Ian Lawton

Thriving in Spirit

2012-02-03T08:08:00.000-05:00

I continued the theme of body, mind and spirit this week with an emphasis on spirit. I wrote three pieces, as listed below. If you prefer to receive this content by email, click here and you can choose to receive it either daily (as the article are written) or weekly (in one longer email). You can also receive audio and video of the weekly content. Click here for audio or here for video.

1. What is spirit? What does it mean to thrive in spirit as well as body and mind? Click here for more.

2. Spirit is not external. It is an inner sense of wellbeing. YOU have access to it ANY time. Click here for more.

3. Mind and body have intuitive, extraordinary, wisdom. Click here for more.

I leave you with this thought from Aldous Huxley,

The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one's own ignorance concerning one's self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one's self.

2012-01-20T13:02:00.000-05:00

This week I wrote about bodies, as part of a larger intention of thriving in body, mind and spirit in 2012. There are three articles to look over;

1. Bodies Matter- Appreciate your beauty inside and out. See YOU for who YOU are. Click here for the article.

2. Caring for your body is a way of caring for others. Your body matters. Click here for the article.

3. Wellness is not about being perfect. It is about being perfectly YOU. ALL of you. Click here for the article.

Please note that you can now receive my content by email, either daily or weekly and by text, audio or video. Sign up for this free service here.

Have an awesome week. I leave you with this quote from Geneen Roth, author of Women, Food and God.

It’s never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels. We don’t want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves

2012-01-12T09:51:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year. May it be your best ever. I started out 2012 with a series of articles called "Coming Out Head First in 2012". More about those articles below.

First, I want to bring you up to speed with some exciting new developments. I am now offering the ability to subscribe to my weekly content in a way that suits you. I generally write four separate articles per week on a theme. You can opt to receive them by email as four articles over four days, or you can subscribe to receive one longer article once a week. You can also opt to receive the content by text, audio, video or all three.

I'm offering this content for free but encourage you to make a tax deductible donation (either one time or recurring) to support my work. There are costs associated with the administration of this subscription system, and your donations will help to cover some of these costs. Please visit the Resources page to subscribe to my content in a way that suits your needs. I will continue to post a summary of my weekly articles on this blog.

As for Coming Out Head First, the New Year is a great time to get your head straight about your intentions, claim the power of your mind, recommit to possibility thinking and transform your memories. Please follow any link below that interests you.

1. Diving Into 2012- click here to read more.
2. Claim the power of your mind- click here to read more.
3. Recommit to possibility thinking- click here to read more.
4. Transform your memories- click here to read more.

May your mind transcend limitations.

May your consciousness expand in every direction.

May you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be. Patanjali

Thriving in the Holidays

2011-12-15T16:27:00.000-05:00

This is my last post for 2011. Thanks to all who have stayed in touch with my blog. I trust that you received what you needed from it. After a short break over the Holidays I will write again. My first opportunity in 2012 is a teleclass on change that I am leading in conjunction with Brian Johnson's En Theos Academy for Optimal Living. All are welcome to join the class, which is using some cutting edge technology to create a truly interactive experience. Read more about the course here.

Most likely your attention is now focused on the Holidays, time with family and your own journey through Christmas. My writing this week has focused on these things. Take what is meaningful from the following-

1. An inclusive spiritual perspective on Christmas, read more here.

2. Four Agreements to help prepare for an awesome Holiday season. Read more here

3. Inspired by the Christmas story. But which story? Four Christmases, read more here.

Above you are the stars. Beneath you is the earth. Within you is the light of life. Like the stars may your vision be clear. Like the earth, may your life be grounded. Like the light within, may your spirit shine.

Much love and gratitude, Ian.

Inner Clarity, Outer Vision

2011-12-08T10:22:00.001-05:00

Helen Keller said, "The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision."

Last week I wrote about doubt. This week I wrote about clarity of vision. There are six articles. Feel free to explore any or all of them at your leisure.

1. Vision grows out of what you see inside yourself (click here for part one in the series).

2. Vision involves squinting at your own sacred essence ( click here for part two in the series).

3. Vision stretches you to see what lies ahead (click here for part three in the series).

4. Di-vision gets in the way of da-vision. Beware of double vision (hypocricy) and focus on authenticity more than size (click here for part four in the series)

5. Vision boarding is a practical way to clarify your vision (click here to read about vision boarding),

6. This visualization on your life five years back and five years forward will help give you perspective on your growth.

Remember that, in the words of Dan Zadra, "Your resources are always far greater than you imagine them to be." Wake up to all that you can be. Shine some light on a vision that may have been buried under a pile of fears for too long. Set out on a path that may feel hard, but you know it’s right. It’s time to emerge from your own dark age and shine your light.

Gratitude and Doubt

2011-12-01T16:29:00.001-05:00

This week began with Thanksgiving and ended in Great Doubt. Its been said that successful people have doubts. They just don’t let doubt stop them. So my message this week is to doubt, and doubt boldly but don't let it paralyze you. Let your awareness grow beyond a shadow of doubt and take you from strength to strength. I wrote four pieces. Please peruse at your leisure.

1. Gratitude in ALL Circumstances, both the ups and downs, the doubts and clarity. This article is about gratitude and growth, through ALL that was, all this is, and all that is to come. Read more.
2. Doubt is often seen as a weakness. Reframe doubt as powerful and beneficial. Give yourself the benefit of doubt. This article describes the benefit of doubt both personally and socially. Read more.
3. In the third article, I spoke personally about working through Great Doubt at a Zen retreat in 2005, and outlines the five stages of enlightenment from Tozan. Read more.
4. The fourth article is on a different topic, the ongoing question of how to change well. This piece is about eliminating things that aren’t serving you and adding more of the things that make you feel alive and inspired. Read more.

Namaste!

2011-11-25T10:35:00.001-05:00

Nelson Mandela said, "There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children."

This week I wrote about protecting children, in the light of revelations about the Penn State abuse scandal. There are five pieces to explore-

1. Honoring the innocence of children while teaching them about boundaries. Help kids to develop wise trust. Read more.

2. Protect children before protecting institutions like the church or college football programs. Read more.

3. Become a whistleblower for kids in danger. Learn to see the signs of danger, and empower kids to trust their intuition. Read more.

4. Learn to forgive yourself when you fail to see the signs or act on warning signs. Read more.

5. We need to believe that good people do bad things so that we are not blindsided by abuse. Read more.

In the end, it all comes down to what sort of world you choose to dwell in. I imagine a world where children are fiercely protected and people are mindful of the effect of their actions.

I love the ritual among the Masai tribes of African. Even though they were considered the most fearsome of all warriors, they use a greeting that is amazingly gentle. They greet each other with the words, “Kasserian ingera?’ which means “How are the children?” Even warriors with no children of their own would give the answer, ‘All the children are well.”

If the children are well, it is well with all. If the least visible and least powerful are well cared for, society as a whole is in a healthy state. Start by caring for the vulnerable child within who needs to be empowered with courage to heal from past choices and move on making powerful choices. Ask yourself often, “How is the child within?” May your answer be, “The child within is well.”

Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-03T09:54:00.000-04:00

This week I wrote about transformation, particularly in relation to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that is gaining momentum. Please follow the links below to read each article.

1. Reform changes things at the surface. Transformation changes from the inside out. Click here to read more

2. Getting beyond labels that divide. Spend less time defining who we are, and more time BEING who we are. Click here to read more

3. Visualizing Transformation, a visualization for anyone managing change, using the analogy of a butterfly. Click here to read more.

Acceptance

2011-10-27T08:33:00.003-04:00

I chose to give my creative mind a rest this week and only wrote once. The piece I wrote was on acceptance and living with no strings attached. The harp created my guiding metaphor, which led to a visualization which I found meaningful. I hope you do too. You can read the article and visualization here.

Throw yourself into every moment with no strings attached, with no assurance that your efforts will be rewarded. Plan your next steps with no certainty of the outcomes. Pour yourself into a cause or project you believe in without knowing where it will take you. Do it as an authentic expression of who you are.

2011-10-20T09:05:00.000-04:00

This week I wrote a four part series on authenticity and taking off masks. Jim Morrison, Doors frontman, said, "The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are." Please follow each link below to read the series as it unfolded.

1. The first article is about the power of authenticity. Click here to read.
2. The second is about authenticity’s payoff. Recover your born identity. Click here to read.
3. The third offers practical steps to live more authentically. Its exhausting not to live authentically. Click here to read.
4. The fourth piece is about the connection between living authentically and the needs of the planet. Masks and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Click here to read.

In order to BE yourself, you have to KNOW yourself. Once you start living authentically, life becomes filled with joy. And as Gandhi said, "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

Have an awesome week of finding, living, loving and being yourself.

2011-10-13T08:49:00.001-04:00

Last week I wrote about taking responsibility. I mentioned responsibility’s mantra, IF IT IS TO BE, IT IS UP TO ME. When you see something that needs to be done, get in and take responsibility. But is there such a thing as taking too much responsibility? What happens when you feel overwhelmed by the needs of the world? How do you persevere when it feels like you’re running backwards into a stiff headwind? How do you remove unhealthy burdens from your life? How do you keep caring without letting the pain destroy you? These are some of the questions I addressed this week.

Please follow the links to read more about

1. 10 ways to know if you are taking on too much responsibility. Click to read more.

2. 10 practical ways to overcome overwhelm. Click to read more.

3. What is the connection between empathy and overwhelm? Click to read more.

4. What does the phrase, “pain hurts more, but bothers you less” mean? Click to read more.

Have a great week, and live with awesome balance between care and acceptance.

Personal Responsibility

2011-10-06T12:10:00.001-04:00

The Dalai Lama said,

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.

This week I wrote about personal responsibility. It seems to be one of the defining qualities of human evolution. I looked at four issues. Follow the link to read each article.

1. Response-Ability- What is personal responsibility? Learn to take responsibility for both your successes and challenges.

2. Empathy and Responsibility- The level of your responsibility will mostly match your level of care or empathy.

3. Spirituality and Responsibility- Take responsibility for your own spiritual path, your beliefs and destiny.

4. Responsibility and Awareness- Your responsibility stretches as far as your awareness reaches.

New Beginnings

2011-09-29T11:18:00.001-04:00

Last week I wrote about ending well. This week I wrote four articles about beginning well.

The first piece was about the opportunity for renewed authenticity in beginnings.

The second was about using nervous energy to your advantage.

The third was about the excitement of joining change at the ground floor.

The fourth was about setting the tone for your life by putting your best foot forward.

Below is an extract from part 4. Please follow the links above to read them in order.

New beginnings are a privilege, and not to be taken for granted. The opportunity to start over, start new, rewrite the script, build something from the ground up, set the tone for an intention, are all part of the forgiving nature of the universe. Second, third and seven hundredth chances are built into the nature of life. When you truly believe that, you can set about living on purpose and without regrets. You are not alive at this time in history with your unique blend of experience and skill by accident. You are not reading this article at this time in your life by accident. There are things that you still need to express and manifest in the world, and your next thoughts, words and actions will set the tone for the rest of your life and help to create the future for all. Your kindred spirits are others who believe in second chances and fresh starts, and live their lives putting their best foot forward. Imagine the love revolution if more of us lived this way.

2011-09-24T18:54:00.000-04:00

This week I wrote four articles on ending well. We all face many endings in life and they bring an opportunity to end well so that you can begin again well and fully without baggage and regrets.

I encourage you to read them all on my Soulseeds blog.

The first part looked at impermanence.

The second looked at ending well, especially in the case of divorce or relocation.

The third looked at assumptions.

The fourth part looked at making peace with time.

F.E.A.R False Evidence Appearing Real

2011-09-15T16:33:00.000-04:00

This is part 3 in a series on 9-11, fear and healing memories. Please visit Soulseeds to read the whole series.

Fear is the memory of danger. It serves a purpose, often keeping us out of danger like not touching a red hot stove top, but in many ways it’s a dinosaur. The fight or flight response of fear is a hangover from ancient times when people had to avoid flying spears and hungry mammoths. It created the urgency to act before thinking. Life doesn’t hold the same dangers for most of us now, and yet our brains still hold the same capacity for fear. Our challenge is to separate healthy fear from unhealthy fear. This is part of the process of photoshopping memories- updating the information and reframing the challenges behind fear.

Healthy fear gets you out of the path of a speeding car, and checks in with the doctor about a strange lump. Unhealthy fear is F.E.A.R, false evidence that appears real but is mostly a fabrication of the reptilian brain and the ego that wants to keep you imprisoned in your own mind, unwilling to be fully alive because it’s too risky to venture out. Overcome this unhealthy fear, and you will wake up to an inner security that will put external threats in a new perspective.

TS Elliot said, “I will show your fear in a handful of dust.” 9-11 showed us fear in a skyline of dust, an urban wasteland. Ten years later, the dust has settled, but the fear remains for many. Unfortunately, some politicians, most branches of the media and too much religion tap into the reptilian fear impulse and encourage unhealthy fear. Whole systems of so called security are established to create the façade of safety. One of the ways we can photoshop the awful memories of 9/11 is to update some of our information and reframe our workdview.

I flew out of American on Christmas Day, 2009, the same day that the famed “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab strapped explosives to his underwear and attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit airport. As a result, I passed through the tightest air travel security regimen that the world has ever seen. Countless hours and dollars were poured into patting down 7 year old girls wheeling Dora the Explorer backpacks full of Christmas toys and crayons. (I always thought there was something fishy about Dora, her evil side-kick Boots and that cunning talking map.)

Update your information about air travel. In the past decade there have been a handful of terrorist related incidents on US airplanes. Most of them failed or were foiled by other passengers. If you look at the total number of passengers on planes in the last decade, the odds of being on a flight with a terrorist incident is 1 in 10 million. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are 1 in 500,000. Here is a stark way to reframe the events of 9/11. You are more likely to die from falling out of bed than as the victim of a terrorist on a plane. Or to reframe this in a positive context. Your odds of finding true and lasting inner peace skyrocket when you rid your mind of irrational fears.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to have air travel security measures. We need to take precautions. But there is a world of difference between precautions and paranoia. A precaution is taking a cell phone and GPS on a long car trip. Paranoia is not leaving your home. There are few things in life we desire more than security, and yet it is often like chasing the wind. Just when you think you’ve caught it, another gust comes up from behind and knocks you down. Security has an elusive charm that keeps you searching but can leave you vulnerable to surprise attacks and missed opportunity.

Security is tightened at major national airports, leaving the gate open for someone to enter the system in one of the smaller, less secure, airports. It’s like double dead bolting your front door, but leaving the side French Windows wide open. There are gaps in the border walls to Mexico. There are loopholes to laws and tax systems. Bottom line, there is no perfect security system. You can surround yourself with the greatest military might on the planet and still not feel secure.

After ten years of tightened security measures, do you feel safer on an airplane? Maybe. But at what cost? While so much focus is on air travel, what other security threats are being ignored? The ultimate question is- Are you prepared to sacrifice personal liberty for the illusion of security?

As long as you frame life against an expectation of security, you will never feel safe. When you frame your life and memories against a backdrop of freedom and personal responsibility, you will be at peace. To live is to risk. To love is to risk. To risk is to surrender. To surrender is to find peace of mind.

Updating memories with new information is one step in reframing traumatic memories. The chance of something happening on an airplane is slim. The risk in visiting New York City is negligible. People wearing turbans are no more or less dangerous than those without turbans. If 9-11 teaches us anything, surely it is to live while you are alive, and not allow the illusion of security and the frame of fear to hold you captive.

Recently I discovered that someone in our neighborhood has built a bomb shelter. I could understand this during World War 2, but in our quiet town in 2011 it verges on paranoia. The same person moved from the other side of the state for safety reasons. The desire for security is insatiable. There is nowhere to run and hide from life. It demands to be lived. There is no place, no travel, no system, that can satisfy the ego’s desire for security. The biggest problem is bomb shelters of the mind, the protective layers that keep you locked in a small perspective.

F.E.A.R- come back to the false evidence part of the equation. Change the frame.

There is a parable about a man who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a poisonous snake coiled next to his leg at the foot of his bed. He lies awake all night, frozen in terror, praying that the snake won’t bite him. As dawn breaks, and light begins to shine on his bed, he finally realizes that it’s not a snake at all. It’s a belt he forgot to put away when he went to bed. Once he knows the truth, the snake disappears, the memory of the night is reframed, the fear is gone and he is filled with relief.

Until he had seen the light, so to speak, his imagination got the better of him and he imagined his own demise at the hands of the snake. When you shine a light on the memories and call them what they are, you can make unconscious emotions conscious and reframe false evidence.

This is one of the ways we can honor the loss of 9/11. Call it what it was, but not more than that. It was the tragic loss of life at the hands of a few extremists. Insane people with insane beliefs can knock buildings down and kill people to further their agenda, but they can’t win inside your head and heart which is the engine room of your life, unless you let them. Choose love over fear.

The choice is there for each one of us- continue to reenact the fear, and you will live your life in a bomb shelter of your own mind. In this case the terrorists win. Or else put events of the past in perspective, and reclaim your power. Live with courage, which is not the absence of fear but the choice to proceed despite the fear. Sometimes your worst fear becomes your greatest opportunity.

Where do you find the strength to persist despite the fear? This simple story illustrates a profound truth. A mouse was in constant distress because of its fear of the cat. A magician took pity on it and turned it into a cat. But then it became afraid of the dog. So the magician turned it into a dog. Then it began to fear the panther, so the magician turned it into a panther. Then it was full of fear for the hunter. At this point, the magician gave up. He turned it into a mouse again saying, “Nothing I do for you is going to be of any help because you have the heart of a mouse.”

Have the heart of a peaceful warrior and nothing outside of you can conquer you. Therefore there is very little to fear. You nurture the heart of a peaceful warrior with the rock solid inner stillness that accepts change without attaching to outcomes.

The stage is set for an incredible evolutionary leap beyond reptilian fear and you and I are a part of this shift. As more people make a choice to live with inner freedom and personal responsibility, the very DNA that defines our fear impulse will be recoded. As we reframe the ego’s insatiable desire for security, we will stop looking for things that don’t exist and start truly living while we are alive. This is the greatest way to honor the loss of 9-11.

Let these words from Native American poet, Joy Harjo sink deeply in. She writes from her personal experience of fear. Change the details to match your experience, but keep the essence of her message.

I Give You Back By Joy Harjo

I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear.

I release you.

You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you as myself.

I release you with all the pain I would know at the death of my daughters.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the white soldiers who burned down my home, beheaded my children, raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.

I give you back to those who stole the food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold these scenes in front of me and I was born with eyes that can never close.

I release you, fear, so you can no longer keep me naked and frozen in the winter, or smothered under blankets in the summer.

I release you I release you I release you I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.

I am not afraid to rejoice.

I am not afraid to be black

I am not afraid to be white.

I am not afraid to be hungry.

I am not afraid to be full.

I am not afraid to be hated.

I am not afraid to be loved,

to be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.

You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.

You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

I take myself back, fear.

You are not my shadow any longer.

I won’t hold you in my hands.

You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice my belly, or in my heart

my heart my heart my heart.

But come here, fear.

I am alive and you are so afraid of dying.

Feed Your Soul by Geneen Roth

2011-09-08T15:12:00.001-04:00

Geneen Roth wrote the outstanding book, Women, Food and God which was featured on Oprah. I included one of Geneen's articles on Soulseeds' Seed Exchange. This article was first published in Good Housekeeping.

There are some things in life you take for granted: Your children will outlive you. No matter how tough it gets, you won't poison your spouse with arsenic-laced toothpaste. And if you have a best friend, you will attend her wedding.

But life sometimes upsets our most basic assumptions. And although I haven't resorted to the arsenic (yet), I did have this surprise: My best friend from college got married today and I wasn't there. Never in a million years did I think I would miss her wedding. We'd been talking about it since we were 18. And yet, when it came down to deciding about making the trip from California to New York, I did something radical, something I rarely do: I took my own needs into account.

I stepped away from my notions of what a good person would do, what any loyal friend would do, and considered the facts: I'd just returned from teaching an exhilarating but exhausting weeklong retreat; I had a broken ankle and a sprained back and could barely walk; my friend decided to get married rather suddenly and told me she wasn't expecting me to come. And I realized that although I would miss seeing her walk down the aisle if I didn't go, I would be a hobbling, exhausted wreck if I did. So I stayed home, sent champagne, and wrote my friend and her new husband a wedding story. It was an agonizing decision but not nearly as painful as the tale I told myself about it: If I don't go to my best friend's wedding — the very friend who held my hair back the night I drank a bottle of Cold Duck and threw up on the sidewalk — people will finally discover how selfish I am and I will lose every friend I have. I will spend my dying days alone, dribbling Diet Coke on my chin with no friends or family around. As soon as I realized I'd made a leap from taking care of myself to visions of dying alone, dribbling and friendless, I understood that I considered looking out for my own needs a radical concept — so radical that it scared me to (a pathetic, lonely, and potentially sticky) death.

I should know better. In working with tens of thousands of women over the last two decades, I've found that there is a whole set of beliefs called "the bad things that will happen if I take care of myself." I've heard things such as, "My son will choke on a fish bone the minute I leave him alone and take some time for myself." "My husband won't be able to make friends without me if I stay home from this party and rest." "My friend will hate me if I don't make brownies for her bake sale."

Think about this: Do you feel it is right to put yourself at the center of your own life, or is your secret fear that if you consider your own needs, you'll alienate the people you love and end up homeless, rifling through old chicken bones in a dark alley? Are you afraid that a "me first" attitude will get you drummed out of the "good people" club?

Most of us secretly believe that good people, especially women, take care of others first. They wait until everyone else has a plateful and then take what's left. Unfortunately, most of us make decisions based on our ideas of who we think we should be, not on who we actually are. The problem is, when we make choices based on an ideal image of ourselves — what a good friend would do, what a good mother would do, what a good wife would do — we end up having to take care of ourselves in another way.

Enter food. When you don't consider your real needs, you will likely fill the leftover emotional hunger with food. (Or another abused substance. Or shopping. But most of us opt for food.) You eat in secret. You eat treats whenever you can, because food is the one way, the only way, you nourish yourself. You eat on the run because you believe that you shouldn't take time for lunch; there's too much work to do. You eat the éclair, the doughnut, the cake, all the while knowing this isn't really taking care of yourself. But to really take care of yourself, you have to think of yourself first.

"Is that possible?" you ask. "What about my children? I'd die for them." Have you ever considered why, on an airplane, the flight attendant tells you to put on your own oxygen mask first, before you help your children? It's because your kids' well-being depends on it. If you aren't grounded, present, calm, and able to breathe, there is no one to take care of them.

What would your life look like if you acknowledged the truth that working nonstop for 10 hours, taking care of other people, leaves you so spent and weary that there really isn't much left of you for your kids, let alone yourself? What would your life look like if you realized that you need to set aside time every day to fill yourself up — even if it's only by taking a few 15-minute breaks during which you stare at nothing or go outside or lie down? What would the pace of your life be if you went on "soul time" instead of clock time, even just a little?

It's possible. A few days ago, I spoke with a first-time mother. Her baby son had colic, and she was completely exhausted. She was so afraid she wouldn't be there when he needed her that she couldn't sleep even when he was napping or with her husband. And she was turning to food to calm herself down. I asked her what it would be like to do something very simple for herself: to sit down and breathe. That's all. No big deal. Nothing to achieve. Just let the body do what it was already doing and give herself a break. She said she could try that. She just breathed.

At the end of five minutes, I asked her how she felt. She said she was relieved, immediately calmer. She said that since she'd had her baby, she had forgotten all about herself and her needs, and while some of that was natural ("I'm so in love with him," she said; "I've never known love like this before"), she was not serving him best by exhausting herself. She said that caring for herself was doable — maybe not in the same ways she did before she was a mother, but in new ways. Taking small rests. Eating well. Going outside for even five minutes while he naps. "I can do this," she said. "I can treat myself with the same kind of care that I give him."

"Now you're talking," I said. "And the better you take care of yourself, the more he will know as he grows up that it's fine for him to take care of himself, too."

If you operate on what you believe a good mother/partner/friend would do and you leave yourself — what you need, how you feel — out of the equation, your relationships will suffer.

I'm here to tell you that cherishing yourself by making yourself a priority in your own life is possible. You can take care of your needs and your relationships with family and friends can thrive. I know, because I am making this my daily practice, and I am confident I will not go out either alone or dribbling.

Six Degrees of Separation

2011-09-01T13:18:00.001-04:00

This is the first part of a four part series on oneness and interconnectedness. Visit Soulseeds for all four articles.

The idea of six degrees of separation is that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet by a chain of no more than five acquaintances. In 1967 the American sociologist Stanley Milgram created a test called “The small-world problem.” He randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger in Massachusetts. They were told only the recipient’s name, occupation and general location. They were instructed to send the package to someone they knew only on a first name basis, who would then send it on to another, and so on until the package finally got to the recipient. While it was expected that the chain would be at least 100 people long, Milgram actually found that the range was from 2 to 10, with 5 being the average. His study inspired the phrase, “Six Degrees of Separation.”

Various forms of the theory have been tested and confirmed in the decades since. Most recently, Microsoft analyzed 30 billion Instant Messenger conversations in one month in 2006. They claim that they captured about half of the whole world’s IM communication for that month. They confirmed that the average chain of connection between IM users was 6.6. Yahoo and Facebook are now creating their own test of the theory.

The Kevin Bacon version of the experiment shows that all actors are connected to Kevin Bacon by an average of less than 3 connections. It turns out Bacon isn’t even the most connected actor. That award goes to Rod Steiger. By virtue of his five marriages, Steiger might invite a new version of the game to see how many marriages each couple is separated from every other couple. The mind boggles. It’s a small world, but as comedian Steven Wright said, “I wouldn’t want to paint it.” You can do your own Six Degrees of Separation exercise. When you’re at a party or work function, strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know, and find out how many degrees of separation there are between you. Ask questions about where they live, where they exercise, hair dressers, doctors, schools, what town they grew up in etc until you find a common acquaintance.

The idea of six degrees of separation is incredibly empowering. That elusive answer you’ve been looking for, the guidance, connection, support, inspiration, are all closer to you than you imagine. Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone and connect with someone new or some new place just to remind yourself that you live in an awesome universe that is open and generous, and that sometimes strangers or unlikely acquaintances bring you surprising gifts. There is enormous value in connecting with a diverse group of people and travelling to new places. It expands you and your experience of life. It reminds you that you live in a small but miraculous world and there is always more to learn.

Six degrees of separation is also motivating. If you understand the power you have to influence others, you can choose what you want to share. Because studies now show that happiness is literally contagious across your extended network, up to three degrees of separation. One study showed that if you are happy, your friends are 25% more likely to be happy as a result and your friends’ friends are 10% more likely to be happy even if they don’t even know you. So, given that we are all connected by six degrees of separation and happiness reaches across three degrees of separation, two people at opposite ends of a social network should be able to pass happiness back and forth among the network like a vibrating chain. Choose to share happiness and optimism. Spread it like a virus for good. Interconnectedness is not just a human experience.

