physicality feeds back in to the implicate spirituality (if one were to choose to look at this dualistically).  [Personally, I believe it is a continuum and that it is only our instrumentation that cuts it from physical to nonphysical.  It is within ranges of frequency that we hear sounds, and in the cosmic music of things, we experience the silence with the song.]

It is in our egos that we can find awareness and therefore free will.  We can choose to nurture, or we can choose to tear down.  I am always astounded to find seemingly “spiritual” people enjoying “good murder mysteries”, watching TV that involves crazy murders and playing games that involves violence.  Then, why are we so shocked when our young kids kill and torment violently?  We have shat down our spiritual highway so why wouldn't it be toxic?  I believe these ways do not create the spiritual ground of peace and love if we continue to let our egos and brain stuff engage in such crap.

Do you believe you have free will?  In what areas?  What can you choose to do for your environment in physical reality and the spiritual ground from which sustains us?

Prana Dance

Prana means “life force” in Sanskrit and is used in Yoga.  I've discovered something for myself that is very effective in healing quite holistically and I’m calling it Prana Dance.  I’ll describe it to you.

It is very free form movement.  In fact, from time to time it isn't very pretty at all.  You would probably want to close and lock your door so that you are completely uninhibited.  You might want to be naked.  The purpose is to check in with your body, all of its parts regarding energy flow, lack of energy flow, strengths, weaknesses, etc.   You turn off your thinking brain and move in to a primitive child-like playful state.  Smile, breathe, and move to the music.  Use any kind of music that inspires you, but something without words.  You want to be in a very free flowing non-verbal state.

The only rules are to not hurt yourself.  You are celebrating and healing in your body and letting life force move through it.  I find that I like to do this in the mornings and my days are much healthier with more vitality.  Any movement that feels good is good.  It could be small, large, standing, sitting, lying, fast, slow, moderate.  This is not choreography, not pre-defined, not prescribed, not formulaic movement.  You might find yourself stretching parts that are tight, shaking parts that need loosening and warmth, massaging parts that need relaxation and releasing aches and pains you didn't even know you had.  In this way it is truly beautiful.

This is total body awareness and body feeling and with self-compassion and self-insight you might even find yourself moving in ways that heal past wounds and abuses that were locked in body memory or in ways that you held your body to brace against future potential wounds and abuses.  In so many ways, although to watch this dance may seem strange; it is a beautiful practice and I've come to look forward to it every day. 

This is not exercise in the typical sense.  Some days may be slow going and might require simple rotations of the ankles before getting in to it deeper.  Some days may be full of joy and bounding out of bed with arms outstretched.  The dance may involve getting up, lying down again, sitting and moving the limbs, rocking, swaying, patting, massage, stretching fingertips… anything!  It’s what suits you and what your body needs.

If you find that you simply get a bit too “heady” to feel spontaneous, close your eyes and swing your arms or just rock to the music to get yourself back in to your body and in to that sacred non-critical state of creativity.  Watching and partaking in various forms of dance and movement such as Yoga, Tai Chi, Belly Dance are all good to get yourself in touch with what your body can and cannot do and where it is stronger than not.  This time, however, is for free and non-prescribed movement.

At times, you actually might produce beautiful moves and aesthetically pleasing postures.  This is also good.  It’s all good.  No matter – it is what your body needs you to do for it. 

You may find some tension to release.  You may find pain to breathe out.  You may find tightness to stretch free.  You may find weakness to energize.  It’s all good. 

To health!  Blessed Be.

Photo of Catherine Jones at the top of this post is by permission.  Photograph taken by Jade Beall.