“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.” Golda Meir said that and it is something you live moment-by-moment.
I am navigating this by noticing all of the places where I feel responsible for something that I do not have control over. Perhaps this is a UNIVERSAL application, but the way it has revealed itself for me this week in in 3 situations.
(1) A friend who is getting her house ready to sell.
(2) Joel’s cat, Zeus, who has matted fur that needs attention.
(3) The fall Dharma Path classes, for which the links do not work properly.
I realized these three were/are all revealing the same habit energy of feeling responsible, wanting to fix, and having an emotional reaction to the feeling helpless.
Referring to number 3, I wrote to my fellow students: Note — I am only the postal carrier delivering these messages. I do not have access to fix the technology issues, nor do I have any more information about the classes than you do at this time.
I asked the others to have patience and to support my doing the same.
This morning I stopped in to see Mary Anne’s set up. Mary Anne is one of three Monarch Mavens I know and love. The previous day she had to put her bridal veil into service to cover the container until she can get to the fabric store to buy more netting. What a beautiful labor of love.
Aaron speaks so beautifully to all of this:
Thought for Today
You move into the experience of ‘oneness’— the essential oneness, the identity with God — which is different than unity.
Then you start to know the true divinity of yourself and All That Is. You are that divinity and have always been.
From that experiential understanding of identity with God your whole moral system is shaken up. You cease acting from a place of doer, from a place of ‘should’ or outward moral imperatives. Your choices of action are based on the simple fact that there is nothing here that is not God, so you may not harm any of it. To hurt another is to hurt myself and to hurt God. It then becomes unthinkable to do harm. That is why moving towards this experience of identity with God is so important, because until then the earth will need to be run by moral dictates — shoulds and shouldn’ts, commandments. And there are always going to be those who break commandments.
Eventually, your Earth will evolve to a place where all understand their oneness, and the commandments will no longer be necessary.
It is clear to me that I am filtering all of these experiences through the lens of what Jeffrey Olsen describes in the aftermath of an auto accident that took the life of Olsen’s wife, and younger son. An accident which resulted in Olsen’s “near-death” experience that forever altered his view of the world. This is what the attending ER physician, Dr. Jeff O’Driscoll, had to say:
O’DRISCOLL: I sensed a divine presence in the room. And then I noticed a light. In it was the form of a woman, floating above the patient’s bed. She had flowing, curly blonde hair and was dressed in various shades of white. Her form was almost transparent, and the look on her face was serene. She looked vibrant, otherworldly—I knew innately that this was the man’s wife. The divine presence in the room was allowing me to view her eternal soul.
She smiled at me, as if she’d known me forever. I sensed her immense gratitude toward the doctors who were working to save her husband. She looked directly at me and back at her husband, then back at me. Her eyes were intent.
Do you want to understand?
Do you need to know what happened?
Are you trying to figure our what went wrong?
Do you persist in asking “why?”
When we are not peaceful, we cannot understand.
When we are afraid or upset, our thoughts are distorted.
When we are hurt or angry, we think through our judgments.
Emotions confuse and come to faulty conclusions.
The understanding comes when our minds are open.
Understanding will unfold as we know more.
Being open and willing is key to real understanding.
Wisdom will not be available in closed minds.
May the world as I experience it today (and every day?) be a place where all understand their oneness….
Ultimately,
direct experience is key
to fully realizing how
we are all connected
through the binding force
of unconditional love
and its unlimited ability to heal.
~ Dr. Eben Alexander
author of Proof of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe:
A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness.
It has been an AMAZING week.
Sunday, July 18, 2021, I joined an evening Zoom meeting of International Association of Near-Death Studies (Greater Boston IANDS). At a few minutes before 8:00 pm, the woman hosting the room said she needed to log off to join another group in Hawaii. Spontaneously, she invited any of us to join who might choose to.
What do you have to lose? I went.
I met Pamela Johnson, who says about her husband, “After he passed, Alan returned from Heaven to tell me that we are meant to continue to live and work together. He has helped me navigate this otherworldly journey from the day he left. I now see him clairvoyantly, hear him all the time (he’s very talkative LOL), and much to my delight, I FEEL Alan’s energy and his love viscerally. I have never known a love like this, it’s better than when he was in a body! Truly! ❤ This experience has healed my grief to the degree that it’s practically gone.” Pamela says their book, Supernatural Love and Life After Death, should be out in the spring. Meanwhile, you can find her on Facebook.