David Lusseau, from the University of Aberdeen, UK, performed a similar experiment on 130 dolphins living off the coast of Svotland. He found that it takes an average of just 3.9 steps to link any two dolphins by the shortest possible route through mutual flipper friends. This is a good reminder that the six degrees of separation is not just about linking humans. All beings are intimately related. The notion of six degrees of separation reminds us of one of the fundamental laws of the universe and a profoundly spiritual truth. We are ALL connected and intimately related to each other. This is the foundation for compassion, morality, gratitude, wonder, vision, the law of attraction, paying kindness forward and so much more.

This week I will write each day on different aspects of six degrees of separation, including the gift of “weak” connections, the effect of the parts on the whole, the need to reconnect widely and culminating in an article on 360 degrees of connection.

Swami Vivekananda, the 19th century mystic credited with bringing Hindu philosophy to the west offers the perfect summary of the theme, All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything

Light in the Tunnel- Change Management

2011-08-27T08:14:00.003-04:00

This post first appeared on my blog at Soulseeds, and is the first in a four part series. All four articles are on the Soulseeds blog.

I have whiplash from following news of the economy in recent weeks. One day I read an article titled, “The top 10 reasons the U.S. will not see a double dip recession”. On the same day I read another report titled, “The top 10 reasons a double dip recession has already begun.” So which is it? Everyone has an opinion, and everyone is so sure they have the truth. In order to keep a little perspective in the madness, here are 10 lighthearted ways to know that we are in a recession.

10. For his birthday last week, President Obama asked for cash gifts….in Canadian dollars.

9. Angelina Jolie and Madonna have begun adopting American babies.

8. You now receive pre-declined credit cards in the mail.

7. Paris Hilton has changed her name to Paris Holiday Inn.

6. When you order your MacDonald’s burger, the server asks “Can you afford fries with that?”

5. When the ATM declines your transaction, you don’t know if it’s because you or the bank have insufficient funds.

4. You take your sales clients for a round of miniature golf.

3. A picture is now only worth a hundred words.

2. Wall Street has been renamed- Wal-Mart Street.

1. The light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off because we can’t afford the electric bills.

The economy is not a laughing matter of course, and many people are feeling its devastating effects. I don’t mean to minimize the difficulties in any way. However a little fun can release some of the tension and offer a little perspective. When you get up each morning, as you eat your Credit Crunch for breakfast and before you watch the so- called news, remind yourself that economic change is in itself a gift. Every economy, strong and weak, creates new, and unforeseen, opportunities. Many jobs today were not even imagined 20 years ago. A recession is an awesome time to get innovative, bolster your resilience and believe in the power of change.

There IS light at the end of the tunnel (and it’s NOT a train). It’s an LED bulb, which incidentally is one product that is selling well this year. This in itself is a sign of optimism. People are making a change to their energy habits after all the focus on sustainability in recent years. Change is happening like it always does and we seem to be finally catching on. Go with change because the light is calling you to make empowered choices and live with optimism. The darkness of the tunnel; your personal shadows, blind spots and forbidden thoughts, are punctuated by glimmers of light. Embrace the time in the tunnel, whether it’s a recession, an illness or a loss. The light is there in the tunnel, waiting for you to see it.

Optimism is the light at the beginning, middle and end of the tunnel. No matter how dark it feels, stay focused on the light which flickers with a reminder of your strength and brilliance. When you stare at light, you still see it when you look away. It’s the same when you focus on your inner light. It colors everything you see with optimism. With optimism, it’s ALL light and no tunnel, just open space and possibility. Follow the light of your intuition and you will arrive at new and exciting opportunities.

Where do you look for optimism? There is an ancient Sufi story about the trickster Nasrudin who loses his keys. His friends find him on his hands and knees under a street lamp. They ask him, “What have you lost?” “My keys”, he says. After a while, one of his friends asks him if he is sure this is where he lost them. He says, “No. I dropped them over in the next street but the light is so much better here.”

As the Zen proverb says, “If you can’t find it where you’re standing, where do you expect to wander in search of it?”

The shimmering new realizations arrive where you are because they ARE you in some new form.

Rumi wrote about light,

The lamps are different.
But the Light is the same.
So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp shop, Forget about them.
Concentrate on essence, concentrate on Light.
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire, The Light streams
toward you from all things, All people, all possible permutations of good,
evil, thought, passion.
The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind, Endlessly emanating all things.
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.

Trust the opportunity of change. If we learn nothing else from the ebb and flow of economies, let it be a reminder of the inevitability and opportunity of change. It’s those who adapt best to change who thrive on the waves of life. It is those who are able to stay present to the loving silence of the moment who find the treasures of change.

In recent weeks I have been writing about change that is forced on us by external circumstances- grief, job loss, divorce, physical pain etc. In these situations you can’t change the circumstance; you can only change your attitude towards them. I turn my attention now to a different sort of change, change that you help to create. These are the opportunities that present themselves for you to get active and get involved. They might be changes to your lifestyle or health, they might be changes to your consumption or energy efficiency, or they might be changes to the way society functions. Whichever it is, similar principles apply. The goal is to live and express beauty, truth, justice and love in your own life, and intend those same virtues for the entire planet. When you do this, you transform the world with light from the inside out.

In the coming days I will outline a three point plan for how to be an agent of conscious change, or in other words how to effect change in the healthiest way possible. It’s the AAA plan for change management that involves

1. Awareness,

2. Acceptance and

3. Action.

There is an article on each step at Soulseeds.

Transforming Grief

2011-08-11T11:45:00.003-04:00

This is the fourth part in a series on grief. Please visit my blog at Soulseeds for all four articles.

Having allowed all the full range of grief’s emotions to move you, mess with you, mould you and make you who you are today, you may feel ready to pull yourself out of the funk and move forward with a greater sense of peace. You will never be the same again. But that is true in every moment, with or without grief. The question is whether you have the courage to live with the disappointment of an imperfect experience. Anne Lamott sums it up brilliantly-

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

There will be cold days when your grief feels arthritic. There will be other, more limber days, when the spring in your step will surprise you. Dance with a limp, live with the pain and roll with the punches. What else can you do? Trust what the experience of millions has confirmed; that grief comes in waves and like a wave, grief does subside with time. When the wave of grief feels overwhelming, stay with it and remind yourself that “this too shall pass”. Fight the waves, and you will exhaust yourself. Go with them, and they will subside more quickly and you will become stronger with every passing wave. Nothing can be transformed until it is fully accepted.

This brings me to the fourth truth of grief. The first truth is to feel the pain and let it transform you. The second truth is that you are not alone, because you have a unique version of a universal experience. The third truth is that grief follows its own timetable and patterns. The fourth truth of grief is that it is ONE part of your life, and even if it feels all consuming at times, you are more than your grief.

E-motion- Energy in Motion

Grief, and all of its associated emotions, are energy in motion. They are always on the move. Grief is not one, unchanging thing. Grief turns on a dime. Stay alert to the alchemy of grief. Burned in the fire of sadness, strength is born. Elisabeth Kubler Ross offers a visual analogy for changing emotions. She says that grief emotions will come and go. When they knock at your door, let them in, and say “Oh. It’s you. Come on in.” Entertain them, get to know them, talk to them. Let them have the run of your house for a while. Maybe keep some space apart from them. Don’t set a space at the dinner table for them.

Transformation takes place when you realize that emotions come and go. You can witness them, talk to them, feel them. But there is a “you” that is doing the witnessing, talking and feeling. At your essence, you are more than any emotion and more than any experience. Emotions and experiences impact and mould you, but they don’t fully define you.

Grief usually visits as part of a group of changing emotions. Hurt, disappointment, sadness, regret and so much more. Emotional mastery is to know what emotion is what, where it is coming from, to be present to them all, but not get stuck in any one emotion.

Rumi’s Guest House captures it well-

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Shaken not Stirred by Change

2011-08-04T16:20:00.002-04:00

This is the fourth part in a series on change. You can read all of the posts at Soulseeds.

Marilyn Monroe said,

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right…..and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

Change is inevitable. That is the first truth of change. The second is that the future is open, and you can help to create it. The third truth is that chaos and change bring gifts of growth. The fourth truth of change is that there is something that remains stable while all else around you changes. It’s this unchanging spirit that gives you the courage and perspective to see the gifts of change. To paraphrase 007, change may shake, but not stir you.

Try this exercise. (of if you prefer, you can watch me demonstrating it here )Take your right hand and hold it out palm facing up. Something is about to change. Your hand will soon be facing palm down. It’s a 180 degree change. Conventional wisdom would say that it can’t be done without twisting your wrist. You are about to turn your palm down without twisting your wrist. Your wrist will remain stable while your hand changes direction. So, hold your right palm out in front of you with the palm facing up. Without turning your wrist, bring your palm up to your face. Then fold it down over your heart. Then take it out in front of you without twisting your wrist. Then bring it up to your face. Now hold it over your heart. Finally take it out in front of you. Now it is palm down. You did it without twisting your wrist.

In this illustration, your wrist is your unchanging inner spirit. You just changed without becoming limp wristed or losing the core of who you are. Everything can change around you; circumstances can be 180 degrees changed in your life. But you always retain the freedom and ability to choose your response. When this response comes from an inner place of peace, or equanimity, then you are not rocked by change. In fact you may even enjoy it.

Do you have something that needs to be released, some change that you feel brewing in your life? Hold your palm out, face up, so that what you need to release can fly free. Is it a relationship, a career path, a religious belief, a political hope? Let it go. Let it out. Let it fly free. Do it from the part within you that is completely free, the spirit that is still and peaceful in the midst of change. Everything is in perfect order. Reality is unfolding in perfect time, and you have the privilege of co-creating this reality as it unfolds.

This quote from Ken Wilber’s book One Taste is challenging but gets to the heart of that which is unchanging-

There is no inside and no outside, no in here versus out there. The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature. You can taste the sun and swallow the moon, and centuries fit in the palm of your hand. The pure I-I, the great I-AMness, breathes into infinity and creates a Kosmos as the Song of its very Self, and oceans of compassion fall as tears from your own very Original Face.

This is how I understand this beautifully poetic thought in practical terms. The lines on your palm change throughout life. The wisdom that some people believe you can discern from your palms is only a snapshot of who you are becoming in each moment, rather than a prediction of your future. There are other marks and signs on your palm; calluses from hard work, scars from injuries, etc, all reminders of your unique life experience. Some of these marks last a long time, but still change over time. I had a birth mark on my left palm that only started fading after 40 years. But there is something on your hand that is unchanging- your finger prints, the distinctive mark you leave when you shake hands with life. Your finger prints represent your unique human expression.

You do indeed hold centuries in the palm of your hand. Generations of genetic and environmental lineage make you who you are. You are changing from moment to moment, just as life changes from moment to moment. An open palm indicates that you aren’t hiding anything. You are ready to surrender to change with all of your vulnerable humanity. With an open palm, you give and receive, let go and begin the process of taking up again. An open palm is also snug. It signifies that you are okay with who you are becoming. This acceptance is the essence of your unchanging spirit. Everything can and will change around you. You will change; your mind, your direction, your path. Others will change. Systems will change. But through it all you remain grounded and stable.

To quote George Orwell, as he marveled at the human spirit that no system can squash,

The thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

Trust Yourself Even When Life Hurts

2011-07-28T08:45:00.002-04:00

This article was first posted on Soulseeds, where I post most days. Please visit Soulseeds for regular inspiration and encouragement.

Maybe you feel jaded because your trust has been betrayed and you have built high walls of protection around your heart. Thats understandable. Life can be harsh, and people can be cruel. Now you have a choice. You can either let the betrayal define you and become closed and bitter, or you can rise above the hurt and become even more determined to do whatever you can to create a world of unconditional love. Trust without any guarantee that your trust will be respected. Love without any guarantee that your love will be returned. Be kind without any guarantee that your kindness will be appreciated. This is the dance of authenticity, the risk that being completely yourself will open you to the most satisfying of all relationships.

Learning to trust an unpredictable world changes your whole outlook on life. It makes the world a more open, inviting and friendly place. Don’t give your trust recklessly. Give your trust mindfully; aware that there are no guarantees and there is always the chance you will be hurt again. In your calmest moments, you know that the risk to keep your heart closed is nothing in comparison to the joy of sharing love.

Are There Any Guarantees?

It seems backward, but the first step to building trust in relationships is to accept that there are no guarantees. As Comedian, Randy Millholand said, “There are people I know who won’t hurt me. I call them corpses.” Trust offers no certainties, or else trust would not be required. But don’t give up working on trust no matter how jaded you feel, or else you might as well be a corpse.

Find your balance. Being jaded and being idealistic are equally dangerous when it comes to relationships.

Be realistic. I have presided over too many weddings where young couples stand before me with stars in their eyes and no idea of how much they will likely hurt each other at some point. Some of these same couples have knocked on my door within weeks or months with awful stories of broken trust.

If people truly realized the intensity of making vows of commitment to another human being for life, they would wear a crash helmet to the wedding. Not a veil, but a crash helmet. Love is an act of faith. I sometimes feel like sending couples out with the instructions, “Do not try this at home without a safety net. It’s risky!”

Be realistic. There are risks involved. But also believe. Believe that there is something stronger than the risk- that is the joy of dropping your guard with another person, letting that person into your private wthoughts and dreams and making a commitment to love each other through thick and thin. Risk your trust in return for the adventure of being in love. Trust opens the gates to love.

Trust is more important than love. Saying to another person ‘I trust you” is often more profound than saying “I love you.” You may not always trust the person you love, but you can always love the person you trust. Trust is a gift. When you offer someone the gift of trust, you create an opening for something greater. Trust frees you from your fears and helps you give birth to love.

Building Trust in Relationships

Stephen Covey, son of Stephen Covey who wrote Seven Habits of a Highly Effective People, is the author of The Speed of Trust; The One Thing that Changes Everything. He offers the analogy that every relationship has a trust account. When you build trust, you make a deposit. When you break a trust, you make a withdrawal. The withdrawals are typically larger than the deposits. Therefore the fastest way to rebuild the trust account is to stop making withdrawals. The other way to rebuild trust is to make new deposits.

Here are 10 practical ways to build trust.

1. Practice with small and safe deposits first. There are big things to entrust to someone, and there are smaller things. How many people would you trust with your life savings? Probably very few. What about telling someone a secret, or starting a new business with someone? Again, very few. But would you be prepared to trust someone with a smile, or a kind word, even knowing that they might abuse your vulnerability? Start by making small deposits into your trust account and build confidence from there.

2. Gather information to get the greatest return on your investment. Trust, to a certain extent, is built on information. Instead of taking a blind leap of faith, take a calculated risk. Gather as much information as you can before you trust, but keep in mind that trust implies incomplete information. Wendell Berry said this- “Knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and… we need urgently now to put it in its place… Let us…abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient, that it can of itself solve problems… Let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the ‘informed decision.” Gather information, but also be prepared to take a leap with incomplete information.

3. Be transparent. Suspicions often emerge in relationships when people act in a way that is outside their character or routine. Even if you don’t know why you are behaving the way you are, or if you don’t know why you are pushing love away, just express that you are going through something and need some space. Transparency leaves less room for imagination that can easily create unnecessary drama.

4. Be consistent. Make sure your words match the way you live. Mean what you say and say what you mean. There is nothing that can devastate trust more quickly than inconsistency.

5. Believe in the strength of your partner. He/ she can deal with your feelings and doubts and questions. Express yourself as lovingly as you can, and trust your partner to stay with your honest thoughts and feelings.

6. Agree to boundaries with other family and friends. Your relationship has its own intimacy boundaries, and this has as much to do with sharing private information and personal feelings as sexual intimacy. If you are telling a friend something that you haven’t or wouldn’t tell your partner, you may have crossed a line into emotional infidelity. This can create major barriers to trust.

7. Don’t confuse trust with forgiveness. They operate differently. You usually forgive people well before you trust them. You might forgive an apologetic jewel thief, but not leave him alone in a jewelry store. You might forgive people who have hurt you, but not leave them alone with your heart. If there has been a breach of trust, work at forgiveness as the first step towards trust.

8. Each person has their own trust account. People operate their trust accounts differently. You need to deposit into the other person’s trust account in a way that speaks to that person. Garrison Keilor tells a story about a couple who had been married for many years. The woman wrote a sonnet to her husband that amongst all the things she loved about him it was when he was working on the broken washing machine that she gained a “trust for tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.” Be clear about how trust accrues, and ask direct questions to know how trust builds for others.

9. If you have breached a trust, don’t make things worse by lying about it. Take responsibility quickly, and begin regaining broken trust. The more time that passes, the more tangled the web, the harder it is to come back from broken trust.

10. If in your situation the broken trust is too deep, then work at a healthy ending to the relationship. There is more at stake than the relationship (and kids if there are kids involved). Your ability to trust yourself and get back on a path with integrity is the biggest issue at stake. Work towards loving and leaving the relationship, giving thanks for what it has meant, forgiving life for disappointing your expectations and moving forward positively.

Trust – What Are You Ultimately Protecting?

A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. The Master sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused,” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

The beautiful thing about this story is that the Zen Master wasn’t holding on too tightly, so trust was easier for him. Be generous in your relationships. The more freely you give, the less you will feel that you have to lose.

Maybe you don’t need a crash helmet after all. Life is generous, and always offers second chances. People are flawed, but there are always opportunities to rebuild trust. You have an inner courage to get back up after being hurt and keep loving anyway. Let go, trust the adventure of being alive and enjoy intimacy without defensiveness.

Living "as if"- the Power of Intentions

2011-07-21T16:45:00.003-04:00

This article first appeared on Soulseeds where I post several times a week, along with many other articles and resources.

When I was 17 and finishing high school, I wanted a career in property. So I wrote to the CEO’s of every major property investment firm in Sydney. Most of them sent back form letters thanking me for my interest but declining an interview, but a few kindly invited me to call and schedule an interview. I had to scramble as I had no suitable clothes, no resume and no experience beyond my paper route, although in my defense I had visited a lot of properties delivering papers. When the day arrived for my first interview, I thought I had thought of everything. I had researched the way business people dressed and what they carried. My intention was to turn up looking and sounding like I was already a business person. Half an hour before I was due to leave home, I realized that I had forgotten to buy one crucial piece of my outfit- a pair of black socks to match my gray suit. There was nothing even close in my closet. Not to be put off, I had what to this day may remain my craziest idea. I took a black marker and scribbled some socks on my ankles. I put my shoes right on top of my bare painted feet and went off to my first job interview. During the interview I looked down and noticed that the marker was smudging. Holes were growing in my fake socks right before my eyes. I kept both feet planted on the floor and no one seemed to notice.

By the time I left the interview, I had my first job offer. 3 weeks later I turned up for my first day at work….with REAL black socks on. Within one year in this job, another altogether different passion took hold of me and I left that job to set out on a path towards my calling as a spiritual leader. I learnt something profound from my brief foray into the corporate world, something that I intuited before the interview, about the power of impressions. The spiritual truth is that the first person you need to convince is yourself. The third big life lesson was that sometimes you have to improvise to reach your dreams. If you have a dream to be someone, the place to begin is to live as if you are already that person. Live as the person you aspire to be and start now. In the words of the 18th century German writer Goethe,

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Attracting Your Intentions

Over the past few weeks I have been writing about the power of intentions. First I wrote about imagining the end point and working backwards. In this my last article about intentions for the time being, I want to focus on the potential to be who you want to be right now and work forwards. In between the first article and this one, I wrote about the power of perseverance, creative inspiration and relationships in setting intentions.

My intention here is to inspire you with examples, from my own life and others, ordinary stories about fake socks and cocktail napkins, of people who have embodied their dreams. No matter how old you are, you are too young to give up on your ideals. No matter how overwhelmed you feel, you have more resources than you imagine. No matter what obstacles you see in your path, this is the time to get clarity on your dreams and begin making them a reality by living them, walking them, dressing in them, thinking them, talking them and breathing them with every breath.

I know someone who took this advice to extremes. She had a deep desire to be in a relationship with a man but there was no one in her life at the time who rocked her boat. Before she met her future partner, she bought him birthday cards and anniversary cards, and even went so far as to buy two tickets to some upcoming concerts. Sure enough, she met him within weeks. Now I’m not saying this always works out so neatly. We can’t always explain why and in whose timing things do or don’t turn up in our lives. There is power in living AS IF things are already true. If at some point, you change your path or alter your course, then clarify your new dreams and make your new dreams a reality.

I love the story about a man with a passion for singing. He was good, but couldn’t land a singing job that paid the bills. So he improvised. He found a job that paid the rent, where he could sing all day long to his heart’s content. He became a bus driver, in fact quite a famous bus driver in Chicago. People would time their trips in the hopes of catching his bus. He said in an interview, “I drive the bus to get a captive audience every single day”, and no one seems to mind one little bit.

Do the best you can to align your intentions with your reality. Let your intentions and who you are become hand and glove, and you will find a way to manifest all that you want to be in the world. Your life will sing and people around you will enjoy your authenticity.

Try it out. When you get up in the morning, after brushing your pearly whites, get dressed as the person you want to be, the person you know yourself to be beyond all the self doubting voices and negative talk. Walk as that person. Be that person. Live that person’s life.

Intentions Overcome Obstacles

Very often when you live AS IF something is already true, you turn “as if” into I AM and I CAN. During the week I was trying to write and it just wasn’t flowing. So I decided to take a break and turned on the TV in perfect time to see part of the memorial service for Betty Ford. I received the inspiration I needed. I caught a clip from Presidential Historian Richard Norton Smith. He spoke movingly about Betty as someone who broke the mould of what you expect from a First Lady. In one nice turn of phrase he described her as “The feminist next door, a free spirit with a dress code.” She overcame her own obstacles to create the possibility of recovery for many. Smith told the story of a time before the Betty Ford Treatment Center had opened. She was on Frank Sinatra’s private jet and conversation turned to funding for the new center. She had no pledge cards on hand, so she improvised and took the first pledges for the Betty Ford Center on Frank Sinatra’s cocktail napkins.

She had clear intentions and nothing was going to stop her. That’s the way with clear intentions. You find a way and often improvise on the details. Betty Ford also believed through her own recovery that she was serving a Higher Power. She held her intentions accountable to this higher purpose. This is part of what makes it possible to overcome obstacles. When you are fully committed to a worthy cause, some higher energy moves with you. Doors open that you couldn’t have imagined, hurdles turn into spring boards to make giant leaps and gains. You can call this higher energy any number of things, including God, but whatever you call it, it is a conspiracy of coincidences that colludes to make your intentions inevitable.

Talking Up Your Intentions

Do you ever catch yourself, saying things that sabotage your intentions? “It’s never worked before”, “Others have tried”, “I don’t expect this to work but….” If you are truly serious about making your intentions a reality, then align your language with your intentions.

There is a You Tube video that recently went viral about a blind guy who was sitting on a street corner asking for money. He had a sign that said, “I’m blind. Please help.” A woman stops at his mat and writes something on his sign. He doesn’t know what it is, but quickly people begin leaving more and more money in his jar. Later the woman comes back and says to him, “I wrote the same message with different words. Finally the sign is revealed, “It’s a beautiful day and I can’t see it.”

Frame your intentions in the most positive, empowering, optimistic language. Take the same three sabotaging sentences and turn them around.

It’s never worked before becomes, “I will now do something new and exciting.”

Others have tried becomes, “I will continue what others have started and do it in my own unique way that no one else has ever tried before.”

I don’t expect this to work becomes, “I’m going to give this every chance of success.”

Find Your Authentic Swing

When it comes to setting intentions, you have to be willing to try, swing, miss, change, try alternatives, try again, and make choices. You need to see various paths unfolding in front of you, and choose the one that is most authentic. Let me end with an example from golf. I’m no great golfer, but the times I have played golf I never could understand the practice swing. I have the sort of golf swing that you don’t want to practice. The less I repeat that swing the better……

When I saw the movie based on the novel The Legend of Bagger Vance, I came to appreciate the practice swing. A great golfer, Ranolph Junuh, is left traumatized from fighting in WW1. After the war, Bagger Vance becomes the voice of his Higher Power, the voice of intention, as he overcomes his demons to play golf again. There is a description in the novel of a conversation between Vance and Junuh about the swing of another golfer, Jones.

Around Jones, encompassing his body in vibrating concentric fields, spread an aurora of energy. It seemed to be his body, but expanded, augmented. It was a field itself. Then there were other fields, an infinitude of them. You could see his will, as Bagger Vance said, his intention select the field he chose, which was the fairway and the target line. Lines of force, which were chromatic not just visually but aurally as well, vibrating like music, extended from Jones' intentionality down the fairway to the target area. But there were at least two exceptional aspects to this will and to the force lines it apprehended.
First, the force lines seemed to exist outside time, independent of it. And second, they seemed to exert an intentionality of their own. Let me try to be precise, for this is exceptionally important.

Jones waggled now and set himself over the ball. I saw his swing before he swung it. But it was not a single swing, as if predetermined; rather it was a number of swings, I would guess a hundred, two hundred, all vibrating simultaneously in Jones' field, as if in alternative futures. Possible futures. They were all recognizably Jones' swing. But some were duffs, tops, skulls, and so on. Bad swings. I could see Jones' will search among those swings, like you or I would hunt through a file drawer for a patient's chart. Jones seemed to settle. To still himself. The auroras surrounding him consolidated. The bad swings fell away, evaporating like a dream; colors intensified around the swings he had intentioned, until there were only half a dozen very closely arrayed swings remaining. As Vance had said, intelligence seemed to pour from Jones' grip, from his hands ("educated hands" no doubt). Receptive intelligence, searching the Field, drawing from it and upon it. Then Jones swung. In actuality. You could see his motion in the physical dimension track along the motions he had intentioned, not perfectly, but very close to those pre-swings that existed outside of time. I was numb, dumbstruck; I couldn't absorb it. The ball rocketed away down lines of force, with everything humming and glowing and vibrating in some keen cosmic harmony.

I must remember that the next time I play mini golf, as I try to plan for the ball to ricochet off a windmill before going down a shute, across a bridge and into the hole in one shot.

Setting intentions is like preparing for a golf swing, rehearsing a speech or making a pro and con list. There are a number of paths your intentions could take, and they are all possible. Few, if any, of them would be a mistake. But one of them is your most authentic path. Finding that path is the gold. When you find your authentic path, nothing can stop you. It will be true in that case that you can do your work and step back, letting go of the outcomes because you have already succeeded.

In that sense it is true that if you follow your heart and build what fills you with passion, the right people will come at the right time and for the right reasons.

The Sufi poet Hafiz once said, “I should not make any promises, but I know that if you pray, somewhere in this world -- something good will happen.”

If you set intentions that come from your highest self, align your life with those intentions, live and breathe them with perseverance, then something amazing will happen, somewhere and sometime.

Getting Ego Out of Intentions

2011-07-14T14:27:00.003-04:00

This article first appeared on Soulseeds where I post several times a week.

Yesterday I rode 50 miles on my bike to watch an Australian rugby team beat a New Zealand rugby team. Not that there’s any rivalry between Aussies and Kiwis :). But it was a glorious day and made extra special by being with the only Kiwi I know in America. Isn’t it funny the way we feel some sort of pride when our team wins? As if I was on the field……

Just in case my head swelled too much to fit into my helmet, I was brought back down to earth with a thud on the ride. I thought I was doing pretty well until an 80 year old man pedaled past me like a streak of light. He was pulling two kids in a buggy behind his bike, and they were stopping at garage sales along Lakeshore Drive. Every time they stopped at a sale, I rode past thinking to myself, “How do you like me now old timer?” Sure enough a mile or two down the road, he flew past me again, now with dolls houses and scooters from the sale piled on top of the kids in the buggy. It was my ride on the inner roller coaster called “Ego”. This was supposed to be a relaxing ride on a beautiful summer’s day and a nice time with friends. That was my intention. But a tiny word with a massively sinister plot threatened my enjoyment until I realized what was going on.

Intentions are so much more powerful and effective when you are aware of the role of ego. This is part 4 in a series of articles on intentions. First I described the power of visualizing an end that excites you and then working backwards to make it happen. Then I wrote about perseverance, where you find whatever resources you need to continue moving towards your vision and no matter what the obstacles you keep going. Third, I wrote about creative inspiration when you tap into a power that is within and around you with effortless effort. Now I want to take the conversation a little further by looking at the role of ego in setting intentions.

What the world needs now, at this troubled time, is for many people to step up with bold intentions that serve the common good. Too much of what we see right now is ego driven. The news about Rupert Murdoch closing down his News of the World paper is an example of egotistical intentions catching up with a business. His intention to run a media empire of epic proportions led him to compromise acceptable standards of ethics and stoop to hacking into private voice mail systems, a strategy that interfered with the investigations of missing children. What began as a worthy intention, ie to inform the public, was hijacked by ego and led astray by an insatiable desire for power and profit.

Modern day capitalism is a brilliant and worthy intention. In itself it is not egotistical. It supports economies and efficiencies that have the ability to create common wealth and serve the common good. But when ego takes over, in the guise of an insatiable desire for size and power, capitalism becomes a destructive force; industries fix prices, companies avoid tax, bribe officials and control the outcome of elections. In these cases, ego gets in the way of the intention of running an efficient and profitable business and comes back to haunt all of us; such as banks that have to be bailed out because their collapse would destabilize global systems.

It happens at an individual level as well. The desire for control in relationships is insatiable. When one person sets the intention to get what they can from a relationship or a work colleague, no matter what they have to do to get it, it becomes destructive.

There are other subtle ways that ego infiltrates intentions. Setting intentions based on prestige or appearance is another example of the ego’s insatiable desire for importance. If you desire more money or prestige because you think it will complete you as a person, this is a trick of the ego. Ego says, “If only I have this amount of money, this property, or this partner I will be happy.” You need to turn this sentence around for healthy intentions. Once I get happy with who I am right now, then I will start manifesting my highest intentions.

Healthy intentions follow the golden rule. If you are looking for more money, then be more generous and participate in the easy flow of money. If you are looking for more acknowledgment, then acknowledge others and participate in the easy flow of praise or encouragement or positivity. Whatever you are looking for in life, start by giving to others and you will avoid ego’s traps.

Enough of the ego driven intentions. We’ve had enough destructive intention, enough corruption, enough violence- enough EGO. Whether it’s the imperial intentions of media magnates or the personal intentions of individuals like you and me, the world is crying out for intentions that serve the common good. The first step is to ask some questions of your intentions. Shine some light on them to see why they are important and who they are serving.

The Motivation for Intentions

We get some clues about this from the world of super heroes. My favorite super hero has always been Wonder Woman and not just because of her star spangled spandex speedoes. She was a ground breaker, bringing women into the super hero realm and paving the way for Zena Princess Warrior and Lara Croft and others. One of Wonder Woman’s secret weapons was her Golden Lasso, an unbreakable rope that corrals the truth of out of people like a cattle herder. When her mother gave her the Goden Lasso, she said,

This is the Golden Lasso. Besides being made from an indestructible material, it also carries with it the power to compel people to tell the truth. Use it well, and with compassion.

Maybe in the past you were taught that God is like a cowboy in the sky, ready to lasso you if you slip up and bring you back into line. God as John Wayne or Gene Audrey, and you as the cattle. That’s not what I’m talking about. The Golden Lasso is a personal thing. It’s also known as your conscience. Swing it round in your mind and consciousness like a lasso and it can garner all the inner truth you need. Use it well and with compassion.

The Golden Lasso is the foundation of the Golden Rule. Once you realize at a deep level the truth that you are one with others, you transcend the ego’s delusion of separateness and set intentions that benefit everyone involved. The Golden Rule becomes completely natural and effortless.

Lasso the truth of your intentions’ motivations. Are they self serving, or do they take into account the broadest circle of concerns possible? Be truthful with yourself, listen to your inner motivations, and act on your highest intentions that come from a place of self awareness and an authentic desire to see the world change for the better.

Healthy Sense of Self

When you set intentions, the point is not to remove your ego. The point is to have a healthy sense of self. Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki said, “How much "ego" do you need? Just enough so that you don't step in front of a bus.” That’s a good starting point, but I think we need more ego than that. You need enough ego to get out of bed in the morning. You need enough ego to believe that you can make a difference in the world and you need enough ego to trust that you have a unique calling in the world.

Where ego becomes a problem is when it tries to convince you that you are a self made person, separate from all others and that your actions don’t impact others. You aren’t a self made person. You are made up of all sorts of other people. Ego becomes a problem when it convinces you that your intentions are more important than other people’s intentions, or that your intentions don’t affect other people.

I remember being in a prayer meeting in rural Australia many years ago. Someone in the group prayed for a dry day so that they could enjoy their family picnic. This was in drought stricken territory where another dry day would mean the loss of another farm. This is an example of an egotistical intention.

A more extreme example was something I heard about after the Columbine shootings in 1999. It was a chain email written by a girl who was in the school on the day of the shooting. Even though she was in the firing line, miraculously bullets sprayed around her and she was not shot. She claimed it was because she was part of a prayer group which met in the school and as the shooters moved around the school she was praying for protection. If her assessment was correct, this would mean that God caused the same bullets which narrowly missed her to, in turn, hit and kill 13 other teenagers.

However you understand God, it makes no sense to me that God would play Russian roulette with people’s lives choosing for some people to be saved while others die. However you understand the universe of intentions, it’s egotistical to set intentions that don’t include the widest group possible. The universal field of intentions wants good for everyone, even if we don’t always understand the timing or unfolding of events in our life. Regardless of your perspective on the cause and origin of intentions, set intentions that serve the greatest good for the greatest number.

It’s Not All About You

When it comes to setting healthy intentions, it is always about more than yourself. Occasionally I play a game with the kids when I drive them to school. We set the intention to drive all the way to the school without stopping. There is only one rule- it has to be legal. This sometimes involves slowing down well before a red light so that it changes before we get there. Everyone in the car is literally on the edge of their seats.

There is one flaw in the game, and it’s an important truth that relates to setting intentions. There are OTHER people on the road. If you set intentions that ignore other people, you are likely to end up in a car wreck. There are things you can’t control, like traffic lights and other people’s actions. Set intentions that include as many stakeholders as possible. Don’t play Russian roulette with other people by setting mindless intentions.

What this means in practice is that if you set intentions that disregard the people around you, it will end in disaster. It also means that if you are in a relationship where one partner is setting healthy intentions and the other person is not participating, it won’t work. If you have the most awesome intentions and strategies for parenting, but your kids are not participating, it won’t work. The right idea at the wrong time won’t work. The wrong idea at any time won’t work.

Set healthy intentions that take into account true empowerment for as many people as possible. Begin with your own motivations.

Bold Intentions For the Good of Humanity

I’ve given plenty of examples that describe intentions wrapped in ego. Let me end with a wonderful example of intentions that include a healthy sense of self. The more I understand of the life of Betty Ford who passed away this past week, the more impressed I am. She was a true super hero in the mould of Wonder Woman. After dealing with her own demons, she set the intention to make a difference in other people’s lives. You would think that having the highest profile drug and alcohol treatment center in the country named after you might be an ego trip.

On the contrary, apparently she agreed to her name being associated only reluctantly. In fact, it was a matter of accountability for her. She said this, “The center's name has been burden, as well as honor. Because even if nobody else holds me responsible, I hold myself responsible."

I like to believe that so many people have been helped by Betty Ford and her treatment center because she set healthy intentions to begin with, and did so with a healthy sense of self and a desire to genuinely empower people in their recovery just as she was empowered.

What are your bold intentions for yourself and the world? Whether you set large scale intentions like treatment centers or whether it’s the intention to live in more peaceful relationships or the personal intention to live with greater balance, get your ego out of the way and get on with the business of being the change you want to see in the world. Participate in the raising of a global intention, galvanizing the collective power of millions of kindred spirits, to bring healing to the world, one person, one community and one nation at a time. There is an abundance of the resources that matter most. Together we have the power to transform entire systems for the greater good of all of humanity, for generations to come.

Creative Inspiration

2011-06-29T16:42:00.001-04:00

This piece first appeared on my blog at Soulseeds, where I post several times a week.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been exploring some of the key features of intention; whether it relates to a relationship, career, goal or vision. This is the third in the series.

First I wrote about the power of intention, where you visualize an end point and work backwards, best described by Michelangelo who said about his masterpiece the Statue of David: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” The second week I spoke about perseverance, intention’s close companion. When you are truly jazzed by your vision of the future, you hustle to make it happen. You do what it takes, trying things, being willing to fall down, get back up and push through any number of obstacles to get where you want to be.

I had a vague idea where I wanted to take this next, but it wasn’t clear and I struggled to find clarity. If I had been been using a typewriter there would have been scrunched up paper flying around the room, the pile of paper rubble a reminder of my frustrating cognitive cul de sac. My stream of consciousness had dried to a trickle. All I had was the one word “creativity” but no idea why this word was significant. Finally, after struggling for several days, it all fell into place like the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle while I was riding my bike. Eureka! The third topic is inspiration, the counterpart to perseverance. Alongside the need for effort, I add the role of effortless effort. Suddenly all my ideas fell into place easily. I completed the piece in about 30 minutes.

Here’s a question as it relates to the theme? How long did it take to write this article- 30 minutes or 3 days? When did the preparation begin- 3 days before or a lifetime ago? Maybe everything that has ever happened leads to this moment and falls together in this theme. And who wrote the article? Well I put the pieces together but whole networks of people conspired to make it possible. That is the awesome power of inspiration. You are not alone. You don’t have to do it all yourself. All you need to do is tap into the limitless power that is within and around you all the time, and let it flow.

Inspiration- Where Does It Come From?
On the one hand, most of life’s great achievements come about through determined, hard work. For example, world famous Cellist, Pablo Casals practiced every day for 4 hours. Someone once asked him, 'Mister Casals, you are a master, you have accomplished so much. Why do you keep practicing four hours a day even though you are 93 years old?' He said, 'Well, I'm finally beginning to notice some improvement.' Legend has it that he even completed his daily regimen of scales on the morning that he died. So on the one hand, Casals is an example of the truth of persistent, hard work.

On the other hand, some of life’s great achievements appear effortless. You hear of people who sit down and write whole books in a matter of days or weeks as if the words are dropping straight from the sky into their brains and from there to their fingers and screen. The great composer, Handel, composed The Messiah in three weeks without leaving his house. Another composer, Mozart, said that his music often presented itself to his imagination as if from nowhere. He had no choice but to stop what he was doing and write the music down. It was as if something beyond his own consciousness was writing his symphonies.

So which is it? Is true inspiration effortless or hard work? Maybe it’s both at the same time. The playwright, Arthur Miller was once asked in an interview, “Are you writing another play?" His answer was brilliant. He said, "I don't know, but I probably am."

Are you working on something brilliant and inspirational right now? Probably. When did it start? At the beginning of time. Who are you working with? All the creative energy that exists. The philosopher Daniel Dennett once posed the question,

How long did it take Bach to create the St Matthew’s Passion? An early version was performed in 1727 but the version we listen to today dates from ten years later and includes many revisions. How long did it take to create Bach? He had the benefit of 42 years of living when the first version was heard and more than half a century when the later version was completed. How long did it take to create Christianity without which St Matthews Passion by Back or anyone else would be inconceivable? About two millennia. How long did it take to create the social and cultural context in which Christianity could be born? Somewhere between a hundred millennia and 3 million years depending on when we decide to date the birth of human culture. And how long did it take to create homo sapiens? Between three and four billion years, roughly the same length of time it took to create daisies and snail darters, blue whales and spotted owls. Billions of years of irreplaceable design work.

The counterpart to attaining your intentions through perseverance is to tap into the energy of inspiration that is already there and just waiting for you. You just haven’t connected to it yet. You can understand that in a very logical and systematic way like Daniel Dennett because everything is constantly being created whether you realize it or not, or you can think of it in more of a synchronistic way like Wayne Dyer who said, “It's the difference between motivation and inspiration. Motivation is when you get hold of an idea and don't let go of it until you make it a reality. Inspiration is the reverse- when an idea gets hold of you and you feel compelled to let that impulse or energy carry you along. You get to a point where you realize that you're no longer in charge, that there's a driving force inside you that can't be stopped.”

You know this experience. It happens at moments of surrender, maybe after some resistance or struggle. You stop the struggle and move with intuition. Maybe you surrender to new love or a new opportunity. It doesn’t necessarily make logical sense at the time, but you jump anyway. It’s inspired. It feels fateful, like it was meant to be and all you do is hold on for the ride.

Creative Energy is Playful
One of the ways to remind yourself that there is a field of intention, or collective genius, or however you describe the latent powers around you, is to remember that creative energy is playful. One of my favorite comedians, Ricky Gervais, does a satire on reading the Genesis creation story literally and in particular the creation of light.

God created the heaven and the earth….. IN THE DARK. How good is that? I would have created a little bit of light, then taken a look and said, “Right, I need some planets.”

He went, “Zap. That’s everything. Now let’s have a look. Brilliant! Then He made man out of dust…. just because he could.”

Compared to a lot of violent creation myths, the Genesis creation story has a certain playfulness about it. For a start it all happens out of God’s nostrils. If you look at your nostrils in the mirror for long enough, you have to laugh. They are funny looking things, not the most dignified part of the human anatomy and not the first part of the body you associate with the creation of the universe. Yet the story says that all of life emanated from the nostrils of God. Psalm 104 described the creator “stretching out the heavens like a tent.” You have to have a sense of fun to parallel the creation of the universe with pitching a tent. All I can say is that we’re very lucky that I wasn’t the creator. If you had seen some of the tents I’ve pitched in my time. The universe would be collapsing back in on all of us in the middle of a rainy night. Creative energy manifests intentions out of raw imagination and whatever resources are available at the time. Inspiration doesn’t have to be grand. It can be real and fun.

The value in bringing playfulness into your intentions is captured in the Chinese phrase Wu Wei. I think of it as “get out of wu wei, or get out of your own way.” Wu Wei means effortless effort.

Blossoms like a flower, flows like a river, reaches like a tree.

Wu wei is like water. You get in the flow, get out of the way of your own limiting voice of doubt, and enjoy the journey. This is an important principle in setting intentions. You want to keep your eyes open, and keep looking around, but you don’t want to overlook your intuitive insight.

I learnt this lesson when I was in England for my brother’s wedding. In good English tradition we shot clay pigeons on the morning of the wedding. It turns out that when it comes to shooting, I’m about as accurate as Dick Cheney. The instructor kept saying, “Don’t think about it. Just shoot.” He was right. See it and shoot. Don’t think about. See it and shoot. It’s tempting to second guess yourself and shoot where you think its going. Every time I second guessed myself and waited, I missed. Every time I followed my instincts and shot immediately I hit it.

How does clay pigeon shooting relate to inspiration? Combine the two big ideas of this article. You are ALWAYS preparing for each moment, and DON’T over think, then you come to a beautiful balance for setting intentions. Everything that happens in your life is building your wisdom and resources. At the same time, everything you need is available right now for whatever act of creation is required. It is both hard work, perseverance AND inspiration all at the same time.

The famous scientists, Watson and Crick, are great examples of the principle of minimal effort. You might imagine they worked around the clock in their ground breaking discovery of DNA. In fact, Watson played hours of tennis every afternoon, and apparently went to Cambridge parties every night. Crick rarely turned up to work before 10am and then took a coffee break within an hour. They apparently lost interest in their study of DNA at various points and made some of their most significant discoveries standing in line at the Lab’s Cafeteria. This is often the way with inspired intention.

Whether it’s riding your bike, goofing around at parties or walking the dog, some of your most creative moments happen when your mind is open and receptive but not stressed and strained. Fun is not just fun. It also reminds you to surrender control of the outcomes and join in the thrill of creative interchange. This leaves you open and ready to receive the inspiration you need and want.

Creativity and Inspiration
Break the idea down a little further. Where is the mind- is it contained in the brain, or does it extend further than your own brain? What is the relationship between the individual mind and its environment? Think about this classic thought experiment. Two people are travelling to a museum at the same time. One of them is of sound mind and the other one has Alzheimer’s. One knows the way to the museum by memory. The other one with Alzheimer’s Disease has the directions to the museum written in a notebook. They both arrive at the museum at the same time. Which one is using their mind? We more easily equate memory with mind but they are both clearly using their minds. The mind of the second person extends to include the notebook. His notebook is part of his mind. He created the system, trusts it and uses it to inform his memory.

Technology takes the idea of an extended mind even further than a notebook. Do you remember when TiVo first came out? It records television shows based on past choices. There was a famous case in the early 2000s about the guy who complained that TiVo thought he was gay because it kept recording shows with gay themes. He tried to correct TiVo’s assumption by overcompensating and recording lots of violent war movies and wrestling shows. TiVo then decided he was an insane Nazi and recorded documentaries on the Third Reich. His story ended up as an episode on the comedy show The King of Queens.

It’s clearly not always right, but TiVo is an example of technology where you extend your mind to interact with your environment. Now Amazon will send you suggestions based on patterns in your purchases. Google is an even more sophisticated form of technology that extends your mind. The more strategic you are with the wording of your search, the more helpful the answers will be. I found a site called Funny Google, which puts your own name in place of the Google logo, making the experience even more personalized. Now your google search is a literal extension of your mind and identity.

Whether it’s a notebook, a slide rule, TiVo or Google, these are all ways of taking your mind out into the world and letting your environment help you think.

Beyond technology, conversation is a way of putting people together and bouncing ideas off each other, to the point where you might say “Whose idea was that anyway?”

When you think of DNA, you most likely think of Watson and Crick. But very few people have heard of Rosalind Franklin who was instrumental in Watson and Crick’s discoveries. In 2003, Dr. Raymond Damadian spent $300,000 to place ads in major newspapers claiming that he should have been included in the Nobel Prize for the invention of the MRI, and not the two scientists who were given credit for the invention in the early 1970s.

Creative energy is like that. It is a process and a network. You can’t always tell who is responsible and you can’t always tell when discoveries are made because many people and many energies collaborate in new advances and they are happening all the time.

It’s the same with intentions. You have to believe them to see them. Picture a bold intention for your life or the world. Hold it steady in your mind with detail and clarity. Add in a burst of perseverance to the image, something that signifies a never say die attitude. Then add in a large dose of surrender to the latent powers of inspiration.

There is nothing you can’t achieve if you partner with the creative energy of the universe that wants you to succeed, and will support your efforts if you have good intent.

You are making a difference, and having fun doing it. In the immortal words of Sinatra, “do it wu wei” and get in the flow of life.

The Power of Persistence

2011-06-22T14:32:00.003-04:00

This piece was first posted on Soulseeds in the Grapevine blog where I post most of my writing.

During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Kenyan long-distance runner Kip Lagat was asked why her country produced so many great runners. "It's the road signs," she replied with a cheeky smile. "'Beware of lions'!" It was one of those priceless moments you can’t script and there was a ring of truth to it as well.

Why ARE Kenyans such good runners? There are lots of theories about this. Some argue that Kenyans are genetically endowed with a high ratio of slow twitch fiber in their muscles, as opposed to the high proportion of fast twitch fiber in sprinters’ muscles. Others argue that it’s all related to environment. In Kenya, kids aren’t dropped at school in SUV’s or yellow school buses. They run to school, and they run a long way. The average Kenyan teenager runs 12 miles a day. I don’t even drive that far in a day. They run to school and turn around and run home at the end of the day.

The genetic factor is no doubt significant, but it’s just as much a learned skill. The environmental factor in Kenyan running ability is enormous. Running is a way of life, it’s a matter of status and for many Kenyans it’s a matter of life and death. It’s like the difference between a rabbit and a fox? The fox is running for dinner and the rabbit is running for its life.

Whether its long distance running, parenting, learning new skills or setting bold intentions, we now understand that to a greater degree than we ever imagined, we can create an environment to support our ideals. It’s an incredible time to be alive, as science gives more and more significance to environment over just being determined by genetic makeup. Passion, persistence and process are every bit as powerful as genes in creating the life we want to live. As a father, this leads me to stand alongside my children, tell them to reach for their dreams, fill them with self belief and optimism and help them create the type of environment that supports their dreams. As a spiritual leader, it leads me to stand alongside people who are dealing with difficult life circumstances and remind you in the words of Christopher Robbin to Winnie the Pooh, “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think” and I would add, capable of far more than you give yourself credit for.

In the past, we believed that God set the limits on human ability, and that we were born with divinely ordained traits and limitations. If you achieved anything it was a gift from God. If you fell short, you justified it because it wasn’t God’s will. It was a disempowering belief. For the last 100 years, genes have replaced God as the standard bearer of human determinism. The incredibly liberating truth of our day is that neither God nor genes need be self limiting concepts.

Don’t get me wrong. There are genetic limitations. No matter how much I practice, there is no chance in the world that I will EVER become a world class ballerina. No matter how much money I spend on lessons or dance instruction, I will never make a living as a ballerina. Genes are significant. It’s just that they don’t control your destiny anywhere near as much as we previously believed. Science now tells us that genes only become traits when they interact with the environment. This is why genetic scientist Steven Pinker can have the baldness gene and still have a head of hair that would put Samson to shame. It explains why sets of identical twins with identical genetic makeup can be quite different in some areas of their personality or circumstances. It is due to environmental factors.

This has huge significance for the topic of persistence. Persistence is part of the process of learning and growing through life. It is about becoming, and overcoming limitations. It tells me that like the rabbit, your level of desire will mostly determine whether you attain your goals.

As a father, I was moved by Will Smith in the movie The Pursuit of Happiness and his commitment to his son while he overcame so many obstacles. At one point he said to his son,

Don't ever let somebody tell you you can't do something. Not even me. All right? You got a dream... You gotta protect it. People can't do somethin' themselves, they wanna tell you you can't do it. If you want somethin', go get it. Period.

Will Smith, the civilian, seems to believe this just as much as the characters he portrays. A few years back he gave an interview where he spoke about the secret of success. He first described the power of intentions. He said, “Make a choice. Decide what it’s gonna be, who you’re gonna be, how you’re gonna do it. I can create whatever I want to create. We are who we choose to be.” Then the interviewer asked if others without his opportunities could do what he has done. He then spoke about the power of persistence. The key factor is “I will not be outworked. You might have more talent than me. You might be smarter than me. You might outdo me in 9 categories out of 10. But get on a treadmill together, one of two things is going to happen. You gonna get off the treadmill or I’m gonna die on that treadmill.” The power of persistence is hard work and hustle.

You put two people alongside each other; sportspeople, business people, whatever. The two people have similar genetic makeup. Which one is more likely to succeed? The one who has the burning passion to persist through pain and obstacle, with little sleep and little reason to keep going, but they keep going anyway. The one more likely to succeed is the one who will stand in the flames of struggle to fulfill their dreams. Put two visions or plans alongside each other- the one that is backed by passion will win every time.

Persistence and Growth

Persistence is an essential companion to intention. Work out where you want to go, decide how important it is to you to get there, then follow that burning passion with dogged determination. Once your imagination is captured by vision and passion, you will climb Mt Everest if you need to, to make sure your intention becomes a reality. Speaking of climbing Mt Everest, take the persistence of Sir Edmund Hillary as an inspiration.

In 1953 he scaled the highest mountain then known to man-29,000 feet straight up. He was knighted for his efforts. But you have to understand the persistence that led to his success. In 1952 he failed in his attempt to climb Everest. A few weeks later he was speaking to a group in England. He walked out on stage to huge applause. Hillary was deeply moved by their belief in him because he was feeling like a failure. Caught up in the moment, he abandoned his prepared speech. He walked to the edge of the platform, made a fist and pointed at a picture of the mountain. He then said in a booming voice, "Mount Everest, you beat me the first time, but I'll beat you the next time because you've grown all you are going to grow... but I'm still growing!"

I’m still growing. This is the mantra of persistence. You’re still growing. You’re always still growing. Your growth is outpacing the growth of your challenges. Growth may even be slow. At times it may feel nonexistent. Human growth is like the bamboo plant. After it is planted, there is no visible growth for up to five years - even under ideal conditions! Just when you think it has no hope, it suddenly begins growing at the rate of nearly two and a half feet per day, reaching a full height of ninety feet within six weeks.

It’s unexpected, but if you could see beneath the ground, you would see the incredible system of roots that are developing for those first five years. It’s the same for you. Even when you feel discouraged that you aren’t growing, or aren’t growing as fast as you would like, there are roots developing deep within that are preparing you for leaps of epic proportions. Every time you persevere when the going is tough, your life becomes more deeply rooted in strength. Every time your detractors tell you that you can’t do something, and you refuse to believe them, your intentions become more deeply rooted in passion.

In 2009, a man named Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins won a Grammy Award for his album Pinetop Perkins and Friends. That in itself is not noteworthy. It’s only surprising if you know that Pinetop Perkins was 95 years old when he won the award. You could say he was a late bloomer, like a bamboo plant. After a life of setbacks and struggle, he never stopped believing in himself. He got his first break in his eight decade, and never looked back. He died in March of this year, at age 97, a chain smoker to the end.

Human Spirit

As much as I believe in the significance of genes, there is no gene for the human spirit. There is no gene for persistence. It is a learned trait, a passion fired in the crucible of human experience. Thomas Edison, who knew a thing or two about trying and experimenting, once said, “Genius is one percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration.” It’s like the Zen saying, “Fall down 7 times, get up 8.” Edison went well beyond 7 stumbles. But it’s not even about failure. Reframe the saying, “Attempt 7 times, and succeed on the eighth.” Try something 999 times, succeed on the 1000th. If that involves falling down, so be it. It’s all part of the process of learning, growth and becoming. Persistence is believing that success lies at or just beyond the next attempt.

To this point I have used the words persistence and perseverance interchangeably. Is there a difference between persistence and perseverance? If there is a difference, it is in their scope. Persistence is in the details and perseverance is in the big picture. You persist with a course of action or a plan. You persevere with a vision, an idea or a belief. This is important, because there are times when you have to change your course of action and you can do that without giving up on your vision. Let me illustrate.