Meeting Pamela led to my attending a three-day online summit with some other remarkable individuals who shared their near death experiences, and told how that experience forever altered their view of life, and death, and life after death, including their work in the world. The first speaker at the summit was Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell! From Dr. Alexander’s website:
About My Experience:
“My coma taught me many things. First and foremost, near-death experiences, and related mystical states of awareness, reveal crucial truths about the nature of existence. Simply dismissing them as hallucinations is convenient for many in the conventional scientific community, but only continues to lead them away from the deeper truth these experiences are revealing to us. The conventional reductive materialist (physicalist) model embraced by many in the scientific community, including its assumption that the physical brain creates consciousness and that our human existence is birth-to-death and nothing more, is fundamentally flawed. At its core, that physicalist model intentionally ignores what I believe is the fundament of all existence — consciousness itself.”
Many of the members of our Grief Journey group meeting here in St. Joseph for over 20 years have had similar experiences of this continuity of consciousness….
Our group changed our normal meeting time to join Pamela Johnson on Facebook last evening. Afterwards I admitted that I am finally able to honor the NDE I experienced in an auto accident with my dad when I was 12 years old, and I now recognize the miraculous way that experience shaped my perspective of and work in the world.
A neighbor whose husband passed last August told me early Saturday morning that she is “doing worse now” than when he first passed. I told her about anniversary energy and invited her to join our group on Sunday. She left voice mail saying honestly that she wasn’t ready. After our time with Pamela, in spite of numerous experiences herself, one member of our group expressed not being there yet, saying, “I still have too much anger.”
This morning as my fingers move over the keyboard, I am remembering many of the summit speakers. Robin Landsong experienced two near death experiences when she was abducted at age 8, taken to Zimbabwae. raped and killed.
Jeffrey Olsen’s NDE occurred in an accident which took the lives of his wife and younger son. His story includes the doctor who saw Jeffrey’s wife there with them in the emergency room! Linda B/G had this to say about their story:
Wow! What an amazing story! I listened to an interview with Peter Panagore and got on his website and signed up to receive his emails. Here are the links:
Listening to Rinpoche teach “Ten Percent Happiness” and quote a sufi master speaking of our true tender-heartedness toward all humanity: What’s heaven? Love in your heart. What’s hell? Lacking that.
What if ALL of these people who have had near-death experiences have shared the glorious truth of unconditional love as our true nature? Safety and peace and love and trust is available to us all NOW. What if this truth is more real than all of the distortions we have believed that kept us sad or scared or angry or depressed or hopeless or helpless?
I do not know if you are ready for REALITY. I do not know what it will take for my neighbor or my friend to be READY.
The most interesting question for me is simply to ask of myself and of YOU, “What do you have to lose?”
“In doing something, do it with love or never do it at all.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
My husband, John, violated a long-learned rule of relating when he said “WE” would do something that I would never have agreed to do.
What am I to do now?
Gandhi’s point is to not do it unless you can do it with love.
I did it with love when I was honest with John: It was not wholesome for you to have committed me to something without asking me first.
Then, I did it with love when I was honest with myself: I had to either do it with love or not do it at all.
The “IT” in question is detailing a house here in our manufactured home community for a friend. She has essentially already moved to be near her children and grandchildren. She hired someone to do the painting, but that did not go well for a variety of reasons. Partially, it did not go well because she had previously painted without proper information or experience.
For some of it, there is no easy solution.
Here is the before-and-after view of one corner in the master bedroom. It is amazing what a truckload of Fast ‘N Final Lightweight spackling compound can do.
It is very good karma to lovingly clean up messes you did not make!
I am reminded of our helping one of our friends move out of a house that our other friends were moving into.
I am reminded of the closing of Holistic Alliance in 2005 when we had 6,000 square feet of space to be emptied out and cleaned, making way for the new owner.