We got a family pet about 6 months ago, a little dog named Millie. At home she is meek and mild, but when in the woods surrounded by squirrels she becomes a monster. She chases every squirrel in sight with a passion that makes your heart sing (and makes the squirrels heart skip a beat). She hurdles logs and charges through bushes like a maniac. You know what- she NEVER even gets close to them. But that doesn’t put her off one iota. She finishes chasing one and turns around to chase another, as if it’s her duty in life.

On the one hand, I want to live like Millie. When I know what I want to achieve in life, I want to chase it like Millie chases squirrels. When I hit an obstacle or a challenge, I want to charge through it in search of my dreams. When I fall down, or hit a dead end, I want to get up and keep running. On the other hand, there comes a time when you have to realize you’re living your life like a dog chasing a squirrel. It’s time to change the plan. But don’t lose the vision. Persevere with the vision, even if you don’t persist with a course of action.

Of course Millie just enjoys the chase, and we could all do with a little canine joy in the process without concern for outcomes.

Where Does Motivation Come From?

Many of us were taught to persevere because God demands it. It was a matter of obedience. We were taught that God has set a race for us, and our role is to persist to the end which is eternal life. We were told that it’s a straight line and heaven is the reward and the motivation.

Now many of us don’t think of God or the afterlife in the same literal ways and we KNOW from experience that life is rarely lived in a straight line. So where does our motivation come from to persevere even through the most difficult trials? It comes from an inner drive for authenticity, a trait that many feel comfortable calling the God within. Whether you give this quality divine language or not, it is a process of becoming rather than a fixed state or an end point. Your motivation is to become more of who you are, to sing the song that is in your heart demanding to be sung. I like using divine language for this process because it reminds me that there is something magical about being captured by a cause larger than myself. There is no set plan for the future. My vision allows plenty of room to change direction along the way. We are creating the future as we go. But when you persevere with a vision, it feels fateful. It feels as if it was meant to be. It feels divinely inspired. How could you give up on something that is divinely inspired?

This doesn’t mean it’s easy. Sometimes you feel all at sea, as if there is too much moving and changing all around you. Just as it helps to look at the horizon when you feel sea sick, it also helps to look above the surface level changes to your vision to remind yourself why it’s worth persevering. The reason for sea sickness is the imbalance caused by two much movement, your body is moving and the boat is moving. Looking at the horizon stabilizes your posture and helps to distinguish between the movement of your body and the movement of the boat. Perseverance is the determination to maintain your inner posture when things outside of you are changing.

There is no gene for inspiration, just hard work and determination. In short, perseverance is recognizing what you have inside of you, and setting out to make it a reality AND keeping on going even when the odds are stacked against you because you see the big picture. Look for it out at the horizon of possibilities.

The Power of Intention

2011-06-15T12:34:00.003-04:00

This article was first posted at Soulseeds in the Grapevine blog.

What is the difference between a prayer and an intention? Depending on how you think about prayer, probably nothing. They are both proactive and powerful. If you take a passive approach to prayer, however, it has less in common with the power of intention. Take for example the Day of Prayer planned by Texan Governor Rick Perry. His website claims that they are unable to fix many of the problems in America and so they are looking to Jesus to fix them. The event is called The Response which is ironic because they appear to be abrogating all responsibility. Their view of prayer follows the old country song, “Let Jesus take the wheel.” The website says, “There is hope for America. It lies in heaven and we will find it on our knees.”

There are many solutions to the problems in America and Jesus won’t be solving any of them. It is the responsibility of every one of us to be an active part of the solution. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. I can only imagine that if Jesus was around today he wouldn’t be running prayer meetings. He would be at the frontline addressing peoples’ needs in tangible and practical ways.

So what is the role of prayer in America’s problems? Even mainline views of prayer are more balanced than Rick Perry’s apparently passive Day of Prayer event. Take for example the conservative televangelist Oral Roberts who died in 2009. When you fly in to Tulsa Oklahoma you can see the entrance of Oral Roberts University from the plane. At the gates there is a massive sculpture known as The Praying Hands, standing 60 feet tall and weighing 30 tons, the largest bronze monument in the world. At first glance, it appears to be a straightforward image of two hands in prayer pose. But when you look closer, you see that they are not two identical hands. You have to dig a little to find the reason for this, but Oral Roberts himself said, “The Hands represent the hand of a physician using the natural forces of God’s earth and the hand of the prayer partner offering the prayer of faith.” One hand represents prayer and the other hand represents human expertise.

Oral Robert’s view of prayer is closer to the mainstream. It keeps the sense of personal responsibility. Prayer is not an excuse for inaction. Each of us has a responsibility to use our hands, and brains and skills to serve the whole. So what is the purpose of the other hand, the prayer hand?

There is a partial truth in Rick Perry’s Day of Prayer initiative. He says there are some problems we can’t solve. This is true, but the problems in America are not among the unsolvable problems. The problems in American are very solvable if we have the will to do so and work together. There are other things we can’t control. The role of prayer, and this is true across many different views of prayer, is to acknowledge that we can’t control everything in life. Prayer is an act of surrender, humility and intention. Prayer is a way of releasing the burden of control over circumstances such as natural disasters, other peoples’ choices and evolutionary forces. It includes an element of gratitude for forces that hold the universe in place beyond our efforts, and it includes a surrender of outcomes beyond our control.

It’s not so much about “ask and you shall receive.” It’s more about, “express your deepest questions and doubts and at the right time the answer will become clear.” In the meantime, get comfortable with uncertainty, stop expecting that two and two will not equal four and give up what your ego has convinced you that you need to receive. The initiative and the power lie within you to discern between things you can control and things you need to surrender. If you can’t control or fix or change something, then change your attitude to the situation. Surrender to the flow of life, and all that you truly need will find you because it is WITHIN you. You just need to peel away some of the protective layers and pride. Prayer is one way to do this.

My own view of prayer has evolved a LOT over the years. I used to think of prayer as communication with a supernatural being external and apart from myself. Now I think of prayer as communication with the part of myself that is larger than me but still deep within me, my higher power by any name. God is no longer a mysterious OTHER, and is now the mysterious MORE that fills life with meaning and powerful possibilities beyond my small concerns. This mysterious more includes the untapped power of mind, the limitless strength of character, the collective power of shared vision, the wisdom of nature and so much more. There is more possibility in life than our small perspective usually allows us to see. Prayer is one way to tap into this power.

Prayer and Intention

Prayer is less about asking and more about imagining. This is where prayer merges with intention. With intentions, you have the power to imagine the future of your wildest dreams, a future that serves you and others in powerful ways. The power of intention is the ability to think from the end and work backwards. Imagination is your memory of the future.

Michelangelo once said about his masterpiece Statue of David: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." It existed first in his imagination, as if he was carving it out of his memory. It began in his unconscious mind, and then came to birth in the marble.

Some people argue that the unconscious, or most ancient, parts of the brain have no way of distinguishing between what is real and what is imagined. There seems to at least be some truth to this statement. Anyone who screamed out loud in Spielberg’s new movie Super 8 knows what I’m talking about. Our brains have the ability to feel fear about things that are not real and may never be real. We also have the ability to imagine futures that are incredibly exciting. To the extent that this is true, you could say that if you focus on imagined fear your brain will think this is real. If you focus on an exciting future, also imagined, your brain will think this is real. Either way it’s a choice.

This is how intentions work. You look out to an imagined end point and work backwards. You train your brain to believe that your future is a reality and begin to take steps to live this reality. There is an awesome example of this from Shell Oil Company. Oil companies need to project a long way into the future, including the price of commodities, global forces and unrest in the Middle East, to name a few. In the early 1990s, when they were projecting an oil price of $20 to $30 per barrel let alone the $120 a barrel we now have, they contracted a surprising support person. Betty Sue Flowers is a PhD in English, and worked closely with Joseph Campbell on the Power of Myth. She was contracted to write stories for Shell. She participated in meetings with strategists and economists and crafted their numbers and strategies into story form. Every day she revised the stories and circulated them to the team.

Eventually they created a series of scenarios about how the future might play out. The scenarios were based on scientific predictions but included some wiggle room for uncertain forces. The team was then able to choose their preferred scenario. In an interview, Flowers said this, “when you tell stories about the future, even if you're not claiming to forecast, there's some sense...that actually the future is the story you choose. Now that is very un-economic in its basis. It's not the "invisible hand" working out invisibly, like a machine. Its human beings coming in and saying "I choose Scenario A, not Scenario B." It's a different emphasis--it puts the human being more in the center, in very nuanced ways, instead of these huge impersonal forces. It's very subtle. But it makes a big difference.”

They learnt some important things that relate to intentions.

1. You don't know the future- but you can create scenarios that make sense and CHOOSE one.

2. The scenarios don’t necessarily have straight lines and fixed outcomes. You can rewrite them as you learn and experience more of life.

3. Use your preferred vision of the future to create the present that you want.

Visualizations

Visualization is one way of practicing the power of intention. You can actually visualize the future you want and begin to make it a reality. Try it out. Choose something that comes from your deepest sense of purpose.

Visualize a powerful intention for your life or for the world. Let it come from your highest purpose where what you want, what others need and who you are, are one and the same thing. Picture it in your mind with as much detail and clarity as you can. Feel it in your body. Be it with all your might. Frame it in a scene that is full of blue sky and light. See yourself in the vision, looking strong and fulfilled.

Now let it become part of your present reality. Let your intention loose. Let it unfold. Let it be a path on which your dreams can travel.

Consider adding an affirmation to your visualization. Something like this-

A vibrant and exciting future is unfolding in perfect order.

Unlike the view of prayer where you let Jesus have the wheel, this view of prayer is empowering and full of personal responsibility. You have everything you need, right within you, to both create the reality you desire and surrender the parts of life that you can’t control. It’s all within you, waiting to be liberated like Michelangelo’s angel in marble. Carve the life of your wildest dreams out of the raw material of your humanity; your memory which has more knowledge of past, present and future than you could imagine, your strength that is shaped by life’s challenges, your skill that is honed by years of practice and your wisdom that knows what to change and what to surrender.

You are connected to the source and power of intentions, your own and others. It is a power that no single religion possesses. It can't be possessed. Religions can hint at this power with stories and metaphors, but this is far bigger than any religion. This is a global awakening. Imagine the revolution when people unite their loving intentions for the good of all. There is no limit to what can be achieved.

Are Your Truths True?

2011-06-09T10:52:00.001-04:00

This article is linked from Soulseeds where I post more of my writing. Please sign up for the weekly Soulseeds newsletter.

When we arrive home after a few days or weeks away, someone in the family will inevitably say “AJ” as they walk in the door. There is a particular odor that we all associate with the previous owner and even though we’ve lived here for 8 years, the distinctive smell remains. We only notice it after we’ve been away. Otherwise we don’t notice it because we’ve become so used to it. I guess that’s why it’s sometimes easy to miss your own body odor. You’re used to it, and it’s impossible to get away from yourself for a few days even if others wish you would…get away.

Some of the thoughts in your mind are like a lingering odor. You are so used to them that you don’t even notice that you are living as if they are absolutely true. You take them for granted without question, unless you arrive back after a mental getaway, sniff at the edge of your consciousness and see your thoughts in a new light.

There are many ways to look at your thoughts in a new light, and most personal growth systems offer techniques to challenge unquestioned beliefs. Both personal development leader Byron Katie and the philosopher Michael Foucault who died in 1984, devised a series of questions to do just that. They are an odd couple, with no obvious connection to each other except that their questions share a strange synergy. Katie’s questions are coming from a personal perspective, and Foucault’s questions are coming from a social perspective.

Here are the questions they each ask

Katie
What is the truth?
Can you absolutely know it’s true?
What self belief does the truth lead to?
Who would you be without the truth?

FoucaultWho can tell the truth?
What is the truth about?
What are the consequences of the truth?
What is the relationship between the truth and social authority?

The Personal Dimensions of Truth

Katie calls her work The Work. It goes something like this.

What is your truth? X doesn’t care about me because he doesn’t listen.

Can you absolutely know it’s true? It feels true, but then again he did hear me last week when I told him about my fear and he seemed to care then. There could be many reasons why he seems distant, and they might have very little to do with me. I get mixed messages from him, but I really don’t and can’t know what’s going on inside his head or in his life. I don’t know for sure that he doesn’t care.

What self belief does the truth lead to? Thinking that X doesn’t care about me makes me feel rotten. The less I feel his care, the more I strive to earn it. It makes me feel unworthy of care from anyone. Ultimately it reminds me of my own self loathing.

Who would you be without the truth? I would be liberated without the thought that X doesn’t care about me. I would spend less time second guessing his thoughts and feelings, and more time healing my relationship with myself.

With this approach, you can change the story, and turn around some of the painful thoughts. The turn around here is that I care about myself, I listen to my feelings and if X listens to me it’s a bonus. I can enjoy the moments where I feel cared about, and I’m not devastated when I don’t feel cared for because I don’t expect my self worth to be filled by other people.

I appreciate the simplicity of Katie’s approach and use versions of it often in my own life. However it’s not always as simple as that. Sometimes there are related issues.

The Social Dimension of Truth
Some of the truths you tell yourself grow out of your relationships; with parents, children, teachers, the media, the government or social norms accepted without question. In Foucault’s case, he wrote a lot about sanity, prisons and sexuality. As a prisoner, your view of the world is formed by your relationship with the penal system. Prison is not just punishment. It also creates a belief that you are constantly being watched. Mental health and sexuality are defined according to the categories given to you by society, eg gay, straight, insane, schizophrenic etc. If your truths don’t match the categories, you feel pressured to conform your truth to match society.

Who can tell the truth? All truth is formed in a context. When you claim your power as a fearless truth teller, you realize that you don’t have to be or do what other people expect of you. You tell your own truth AND it can change over time and in different circumstances. You tell your truth in the context of your various roles in society, which create your unique insight.

What is the truth about? Truth always has a trajectory. Society usually decides the direction of truth- for example women are this way and men are that way. Decide on your own story. Claim your gender, sexuality and personality without apology and without society’s biases.

What are the consequences of the truth? Foucault famously said, “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does." Your truths have consequences in the world beyond your mind. They affect other people’s truths and the systems that we are all related to. Live mindfully. Are your truths nurturing the sort of environment where diversity and authenticity can flourish for you and all others?

What is the relationship between the truth and social authority? The 1990s song from the Disposable Heroes of Hypopricy said, “Television- is it the reflector or the director? Do we imitate it, or does it imitate us?” Is society the way it is because of our collective truths, or are our truths formed by society? Likely a complex mixture of both. Choose to focus on self determination. If they give you lined paper to write on, write sideways. Be the best version of yourself, a perspective that includes the good of others.

Nothing But the Truth

Katie keeps the process grounded in personal responsibility and reality as it is rather than the stories that aren’t serving you or those around you. Foucault also focuses on personal responsibility but offers some broader perspective to the personal dimensions of Katie’s work. Together they offer some key questions for checking in with your assumptions and habitual thoughts.

A concluding quote from Katie-

“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years."

Still Small Voice of Peace

2011-06-01T15:21:00.003-04:00

Our kids have pretty much grown out of singing the road trip blues-“Are we there yet? When are we going to get there? I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I’m bored. I need to go to the bathroom.” Masters of catastrophe, kids are! One of the kids will say, “I’m starving.” I will reply, “Kids in Africa who haven’t eaten in days are starving. You on the other hand, had a sandwich fifteen minutes ago. You are not starving.” Or else, a kid will say, “I’m dying of thirst.” And I reply, “That is highly unlikely but don’t tempt me.” One of our kids, who shall remain nameless, hit the jackpot with the most woeful statement and had us all laughing. After several rounds of complaints, this one said, “I’m dying to death back here.” Dying to death! That could be the mantra for catastrophizing.

We’ve tried banning the expression “I’m starving.” A little mindfulness about the power of language can’t go astray. Of course it’s not just kids who excel at catastrophizing. I found a small lump on my body recently and within minutes I had imagined myself in months of chemo and radiation. I pictured myself bald. Then I day dreamed my death bed scene telling the kids how much I love them and kissing Meg for the last time, wondering if she will remarry. All of this anxiety was created over what turned out to be a boil. It seems it is easier to lance a boil than it is to dissect the workings of the human ego.

Catastrophizing does not serve you well. At best, it leaves you depressed and anxious. At worst it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If the worst never arrives, you worried for nothing. If it does happen, you endure it twice. Catastrophizing tells the stories that pessimism wants to hear to justify its perspective. Catastrophizing is sitting in traffic and imagining that the meeting you are missing is the beginning of the end of your career. Catastrophizing is looking at your child’s report card and imagining that he will never get a college degree. Catastrophizing creates stories with very little basis in reality, feeds the stories with evidence from unrelated situations, spirals in negativity and eventually becomes irrational and closed to all reasonable conversation.

We’re pretty good at it as a society as well. Every time I hear people talking about America sliding down the slippery slope to socialism, my mind goes back to the kids in the back seat telling me that “they’re starving.” Do you remember the hyped up drama about “death panels” a few years back? Some people seemed to think that President Obama would personally be visiting nursing homes with a pillow tucked under his arm. When public conversations become irrational like this, not much is achieved.

We’ve seen this many times before, on both sides of issues. The passage of the Civil Rights Bill in the 1960s had its own controversial path. Many people became convinced that whites would be enslaved in this new world order. Now, 40 years later, we take the Civil Rights Bill for granted and very few people are worried about a black takeover of the country. I can’t help wondering if in 10 or 40 years time, there will be a universal health care system in America and we will all look back and say “what was all the fuss about?” That’s often the way with catastrophizing. As the predicted dates for the end of the world come and go, and as all the anticipated anxiety fails to materialize, we look back and smile at our over active imaginations.

Catastrophizing is often built around pre existing conditions like fear of change or self doubt. It’s another cunning ploy from your ego to play small and hide behind fear.

There is a fascinating story told in the Bible about the Israelites floundering in the wilderness, and they are imagining the worst. They shout to Moses, “We’re dying to death out here.”

Here is the actual text-

They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” Exodus 14:10-12

You can’t really blame them for thinking they are dying to death. They couldn’t flick ahead a few pages to see how it turned out like we can, or watch Charlton Heston save the day in the movie The Ten Commandments.

In the face of their catastrophizing, here is Moses answer to them.

Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” Exodus 14:13-18

Now this is interesting. Was Moses being optimistic? Because we know the story, we know that it took 40 years, rather than one day, for the Israelites to find freedom. Maybe Moses was not talking about their physical deliverance, but an inner freedom that was theirs to claim that very day.

Moses offers three antidotes to catastrophizing, all based on negating fear.

1. See alternatives. Your imagination is powerful. So use it to conjure up multiple scenarios. Then remind yourself that any of them is possible. Even your most positive predictions may fall short of reality.

2. Stand firm. Be patient and allow the situation to unfold. Don’t be too quick to form conclusions about good and bad. Bad can very quickly seem better once worse happens. Good can easily be forgotten once better happens. There is always more to come. Sometimes good things change so that better things can emerge. Stay open because everything that happens makes you wiser and stronger.

3. Be still. In other words, stop swirling in fantasy about unknowns and dwell in this moment where everything is as it is.

For the most part, it’s a mind game and it’s a game you can win.Your mind functions like a committee. The committee is constantly bombarding you with different voices and opinions. One of the members of the committee is catastrophe, the pessimist who wants to remind you to expect the worst. Maybe the voice of catastrophe is simply echoing the voices of people who haunt your life with their negativity; a teacher, an ex or a business nemesis. They all have their perspective, and they all bring something worthwhile to the table. But none of them holds all the truth of your life.

There is a still small voice that stands firm in the midst of all the other voices. This is the voice of your true essence, your highest self that transcends and includes all other perspectives and roles. It’s a small voice, not because it lacks power. On the contrary, this is your most powerful voice. It’s small because it has no need to raise its voice in anger, or shout irrational obscenities in meetings. It’s small because it waits to hear the answers to its questions and keeps an open mind. It has no predetermined ideas as to how the future will play out; preferring to urge you to be all you can be in each moment, a work in progress.

It’s a still voice, not because it lacks conviction. On the contrary, this is your most powerful voice. It’s still because it doesn’t fight reality. It’s small because it has nothing to prove and compels you forward with gentle persuasion. It states its case calmly and respectfully, and genuinely looks for win/win solutions.

The intent of spiritual practices such as meditation, yoga, contemplation and so many other practices is awareness so that you know which committee member is ruling your life at a given moment. With this awareness, you can choose to appoint the still small voice as the chair of your mind’s committee. As chair, it can affirm and embrace each voice for what it is, but not be ruled by any one voice. Spiritual practice helps you to tune into the still small voice and live your life with contentment and skilful means.

In this moment, stand firm and be still, all is well and all will be well no matter what the circumstance.

Please visit Soulseeds for inner peace resources.

Harvesting Memories

2011-05-30T09:31:00.002-04:00

Two very elderly ladies were enjoying the sunshine on a park bench. They had been meeting at that park every sunny day for over 12 years… chatting, and enjoying each other’s company.

One day, the younger of the two ladies, turns to the other and says, “Please don’t be angry with me, but I am embarrassed, after all these years, my memory is not what it used to be. . .What is your name? I just can’t remember.”

The older friend stares at her, looking very confused, says nothing for two full minutes, and finally says, “How soon do you need to know?”

I’m speaking about memory today. I’m sure there’s a good reason for that, but I can’t remember it right now. As Meg says I have a photographic selective memory. When it comes to household chores, I run out of film.

My topic is memory because it’s Memorial Day. What role does memory play in your life? My hope is that you can draw inspiration from the positive memories and find some healing and transformation in the difficult memories.

Memory and Gratitude

Memory is one of the basic ingredients of gratitude, which is in turn one of the basic ingredients of optimism. We’ve had two tender memorial services in the last week. Both included inspiring eulogies for the dear departed. As I listened to the eulogies on both cases, it struck me that it would be SO powerful to tell each other’s stories like this while we are still alive. Imagine the gratitude if we took every opportunity to share memories and each other’s positive attributes while we are around to hear it.

Having said that, there is something unique about memorial services. No matter what has happened in life, or what might be unresolved in a relationship, a eulogy focuses on gratitude.

There is a funny story about a minister who is leading a memorial service. He calls on people to come forward and say a few nice words about the deceased. No one comes forward. He urges them, “Surely someone present today can say something appreciative!” Eventually a man comes to the microphone and says, “His brother was worse.”

In most cases, this is not a problem. Once someone has gone, memories come to us of good times shared and admirable qualities. They comfort and inspire us. These memories often lead to forgiveness and healing. Even when it comes to wars that you may disagree with or feel conflicted about, it’s appropriate to remember the people who have lost their lives in war. They no doubt had their mixed motives, like all of us, but our lives are built on the imperfect but well intentioned platform of those who have gone before us.

Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who created the amazing Mount Rushmore Memorial, was once asked if he considered his work perfect in detail. “Not yet,” he replied. “The nose of Washington is an inch too long. It’s better that way, though. It’ll erode to be approximately right in about 10,000 years.”

Memory tends to be like that. We erode the imperfections of the past into a coherent whole, integrate even the difficult memories, and move forward. In time, memories fall into place as they need to.

Memory and Change

We all have stories and a lineage. Our memories are built on these stories that are part fact and part fiction. It’s not so much that we retrieve memories. We reweave memories in a way that feels consistent. There is an old Jewish story that makes this point.

When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov felt anxious about the future for his people, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. He would light the fire, say a special prayer, and sure enough his anxiety would subside. Sometimes, his people would even be miraculously protected after his forest ritual. Years later when he was gone, it fell to the next generation to deal with the same anxiety. The head Rabbi knew the story of his ancestor in the forest but didn’t know all the details. So he would go to the same place in the forest and say: “Creator of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer,” and sure enough his anxiety would subside and often a miracle would be accomplished. Another generation later, the same ritual would take place but with even less certainty around the detail. The Rabbi would go into the forest and say, “I do not know how to light the fire. I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.” It was always sufficient. The years passed. Finally the next generation brought the head Rabbi to the same point. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he said: “I am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was always sufficient.

Ritual and memory are like that. When I was growing up, our family had a Christmas ritual that we inherited from an English custom. Christmas pudding, steamed and served with brandy butter and cream. The earlier custom was to include certain items in the pudding before cooking it; silver coins for wealth, tiny wishbones for good luck, a ring for marriage etc. Whoever found the items in their pudding on Christmas day would get what they chomped on. When I was young, my parents would put coins in the pudding that they had collected from their parents; shillings and sixpence and the like. They must have gone missing, because by the time I was about 10 the coins were current day coins. Then when people started losing teeth on their Christmas pudding and the hygiene of cooking metal in pudding was questioned, we stopped putting coins in the pudding altogether. But we still ate the pudding and brandy butter endures to this day. Just like the story of the Rabbis, eating the pudding and telling stories about the coins of Christmas past was always enough.

Tradition, ritual and memory are based on ever changing memory and culture. One of the dangers of religion is the expectation that tradition remains the same. It’s not possible. All traditions change, and there should be no guilt about allowing rituals to evolve. It’s all based on memory, and as Barbara Kingsolver wrote in Animal Dreams, “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

Memories in Nature

Nature has always been the focus of significant memories both for individuals and cultures. The ancient story is told that while the Israelites were in exile, they were particularly desperate and anxious. The rainbow was their reminder that they were part of something larger than their circumstance. Before they understood how rainbows came about, they no doubt filled it with supernatural meaning. They put the meaning on the rainbow that their God (hope) was larger than any natural disaster like a flood and larger than their exile. In non theistic language, we could say that they were comforted by the evolving reality that all things are constantly moving and changing. Despair and grief may feel like the last word, but there is always a rainbow close by the rain. Rainbows are universally loved, even now that we do understand how they occur. The meaning we place on rainbows, however, might be different.

I remember taking a wedding on a beach a few years back. Clouds were looming and the bride was getting anxious. People were constantly looking up at the sky to check for rain. A few drops of rain began to fall, smudging the marriage license. Just when we were about to turn and run for cover, the rain stopped and a massive rainbow appeared right behind us. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. It was as if the rainbow was framing the happy couple like a gazebo. The rainbow was a reminder not to give up which was similar to the original intent of the covenant between the Israelites and their God.

There is always more to come. It’s such an important part of a covenant, whether it’s an agreement between two people or two nations or between humans and the earth. There is always more to learn, more to understand and more to come. We now know that there is nothing supernatural about a rainbow. It’s all about the refraction of light as it passes through water. There is nothing supernatural, but there is something magical about the rainbow. It’s AS IF they are coming from beyond. It’s the same with memories and ritual. There is nothing supernatural about miracles that appear to come from nowhere. They are formed in the brain. But there is something magical about the healing qualities of memory that can turn wounds into wisdom and pain into perspective.

Do you ever arrive somewhere for the first time and “feel” like you’ve been there before? Maybe it’s a smell or a sound that triggers your memory of another time or place. The memory could trigger a protective instinct or some kind of reassurance. For me, the smell of pine after rain in Duncan Woods triggers an incredible surge of optimism. A 20 minute walk in the woods takes me back to childhood hikes. The smell of the beach refuels me. There is a sign down at the beach at Grand Haven. It says, “No refueling on the beach.” I always smile at the sign because this is one of the places where I totally refuel. The beach takes me back to childhood vacations, hours lying on the sand before we knew about the dangers of sun exposure. In our blissful ignorance, we would spend hours refueling each summer.

Nature, in all its beauty, is a playground for the senses and a memory emporium. It’s a place to be inspired by happy memories and heal difficult memories.

Memory and Mystery

Memory remains one of the great mysteries of consciousness. How do birds travel thousands of miles every year and apparently stop at the same points each year on their trek? How do they know? How do new generations of birds know to continue the same route? Are they taking visual cues or following their nose? No one knows. Then there is the clownfish; remember, Nemo? After clownfish hatch from their eggs, they spend 10 to 12 days in the open sea, carried out by currents. But they often miraculously find their way back to the reefs where they were born. Apparently they sniff for leaves that fall into the sea from rainforests near their coral reef homes. Memory fills their senses and brings them home.

Do you ever find yourself somewhere and sense that you have been there before but don’t know how you know? Or do you have moments of déjà vu and wonder where in your memory the experience is coming from? Do you sometimes say something and wonder where your information came from? Memory is a mystery to be mined for meaning.

Part of the beauty of imagination is when we have memories of the future, and understand with confidence what needs to be said or done. As the White Queen says to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” The Queen warns her that it can make you giddy at first.

Maybe the point where memories collide in both directions is dreams. Dreams appear to be the brain’s way of consolidating memories. Dreams are a complex and confusing combination of memories, maybe a clearing house, where you put unlikely people in the same situation and play out frightening and delightful scenarios.

Memories are personal, subjective and evolving. As Philip Roth wrote, “each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthing windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint”

Dreams and memories connect you with hidden powers. Deep down you have a memory of who you are at your essence, an essence that the anxieties and traumas of life have partially robbed from your conscious mind. Explore your dreams, memories and surprising thoughts to recover some of the power of your full humanity. Once you recover some of this essence, you will feel liberated to live through floods and rainbows, love and loss without overly attaching to any of it. For there is always more to come. Namaste.

Each Life Has Its Place

2011-05-26T08:53:00.002-04:00

With Memorial Day coming up in America next weekend, I was thinking about how much I appreciate people who blazed the trail that I now walk. Even if I never knew them, if I didn’t particularly like them, even if they died in wars that I disagreed with, they lived and loved the best they could and made a difference to the whole. As the Indigo Girls sing, “Each life has its place” and I am growing to believe that EVERYONE is my teacher. Sometimes death is the only thing that brings the significance of someone’s life into your consciousness.

Last weekend I spoke at a funeral for a woman who was a local artist. I knew her quite well, and loved her from the minute we met. She was easy to like and attracted positive people into her presence. But it was only in her death that I truly began to appreciate all she had taught me. What follows is something close to what I said at the funeral.

The Indian spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti, once said, “our souls all come from the same paper but what makes us unique is the creases formed in the paper from all the folding and unfolding of our life experience.” Today we honor the life of a uniquely beautiful and creative woman. Liz understood symmetry, appreciated colors, and resonated with fine form. When I think of Liz in the context of the Krishnamurti quote I think of Origami. In Origami, a flat piece of paper is transformed into an animal, a flower, a shape or some abstract design. The crane holds a special place of honor in the world of Origami. The incredible thing is that these forms were crafted just with folds and creases.

Liz’s life was like a piece of Origami. She went through ups and downs like all of us, and ultimately had to come to terms with her own death, the greatest challenge of all. Liz’s husband John told me that soon before her death, Liz told him that she had made peace with her death. It was a tender moment, and spoke volumes about John’s quiet reassurance. I can’t help wondering if it was partially Liz’s appreciation of form that gave her an insight into the beauty of imperfection that brought her peace with death.

Artists throughout the centuries have come to profound spiritual realizations, which often came about through disillusionment and the agony of their own creative brilliance. Rembrandt was an artist who lived his odyssey out loud through his paintings. He had a brief, 8 year, marriage to Saskia. In the early years of their marriage Rembrandt painted Saskia in the form of Flora, the goddess of Spring and fertility. He portrayed her as an exquisite beauty. When Saskia gave birth to their child, she became ill and never recovered. She lived her final years bid ridden. Rembrandt chose to portray her with stark honesty, lying in bed with sunken cheeks and a frail body. It was such a huge contrast to the early Saskia paintings. How did Rembrandt resolve his experience of the two Saskias in such a brief time?

The answer to this question may be found in one Rembrandt’s most famous works, The Three Trees. The focal point of the piece is the three large trees. Nature is active with swirling clouds hovering above and puddles of sunshine in the fields. There is a lot taking place under the shade of the trees; an artist sketching, a couple fishing and the faint impression of a couple in love. Rembrandt seems to be placing himself all over the etching, coming to terms with his own life. Nature is revealing its cycles through it all. The resolution is that life moves and changes and the only meaning is the meaning you place on experiences.

Rembrandt’s Three Trees etching seems to be an example of Wabi Sabi. Wabi Sabi is a Japanese phrase that indicates that beauty is often found in things that are old or worn or even uncomfortable. Wabi Sabi is the honest emotions and inner perspective that can see beauty in imperfection, meaning in chaos and life in death. Wabi Sabi is a single cherry blossom nestled in a pile of debris after an earthquake. Wabi Sabi is a family photo on the front lawn after a tornado. Wabi Sabi is a precious last kiss before death. Wabi Sabi, like nature, appreciates beauty without attaching to beauty because all things change and die. There is symmetry even in death.

Wabi Sabi honors the aging process. Lines and wrinkles aren’t signs of decay. They are the unique creases in the paper that map the unfolding of your life. The limps and slumped shoulders aren’t signs of weakness, but reminders of character and a lived life. The love handles in your middle are nothing but love given and received. Each body tells its own story.

The Wabi Sabi of Liz’s last days was the image of her in bed at home where she wanted to be, the curtains closed except for a thin stream of light casting shadows on her face. The bed clothes neatly made, with one of the corners folded like an envelope and one of her feet peeking out from under the sheets like an unread letter. Her face gaunt and her cheeks sunken. And a glint in her eye that spoke of peace and acceptance.

We gathered for Liz’s funeral on May 21 just hours before the prophesied end of the world. The prophecy seemed trivial in the context of an actual ending of life. Life is beginning and ending every day, and in every moment. There is too much to experience right now, in both the ups and downs of life, to be distracted by trivia. The only possible response to end times prophecies in the light of the death of a teacher is to live each day as IF it’s the last. Then get up the next day and do it again. The incredible symmetry of life is waiting to be noticed.

May you remember that without darkness nothing comes to birth, as without light nothing flowers.
May nature teach you patience as snow covered grass.
May the earth teach you courage as the tree which stands tall and strong.
May survivors inspire optimism as the seed which rises in the spring.

Ps, please visit Soulseeds for my regular blog, as well as Meg's blog and many other resources

Change Your Life, Change Your Mind

2011-05-22T21:19:00.002-04:00

May your mind transcend limitations.
May your consciousness expand in every direction.
May you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.

These words are a translation from Patanjali, the compiler of the Yoga Sutras around 200BC.

This is the essence of the spiritual journey; transcending limitations, expanding your consciousness and becoming the person you are destined to be. Sometimes this requires stepping out of your comfort zone to remind yourself that you are alive and on an evolving adventure of growth and learning. This doesn’t have to happen through extreme experiences, like sky diving or moving to an Ashram. It can happen in everyday experiences. Take it from me, Mr Everyday.

On Friday night Meg gave me an early Father’s Day surprise. We drove about an hour north to Val Du Lakes to watch an Aussie band perform; Sick Puppies, probably best known for their song in the viral Free Hugs video. Meg had been saying for weeks that I would never guess what we were doing, and she was right. I wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years. We lead busy lives that follow a fairly predictable pattern. So you can imagine that finding ourselves in a part of Michigan we have never been to, listening to an Aussie rock band, was outside of our comfort zone. Even listening to a band was outside of our comfort zone.

Before you think that this is a story about how courageous and liberated we are, you need to picture the scene. Meg and I sitting in our fold up lawn chairs, well back from the stage, with a crocheted rug over our knees, one occasionally turning to the other to say, “It’s very loud isn’t it?” and “I can’t understand a word they’re singing.” The funny thing was that when we set our chairs up it was still light. We didn’t realize that we had set up camp right in the path of the flood lights. So when the photographer from the Muskegon Chronicle took our photo we shouldn’t have been surprised. He came over and asked for our names so he could include them with the photo. We looked at each other, laughed and declined. He seemed shocked. We should have said, “Just put the names down as Satan and Mrs Lucifer. That outa kick start the comments section for you. We had a good laugh about it all.

Do you ever do things that surprise yourself? It’s important to be able to surprise yourself. When life starts to feel too predictable or routine, you can easily fall into auto pilot and miss some of the adventure of being alive. Do something today to remind yourself that life still has more to offer you. There is more of you that is waiting to come out and play. You don’t have to sell all of your possessions and move to India. You can even do it from a folding chair. Mix it up a little. Do something that reminds you that you have more capacity, and greater genius than you will usually allow yourself to believe.

Internal Conflict

What stops you from truly manifesting your genius? Internal conflicts often prevent you from living as fully as you want to live. Sometimes the internal conflict is very obvious; for example I want to take up a new hobby, but I don’t want to make any time for it. I want to meet new people but I don’t want to take any risks. I want to lose weight but I don’t want to change my lifestyle. I want to feel healthier, but I don’t want to stop eating ice cream for breakfast.

In these cases, it’s a fairly straightforward scenario. You have different voices competing for your attention, and you make a choice. Sometimes you choose to play it safe. Sometimes you choose the most immediate benefits. There is a story about an old Cherokee chief who told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves. One is destructive–it is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

The other is life affirming. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee chief simply replied, “Whichever one you feed.”

The story presents a partial truth. Sometimes it’s about choosing between negativity and positivity. It’s certainly better to think positively than negatively. There is even something to be said for faking it till you make it. Lots of small but repeated changes in your actions make a big difference over time. Noticing your language, spending time with positive people, using will power, and removing temptation are all great things to do.

But it’s not always that straightforward. When you consider that the majority of your decisions and responses come from your unconscious mind, and your unconscious mind is neither positive nor negative, you could say that the wolf who wins is the unconscious wolf.

No amount of yelling or screaming can change the unconscious mind. You can’t change lifelong habits with will power alone. Your conscious mind holds something like 5 or 7 pieces of information at one time. For me it’s even less. That is no match for the millions of memories, reactions, instincts and environmental cues that your unconscious mind holds. Your unconscious mind is a machine running on a finely tuned program. You can edit it, but you can’t change the program…easily.

In fact, if you try to change your unconscious mind by overriding its programs, you could end up harming yourself. Do you remember the 1990s film Shine? It was the true story of Australian concert pianist David Helfgott. Helfgott’s father was a holocaust survivor and programmed into his son’s unconscious mind from an early age that he couldn’t succeed in life because that would make him vulnerable as he would stand out. In his conscious mind, Helfgott knows that he is a world class pianist. In his unconscious mind, he has decided that he can’t stand out. Helfgott tries to feed his conscious belief and chooses one of the most difficult piano compositions, a piece by Rachmaninoff, to play in a recital. During the recital, a battle takes place between his conscious belief and his unconscious doubt, between his will to succeed and his instinct to fail. After successfully playing the last note of the recital, he passes out and suffers a breakdown. His conscious will had won the battle, but lost the war. In the end, the unconscious mind always wins.

Changing Your Unconscious Beliefs

If you want true and lasting change in your life, you have to get to the unconscious beliefs and transform the ones that are not serving you. This is often not easy. There’s no point being logical. Logic can edit the unconscious script, such as when you rationalize a compromise. You decide to eat well half the week and not worry the other half, trying to convince yourself that this is a solution. You’re not dealing with a logical machine. The unconscious mind is more like a sensor that lights up when it resonates with a story, an emotion, an image or an intuition.

Thinking positively is an attempt to edit the script, but it won’t in itself change the script. Don’t you sometimes find yourself standing and staring inside an open refrigerator? Are you waiting to be seated, or for a waiter to take your order? It seems to be a universal habit. It’s as if we expect some blinding realization to leap out of the fridge into our minds. You’re standing there, not at all hungry, but scanning the contents as if your life depends on it. If you’re like me, you say to yourself, “I’m not hungry. I don’t need cheesecake. I won’t have that cheesecake. I won’t have the cheesecake…..give me that cheesecake NOW.”

Until you know what hunger you are truly feeding at an unconscious level, you won’t change your relationship with food. Until I understand that I am filling the hole in my life which is self doubt with cheesecake, I will keep running the fear script. If you feed your fears, they thrive. Once you feed your passion to live an integrated and healthy life, your fears will starve to death.

How do you know when you’ve made a change at the unconscious level? The sensor light of self awareness flashes in your mind like a fridge light in the middle of the night. You realize what you are doing, and it becomes a joy to change, a natural expression of who you are becoming.

Integrating the Unconscious Mind

When the sensor light of self awareness flashes in your mind, you are moving towards transformation. Your mind is transcending limitations. Your consciousness expands in every direction. You discover yourself to be a greater person BY FAR than you ever dreamed yourself to be. Replay that last sentence. You discover yourself to be a greater person by far than YOU ever dreamed YOURSELF to be. YOU surprise YOURSELF. That’s strange. Who is this you, and how is it different than yourself? Who is the YOU who makes the big discovery about YOURSELF?

If you want to communicate with your unconscious mind, bring together a united front and stop the struggle. Positive thinking, and making simple choices requires a lot of effort. It’s hard, maybe impossible, to overwrite the unconscious script. So stop trying. It’s like looking for your glasses. You can’t see them because you don’t have your glasses on. You can’t access your unconscious wisdom because it is the essence of peace and you are striving for something that can’t be found outside of you and you are looking without the benefit of the very thing that will get you there. The glasses are on your head. Just tilt your head to the sky and let them fall into place.

When you shift your habitual way of thinking, stop judging things as positive and negative, and get out of the way of your inner wisdom, you come closer to communicating with the unconscious mind. Spiritual traditions have always found ways to point to this truth, whether its parables, proverbs, stories, myth, silence, koans, music or art. They speak the language of the unconscious mind, rather than battling with it. They offer ways to subtly shift your consciousness to include more possibilities, rather than trying to overwrite the unconscious.

One example is The Ten Ox herding Pictures, originating in the Sung Dynasty in China in 12th century. Each step comes with an image and a few words that convey the usual path that we follow in search of spiritual awakening. The ox symbolizes the mind and the herder symbolizes the seeker. You look outside of yourself for the ox, think you find it, try and tame it by riding it, and then eventually realize that it is within. You stop looking, and eureka there it is in the peace.

Practical Ways to Speak to Your Unconscious Mind

Some of the internal conflicts require therapy, and there are many good professional ways to access, heal and transform your unconscious script. There are also some things you can do yourself.

I’m a big fan of affirmations. I write them every day. When I write affirmations, I’m not just writing positive thoughts, although I hope they are positive thoughts. I use images, poetry and metaphor to bypass the conscious processes and speak to the unconscious mind. I don’t say “This will be a great day” or “I will lose weight this week” or “I will become super wealthy”. I use images that point back to the peaceful essence within that knows that it has the resourcefulness, the capacity, to thrive in any situation. I say, “I have everything that I need to thrive” and “I am becoming exactly what the future demands of me” and “I have an abundance of resourcefulness.” I wrote one last week that said, “Everything that happens makes me wiser and stronger.”

Affirmations aren’t desires for the future. They are affirmations of peace and capability that you already have. This is an affirmation I wrote recently.

Don’t compare yourself to any another person, or compare this time to any another time. You and this moment are a perfect match, engaged in a fateful love affair. You are the right person in the right place at the right time. Give thanks today for who and where you are. It is PERFECT for NOW.

Say to yourself: I am who I am, and all that I need to be.

I also try to reframe unconscious beliefs through affirmations. I heard an awesome example of reframing, which is to put your situation into a new context. I heard a guy say that the upside of having to live in his car is that he wakes up in whatever neighborhood he wants to. He has choice. We all have far more choice than we usually imagine. Your attitude is a choice. This is another affirmation I wrote about reframing anxiety.

Does anxiety sometimes get you down? Think of it as part of your growth. Questions, doubts — the very things that you thought were weighing you down — are part of your growing resourcefulness. You don’t need to pretend or put on a brave face. Growth happens in the midst of struggle.

Say to yourself: Even anxiety is making me stronger and wiser.

In other words, you aren’t denying your anxiety. Denying your anxiety would fly in the face of the unconscious message. You are simply redirecting your anxiety to a new end in your life.

The unconscious mind is your friend. It holds your capacity for genius, as well as some hidden fears and insecurities. Honor it all, work with it, and let your life change from the inside out. Namate.

The End is Nigh- Look Busy!

2011-05-19T10:46:00.004-04:00

Our family sometimes fights over who has to use the drinking glass with a picture of Jesus on it and the caption, “Jesus is coming. Look busy!” Can you blame us? It’s scary, and only occasionally moves to the front of the cupboard when other glasses are dirty. Another wave of scary end time prophecy has moved to the front of the American media cupboard in the last month. You thought you had until 2012, but it turns out that our days are literally numbered….. to 4. According to a movement of Christians convinced by their reading of the Bible, the world will end on May 21, 2011. To spread the word, they're using billboards and bus stops, RVs and pamphleteers on street corners to strike the fear of hell into passersby. Apparently, there will be earthquakes starting at 6pm on May 21 in the Pacific Rim and moving through each of the time zones. Believers will be raptured, i.e. taken to heaven and non believers taken to hell. 153 days later the entire universe will be destroyed forever.

Are beliefs like this quaint but harmless? Is this a light hearted distraction from more pressing issues, or do they take our eyes off the prize of fearless living? I will never forget the story about a Little Rock woman who was killed after leaping through her moving car's sun roof. Her husband, who was driving, described it as a mistaken rapture. It led to a 20 car pileup and 13 other injuries, as a mass of cars tried to avoid the woman who was convinced that she had seen 12 people floating up into the air at the same time as seeing a man on the side of the road she believed to be Jesus. Her husband later told the story – “She believed it was the rapture,” he said, “She was screaming 'He's back! He's back!’ And she climbed onto the roof of the car. I was slowing down but she wouldn't stop.”
As it turns out the Jesus look-alike on the side of the road was on his way to a toga party. He had stopped his truck by the side of the road, when the tarp became loose and released 12 blowup sex dolls filled with helium which floated into the air. The man who had been told by several friends that he looked like Jesus pulled his car over and lifted his arms in the air in frustration. Seeing the Jesus lookalike standing by the road reaching his arms to heaven while dolls floated up into the sky was too much for the woman. The dead woman's husband gave his statement, and finished by saying- “My wife loved Jesus more than anything. She believed that was the end. She wouldn't miss out on being with Jesus in heaven for anything.”

There are people who truly believe these end time prophecies and lives are ruined when the dates come and go without incident. People give up their jobs, stop planning for the future, and become obnoxious in their evangelical zeal to save as many of us as possible. What do you make of this? How would it change your life if you knew the world was going to end at a specific time and date?
Here are some of my thoughts-

1. The World is Always Ending

The end timers have a partial truth. The urgency that comes with an expectation of a short lived future can be a healthy motivation for living fully in the present. Surely it’s a far healthier motivation to live with urgency because you don’t want to miss a moment of what life has to offer, and you want to be all that you can be in the world, than to live with urgency because you are afraid of eternal punishment.
The partial truth is that the world IS ending on May 21…and it will have ended on May 20….and it will end again on May 22….and you will get up on May 23 to a new world to do it all over again. The 1980s REM song said it well, "It's the End of the World As we Know It. And… I….. feel…. fine!" Every moment involves an ending and a beginning because the old has gone, the new has come and it’s okay. You are fine. You have changed with the moment. Your consciousness is evolving, transcending and including everything that brought you to this point. You are becoming a new creation along with each moment.

The world ends with the passing of every moment, however long that is. The past only exists as memory. It’s over. It often intrudes in your life like a thief in the night, robbing you of a full experience right now. As if the present moment is not enough on its own, we so often engage in mental time travel. We travel back in time, at least our mind’s best effort to reconstruct the past. We try to live through a rear view mirror. The problem with rear view living is that objects (and memories) appear larger than they really are. Situations that were challenging in the past might not be so challenging now that you have grown and evolved. Similar challenges may arise, but you are a new person, stronger, smarter and wiser. And this is a new moment. Just because things happened in a certain way in the past doesn’t mean they will repeat the pattern.

A great example of this danger is the story of the Swiss watch; the Swiss created it and then rejected it because it didn't fit their idea of what a watch should be, with internal moving dials. The Japanese ran with the new watch. Since they weren’t limited by preconceived notions about how a watch should work, they were able to develop this new technology. The Japanese have combined innovation, including kinetic watches that do not require batteries and have built-in cameras, with low cost and become a leader in the time industry.

Coming back to that other time industry, the religious end times industry. Sure, the world will end on May 21. Same as it does every day. This is good news. May 22 will arrive as a fresh start, with a new you ready to innovate and continue your evolving journey.

2. The Future Only Exists As Projection

Anyone who thinks they can predict the future is delusional. Do you remember the Y2K scare that computers would crash when clocks rolled over to 2000? It was amusing to be in Australia, one of the first time zones to see the New Year. January 1, 2000 arrived without incident and yet people in other parts of the world still fretted about what would happen to them. We love to worry, don’t we? As Charles Schulz (creator of Charlie Brown) said, “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.”

The future is nothing but projection, often casting a shadow over life like storm clouds. You hold your breath, for fear of allowing yourself to fully embrace the moment. Just as we time travel to the past, we also travel forward in time, at least our mind’s best attempt to guess the future. It’s the same problem. You think about the future from the level of wisdom and courage you have now, forgetting that you will be different, wiser and stronger by the time the future arrives. Mental time travel leads to such a distorted sense of identity, and so much unnecessary suffering.

Take all predictions about the future, whether the end of the world or the expectation of some personal calamity, with a big pinch of salt. Cash in a reality check and bring yourself back to the present moment where life truly happens. You can bank on the present moment, but not the future.

3. The Future Is Open

Of course, it’s essential to do SOME mental time traveling. That’s how you learn from the past and anticipate the future. It’s right to reflect on the past and plan ahead. Just don’t dwell there or concretize your conclusions.

There is an alternative to reliving the past, obsessing about the future and reacting to the future in a passive way. On this point, I have been influenced by the ideas of management guru, Otto Scharmer. Basically he suggests that instead of only learning from the past we should also learn from the future. More specifically, we should learn from the emerging future. You don’t predict the future because the future is not yet decided. You pre-sense the future. You intuit your way forward and live the future by sensing it as it arises.

We’ve all had those spectacular moments when you sense the next move and don’t even know how you knew. You hold your child’s hand on the sidewalk just moments before a car speeds past. You sell stock on a whim that change is afoot. You preemptively heal a conflict before you really knew it was even flaring up. We have more intuitive wisdom that we give ourselves credit for.

It’s not that you make change happen singlehandedly. Its more that you sense what change is emerging and you help to co create it. In order to pre-sense the future, it’s helpful to suspend the many voices of judgment and fear that become small self fulfilling prophecies and respond in a new way, from your higher self that intuitively knows its connections with others. From this higher self, you can see through multiple pairs of eyes at the same time. It’s as if you’re playing both sides of a chess board, or coaching both teams on a sporting field. From this perspective, you inevitably sense the best interests of many parties. Once you have opposing perspectives working together at a higher level than competition, you are pre-sensing the patterns that hold it all together and allowing collective genius to manifest.

I put end times prophecies in the same category of small self fulfilling prophecies. They operate on a need to know basis. You need the prophecy to be true to justify a narrow interpretation of the Bible and to validate the theories of charismatic leaders. No one knows the future, but we all have intuition about the direction of the future. From an intuitive perspective, whenever the future arrives, you’re already there. Whatever the future demands, you’re already doing it. Wherever life needs you, you’re in position.
So how does this relate to May 21 prophecies? They have a partial truth. On the one hand, don’t fall for the delusion. Author Zadie Smith offers a beautiful turn of phrase when describing the passage of time in her novel White Teeth. She says; “don’t fall for ‘the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect’.”

Grammatically, the perfect tense has a neat relationship with the present tense. The perfect tense implies that everything that needs to be done is already done. It all collides in this moment; everything necessary for contentment comes together in this moment. The past is what it is, and what your memory makes of it. You make the future perfect by living fully in the present.

Don’t fall for the end times lie and rob yourself of a full and fulfilling present. Live your life in the perfect, present tense. You lack nothing in this moment. You need nothing in this moment. All is in perfect order right now.

At the same time, take on the partial truth of the end times. You don’t know the timing of future events. You don’t need to fear any particular day. But you can sense the future as it is emerging through you and others. This is the higher self fulfilling prophecy where the good of the widest number is included.

Ps Please visit Soulseeds where Meg and I do most of our blogging, and offer resources for all ages and stages of life.

Raising Consciousness

2011-05-08T16:30:00.002-04:00

There is a fanciful story of a yogi who died and was taken to yogi’s hell because he had broken his vows. In yogi’s hell he was shown three rooms and given the last choice he would ever make of where he would like to spend eternity. The first room was full of yogis standing on their heads on a cement floor. He declined because he thought that sounded painful. In the second room there were yogis standing on their heads on a wooden floor. This seemed like a better option but still very painful. So he asked to see the third room. In the room the yogis were sitting in chairs at a table drinking coffee, but they were knee deep in filth, mud and excrement. This didn’t seem great but a lot better than the other two rooms. After all, it was only knee deep and he was able to drink coffee. So he chose the third room. No sooner had he sat at the table and poured himself a coffee than a devil walked into the room, blew a whistle and said, “Ok, coffee break’s over. Everyone back on your heads.”

Should have gone for the room with wood floor after all. It feels quite liberating to make light of a religious belief that has been used to spread so much fear and shame. The belief in heaven and hell is attractive to the small self because the ego longs to live forever and it loves to believe in absolute good and evil with appropriate rewards and punishments. Did you know that 63% of Americans believe in hell where people are punished eternally? But when the question becomes more pointed, “Do you think you will go to hell after death?” only 1% say they are going to hell. Nearly 2/3 of Americans believe in hell but virtually no one thinks they’re going there. French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre was right; “Hell is other people.”

It feels comforting to put other people in the box of evil, because it makes you feel righteous and safe. It’s been interesting to watch the response to the killing of Osama bin Laden this week. A few times I had to pause and wonder what it was we were celebrating. I don’t fully understand the psychology of celebrating the violent death of any person. I can understand celebrating a sense of relief like you might have at the end of a drawn out trauma, but it didn’t feel like that. It was too joyful, almost smug. The word “justice” was used too often, or in the case of Rudi Giliani the word “revenge”. Justice that is based in revenge just adds hate to hate, and revenge is an insatiable beast that in the words of Ghandi “makes the whole world blind.”