As we were there working on the house, one of our neighbors stopped in to see how it was going. She said how fortunate our friend was to have someone who was willing to step up and lend a hand. I reminded her who our friend is. Our friend works for our local hospice. She paved the way for John’s mom to get hospice care when needed, and then for his brother, Jim, as he was dying with lung cancer. Our friend had also assisted the neighbor’s husband.
Yes, it is a clearly “compounded” mess. As I mused about all of this, I could see that I have left messes (physical and emotional) for others to deal with. We all have.
And admittedly — even with all of our hard work this week — we have not been able to make all things right. Doing that will fall to some other at some other time.
Obviously, universal implications….
And, while I could not do a great job of everything, it is my intention to leave things better than I found them.
“When you are on the right path,
invisible hands will come to your aid.”
~ Joseph Campbell
Imagine my delight to log onto a Zoom meeting of Greater Boston IANDS and see Dr. Bernie Siegel It is no exaggeration to say Bernie is/was my first conscious step onto the path of awareness as self-healing tool, and thus a long-time idol.
Geoffrey Hayes, our pastor at the time, loaned me his copy of Bernie’s book, Love, Medicine and Miracles, which I read at our small travel trailer on Pitcher Lake Campground, in Dowagiac, Michigan. This was a period of my life during which I was experiencing daily chronic pain. It was revolutionary for Bernie to suggest I ask myself what that pain allowed me to do or be or have that would otherwise elude me.
The answer?
REST!
The synopsis of Bernie’s life-changing words of wisdom: Find another way to give that gift to yourself and the symptom/s may subside.
I became aware I had been in the habit of pushing myself through tasks.
The chronic pain gave me “permission” to rest.
This week, I gave our kitchen cabinets a much-needed fresh coat of paint. That meant taking off all of the doors, doing a light sanding, removing and cleaning all of the pulls and hinges, painting the doors, reinstalling the pulls and hinges, and rehanging the doors. Whew….
Not having a basement or garage,
I set up my work station in the great room!
The morning after the doors to the upper cabinets had dried overnight, I was awake early. They had to all be rehung for me to have room to paint the lowers.
I figured out a way to stand on a step stool, put one leg up on the counter top, aim the hinge on the door perfectly over the corresponding hole on the cabinet frame. I could use that leg like a third hand, and pick up the screw and screwdriver with my other two hands.
I now call it my prehensile leg (a term referring to an animal’s limb or tail capable of grasping).
Hanging the cabinet doors (and aligning them properly) certainly had a learning curve, but by the time John got up, the uppers were all hung and I had started painting the lowers.
Noteworthy: I have never previously hung a cabinet door.
That brings me back to Joseph Campbell’s opening quotation, Bernie Seigel’s message, and my current awareness: I cannot say I hung the doors alone, nor all by myself, or even without another human being helping. Each step of the way I was consciously inviting and, more importantly, receiving help.
And the kitchen looks so fresh and clean!
Bernie’s wife passed about 3 years ago. On the 4th of July, his family was visiting. Bernie could not find his cell phone. They tried calling the phone; they looked and looked. No luck finding the phone.
Shortly after his son had left for home, the son came back, saying, “Mom told me where your phone is.” Way out in the back yard, Bernie’s phone was on the chair, exactly where she said it was.
The kicker of this story is that they had not been out there!
I have written about a sense of beyond-personal capacity many times before. Many others share this recognition. We can benefit by being intentional in encouraging others to ask for and receive these types of non-physical support.
I will save how Bernie made me quit my job for another post and close with his words:
“Learn from the wisdom of others and enjoy your life experience. Remember the Bible ends in Revelations, not Conclusions, and graduations are commencements not terminations.” ~ Bernie Siegel
Hearing Gary Zukav express something absolutely obvious — fear is excruciating — is the roadmap to living from authentic power which is our highest purpose as humans.
Gary adds: Authentic Power refers to our ability to create positive energy and heal any issue through the power of love.
Whereas our normal idea of power involves control and manipulation of other people, authentic power reverses this idea to assert that the true sense of power always originates within oneself. When you become centered and align with your own states of inner joy and love, you are able to tap into a source of inspiration and creative genius that few people have known. ~ Gary Zukav
A friend reached out recently asking my advice for his finding a doctor who would respect his desire to safely titrate off mood-stabilizing medication. I responded, “It is the same process as finding anything else we think we want. Get clear on your intention to live from your highest purpose. Ask for and expect to receive divine assistance. Soften resistance around this or anything else. Let awareness guide the way.”