The death of bin Laden could be celebrated but not because of his personal demise. Rather it could be celebrated as part of the demise of bin Ladenism and all that he represented. His death was one more step in a process of global transformation that has been taking place for some time, a raising of global consciousness being led by young, non violent protestors in the Middle East who neither looked to bin Laden for leadership nor served his violent agenda. We could celebrate the resilience of Americans who refused to give in to the cunning attempts by terrorists to engender fear and uncertainty into everyday life. If we now revoked the Patriot Act that was only ever supposed to be a temporary measure after 9/11, we could celebrate the raising of consciousness in this country because we choose not to live in mistrust and suspicion.

With our raised consciousness, we don’t need to imagine bin Laden in hell. We can make peace with him, knowing that his agenda failed because we wouldn’t let it infiltrate our psyches. To live in fear and paranoia is to be in a hell of our own making. We can make peace with bin Laden, knowing that like many misguided extremists before him, he had a partial truth about heavy handed American foreign policy that created far too many enemies. We now seem to be heeding the same message but we hear it so much clearer from non violent protestors in the Arab world that it’s time to let Middle Eastern countries create their own form of democracy.

With our raised consciousness, we don’t for a second condone the calculated violence of bin Laden, but we choose to respond from a higher perspective than what he operated with.

Cultural Consciousness

What is consciousness? There are many theories about this. The way I describe it is that we each have our own level of consciousness, the total package of our current awareness. Sometimes we include more people and perspectives in our awareness than other times, but we have a general level of consciousness. Our consciousness is not one static thing, and it may not be located in one particular place. It is the ever changing combination of nature and nurture, genes and scenes, thoughts and feelings, impulses and instincts that give you a unique perspective in any given moment. It’s not necessarily the way things are. It’s the way they taste to you at the time.

A few years back we were on vacation in Panama. We had our first experience of eating miracle fruit. The miracle fruit is an amazing berry. It doesn’t claim to be a weight loss marvel or to increase antioxidants like some other wonder fruits. It’s a miracle because for several hours after eating the miracle fruit, everything else you taste is sweet. So we ate lemons and limes and even they tasted sweet after eating the miracle fruit.

Consciousness is like that. You experience life exactly according to your current level of consciousness. With a grateful consciousness, everything becomes a reason for gratitude. With a fearful consciousness, everything becomes threatening. You imagine that you are a highly rational person and that you make well informed decisions and discernments. But in reality a good portion of your life is driven by unconscious forces; memories tucked away in your inner filing cabinet, intuitive understanding that seems to come from nowhere, sudden achievements that surprise even you.

Similarly, communities, nations and the globe as a whole have their current levels of consciousness. Sometimes we unconsciously follow the group response without much thought. I had this experience in 1994. I was downtown in Sydney one night when huge crowds began to gather in the streets. I had no idea what was going on. People were singing and dancing arm in arm. I found myself caught up in the festivities without a clue what I was celebrating. Finally I said to someone, “What is it we’re celebrating? Why are we so happy?” He said, “It’s just been announced that Sydney won the bid for the 2000 Olympic Games.” Ah, woo hoo, I said and the party continued.

Too often, religion is like this; group think, assumptions and prejudice justified by self serving beliefs that God takes sides and rewards loyalty. Some of the response to bin Laden’s death has also seemed a bit like this. Crowds of people going along with the group response. The President tells us it was justice. The government tells us we’re safer. The media conveys pictures of New Yorkers partying at Ground Zero and crowds gathering at the White House. Our consciousness is so often shaped by group think.

At a time of global transformation such as where we find ourselves now, it’s a great opportunity to check your assumptions, search for the hidden motivations and consider what level of consciousness you are operating from. Global consciousness is raised by individuals who raise their consciousness.

Consciousness Raising

There is a long tradition of leaders who were consciousness raisers. You might even call them hell raisers; people like Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. More recently people like Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto among many others, have helped to raise the consciousness of the planet by raising the bar on personal responsibility and reinforcing the social contract to be mindful of others, especially the most vulnerable. It’s frightening to think about how many of the people I just listed were assassinated for their efforts. When you challenge the status quo, people get scared and tragic things happen.

Our calling is to be consciousness raisers. When terrible things happen in the world, our calling is to come from a higher perspective than the act or situation we are responding to. Albert Einstein said, “You can’t solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them.” If someone is acting with hatred, you can’t beat them with more hatred. You will just create an endless spiral of hatred.

I’m not talking about being passive or allowing abuse to continue. I’m talking about being smart and coming from a broader perspective. Raised consciousness is able to hold more than one quality at a time, for example both forgiveness and personal rights. You can forgive someone and demand that the behavior changes at the same time. You can accept someone without fully trusting them. Let the trust grow in time.The amazing thing is that the behavior is more likely to change with this raised consciousness, and if it doesn’t change you are more able to deal with it internally.

Protestors in Egypt and now Syria are a great example of this very point. They are demanding change, but doing so in reasonable ways which makes their case more compelling.

Raising Consciousness

Being Mother’s Day, it’s a good time to remember that mothers have a special role in raising the consciousness of the next generation. The ancient story about John the Baptist jumping in Elizabeth’s belly when Mary came to visit is a story usually told at Christmas time. I always liked it, but when I considered it in the context of consciousness, it came alive for me. There is no reason to think of it as a story of supernatural intervention. Babies kick, and from one perspective this is just the story of a kicking baby. The miracle is in the circumstances and the experience of connection. The story is told through the eyes of two women which was revolutionary enough in a patriarchal world. Elizabeth, according to the story, was 80 years old and barren. The connection she experienced with her unborn baby was tender and significant. She was beginning a bonding process that is itself a natural miracle.

This is a parable about the incredible merging of consciousness that takes place between parents and children. Kids do not arrive in the world as blank slates. They come with a huge amount of genetic coding and unconscious impulses. Then their environment and parents help to shape them as people. It’s not that the whole pressure is on moms. But moms are powerful to impact the consciousness of kids from care during pregnancy to the way you talk and play with kids in their early months. The relationship between mother and child is a mirror into wonder. Until about 18 months old, the child thinks she is an extension of her mother and many later beliefs grow out of these early interactions. At the same, for a mom, your child is a mirror into the mystery of who you are as a spiritual adventurer on a human journey.

I’m not saying that Moms need to be perfect. On the contrary, moms can model a sense of adventure and forgiveness to their kids because you are willing to try new things, then acknowledge your limitations without dwelling on failure.

And I’m not just talking about Moms. You don’t have to have children to be a mother. We all have a parental instinct to nurture children, pets, communities, ideas and causes and when you are truly passionate you will give yourself to these children of yours unconditionally. When it comes to consciousness, you are always giving birth to something. As with the story of Elizabeth, the consciousness of one person can raise the consciousness of others by virtue of their interactions. Something incredible is being birthed in the world right now, as more and more people honor the feminine dimension of life, tap into their intuitive wisdom, and seek non violent transformation of oppressive systems.

Consciousness Cleanse

With all this talk about raising consciousness, how do you do it? Where does this new consciousness come from?

It comes from within. It’s all there to begin with. You just need to remove some of the protective layers to uncover your wisdom that is often unconscious. It’s partly about trusting your intuitive wisdom, and it’s partly about making manifest instincts and motivations that are unconscious; make them conscious and intentional. Either way it’s an inner challenge.

It’s like cleaning frost from the windows of your consciousness. You can scrub for hours on the outside and make only slow progress. The more effective way of wiping away the frost is to light a fire on the inside. Shine a warm light on the frost from the inside and the frost will vanish like nose prints on windows. Frost on consciousness is often hiding your awareness of what you value, why it’s important and where your true motivation lies. Revenge for example is often a suppressed self loathing. Light a fire of awareness on all the dark places, fears and habitual patterns and you will see beyond them to the perfect peace within. Then this peace will manifest in your actions.

At root, the situation we face in the world today is not a political crisis, and it’s not an ecological crisis. Nor is it a financial crisis. It is a crisis of consciousness. The old way of operating is no longer working. We can either rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and slowly sink or we can radically change the way we approach the challenges and do it from the inside out. The solutions are there, awaiting our attention. It’s a cause for great optimism that there are signs that people are beginning to make this quantum leap in consciousness. That is something well worth celebrating.

Evolving consciousness in me greets the same in you. Namaste.

Mothers Day- The Source of Life

2011-05-05T10:09:00.002-04:00

A pregnant woman boards a bus. After taking a seat, she notices a man smiling at her. She feels self-conscious and changes her seat, but he seems even more amused. She moves a third time, and he starts to giggle. On her fourth move, he bursts into hysterical laughter. They both get off the bus at the next stop. The pregnant woman is furious and demands an explanation. “What exactly is so funny?” ”I’m sorry, ma’am,” replies the giggling man. “But I couldn’t help noticing you’re pregnant, and when you first sat down, you sat under an advertisement which read ‘Coming Soon: Million Dollar Baby.’ Then you moved and sat under an ad that read ‘Sloan’s Liniments Remove Swelling.’ Then you moved under a deodorant advertisement which read ‘William’s Stick Did the Trick.’ And I just couldn’t hold it in any longer when you moved a fourth time and sat under a tire advertisement which read ‘Dunlop Rubber Would Have Prevented This Accident.’”

I’m going to risk a different sort of accident by writing about motherhood from a masculine perspective. This is probably unwise, as the general rule is “no uterus, no opinion.” My only right to an opinion is that I have had a front row seat watching an amazing Mom in action for 17 years now. It all began in 1994 with my frantic drive to the hospital. Then many hours later in the delivery room, it happened. Delivery doesn’t seem like an accurate word for what went down in that room. Delivery is what happens when your pizza arrives; within 30 minutes or no charge. This was altogether unlike welcoming a pizza boy at the door. Other words come to mind, but not delivery; words like intense, nerve-wracking, thrilling, and heart wrenching. There is screaming, laughter and tears all within the same breath, then the elation of a little human person in your arms.

I had the honor of cutting the chord. Now that was a heart stopping thing to do. It was hard for me to believe the nurse who said that it wouldn’t hurt either mother or child. I mean it was part of both of them. How could it not hurt? It made me a little squeamish. I asked if we could just leave them attached. It seemed safer. We wouldn’t lose him that way. Couldn’t we just raise him attached?

In all seriousness, being present for the birth of my three children is without doubt the greatest privilege and joy of my life. Words can’t accurately describe the elation of partnering the creation of new life. My heart danced with pride at the sight of Meg; blissfully exhausted. I can only imagine the feeling for a mother in that moment. It seems to me that mothers have an insight into some of the mysteries of life because of this experience, including a profound appreciation for the Source of Life…… by any name. These insights are universal truths that mothers may be able to help us all to understand.

Holding On and Letting Go
In the Susan Jeffer’s book End the Struggle and Dance with Life, an old woman is asked why she is always cheerful. Her answer is beautiful. “Well, I wear this world just as a loose garment.”

To wear the world as a loose garment means to embrace life with passion, but neither to smother it, nor be smothered by it. Wearing the world as a loose garment speaks of being at ease with what lies beneath, accepting life is it evolves, but not expecting it to stay the same. Wearing the world as a loose garment is a metaphor for holding the balance between embrace and detachment, intimacy and autonomy, the present moment and impermanence.

From the moment the cord is cut, mothers learn the delicate balance of holding on and letting go. It’s a profound spiritual truth that mirrors the mysterious relationship that we all have with the source of life, no matter what language or imagery we use to describe this mystery. The source of life and love is both tangible and concrete like a new born baby or an act of kindness, and it’s also mysterious and fluid like a new realization or a felt connection. Life is both something you can hold onto with passion, and also something that cannot be fully grasped or described. The lesson of motherhood that is a profound spiritual truth for all of us is to balance holding on to life, and also letting go so that you are free for new and evolving experience.

Birthing a New You
Marianne Williamson said- “When a woman gives birth, two are born; a baby from the womb of its mother and a woman from the womb of her former existence.”
Being a mother, in all its humanity, joy and frustration, is ultimately a celebration of a new you. You will never be the same after all this pain, all this loving, all this letting go. In each step on the path of motherhood, you are discovering the delight of awakening to the source of life that dances in and through you.

As a mother, you know what it is to feel such intense passion for your creation that you would stop at nothing to try and end your child’s suffering. As a mother, you know forgiveness like no other. As a mother, you celebrate the achievements of your child because you know better than others the struggle that often leads to success.

Most importantly, mothers know how changeable life is. You know what it is to shift your roles and relationships with your kids. This is such a profound lesson in impermanence. My grandmother died in 1994. At the time, Meg was full of the life of our first child. After the funeral for my grandma, my mother placed her hand on Meg’s pregnant stomach and said, “As one life passes, another begins.” I have never forgotten that moment as new life merged with transitioning life, four generations crossed paths for just a few precious moments.

Mother or not, you are birthing new life each and every day. Your new creations and achievements are dear to you like children. May you wear life like a loose garment, surrendering to the rhythm of the source of life. May you cut the cords that need to be cut, hold tight where appropriate and be wise to know the difference. May you let go, not palms down but palms up so that what you release can fly free. May you know, amidst all the disappointment and imperfection, that life has a unity even if you don’t always feel or understand that unity. All things are evolving as they need to, and you are learning what you need to learn. You are part of the mysterious unity that dances free and unrestrained in all things at all times. I honor all who give birth to life in every thought, word and action.

Social Contract- Communal Responsibility

2011-05-01T21:16:00.003-04:00

A milk man in a small town goes door to door each morning with a large jug of milk. At midday he sets his jug on a rock while he unpacks his humble lunch of bread and hard cheese.

One day, the goat herder comes by as the milk man is having his lunch. The milk man hollers a greeting which spooks one of the goats which in turn knocks the jug over, shattering it and spilling its contents. Not only does the milk man lose the rest of his day’s wages, but it will take up to a month to get another jug. How will he live without a month’s income? The milk man demands the goat herder sell his goats to pay for the milk man’s losses. The goat herder responds that to do so would bankrupt him.

The two men go to the village judge. After hearing both of them plead their cases, the judge declares that it is neither the fault of the goat herder nor the fault of the milk man. To truly find out whose fault it is, he decides to hold a trial between the goat and the rock. The judge sends his bailiffs to bring forward the goat and the rock. The goat comes fairly easily. The rock comes with a struggle.

Soon, word of the trial spreads throughout the village. The trial is held in the town center, and all of the townspeople come to witness the ridiculous trial. The judge speaks. “You have come to see a trial between a rock and a goat, which is a foolish thing. Thus, you have come to see me make a fool out of myself. The only fair judgment is to fine each of you a few coins for ‘improper thoughts.’” The money is collected and given to the milk man who is able to purchase a new jug and continue his work.

Everyone in the village was involved and while some resented having to contribute their own money to a situation that didn’t concern them, they all felt that they had been part of the solution.

It’s an interesting parable for our time, as we continue to debate the role of taxation, welfare and social security. From the right and the left, we are seeking to find the balance of personal liberty and communal responsibility. It’s also a story that illustrates a profound spiritual truth. As hard as you may try to live an independent life and keep to yourself, your actions inevitably impact others. As hard as a nation may try to assert its independence in the world, it too is part of a global village. And as much as we humans live as if we can do whatever we want, consume whatever we want, control whatever we want, we forget that we too are part of the whole ecosystem of life.

The American pastor and peace activist, William Sloane Coffin, who died just a few years back said,

The new survival unit is no longer the individual nation; it’s the entire human race and its environment. This newfound oneness is only a rediscovery of an ancient religious truth. Unity is not something we are called to create; it’s something we are called to recognize.

Where Does the Responsibility End?

So we are connected to each other in a social contract, or using Judeo/ Christian language a social covenant. How far does this stretch? Are there limits? Where does the responsibility start and end? Your immediate family? Or does your responsibility stretch to include your extended family? As a parent, you might imagine that your job is done when the kids leave home. But they keep coming back! And the family keeps getting larger. Now you worry about the grandkids, and you include in-laws and their extended family in your life. Is extended family the extent of your responsibility? Do you have a loyalty to your communities, or to your nation? Do you have a responsibility beyond your nation and beyond your species?

When the Pilgrims arrived in America on the Mayflower they signed what they called a Social Compact which gave them a way to organize themselves socially and politically. It modeled certain principles that we still take for granted. The only problem was that it didn’t include women and it didn’t acknowledge the indigenous people whose land they were about to invade. Our social contracts need to include as many stake holders as possible. Too often, it’s the loudest or wealthiest stake holders whose interests take precedence.

I will never forget the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. 2000 was the last year that we lived in Sydney and the buzz was phenomenal. The city was full of people and good energy. The streets were all clean. New roads were built. Buildings and facilities were updated. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see milk and honey raining from the clouds. But behind the façade shown to the world, something took place that was completely corrupt and offensive. And now I have discovered that it happens in cities around the world before Olympic Games and large political conventions. Thousands of homeless people were randomly arrested for loitering, and were either jailed or bussed several hundred miles out of the city. Sydney was put on the global map in 2000. But the cost was that we broke our social contract with those who needed support the most. We forgot that homeless people are part of us and our actions affect them.

To bring the thought close to home, this week a junior at a local High School ended his life with a gun. I don’t pretend to know the situation or the motivation, but I have heard that there was a long history of bullying that went back to Middle School. He was apparently a quiet and intelligent kid, which made him a target. This breaks my heart. We are ALL part of perpetuating a culture where some people are not safe, where it’s not okay to be quiet and intelligent, a society where if you are different from the norm you are safer to fly under the radar than boldly be who you are. His death rests in part on all of our consciences for allowing bullying to take place. Bullying is a breach of the social contract that everyone should be able to live freely without fear of harm.

Our responsibility in the social contract extends to homeless people and to teenagers in the local school, and to future generations who will inherit the planet. How far does it stretch? Our responsibility stretches as far as our consciousness has revealed to us that our connections run. In this day and age of global communication, and rapid movement of information, there is little excuse for having a limited or tribal mentality. We are connected all the way from east to west, south to north. One of the best ways to expand this consciousness is gratitude. Rather than make our responsibility to each other a matter of guilt or shame, think about it in terms of gratitude that stretches all the way back and all the way forward.

Gratitude and the Social Contract

After a heavy rain an old man began digging holes in his garden. His neighbor asked him, “What are you doing?” “Planting mango trees”, he said. The neighbor said, “Do you expect to eat mangoes from those trees?” He replied, “No. I won’t live long enough for that. But others will. All my life I have enjoyed mangoes planted by other people. This is my way of showing them my gratitude.

It’s a beautiful story that reminds us that someone once worked hard to make possible all the things we now take for granted. Second, our actions now create the ground on which future life on earth will sustain itself. Gratitude creates connections we hadn’t even thought of; connections with the earth, connections with each other and connections between our actions and future life.

Gratitude is one of the most enlightened human responses. It gets you beyond yourself. It’s close to altruism. There must have been a time, many years ago, where someone in a cave decided not to eat the food and instead to share it with others. One of the first acts of community, and you can imagine the surprise. And there must have been a first time that someone extended generosity beyond their tribe. And so it began. There must have been a first time that someone extended their sense of responsibility to include all living things. Gratitude helps us to appreciate others and to see our life as an opportunity to pay this gratitude forward. Gratitude brings us back to the web of life that supports our existence, our social contract with all living beings.

Social Contract and Human Nature

The idea of a social contract was part of the Enlightenment that arose in England and France in the 18th century. Their new understanding of human nature and community spread to America and was hugely influential in the foundation of the rule of law in this country. They wrestled with the question of what happens when people are left to their own devices. What is human nature capable of doing to a society?

The big breakthrough of the Enlightenment was that everybody was included in the social contract. Up to that point the religious sense of tribalism and God-ordained order justified excluding or marginalizing certain people or groups. Now the social contract included all people, in theory at least. The social contract says that all people are free and equal, and each person has inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This sense of egalitarianism was one of the great benefits of the Enlightenment, that emphasized the freedom and self empowerment that we now enjoy to craft our own spiritual path.

The downside of the Enlightenment view was that they didn’t have an optimistic view of human nature. The basic idea to come out of the Enlightenment was that if we were left to our own devices, our human nature, there would be chaos. It would be Lord of the Flies on a global scale. Each would act selfishly to ensure their own survival. Because human nature is essentially rational, we agree to enter a social contract to overrule our human nature. We now have a more nuanced view of human nature. I will return to this theme.

In general terms, the social contract is a fine ideal. However we know that even with a social contract homeless people get bussed out of town before Olympic Games without a thought to their rights, and kids commit suicide without enough questions being asked about the culture of bullying.

Community and Consciousness

As long as people suffer innocently there is more work for all of us to do. Stretch your consciousness to include all living things. Take some responsibility for the suffering of people near and far and do what you can to ease their suffering.

At the same time, continue to explore the essence of human nature. While much religion takes a mostly negative view of human nature saying that the basic human impulse is selfish, look more deeply into human potential. Traditional Christian language speaks about repentance as if you are changing natures. In this scheme, you are changing from the sinful nature to a holy nature. It’s a disempowering view. Another way to think about repentance is the movement from unconscious thoughts to conscious thoughts or awareness. The more you make your unconscious mind, which drives the majority of your life and decisions, conscious, the more successful, connected and compassionate you will be.

When you think of going deeper, or exploring the inner world, think of this as making unconscious thoughts conscious. The deeper you go, the more you discover “the inner extrovert” as David Brooks described it in his new book The Social Animal. The more self aware you are, the more connected you feel to others. The suffering of others feels like your own suffering, and your compassion compels you to live with greater care and kindness.

I’m going to revisit this issue over the coming weeks to explore practical ways of making the unconscious world conscious. This is not just an academic discussion. The safety of teenagers, the rights of indigenous people and the very future of the species, rides on our ability to participate in this shift to consciousness. More to come on this issue. For now, simply consider your social contract and how far your responsibility reaches. Instead of taking a guilt trip, explore an attitude of gratitude as a pathway to consciousness that includes more and more living beings in your care and concern.

Inclusive Easter

2011-04-25T10:52:00.002-04:00

During the week several people commented to me that I must be busy, being Easter week. I explained that I am busy but it has nothing to do with Easter. In the past when I followed the Easter story through the last days and hours of Jesus life it was busy because there were multiple services to coordinate. Now I have less interest in following the literal story of Jesus’ last days. Like many people, the literal version of the story smacks too much of a view of salvation that we have left behind. It’s a view that says we have all fallen short of God’s nature, and Jesus died and rose as part of God’s plan to help us rise above our human nature and attain eternal life. I take almost the exact opposite view. I don’t think it’s our nature that’s the problem. On the contrary, what we need to do is return to our essential nature that we often forget. It’s the fact that you’ve forgotten your nature as a spark of light in the world that’s the problem. You don’t need to be saved by someone outside of yourself. You need to awaken to your true nature that is very much alive and well within you.

For those of us with an inclusive spiritual perspective, Easter is an opportunity to reinterpret the message in a way that is personally empowering and optimistic. The message is one of personal responsibility. Change the course of history from this moment forward by reclaiming your power as a human being with a voice and a call to be all you can be in the world.

What Unites Us?

What is your feeling about Easter? Do you look forward to it, dread it, or do you feel conflicted?

While we come from so many different perspectives on Easter, some following a more literal understanding of the events than others, there is something we can all agree on. We are all looking for a little magic in the midst of life that can be confusing and uncertain. Whether you take the story of resurrection literally or not, the season can provide a little renewal of your belief in possibility.

Let me illustrate with a story from when I was 6 years old.

When I was 6, I found an old car tire and put it in the dirt in the backyard. Every afternoon when I came home from school I sat in the middle of my tire and dug. I dug my heart out with my little plastic spade, shoveling handfuls of dirt over the side, fully convinced that if I dug for long enough I would get to China. I imagined that on the way I would pass through lost cities and find old treasures before eventually arriving at China. I’d heard the phrase, “digging a hole to China” and I thought that was just about the coolest thought imaginable, so I dug. I wanted to know how it could be that you could dig down but then end arrive somewhere by coming up through the ground in some place far away.

I found the world an enchanted but strange place. The hole in the ground was one of the ways I escaped from a world that confused me. There was something about sitting in the dirt that put things in perspective. Around this time, I had some traumatic experiences. One day I found my best friend in the boy’s bathroom at school sitting on a strange man’s lap. I never knew what had happened, but I knew it wasn’t right. Another friend died when he became trapped in an abandoned fridge. He was sitting next to me in his seat in class one day. The next day his seat was empty. This also wasn’t right. Soon after that I walked into the kitchen of my home and found a man from the local pysch hospital holding my parents at knife point. At least that’s how I remember it. Whatever happened, I knew it wasn’t right. How does a six year old boy make sense of a world that turns out to be less certain, less friendly, and less trustworthy than he expected? He digs a hole in the ground. He plays. He makes believe. He talks to imaginary friends. He dreams. He waits for tooth fairies and Easter bunnies to bring chocolates and coins and other magical treats. My hole in the ground was one place I could control.

I gave up tunneling to China after a few weeks. I was a persistent kid, but when I could barely fit my feet in the hole after 3 weeks I lost interest. So much for my trek to China. What are your early memories? When did you first realize that life can be a raw and rough ride? How did you cope with the disenchantment? What place did magic have in your childhood?

The Easter story, whether you understand it literally or as a long lasting myth, has all the elements of life in it. It has betrayal, disappointment, disillusionment, loss, corruption, relief, joy, surprise, forgiveness and so much more. It is a real world story of despair giving way to hope.

Easter As a Pagan Celebration of Nature

The Easter story emerged at a time when people were living with high levels of uncertainty and change. The magical elements of the story were partially a way for first century people to dig a hole to China. At the time of Jesus, magical thinking was closely tied to survival. Druids burned Yule logs in winter to remind the sun god to return; something that was by no means certain. What we now call Easter was for them a grateful relief, the return of the sun. They believed that their nature rituals had something to do with this miracle. At least it gave them a semblance of control in a world that seemed relentless and harsh.

A strong argument can be made that the story of the resurrection was fashioned after these pagan rituals. The word Easter never appears in the Bible. The word comes from Oestra, the pagan goddess of spring and rebirth. Easter is celebrated with symbols of fertility such as rabbits, eggs and spring colors. The fact that Earth Day fell on Good Friday this year is perfect. Eater reflects the pattern of nature. The seed of new life prepares itself in the darkness, ready to flourish in the spring. Jesus was the archetype for the greening of life. Maybe those who spoke about Jesus as the vine had some intuitive understanding of the earth connections, with the imagery of green growth and a web of relationships. Jesus death represented the dark days of winter that give way to the new birth of spring. It may also be no accident that in the story when Mary first saw the risen Jesus, he appeared in the form of a gardener. The earth holds all the same lessons as the Easter story.

Nature holds wisdom for dealing with the ups and downs of life; patience, surrender and acceptance. Nature is the place where so many extremes of human existence play out. At various times we go on personal quests and test extremes of endurance. We find both peace and challenge in the wild. We stand face to face with the most mind blowing beauty in nature, and quake at the feet of her power. It is a giant back yard for self discovery and imagining the possibilities for a better future. Nature has magical qualities.

The Easter story tracks the wild extremes of nature, the changing seasons and enduring wisdom. The story and rituals around Easter include enough magic and miracle to give you space to sit in the ground and dig to China. After centuries of scholarship and science that make a physical resurrection unlikely, the magic is found in a different way. Sometime after I was about 8, I realized that I couldn’t dig to China no matter how long I sat in that tire. I entered a stage of development that children’s author, Beatrix Potter described as “half believing and wholly playing with fairies.” This is the stage where you continue “believing” in Santa Claus to get gifts and you keep “believing” in the Easter Bunny to get candy. You keep the magic alive just enough to benefit without embarrassing yourself.

The same process happens for many adults with stories like Easter and Christmas. As long as you benefit from half believing the stories, and don’t lapse into beliefs that are pre-scientific, you can play in the story and see where it leads you. The benefit of half believing the story is the optimism it engenders that you can change the course of history.

Change the Course of History

Changing the course of history is a good Easter phrase. There was a commercial a few years back. It was for a new video cell phone. Jesus was sitting around the Last Supper table. When he realized that Judas wasn’t there, he called Judas on his video cell phone. He caught Judas downtown telling jokes to some Roman soldiers. In the background, you see one of the soldiers dangling a bag of silver coins. There is guilt written all over Judas’ face. The look on Jesus’ face is, “Aha, I caught you in the act.” Then the caption flashes onto the screen- “So and so brand mobile phone- Changing the Course of History!”

The Easter miracle is that you can change the course of history. You can rise above hurts and trauma from your past, and change the course of your own history. You can face your own wild nature, both the accepting, peaceful aspects of yourself and your vision for change, heal some of the broken parts and move on with determination. The Easter miracle is that a seed of possibility, buried in the darkness of your own psyche, is all it takes to create a massive transformation in your life.

I have been busy, but not because of Easter. I’ve been busy because I’ve been playing a small part in a local production of Pygmalion. Pygmalion is the story better known for its musical version “My Fair Lady”, the story of Eliza the flower girl and Henry Higgins who wagers that he can pass her off as a duchess by teaching her manners, culture and above all else correct speech. It’s a play that holds all the best and most difficult parts of the Easter story. When Higgins attempts to change Eliza against her will it’s a little like the salvation version of Easter where God feels the need to change us from the outside. But the play, and Higgin’s character in particular, have layers of complexity. The play also has elements of the reinterpreted Easter story where Eliza takes control of her own destiny, rises above her past and changes the course of her history. She comes to appreciate that speech is a superficial change, but something far more profound changes inside of her. She learns self confidence. She claims her own worth as a valued human being who offers something significant to the world.

Soaring In Your True Nature

The butterfly is a beautiful symbol for the Easter message. The first stage is the caterpillar which lives close to the earth, grounded and steady. The next stage is the cocoon, which is like time in darkness preparing for new growth. Finally comes the butterfly which emerges from darkness but flies free. Rediscovering your true nature often follows these stages. The Easter story follows the same pattern. Nature models the pattern. Eliza Doolittle experienced this pattern.

The other connection to the butterfly is what is known as the butterfly effect. One small change in your life spreads and impacts all parts of your life, and the lives of those around you. One person’s awakening, though it always begins within, is never independent of others. The Easter message of taking responsibility for changing the course of history applies to the whole world. We’ve seen it in the Middle East. When the fruit seller in Tunisia set himself on fire in front of government offices as a protest just before Christmas, he may have had no idea of the chain of events that have unfolded since in Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Egypt and now Lybia. He had had enough of the corruption and silencing of peoples’ voices. He took extreme action the same way Jesus took extreme action in the story of his life and death.

It is the responsibility of every one of us to continue the legacy of the fruit seller. Even if we aren’t called to extreme action like setting ourselves on fire or going toe to toe with the Roman Empire, we all have our ways and means of changing the course of history. Start as a caterpillar. Inch forward while staying close to the earth. When you spend time in the cocoon, prepare your mind and heart for the inner awakening. Then release yourself to fly and be all that you can be in the world.

Reclaim the magic of Easter in whatever way is meaningful for you. If you find little in the original story that resonates, then take to heart nature’s story. Remember the words of the American inventor Buckminster Fuller, “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to a butterfly.” However frail and fearful you feel right now, rest assured there is a butterfly in you just waiting to soar.

Just like a butterfly, I will awaken to my true nature at the right time. Namaste.

Earth Day- Enormous Care, Little Struggle

2011-04-21T10:05:00.002-04:00

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done — challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.” Jean Houston

What does this new humanity look like? Is it a George Jetson style future with hybrid cars travelling on elevated monorails to paperless and wireless offices? Or is it a world where we can look at each other across a fence, or across species, and recognize our essential connections? Hopefully it’s a combination of both.

A lot of people are making an effort. Communities around the world have experimented with bike sharing systems over the last couple of decades. Abandoned bikes are refurbished and painted green. Bike stands are erected at strategic points around town along with a notice explaining that bikes can be used and left at any authorized Green Bike site. It’s a great idea that has run into a little snag. People keep stealing the bikes. The fleets of bikes disappear faster than they can be replaced. Many communities have abandoned the scheme because of the cost of replacing stolen bikes.

This dilemma is a parable for the environmental movement. Until there is a change in consciousness that reminds us that we are all in this together, and that stealing from another person or plundering the earth, is effectively stealing from ourselves, no green scheme will make any lasting difference. Until we have sustainable consciousness, no ecological program will ever be sustainable.

This is a profound spiritual tension. It’s part of the realization of a new humanity. Making green mainstream is the easy part. Creating a green consciousness is a much deeper challenge. But it is worth the effort, or should I say it’s worth the effortless effort. Once you tap into this connected consciousness, a perspective that includes all living things, as part of an evolutionary context, there is enormous care, but little struggle.

Over the last twenty years, the response to the ecological crisis has gone through many different stages. Each of them has involved this tension between creating superficial change and effecting lasting change. My earliest memory of the ecological crisis was around the hole in the ozone and dreaded aerosols. It was all fear and doom. Aerosols were used to scareosol to death. Then the focus shifted to recycling. Suddenly, the relatively easy process of dumping our trash in a bag and taking it out back became a science of its own. It felt like you had to be a chemist to know what plastic to put in which bin. Then the focus shifted to green consumerism, sustainable development, renewable energy, and hybrid cars. At each step along the way, there has been a sense of crisis and struggle that has eventually given way to mainstream acceptance. Where are we now? Eco-sensitivity has entered the mainstream.

This is awesome, and necessary, but it would be even better if the change took place as much on the inside as it has on the outside. Sustainable change requires both changed light bulbs, and it requires an inner light bulb to glow with the motivating realization that everything is related. Sustainable change requires both recycled materials and it requires waking up to the incredible realization that everything is part of one cycle of life and death. Change is the nature of life- all things change, but nothing fully dies. It just moves into another cycle of life and rebirth. This thought sparks a level of humility that could truly make a difference to the earth. As Carlin said, “the planet isn’t going anywhere. We are.” We can certainly damage the earth, but the greater damage will be to humanity and the greatest damage will be to our spirits and not our bodies. Our shortsightedness is already catching up with us. The earth will continue with or without us.

Religions are also getting serious about environmental issues but a quantum shift in consciousness is now needed. Green projects are some of the rare opportunities for conservative and liberal religious groups to work together. This is an awesome development. It would be even better if religions shifted the focus from the hereafter to the here and now, and sought a fresh realization of heaven on earth. Part of a sustainable consciousness is the understanding that the earth is a single, connected, living system, of which humans are a part. Recognizing this unity in diversity is good for your soul because it prevents you from becoming arrogant and superior which is likely one of the root causes of the ecological crisis.

Sustainable consciousness involves the delicate balance between enormous care and little struggle. Enormous care, because the small and large changes you make in your life DO make a difference. Little struggle because you know that the earth is a living system on its own journey of death and rebirth. To quote Carlin again,

“I don’t worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron… It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. At least for a little while.”

Carlin was a prophet. At least he addressed one half of the equation- the humility and little struggle. Just don’t lose sight of the enormous care. One day we might look back and see that small practical changes like canvas shopping bags and small changes in consciousness like the realization of oneness have truly changed the world.

This earth day, remember that you are a part of a higher order, an incredible whole, the big electron, intimately related and significant. How could you not live with enormous care? Your actions make a difference. At the same time, respond without struggle, for you are part of an unfolding process that is infinitely larger than you or your efforts.

Please visit Soulseeds to sign up for Earth affirmations. Wake up each morning to a gentle reminder of Mother Earth’s spiritual lessons.

Heaven and Earth

2011-04-17T19:42:00.002-04:00

Oscar Wilde once said, “In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures.” It’s a common aspect of the human journey, inside and outside of religion, that we seek things that endure. Within religion, the afterlife is often seen as the enduring hope.

Grand Rapids pastor Rob Bell has caused a stir with his new book Love Wins. He begins the book by hinting that there is no hell and goes on to outline the universalist perspective that everyone ends up in heaven, no matter what it turns out that heaven is. Of course many people have been saying this for years, but it’s significant that a prominent evangelical pastor has gone on record and landed the lead story in this week’s Time magazine. This is big news, and in my opinion good news, a step in the right direction.

It’s going to be fascinating to watch this unfold, as he will inevitably continue on this path of deconstruction and question many other doctrines. His critics are right to say that he is now on a slippery slope to deconversion. When you open Pandora’s Box, you have little idea of the many questions that follow on from questioning the existence of hell. As it says in the Time article, once you open this gate, many other questions follow. With this universal perspective there is no inside and outside group, no saved and unsaved people. There is no doctrinal marker for membership in a church. There is no significant or ultimate difference between the religions. You start to see Jesus as a great teacher and leader, but not the sacrificial lamb for anyone’s sins. There is no carrot for the church to hold over its flock to ensure membership and regular tithing. The Bible is opened to all sorts of questions and revisions to the point where the very authority of the Bible is questioned. At an extreme some would say there is no hope, no meaning in life and no sense of justice, without a salvation system that involves heaven and hell.

Many of us have been there. We know that at the bottom of this slippery slope you can either crash and burn or you can gather momentum for a run back up the hill of reconstruction where your beliefs are more inclusive, more focused on THIS life and more self aware and responsible than ever. Maybe you know both the anxiety and joy of giving up beliefs that used to give you comfort, and skiing free style up and down the hills of life. Maybe, like me, you find more meaning than ever in life. You find glimpses of things that endure in every day moments. Those of us reveling in the joy of our own freely formed spiritual path, know that on the other side of deconstruction there is enormous hope and meaning. Without the fear of hell, you are free to live fully in this life and find meaning where it shows itself without needing to be told by any religious authority what to believe and how to experience the God of your understanding.

Where to Next?

I became a universalist many years ago. It makes no sense to me to believe that some people suffer eternally in hell. I decided a long time ago that whatever heaven is, if there is any such realm, it has to include all people. Any justification for excluding people from heaven is arbitrary and self serving. But now I find myself going a lot further than universalism.

I now find that my circle of concern and compassion stretches well beyond people. I no longer believe that people have a privileged place in the universe. We have greater responsibility because we have become conscious of our ability to make choices that impact the whole universe, but we have no special privilege. Once your consciousness expands to include all species, past, present and future, the notion of universalism becomes too small to hold your love. Whatever heaven is, if there is any such thing, it must surely include all living things.

The second reason that universalism is not an adequate worldview is that it implies that salvation, or the fulfillment of life, is a future reality. I see no reason to wait. Heaven is realized in each moment that your awareness is pure and at peace with what is. Heaven is now, the glimpses of perfect peace that we gain when we live in harmony with all of life. Heaven is also something that we can create in the here and now when we live mindfully.

One of the things that unites many people who aren’t glued together by religious doctrine is the vision we have to make the world a more humane place. We want to make sure the world is in reasonable shape for the next generations. The best way to take care of the next generation is to take care of the place that will take care of the next generation. Get your house in order, leave the world a little better than you found it, and make sure there’s a solid basis for the next generation to work with.

Heaven and Earth Day

What does this discussion of the afterlife have to do with Earth Day? There is a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy has her arms folded and a stern expression on her face. Charlie Brown pleads, “Lucy, you must be more loving. This world really needs love. You have to let yourself love to make this world a better place.” Lucy angrily whirls around and knocks Charlie Brown to the ground. She screams at him, “Look, Blockhead, the world I love. Its people I can’t stand.”

We all feel that way some of the time. Maybe it’s easier to love the earth. In our best moments, we love both the world and its people. These lines from Lord Byron were quoted at the beginning of the 2007 film Into The Wild.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea and the music in its roar;
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

In the movie, Emile Hirsch plays the part of Chris McCandless who gives up all his possessions after graduating college to hitchhike north and live alone in the wilderness in Alaska. The ironic charm of the movie is that while he is running away from relationships to live a solitary life, Chris strikes up some amazing relationships along the way that seem to nourish him along with the incredible wilderness experiences. In community and in the wild, he finds his own salvation. He creates heaven both in new relationships and in his amazing experiences of nature.

For many of us following an inclusive spiritual path, Earth Day is the most significant day of the year, and more important than the religious celebrations that are closely tied to the traditional salvation system. Why is this? It’s certainly true that Earth Day brings our focus back to the awful destruction of the earth at human hands, and the need to live more mindfully and simply. But there is a more fundamental connection with Earth Day which also may provide a more sustainable response to ecological despair. It is our oneness with the earth. We respect the earth as part of us, and we honor the earth that gives no concern to time and is at peace with change. Nature makes no attempt to control circumstances and offers constant reminders of change and impermanence. Nature gives us a cool summer’s day and an icy cold day in late April as if to remind us that life is unpredictable and to take nothing for granted.

Earth Day is a reminder to let go a little of the delusion of control. This is part of a response to the ecological crisis. Create some sustainable change in your thoughts that gives you peace of mind and then you will feel less need to over consume to fill a hole or try and prove your control by dominating the earth.

Rising Above Mindlessness

I guess it’s no accident that Rob Bell’s book was released so close to Easter. Easter is one of those times that brings up many mixed emotions for people on the slippery slope of deconstruction and reconstruction. More about Easter in the coming week, but for now let me end with a little teaser on the reconstructed meaning of Easter as a symbol of renewed hope. Once again the movie Into the Wild offers a beautiful parable of hope restored. Chris finds his resurrection in the movie, but it’s very much a here and now resurrection, coming to terms with who he is and how he relates to the world around him.

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam wrote the soundtrack for Into the Wild. My favorite song on the soundtrack is called Rise. With the lone Mandolin playing, the song brings to mind a collage of Chris’s adventures of self discovery. Here are the lyrics-

Such is the way of the world
You can never know
Just where to put all your faith
And how will it grow

Gonna rise up
Burning back holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold

Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
And suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold

Gonna rise up
Find my direction magnetically
Gonna rise up
Throw down my ace in the hole

You don’t need to look to heaven and hell for your salvation and you don’t need to wait. Salvation is yours for the taking right now. You find it within as you rise about the self defeating thoughts, forgive your past and turn your mistakes into gold. As Chris says in the movie, “You don’t have to be strong, you just have to feel strong.” There is no one correct path to follow, but you certainly don’t have to follow the path of guilt and shame. Find your direction magnetically. Feel your way forward, knowing that there is always more to come and there is always more to learn. The one thing that endures while all else changes is the inner peace that you have all that makes life whole right now.

The wild struggle for hope within me honors the same within you. Namaste.

The Source of Balance

2011-04-14T08:17:00.003-04:00

What matters most in life? If you had just a few days to live, how would you spend them? If you had one phone call you could make before your life ended, who would you call and what would you say? If you had two minutes to gather what would fit in a small carry-on bag before fleeing your burning home, what would you pack?

During these moments of crisis, or even when reflecting on tragedy such as the recent disasters in Japan, you may come to a crystal clear realization that you wouldn’t miss your finest possessions, or your hardest won financial security for a second if faced with death. You realize that what really matters are the human moments of care and connection. The most amazing thing about these crisis or perspective moments is that you realize how full your life already is. You realize that you have been taking your abundance for granted. You have been starving in the midst of plenty, drowning in the calmest ocean of love.

Try this experiment, or at least think of it as a visualization. Take a large and empty jar and fill it with tennis balls. Is the jar full? It certainly appears to be full but its not. Pour some pebbles into the jar. After shaking the jar, the pebbles roll into the open spaces between the tennis balls. Is the jar full now? It seems to be but it still isn’t full. Then pour sand into the jar. The sand moves into the empty spaces between the balls and the pebbles. Is the jar full? Still not. Lastly, pour some liquid into the jar. The liquid spreads around the jar, moving into the empty spaces between the balls, pebbles and grains of sand. Now the jar is finally full.

Your life is full of something, so make sure its things you can be proud of and people who make your heart sing. The things that matter most to you are the tennis balls; your family, your inner peace, your friends, your creative freedom, your health. If there was nothing else in the jar but these things, your life would be abundant and joyful. The things that are important but not essential are like pebbles. Maybe the pebbles include your job, your house or your changing beliefs. They move around more easily than tennis balls and may be important at certain times more than others. The sand is the really small stuff; the distractions, the petty grievances that claw away at your inner peace, the anxieties about things that may or may not be problems. Like sand in your mouth, the petty things aggravate you and get in the way of your appreciation of the truly important things.

If you put the sand in the jar first, then there’s no room for the tennis balls. It’s the same in life. If you fill your life with things, jobs and petty grievances, you have no room in life for what matters most. Life is short and precious. Allocate your time according to what matters most. The rest of life is sand. And make sure you pause often to appreciate the incredible fullness of life that is already yours.

If your life feels out of balance, set about correcting the imbalance.The beautifully reassuring thing is that the human body is built to restore balance. I love the fact that our balance center is in the inner ear because it suggests that we have inner wisdom if we are able to “hear” it. In other words, you have within you the wisdom to know how to restore balance in your life.

What is your current challenge with balance? Maybe it’s the balance between work and play. Maybe it’s the balance between justice and forgiveness. Maybe it’s the balance between self worth and humility. Maybe it’s the balance of your own needs and the needs of others. Maybe it’s the balance between changing what you can change, and accepting what you cannot change for now. Maybe it’s the balance between striving and just being.

The wisdom of balance is that it doesn’t have to be one or the other, and you can change from one moment to the next. Some problems are not meant to be solved, just managed. Even the tennis balls sometimes need to be juggled. Imagine yourself juggling a number of balls; work, family, health, friends, economic crises, global suffering and your own needs– and you’re keeping all of them in the air. If you drop some of them, they just bounce back. The economy is an example of a ball. It will bounce back eventually so keep this in perspective. But sometimes the balls are more like glass. If you drop them, they may be damaged, or even shattered. They may never be the same. Take greater care with these.

Strive for balance in your life. Know what is most important, what is negotiable and when action is important. At your core you have a balance that is neither rubber nor glass. It is not rubber because it doesn’t bounce around with circumstances, and it’s not glass because it can never be broken. It’s more like water which can be both gentle and yielding and tough and corrosive depending on the circumstance. It knows what to do and when to act. It is the source of your deep seated inner wisdom. Think once again about the jar analogy. The water is the source of your life and it fills everything else with meaning and gives all your relationships and visions a higher purpose.

When you feel out of balance, may you hear the voice of your inner wisdom whispering truths about balance and inner capacity. When despair grows in you and you feel overwhelmed by the burdens of life, may you feel the reassurance of your own balanced spirit. When confusion reigns and tragedy strikes the world, may the earth and all of its people be restored to balance. Namaste.

Please visit Soulseeds for resources that support balance and essential priorities.

You Are What You Eat- A Gratitude Meditation

2011-04-12T08:12:00.003-04:00

If you are what you eat, you should definitely avoid chopped liver, waffles and all forms of nuts. In seriousness, its just as true that you are what you eat as it is that you become what you think and end up where your intentions lead you. We eat our histories, live our intentions, and create our futures with each thought, word and meal.

Wendell Berry wrote, “I eat my history day by day. Bird, butterfly, and flower pass through the seasons of my flesh.” This is true for all of us. When you eat with love, what’s grown with love, prepared with love and served with love, you feel more nourished, revitalized, satisfied, balanced and loved. Meal times are an awesome time for gratitude, to remember the goodness of the earth and our many connections. We consume earth’s food to give us strength to serve the earth and everything in it.

This is a meditation to nurture gratitude around food, to be mindful of the journey of various ingredients to your plate. You can do this meditation alone or with your family as a fun visualization.

Quiet your mind and bring your full attention to this moment. Begin with awareness; of your body, your breath and your surroundings. Become as relaxed as possible knowing that in this moment you are safely held in the embrace of a life force that is larger than you and yet deeply present within you and in the earth and in every living thing.

Let your senses take in the beauty of the moment; the awesome potential, the surprising symmetry, the glorious oneness of life. Life is an incredible miracle and you have the privilege of participating and co-creating the future. Focus on gratitude, for all this and more. Nature is rolling out spring like a red carpet with its own designer labels of new color and spectacular growth. Feed this appetite for gratitude with a visualization about a spring feast. Gratitude is to the spirit what food is to the body; it nourishes and regenerates.

Imagine yourself the host at an outdoor party. The sun is bright, warming your face and body, and splashing patterns of light on the meal table. Give thanks for the sunshine, earth and rain that helps grow the food that makes your feast possible. Give thanks for the animals that provide your nourishment. Give thanks for the trees that provide shelter and shade. Give thanks for good company and for the love that connects us all. Breathe in deeply and feel your connection to ALL THAT IS.

Allow yourself to drop deeply into this scene until you truly feel you are there. Imagine that you are greeting all the objects of your gratitude along a red carpet, leading to the feast table. Local farmers and bakers are arriving, bringing their seasonal goodies. Friends are arriving with home cooked dishes. Children are skipping down the carpet. Blue feathers are floating down and resting on the carpet. The people who have prepared, packaged and processed your food are now arriving. Greet them all warmly. Include the local store owners and cashiers. The homeless and hungry are also arriving for they too are part of your compassionate consciousness.

The table is ready and all the participants are here. Notice the way you feel about this feast. Notice the aromas. Feel the energy. Are you feeling pangs of hunger and anticipation? Are you feeling profound gratitude for all those who make your life and health possible?

Call all your guests together around the table and join hands in friendship, grace and gratitude before you sit down to eat. Notice the abundance at your table; love, food, friendship, warmth, shelter, peaceful hearts, good conversation. This feast is a gift of the soil and the air; the ricefield, the vegetable garden, the beans sown in the soil, an apple orchard, a tomato garden, the bees and butterflies flying from flower to flower. Every part of the universe has participated in this feast and is part of your nourishment.

Is your heart full of gratitude and joy? As you eat the feast, let it nourish your consciousness that all is related and let it feed your compassion for those who don’t have enough to eat. Every bite nourishes you and reminds you of your ancestors and your descendants, who live in you. As you eat with full awareness, feel the compassion, freedom and joy.

Now you have finished the meal and said goodbye to your friends. Stand alone in the gentle moonlight. Bathed in light and love, you are ready to return to this here and now reality. Focus your awareness back in this setting. Feel your feet on the floor and gently open your eyes. Offer love and blessings to all as you go about your day in greater awareness and gratitude for the great web of collaboration that makes life possible.

Universal blessings on your meals, your friends, your family, the earth, the hungry and all living things. May peace and compassion fill the earth and may it begin with you.

Please visit Soulseeds for more meditation, mindfulness and family resources.

Perfect Imperfection

2011-03-31T11:11:00.004-04:00

I like to think of myself as being fairly competent, but underneath this calm exterior there are many, many cracks. As a home handyman, for example, I make a great philosopher. The very word “Ikea” makes me break out in a cold sweat. I don’t understand restaurants where you have to cook your own food and I don’t appreciate furniture stores where they send you out with a box full of wood, a wingnut and a prayer. Our home is full of reminders of my imperfection. We once bought an Ikea bed. It was called the BLAARKEN which is Swedish for “best of luck, you sucker”. After 6 hours trying to put together this Swedish puzzle, we gave up and decided to use it as a bookcase.

Another time, I was trying to assemble a cabinet and got trapped inside of it. I had to call technical support to help me get out. Once I tried to put together a bed side table for Meg. Apart from the drawers not opening and needing a block of wood under one corner, it works just fine. The coffee table in our living room has two massive cracks in it where I failed to properly install the storage compartment. Every time we look at the cracks in our coffee table, we are reminded of my glorious imperfection. This is why Leonard Cohen’s anthem is my personal theme song, “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Or as Groucho Marx said, “Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.”

The perfection of imperfection is comforting. It reminds me that what’s on the inside is perfect even if the outside leaves a little to be desired. The Bible used its own first century handiwork analogy for the perfection of imperfection-treasures in clay jars. The outer form, the container, is fragile but what it holds…now that is incredible. Don’t judge yourself, or others, for outer frailty and instead celebrate treasures that lie beneath the surface. These treasures come in the form of wisdom and experience and strength of character.

The Japanese Kimono gown is a beautiful symbol of this truth. Some Kimonos have very plain outer designs but immaculate and exquisite decoration on the inside of the gown. Some of them are even intentionally imperfect on the outside. The purpose is to remind the person wearing the gown that beauty ultimately resides within. Those who see the imperfections of the outer gown are reminded to appreciate the variety of the outer and look to the magnificence that lies beneath the surface.

It’s not that we just tolerate the outer while glorifying the inner. The imperfect outer form is where the light gets in. The perfection of imperfection reminds me that even on the outside I am becoming what I need to be. It makes me smile and drop a few attachments. As I watch my hair gray in funny looking patches and my gut hang like an awning over the toy store, I am reminded that everything is so changeable. My own body is a reminder of the wisdom of holding loosely to opinions and perspectives. Beauty and joy are so often experienced in the cracks of life, where the light gets in. Jack Kornfield tells the story of a Buddhist statue in his book The Wise Heart-

In a large temple in Thailand’s capital, Sukotai, there was an enormous clay Buddha. It had survived over five hundred years. At one point, however, the monks who tended the temple noticed that the statue had begun to crack and would soon be in need of repair and repainting. After a stretch of particularly hot, dry weather, one of the cracks became so wide that a curious monk took his flashlight and peered inside. What shone back at him was a flash of brilliant gold! Inside this plain old statue, the temple residents discovered one of the largest and most luminous gold images of Buddha ever created in Southeast Asia. The golden Buddha now draws masses of devoted pilgrims from all over Thailand. The monks believe that this shining work of art had been covered in plaster and clay to protect it during times of conflict and unrest.

If you are feeling frail or insecure in any way, let me remind you that you are exactly where you need to be and becoming exactly who you need to be in each moment. Start with a little self compassion. It’s like a flight attendant who gives instructions to fit your own oxygen mask first before helping others. It’s only when you learn to accept yourself that you can be of assistance to others. Forgive yourself for any mistakes, and accept yourself despite any limitations. You are the person you are with 24/7, so make sure its quality time with plenty of love and acceptance. Moments of insecurity are breeding some new truth in you if you can stay awake, stay open, listen, learn, and grow. Let a little light in, and don’t be afraid to let the rest of us see your glorious cracks.