If you act on an intention with fear, you are going to create painful, destructive consequences for yourself (the same as you’ve created before) because this experience in you didn’t just come about with this partner, this business partner, this neighbor, this roommate, this classmate. You’ve experienced it before.
And you’ll experience it again as long as you continue to escape the pain of it by changing the world. ~ Gary Zukav
Almost daily someone is implying that we need to take action against something dreadful. We need to demand equal rights for the LGBT community; we need to protest to protect the environment; we need to demand equality for race, gender, religion. We must stand up for all of these rights.
Wholesome action is, well, wholesome, but Zukav points out that acting on an intention with fear is definitely not wholesome. In fact, taking action that is motivated by fear can create painful, destructive and even excruciating consequences.
The Noble Eightfold Path, an early summary of the path of Buddhist practices leading to liberation consists of eight practices: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi. Samadhi is calm-abiding meditation, where one intends to not follow the constant flow of thoughts, to not focus on them.
Recent news: a friend hospitalized following an intentional overdose of anxiety medication; escalation of a teenager’s mental and emotional chaos surrounding child-hood sexual trauma; a mothers recent discovery of her daughter’s anger at not having been protected from early childhood sexual trauma.
Excruciating news.
Injustice, abuse of power, corruption, dishonesty and despair is commonplace. These are all manifestations of fear, therefore it does not help to meet any of it with more fear.
Zukav makes it clear: There’s nothing wrong with following that. The universe isn’t oriented in terms of right and wrong, or good and bad. It is oriented in cause and effect – there is a cause, and for every cause, there is an effect, and if you participate in the cause, you will participate in the effect.
Today’s Daily Aaron Quote:
There is no thought for today!
Perhaps a reminder from the Universe that if we participate in the cause, it is not possible to not participate in the effect, so being a universal human with authentic power is totally the right action…
Note* Here are links to the two Zukav talks these comments come from:
The more you sense the rareness
and value of your own life,
the more you realize that
how you use it,
how you manifest it,
is all your responsibility.
We face such a big task,
so naturally we sit down for a while.
~ Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi
I did not know John and I would make a spur-of-the-moment drive to Tennessee and have such a wonderFULL four days with our daughter, Stacey, and her family, including our 6 month-old great-grandson, Jackson. My heart is so full, my eyes keep running over….
A lasting effect of the pandemic.
One of the lasting effects of the pandemic is an open schedule which allowed us to pick up and go. Another lasting effect is the down-on-my-knees gratitude for surviving. Not only have we survived the virus, but we see now how we have also survived the thought-virus of “MY WAY IS THE WAY.”
Ours is not the only family that navigated the pandemic with physical isolation being secondary to the pain of emotional distance, this dynamic having played itself out for many, if not most. This dynamic plays itself out over-and-over in every human life as the eight worldly concerns (conveniently divided into four pairs of seeming opposites): gain and loss, praise and blame, good reputation and bad reputation, and pleasure and pain.
Did the dissipation of distance and the opening of our hearts occur because of our mutual love for Jackson? Caring for him, delighting in him, cooperating with one another on his behalf surely has produced a welcome lasting effect.
When I captured this photo of Jackson’s face-palm, his mom shared that this was his pose in the ultrasound images while he was in the womb, and his dad said that was the pose as he entered the world! The gesture is found in many cultures as a display of frustration, disappointment, exasperation, embarrassment, horror, shock, surprise, exhaustion, sarcasm, or incredulous disbelief. One friend commented that it is was his way of saying, “What have I gotten myself into?”
A lasting effect of the pandemic likely has all of humanity experiencing some of that feeling….
But, everything holds its opposite, as is seen in this photo of a very contented Jackson in the arms of his Uncle Adam.
“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality…. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.” ~ Buddha / Kalu Rinpoche
And the older I get, the more thankful I feel, for the life I’ve had and all the life I’m living still. My heart still rings with John’s playing guitar and singing those lyrics from “The Older I Get” by Alan Jackson.
Another lasting effect of the pandemic!
The Older I Get
The older I get
The more I think
You only get a minute, better live while you’re in it
‘Cause it’s gone in a blink
And the older I get
The truer it is
It’s the people you love, not the money and stuff
That makes you rich
And if they found a fountain of youth
I wouldn’t drink a drop and that’s the truth
Funny how it feels I’m just getting to my best years yet
The older I get
The fewer friends I have
But you don’t need a lot when the ones that you got
Have always got your back
And the older I get
The better I am
At knowing when to give
And when to just not give a damn
And if they found a fountain of youth
I wouldn’t drink a drop and that’s the truth
Funny how it feels I’m just getting to my best years yet
The older I get
And I don’t mind all the lines
From all the times I’ve laughed and cried
Souvenirs and little signs of the life I’ve lived
The older I get
The longer I pray
I don’t know why, I guess that I’ve
Got more to say
And the older I get
The more thankful I feel
For the life I’ve had and all the life I’m living still
I cannot swear that Tami Simon, the founder of Sounds True, which produces Insights at the Edge had pondering fathers on her mind when she shared “Fierce Intimacy” with Terry Real. Now, I have to confess, I devoured two of Terry’s books — I Don’t Want to Talk about It : Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression and How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women — long enough ago that he was going by Terrence Real.
Perhaps being a teenage wife (to an equally teenage husband) was part of the motivation of my avid interest, but I am honestly assuming the relationship of my own mother and father as I was growing up played an even more significant role.
In the interview with Tami Simon, Terry answers her question about how he developed the core skills he teaches with brutal transparency:
Bloodily. [and he laughs] People have asked me how I became a family therapist and I jokingly always say, “I started about four years old in my dysfunctional family.” I come from a violent, dysfunctional, depressed family and I was pretty messed up for most of my life. I write about it in I Don’t Want to Talk About It. That’s autobiographical in part. There’s this old joke that therapists are people that have to be in therapy 40 hours a week.
I had never heard that line about therapists being people who need to be in therapy 40 hours a week, but it resonates. I had also never heard of using the parallel of becoming relationally fit to becoming physically fit.
Tami Simon: In your book, The New Rules of Marriage, you actually make this comparison in the beginning of the book that becoming relationally fit has parallels to becoming physically fit. If you work out, if you do it, you’ll become physically fit. I thought, for most people, they think… I think most people think, that happiness in relationship is a lot more mysterious than becoming physically fit.
To become physically fit, this is something I’m going to do on my own. And I know that if I’m not physically fit, it’s because I haven’t been to the gym. I’ve been eating ice cream. Whatever. I take responsibility. I know inside, I’m not physically fit. I haven’t been doing it. But relational happiness, this is going to take a miracle outside of my own energy and effort because there’s this other person involved. And this other person’s really difficult.
Terry responded with, “Yes, isn’t that amazing the way the other person is always so difficult and we’re all so nice?”
Last week during the Dharma Path Intensive, we heard an amazing teaching from Aaron, channeled by Barbara Brodsky, about bringing beautiful flowers up from the deep crevasse of darkness. That certainly seems to fit with becoming relationally fit. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of a talk given by Aaron on June 1, 2021.
Now let us brave the long ladders that we find. Going down, and down, and down into the darkness.
Your feet finally touch the bottom. Firm ground. But what is there around you? Is it safe? But there is a sweet scent in the air.
Just as you get your footing, the sun crests over the edge high above you and shines straight down and illuminates a land filled with flowers and beauty. Just a few seconds, because the crack above you seems so narrow, so high above, and then it passes and you’re in darkness again.
Can you imagine this? You came down the ladder with courage and fear. You land on your feet, not knowing if you’d be attacked by something that wanted to destroy you, to eat you. And there in the darkness were radiant flowers with a beautiful scent.
You have large baskets on your backs. You ask the flowers, “Who will come with me?” And so many of them shout out, “Me! Me! Take me!” So you begin to fill the baskets with flowers. You carry them up. Some of them you cut; some of them you actually dig out by the roots and put in small pots. You climb back up.
Now instead of just your heart carrying the light of the Dharmakaya onto the bridge and out into the nirmanakaya, instead of just reaching for those who are able to come on the bridge and directing them toward the Dharmakaya, you have something of substance.
You carry it across the bridge. You do not set it on the nirmanakaya end of the bridge. You do not set it off of the bridge, but you set it on the edge of the bridge, so that people must take one step into the sambhogakaya to reach this wonderfully-scented offering.
Picture the beings who come and take these flowers, beings living in a nirmanakaya realm who have never seen anything except the most mundane flowers, and those still being beautiful, the dandelions and such. But this is something with such an exquisite scent and beauty…
Feel yourself there on the end of the bridge, holding out these flowers and asking people to simply take one step up to reach the flower and to receive their flower. Inhale the heavenly scent. See the radiant colors, colors so much more vivid than anything in the nirmanakaya realm.
But to reach this you had to have the courage to move off the safety of the bridge and into the darkness. There are flowers there. There are also tigers with enormous fangs, and huge snakes. This is not a realm only of light.
But as you brave the darkness and bring up the flowers, who say, “Take me! Take me!” and offer them out to the world of suffering, that world also can become transformed.
Janice Keller has transcribed Aaron’s teaching for decades. When she sent this one, she included an image and the precious line: bringing beautiful flowers up out of the crevasse.
You will know it is significant that you are reading this. I only know it is significant I am writing it as I am pondering fathers….
There isn’t anything anybody wants
that is for any other reason than that
they think they would feel better in having it.
Our Love,
Esther
(and Abraham and Jerry)
Excerpted from Seattle, WA on 7/3/99
This morning I am pondering….
What have you lost and/or gained from COVID-19? Some people have lost their lives, others have gained weight.
My pondering has led me to wonder about the loss of our peaceful, easy, feeling with being with our daughter, Stacey. Stacey is our only child. We were sooooo young when she was born, we all grew up together. Most of our adult life there has been no one we more enjoyed that peaceful, easy, feeling with. Admittedly, the emotional distance predated the global pandemic. Likely, it was exacerbated by the political polarization that predated the pandemic.
AS I WAS KEYING IN THESE WORDS, Stacey send her dad a text message saying she would like to come up and see us, and asking if we would be comfortable!
We would certainly be more comfortable if we knew she was fully vaccinated.
On the surface “things” can look like they can be disconnected, but there truly is no such thing.
Last evening I could feel someone reaching out, a felt-sense someone was needing support. I did not know who, what, when, or where, so, I went to bed early with this intention on my mind and in my heart: May all beings come to the end of suffering.
Checking text messages early this morning revealed the particulars of the reaching out, and I was blessed by a FaceTime visit with my friend who had sent the text message asking for support the night before.
Just now, as I was reaching out asking for this emotional distance to be spanned, Stacey was also reaching out wanting the same thing.
We all know that a peaceful, easy, feeling feels better.
A friend shared having a dream that her entire body was covered with a honeycomb. It was very soothing — sort of like a protective layer. She woke up feeling very supported.
A bit later, she discovered that WHILE she was sleeping and dreaming of a honeycomb, her friend/colleague was awake trying to figure out how to create a honeycomb pattern with ink on paper with a dotting tool!
Bees, honey, and honeycombs are significant to life on earth. Neanderthals probably used honey as a food they gathered. The family of apes are known to utilize honey.
What we humans are going through on earth at this time is not new.
EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED.
The wisdom and awareness of this, as truth, is what is new….
My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue,
An everlasting vision of the everchanging view,
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold,
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold.
~ Carole King
Today is day five of a five-day workshop that in music might be called the crescendo of the past three years of an intensive spiritual program with Barbara Brodsky called “Dharma Path.”
The closing ceremony is one in which we are to express our deepest intention for our highest purpose of this human life. I wrote in my journal:
What is my highest intention for this incarnation?
It is my highest intention in this incarnation to participate fully in what Aaron calls raising earth’s vibration and assisting in it’s becoming positively polarized.
It is my highest intention to know the realms of support for this coming to be.
In the personal realm, that translates to balancing old karma, freedom from habit energy related to that old karma, stabilizing new patterns that activate the highest possible frequency and: Living, encouraging [and enjoying] a conscious spiritual journey.
To respond to reactivity with clarity from this highest intention, I remember the great prayer: May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings feel joy. May all beings realize their intrinsic perfection and find perfect peace.
~~~~~~
This morning I awoke at 5:00 am and unable to fall back asleep, went into the front bedroom which is simultaneously serving as my meditation hall, office, and guest room. I opened my email to a promotional piece for a book by Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, and listened to an interview with her as she speaks about the book. Here is a link to the podcast: A Different Way to Live Virtuously, in which she says:
The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. The opposites tend to play out on our planet.
These things [fruits of the spirit] aren’t just virtues, they are not just nice little moral qualities, they are not just nouns. They’re actually energy packets, they are food. And they’re nutrients that our planet needs directly because the lack of them causes things to get so harsh and so desiccated and so dry and barren and parched that you can’t stand to live here. Craziness enters….
We do have something that we have to give back and pay back, and it is not only food for our own realm but for realms above.
She speaks about George Gurdjieff, Russian philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent, who died in 1949. She says her book is mostly about “World 24” – from his metaphorical number system about human consciousness.
World 24:
The world of Presence, deep equanimity, of deep mindfulness and of the conscious circle of humanity, the place where we actively receive on this planet assistance from above (from what Christians would call the Saints and the rest of the traditions would call the enlightened ones). Where we hand up our transformed gifts of goodness and love and forbearance and patience and devotion and where we bring down onto our planet the benefits of faith, coherence, temperance, forgiveness, courage. It’s a realm of very active interface between the visible and the invisible, what the senses and reason says is logical and sensible and what the heart knows is good and true.
World 12, accordingly, for the Christians it is Heart of Christ and for the Buddhist it is the Boddhisatva Consciousness – identical states of consciousness where human beings know we are bound to each other.
For over ten years now, my signature line on my email is this quotation by Mother Teresa: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
I ask you to offer support for my intention, and to craft your own.
When I picked up the spoon off the napkin to stir my morning tea, a huge ant fell out onto the kitchen counter. I carefully picked it up with the napkin, and carried it out onto the porch.
Looking up “ant as animal totem” I was surprised to see a reference to MOLD:
The plant spirit medicine of mold is in partnership with Ant medicine and it teaches of the psychedelic dimensions of Earth.
The insect nation is in direct communication with such dimensions which is why it is often very disconcerting to encounter Dragonfly, Ant, Spider, and all the other tiny crawlers of Earth.
(Regular readers of Yellow Brick Road know we had quite the dance with mold.)
Coming back to get my tea, I saw a long-legged spider in the sink. I grabbed a tissue and carefully delivered the spider to the porch as well. Very unusual happenings both of these….
The following morning, another (near-identical) spider was in the sink!
Over the past week I have been gifting contents from my professional office. While it was not an easy decision to give up a formal practice space, I have already had many confirmations that opportunities abound to love, serve, and remember, as Betty Lue and Robert (Reunion) taught us to sing.
It has been my hope that the love and healing related to each item and all of our history will continue to bless the world with remembered wholeness.
I had an odd interaction when I dropped off the door name plate to one colleague. Knowing she had last expressed not having been vaccinated, I put on my mask and offered a hug. “No hugs,” she replied. “I have to protect you.” The words did not match the energy.
“I am masked to protect you,” I responded.
“No hugs,” she repeated, shaking her head.
I got back into my car feeling some sadness. I was very grateful our next delivery was to drop off the afghan with Jesus surrounded all the forest creatures. It was a wonderful visit…. complete with hugs.
One of the members of the Zen Empty Circle shared the stressful situation with his in-laws, who neither mask nor choose to be vaccinated against the coronavirus — understandably wanting his young daughter to come spend time with them. They miss her. He does not feel comfortable allowing her to go. The meditation teacher said, “Remember you are not keeping her from them, you are protecting her from the virus.”
In our own family we have this dynamic.
In many families, this polarized world view expresses itself.
What will our post-pandemic world be? The wondering comes if we will we be like the Sneetches (Dr. Seuss) and get over ourselves, but at a cost like when McBean drives away with the Sneetches‘ cash, exclaiming, “They never will learn. No. You can’t teach a Sneetch.”
It did not feel as though she refused a hug “to protect me” but I do know she is not a Sneetch, and neither am I….
If you want to go fast,
go alone.
If you want to go far,
go together.
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