Please visit Soulseeds where I post regular blogs, as does Meg. We also offer various mindfulness and affirmation resources.

Love Lessons From Nature

2011-03-27T17:22:00.001-04:00

Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Small Wonder” opens with an amazing, true story about a missing child in the forest in Iran. The parents frantically search for 3 days to find their 16 month old baby. Without a single clue to guide them, and close to giving up hope, some members of the search party hear a cry from inside a cave 6 miles from where the baby had gone missing. Deep in the belly of the cave they find the baby nestled in the lap of a bear. You would have expected the bear to tear the baby to pieces. On the contrary, after rescuing the baby, they find him in perfect health and with signs that the bear has actually been nursing him. The bear that had likely lost its own cubs took the child as if it’s own, nursed and protected him from harm.

It’s an incredible story. There are three lessons that I take from this story that seem relevant at this time.

1. Miracles happen

Miracles happen. When it seems like all hope is gone, and when the cave of despair seems darkest, you find surprising hope sitting on the lap of a bear. We’ve seen it in the incredible stories coming out of Japan, with the recovery of people missing for days in seemingly impossible situations. We see it in the seasons. Even now we see it in the new buds of spring. When it seems like you can’t bear another cold, grey day of winter, nature reminds you that there’s always more to come.

Whether you believe in an interventionist God or not, and no matter what language you use to describe unexpected situations, believe in the miracle that hope and fresh starts are ALWAYS possible. The pattern of possibility seems to be built into the nature of life.

Don’t just believe in miracles. Live the miracle. Human beings are not unique among species in our ability to compete and destroy in order to ensure our survival. We are probably just the best at it. The true measure of our species is not so much in our ability to conquer as it is in our ability to care, even radical care for those outside of family, nation and species.

2. Sometimes the very thing you fear becomes the path forward.

The other side of hope is fear, and you can’t have one without the other. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the choice to proceed despite the fear. Susan Jeffers wrote the book, “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.” In it she says, “Fear goes on every journey we take and always has bad advice.” I saw a televangelist describe fear like this. FEAR= False Evidence Appearing Real. At best fear takes an argument from silence or unknown outcomes and lives down to the likelihood of a negative outcome.

Again, learn from nature. Remember the cyclical nature of life, with its ups and downs, peaks and troughs. Every ending is preparing the way for a new beginning. Fear’s imagination may have a half truth about change that is looming. What fear doesn’t know is whether it’s going to be negative change. As Tom Stoppard said, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” Sometimes your worst fear actually becomes your greatest opportunity.

Where do you find the ability to deal with fear? This story might illustrate. A mouse was in constant distress because of its fear of the cat. A magician took pity on it and turned it into a cat. But then it became afraid of the dog. So the magician turned it into a dog. Then it began to fear the panther, so the magician turned it into a panther. Then it was full of fear for the hunter. At this point, the magician gave up. He turned it into a mouse again saying, “Nothing I do for you is going to be of any help because you have the heart of a mouse.”

Have the heart of a peaceful warrior and nothing outside of you can conquer you. Therefore there is nothing ultimately to fear. You nurture the heart of a peaceful warrior with the rock solid inner stillness that accepts change without attaching to outcomes.

3. Global healing.

The third lesson from the story of the bear relates to the current needs in the world. Kingsolver found the news story about the bear protecting the baby on the same day that America began bombing Afghanistan in 2001. The story is a parable about the challenges we face in our world today. The bear represents both the best and worst of contemporary culture. Our voracious appetite for power, control and possessions leads to internal and external wars. We tear ourselves and each other apart in search of the enemy. And yet the bear is also the answer. There comes a time to stretch across the boundaries that divide us and show compassion across lines of difference, even across species. When we do that we discover that there are no enemies, and fear disappears. A verse in the Hindu Scripture, Isa Upanishad, “Who sees all beings in his own self, and his own self in all beings, loses all fear.”

Eleven years later, civilians are still dying in Afghanistan and Iran remains a sleeping bear in a rapidly changing Middle East. 2001 was also the year that America withdrew from the Kyoto climate change agreement. Eleven years later, America still lags the rest of the world in “getting real” about global warming. A 2009 UN study showed that global warming is killing 300,000 people a year and affects 300 million people. By 2030 the same report predicts that half a million people could die every year as a result of climate change.

Think about the need for inclusive spirituality in this context. It’s not just a philosophical curiosity or a sociological experiment. It’s a matter of global healing. Inclusive spirituality is not just about the freedom to think for yourself and take from whatever wisdom sources make sense to you, although that is true. Inclusive spirituality is about reaching across boundaries and conquering the fear of difference. It’s about living in harmony with the earth and seeing the divine wisdom in the earth. It’s about not giving up optimism no matter what the setbacks and how impossible the problems.

Arthur Ashe, the great American tennis player and social activist who died of AIDS a few years ago was asked how does he get through the day when everything seems so challenging. Ashe replied with a profound formula for spiritual activism and I end with these words-

Start where you’re at… Use what you’ve got… Do what you can.

Wabi Sabi and the Japanese Cherry Blossom

2011-03-24T09:45:00.003-04:00

A verse in the Jewish text the Talmud says, “Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, Grow.” What a beautiful image! Today, where I live, I’m watching brown grass squeeze out the last reminders of snow and frost as it strains to kick start its green growth. The sun is doing its utmost to break through clouds and call to the grass to “Grow! Grow! Take my rays of light and reach for the stars with me.” It’s as if the tiny beads of dew are perspiration as the grass prepares for another spring on green duty.

Nature has spectacular patterns of growth and change. Mushrooms hover over grass as if they are umbrellas to soften the fall of rain. Every blade of grass, every leaf and drop of water is part of an elaborate ecosystem. We can learn so much from nature. It’s as if nature is your angel bending and whispering to you, “Grow, Grow. Just a little bit more.” Every turning and falling leaf is calling you to fulfill your personal potential and be all that you can be. They are reminding you that growth is not always a linear process but it always involves change. Human beings grow the same way a leaf falls to the ground- back and forth, two steps forward and one step back. Be prepared to change and fall, many times and then get back up. Sometimes you grow in one area of your life and not in another. As Anais Nin said, “Growth is relative. We are mature in one realm, and childish in another.” Celebrate your own crazy, unpredictable and sometimes even erratic, growth.

As well as being angelic and nurturing, nature is also wild and destructive. We have seen many examples of this in recent weeks. Nature’s wild outbursts call for a different human response, more active and decisive, but growth nonetheless. In this case its often courage and resilience that are added to beauty’s inspiration. Among the devastating stories of death and destruction on Japan’s north coast, some awesome stories emerged of survival against the odds. Many people, the elderly and babies included, rose from the ashes days after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. Against all odds rescuers gave hope back to families like a spring miracle of rebirth. Life can be a wild and unpredictable ride, but there is always more to come, more to learn and more to become. Spring is a reminder that nature, like the seasons of personal circumstance, cycles from death to life.

Imagine the joy of holding your four month old baby three days after being separated by a massive tidal wave, followed by even larger waves of grief. It is a reminder, like every spring is a reminder, to take nothing for granted and to stay open. Life is a precious gift. Give thanks for every moment of living and loving. Make the most of every opportunity for giving and growing.

We tend to want everything NOW, but it may not be time and you may not be ready. There is a time for patience and there is a time to dig in the rubble and get active. Learn from the people of Japan. What a wonderful example of grace under fire. I bow to the people of Japan and hope that if I am ever struck by tragedy I can respond with just as much character. For a culture that values nature, beauty and order so deeply, we can only imagine the heartache of living in the midst of so much chaos. But you don’t see stories about Japanese people looting or disrupting food lines, and you DO see images of people still bowing to each other and helping wherever possible.

Every year at this time Japanese people celebrate the blooming of the cherry blossom tree which bears no fruit and flowers for just a few days. Even so, it represents something incredibly powerful. The cherry blossom is a reminder of new beginnings and the briefness of life. Seeing the seed of change in a cherry blossom, or the cries of hope under the rubble is the essence of wabi sabi, recognizing order beneath the surface level chaos, perfection beneath the appearance of imperfection. It’s this perspective that enables people to maintain dignity and optimism when all seems to be lost. There is a saying, “The cherry blossom among flowers, the warrior among men.”

Wabi sabi is an inner strength and perspective that can see a cherry blossom nestled in a pile of debris or hear the cries of a baby from the middle of rubble and know that life is beautiful. Where does this hope come from? It comes from stillness that collapsed houses and disheveled gardens can’t disturb. I can appreciate beauty, but don’t attach even to the beauty because that too will change. From stillness and simplicity, your positive thoughts and acts of kindness create beautiful symmetry in an imperfect world. This story illustrates the power of Wabi sabi-

Sen no Rikyu desired to learn The Way of Tea and so visited the Tea Master, Takeno Joo. As a simple test of whether to accept Rikyu or not Joo ordered him to tend the garden. Rikyu raked the garden until the ground was in perfect order. When he had finished he surveyed his work. He then shook a cherry tree, causing a few flowers and leaves to fall randomly on the ground. At that moment Takeno Joo knew Sen no Rikyu would be one the greatest example of wabi-sabi way of life.

Cherry blossoms scattered on a perfectly raked garden are just as disarming as blossoms in rubble. They both shake you out of preconceived expectations and lead to an act of surrender. You can’t control nature, you can’t control growth, you can’t control the timing of events. But you can control your responses to life. The cherry blossom takes most of a year to prepare for its spring splash of color. Growth is like that. It arrives like a stray cherry blossom or a wild wave. You can’t always trace its path and the source of growth may be as random as stray seeds or buried dreams. In any case you often become aware of growth only after being reunited with hope. Nature reminds you to watch and be mindful. Your thoughts are powerful, and wherever you place your attention there you shall dwell.

Begin with awareness of change and possibility. Scatter a little positive thought and kind action on your awareness. You are a beautiful flower opening yourself to life, as if to say, “I’m here and I’m growing and I’m ready to bloom.”

My friend Richard Powell, author of “Wabi Sabi Simple”, has a profound understanding of wabi sabi. He summarizes the essence of wabi sabi as “nothing lasts, nothing ends, and nothing is perfect.”

May you remember that without darkness nothing comes to birth, as without light nothing flowers.
May nature teach you patience as snow covered grass.
May the earth teach you courage as the tree which stands tall and strong.
May survivors inspire optimism as the seed which rises in the spring.

Please note- this was cross blogged from Soulseeds which is my main blog.

Ending the Battle – Mindful Separation

2011-03-20T18:55:00.002-04:00

I figure I’ve married about a thousand people in my life. I don’t mean that in a Charlie Sheen “winning at home with my two and a half goddesses” type of way. Do you know the religious argument that you are required to marry 16 people; 4 better, 4 worse, 4 richer and 4 poorer? I’m not a believer in polygamy. It’s a miracle that I could even find one woman who would marry me. But I have presided over the weddings of at least 500 couples in the last 20 years. I’ve always wanted to tell my favorite wedding story and since it took place in New Zealand nearly 10 years ago, it seems safe to do so now. I’ve had some fun moments, twice this past year with dogs in the bridal party and once on the 18th fairway of a golf course. The runner up for best wedding story was when the mother of a bride stopped the wedding mid vows when she realized that it wasn’t a Catholic church. Her daughter had told her I was a Catholic priest. The ear ring and bleached blond hair gave her some doubts, but when I prayed without doing a sign of the cross, she stood up and stopped the wedding.

That was interesting, but my all time favorite story was another couple I married in Auckland. I didn’t think much about the fact that the bride wanted to meet daily before the wedding. Each bride has their own way of preparing for their big day. And I didn’t think much about the way she was looking at me while she held her fiancé’s hand at the altar. I thought she was looking for reassurance. But when she made an appointment to come and see me 4 days after the wedding, it all became clear. She declared her undying love for me, and told me that she had fallen in love with me while standing at the altar with the groom. I know the pastor is supposed to love the flock, but this was going too far. She wanted to know what I suggested. I said, “Get thee to a nunnery” and sent her back to her new husband with the phone number of a good therapist. She tried to keep in touch with me, and eventually gave up when we moved to America.

That particular bride wasn’t a great advertisement for the troubled institution of marriage. With brides like that it’s not surprising that over half of all marriages in America end in divorce, and half of the other half of couples who stay together might be better off getting divorced. It might also be true that half of the marriages that separate, don’t need to. I want to address some relationship questions, from a social, religious and finally from a spiritual perspective. My hope is to build a stronger platform for relationships that last, whether in marriage or not. I want to instill an inner motivation to have awesome relationships that fill your own life with meaning and create healing energy for others. I want to remind you that life is beautiful and even better in healthy relationships. Relationships are not just a good and beautiful thing to be nurtured but a gateway to the sacred dimensions of life, where you learn about the source and many faces of love.

I also want to broaden the conversation from just marriage to relationships in general. These could be romantic relationships, business relationships or family relationships. Many of the same principles apply in all cases.

Among other questions I want to ask- How do you mend a broken relationship? How do you know when a relationship is done and needs to be ended? How do you end a relationship in the healthiest way possible? How do you heal when someone leaves you and you didn’t even see it coming?

Relationship Ethics and Religion

Let’s start by looking at the role of religion in morality. A lot of people think that the Ten Commandments provide the basis for morality. Do you know the real story about Moses and the Ten Commandments? In Mel Brooks version of the story, Moses came down Mount Sinai juggling some large stone tablets. Just as he was announcing to the Israelites that he had 15 commandments, he dropped one tablet. It smashed on the ground and without missing a beat he said, “I have 10 commandments.” In another version of the story Moses came down the mountain and said to the Israelites, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I got him down to ten. The bad news is that adultery is still in.” While I don’t endorse adultery in any way, and know that it’s no laughing matter, the joke points to the problem in looking to ancient religious texts that have passed through multiple oral and written revisions before arriving in their current form, for contemporary morality.

The Bible has many conflicting teachings about divorce. The Hebrew texts teach that a man can freely divorce his wife without need for a reason while a woman has no right to divorce under any circumstance. Deuteronomy 24 implies that a man can divorce his wife if a better offer comes along or his wife is no longer “pleasing to the eye”. Numbers 5 says that if a man suspects that his wife has been unfaithful, in fact, even if he is jealous of his wife, she is forced by the priest to drink a cup of muddy water. According to superstition, if she is innocent, she will become pregnant. If she has been unfaithful, then she will suffer the agony and the pain of a prolapsed uterus. The last verse of the chapter says that even if she is innocent, the husband remains blameless and either way the woman will suffer.

It’s not just the Old Testament. The New Testament is also inconsistent. The early Rabbis had diverse opinions about divorce. By the first century, some Rabbis allowed divorce for just about any reason, including a wife burning the toast. In one passage Jesus is recorded as saying that divorce is always wrong and in another he is recorded as saying that divorce is allowed in the case of sexual immorality. Saint Paul allowed a Christian spouse to divorce if the other spouse is a non-Christian and has left. Polygamy was widespread in Hebrew culture and life expectancy was so short in Bible times that marriages rarely lasted more than 15 years. It was a completely different world. Even if you expect to find morality in the Bible that makes sense in the modern world, the Bible’s teaching is completely inconsistent on the issue of divorce.

Apart from anything else, even if we could say for sure that we have an accurate record of what was really said by Jesus and others and even if the Bible had a consistent teaching on the issue of divorce, it still has little to offer us in a world where we value gender equality. The world of the Bible, Old and New Testament alike, afforded women very few rights and very little dignity. Women were literally the property of men to be used, abused and discarded however men chose. I feel no need to criticize ancient cultures and the Bible is simple a semi historical record of ancient practices. The question is what, if anything, it offers today’s world in relation to morality.

In the past many people believed, or maybe needed, religion to be the basis for morality. When it comes to marriage, the statistics suggest that religion doesn’t help. 25% of the total adult population in America have been divorced. 27% of adults in churches have been divorced and 29% of adults in Baptist churches have been divorced. At the other end of the spectrum, 21% of adult atheists and agnostics have been divorced. You could easily conclude that religion makes it more difficult to be married. The stricter the church, the greater the incidence of divorce. Maybe the more conservative the religious perspective, the greater the pressure, and the less realistic the expectations and gender roles. Divorce rates are MUCH higher in the Bible belt, in the American south, than in New York and other parts of the north east. The statistics come from a 1999 Barna Research Report and Barna is himself a conservative evangelical Christian.

This is all particularly surprising when you remember that conservative Christians are more likely to preach family values and the danger of same sex marriage on the basis that same sex marriage is a threat to the institution of marriage. In fact since 2003, states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period. IF marriage is under threat in America, it may be more at risk from those who read the Bible literally than it is from atheists or supporters of same sex marriage. The reason I emphasize this point is not to criticize the Bible. I have no need to defend or critique the Bible, except when the Bible is used as a whipping rod of guilt and shame for so many people. The Bible does have wisdom when it comes to relationships and sexual ethics, like all wisdom traditions, but not in the way it is usually used. Before I turn to some examples of non literal wisdom from the Bible, let me just say that because gay and lesbian people still deal with high levels of pressure and alienation in society, break ups can be particularly difficult and lead to a lot of isolation. Both in terms of community support and also in legal options, we should be particularly mindful of this extra challenge and create community that has an extra cushion of support for people who are doubly marginalized.

Divorce and Spirituality

It’s questionable whether religion increases the stickability of relationships, and it’s questionable whether religion offers a clear basis for morality. What does an inclusive spiritual perspective offer the issue of morality and relationships? Inclusive spirituality looks to the truths that turn up in many places rather than expecting to find absolute truths in literal readings of ancient texts. Let me illustrate by looking to the Bible stories in a different way.

Here are three non literal possibilities.

1. We are all connected.

Jesus encouraged his disciples to live with integrity after he was gone by saying, “I am with you always.” Think about the implications of living as if we are with each other ALWAYS, whether we are physically together or not. We are with each other, whether we are together or separate, married or divorced. Let me put it more bluntly. You might be able to remove your ex from your daily logistics, from your home and from the photographs around your house, but you can never remove them from your heart. This is where the notion of closure can be so impractical. We’re ALL connected, and you chose to make a special connection to your ex. He will always be with you to some extent. She will always stay with you.

No matter how much you wish you could erase parts of your life, they stay with you. Their lessons and karma continue to cycle through your life. You may even feel that you have been greatly wronged, but let me remind you that even a pancake has two sides. You brought at least some of the energy to the broken relationship. You don’t have to wear the other person’s baggage, and you can’t make them clean it up. But you can ALWAYS honestly reflect on your own part in the relationship and take responsibility for your responses NOW. The beautiful irony in the words of Jesus (I am with you always) is that according to the story he said that in one of his reappearances after death. Jesus kept showing up. Sometimes he was easily recognized and other times he was in disguise. The same is true for all of us. Our previous relationships and nemeses, our hurts and betrayals, continue to turn up and demand a great deal of honest self reflection. The question is “do you recognize the past when it turns up in your life?”

2. Make Peace with the Past

That sounds like bad news to many people. It’s a harsh reality. The good news is that you can make peace with the past as you learn to recognize it when it turns up in your present. When Jesus made his resurrection appearances, the story tells us that sometimes he told people to hold on and sometimes he told people to let go. When Mary wanted to hug him, he said “Stop clinging” and to Thomas he said, “Touch the wounds”. There is a time for both when it comes to moving on and making peace with the past. Do you remember the agonizing scene in the movie Titanic? Jack and Rose are floating in the icy ocean after the ship has gone down. Rose finally realizes that Jack is dead and she pries her trembling hand from his dead, lifeless grip. She lets go and his body floats away. As hard as it was she came to realize that she couldn’t carry his corpse or else she would risk her own life.

We spend far too much energy carrying corpses through life, the skeleton of past choices or previous relationships. Sometimes you need to question what you’re clinging to, whether you’re clinging to an idea about the past, blame for the break up, settlement details, custody arrangements or seething hostility, and sometimes you do that by touching the wounds of the past with the healing touch of acceptance. Make peace with who you are and who you’ve become. Your first love, even though they may have broken your heart wide open, taught you how to know yourself and to know what open-heart living feels like. They were with you for the first mile when your heart broke a sweat, the first kiss when your lips became moist with awareness, the first heart palpitation when you surrendered to passion. All that the past meant for you is still with you; the good, the bad and the ugly. Your choice now is how you respond.

3. Love Your Enemies

The measure of spiritual strength is not how well you love those who are easy to love, but how well you love those who are hardest to love. Jesus said, “If you only love those who love you, the rewards will only be moderate.” Growth takes place when you can wish ALL people well, even those who have harmed you and left you with many pieces to put back together. I know how hard it is. Even though I have been with the one saint of a woman who has put up with me for over 20 years, I know how hard it is to forgive enemies and how much easier it is to curse them. I have my “exes”, the corpses I carry around with me, the hurts I cling to. Letting go of the corpses and wishing my “exes” well may be the most challenging thing I ever do. But the rewards are phenomenal.

If you are still making an enemy of your ex you are harming yourself. If you are speaking ill of your ex, then you are harming yourself. If you are gathering people around you who confirm your basest instincts and encourage bitterness, then you are hurting yourself. You can be so much more by living from your highest values and loving even those who have hurt you. Note that I’m not suggesting that you trust them. They may be exes for good reason. But love them. Love them despite themselves and their destructive patterns. I’m not even talking about expressing it to them. You might have good reason not to communicate. But in your own heart, love them and recognize that they brought something good, true and beautiful to your life at some time. Love and let the past be what it was, clearing the way to move forward with integrity.

Spiritual Break Ups

Every situation is different and I’m certainly not telling anyone what to do. There are very few rights and wrongs when it comes to ending relationships. Whatever your situation, whether you are considering a break up, trying to mend a relationship or trying to mend your life after a break up, make sure that this is an opportunity to be all that you are destined to be in the world. Choose to stay together or break up, but either way do it with mindful self reflection and honesty.

Other people can make you lose your balance for a time and wobble on the edge of bitterness, but ultimately you have a spirit that no one and nothing can break. As you honestly face your own attachments and take responsibility for your own sense of inner peace, you will remember that you are strong and capable. This self awareness will prepare you for relationships that are healthy and life affirming. The unbreakable spirit of strength in me honors the same in you. Namaste.

Inclusive Spirituality

2011-03-18T09:59:00.004-04:00

It happened once again. I was asked to take a funeral in a tragic situation. The family described their dear departed as intelligent, philosophical, very musical AND particularly emphasized that he was spiritual but not religious. I feel right at home in that setting and have strong intuition about what people mean when they use the phrase.

I prefer to call it inclusive spirituality to avoid any unnecessary negatives. It’s generally healthier to talk about what you are than what you aren’t. It took me a while to come around to that distinction and I fought for the “spiritual but not religious” label for some time. But it’s not a fight I need to take on anymore. I’m very comfortable with the phrase inclusive spiritual and I think it catches the spirit of what people mean when they say spiritual but not religious but without the unnecessary drama. If there’s one thing we need less of in the world, its drama.

Labels are a funny thing. None of us want to live with them, but we can’t communicate without them. We spend our days growing in and out of various labels like a pair of jeans that shrink in the wash and stretch with use. That’s all fine as long as we don’t imagine that ANY of the labels fully define who we are. Even our most carefully crafted labels will fall short and grow holes eventually. Still, we do our best to identify ourselves with the language we have.

What are some of the features of inclusive spirituality? Let’s start with the bleeding obvious. It’s inclusive!

A cowboy went to an up market church wearing jeans, ragged boots and a worn out old hat. As the cowboy took his seat, people moved away from him. No one welcomed him. As the cowboy was leaving the church, the minister approached him and asked the cowboy to do him a favor. “Before you come back in here again, have a talk with God and ask him what he thinks would be appropriate attire for worship.” The old cowboy assured the preacher he would. The next Sunday, he showed back up for the services wearing the same ragged jeans, boots, and hat. Once again he was completely shunned and ignored.

The preacher approached the man and said, “I thought I asked you to speak to God before you came back to our church.”
“I did,” replied the old cowboy.
“If you spoke to God, what did he tell you the proper attire should be for worshiping in here?” asked the preacher.
“Well, sir, God told me that She didn’t have a clue what I should wear, seeing as She’d never been in this church.”

Maybe you have had your own experience of being made to feel unwelcome in church because you didn’t have the right clothes, lifestyle or labels. I couldn’t tell you how many people have asked me over the years, almost apologetically, if I would baptize their babies or conduct their weddings, even though they aren’t members of any church. Many of them have already been rejected by 5 or 6 churches who insisted that they go to classes or agree to certain labels.

The whole intent behind inclusive spirituality is to bring people together. Incidentally that’s also what the word “religion” means, “bring together”. If you are one of those people who have been shunned by the church because you didn’t measure up in some way or other, then this message is for you. Inclusive spirituality is concerned with bringing together; head and heart, past and present, beliefs and values, people and neighbors, tribe and nation, reason and passion, spirituality and religion. All of life is part of a unity that is miraculously connected and beautifully meaningful. Maybe you don’t even have to choose between spirituality and religion. Just be yourself, love what you love, and live beyond the labels.

Having It All. It’s All Spiritual!
Inclusive spirituality is about having it all, including it all, loving it all. Millions of people have been deeply moved by the Elizabeth Gilbert book, “Eat, Pray Love.” It’s the story of her search for meaning in a variety of places. She wanted her life to make sense as a whole, and she wanted to honor all the parts. She wanted to include even seeming opposites in a worldview that excludes nothing. She was on a quest to eat, pray and love with intention.

The concept of having it all always reminds me of a Seinfeld episode. George Castanza has a fantasy about making love to a woman while eating a sandwich. The scene has George under the sheets, his hands occasionally appearing out of the sheets to dip his pastrami sandwich in hot mustard. Then he says under his breath- “Now for the trifecta.” Grinning, he puts his ear piece in and begins watching a portable television under the sheets. The woman turns the light on, throws the sheets off and sees George eating his sandwich and watching television. She says, “what are you doing.” George replies sheepishly. “Pleasuring you?”

Narcissism, and pastrami, aside, what if it was possible to have it all and learn from it all? Inclusive spirituality honors all traditions, religious and otherwise, science included. It honors inner wisdom that intuits so much ancient wisdom. It honors the collective imagination and the earth’s wisdom. Inclusive spirituality touches every aspect of life, and includes all experience and all language. My favorite quote from Gilbert is about the value in cherry picking, which is taking wisdom from many different sources and not feeling tied to one tradition alone. She says, “I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted... You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light." (Eat Pray Love p. 208)

When it comes to life partners and family doctors you might want to find one and stick with them. There is something to be said for loyalty and intimacy in those cases. However when it comes to your spiritual essence on a unique human journey finding your connections to all else, no such limitations apply, because God is in your bloodstream. All of life is infused with wonder and meaning the way sunlight glistens on water and oxygen moves through your body. You don’t want to limit your experience of life any more than you want to limit your oxygen intake.

Inclusive Spirituality is Universal
I like to think that Jesus was a great humanist preacher and an inclusive spiritual teacher in his day. He seemed to prefer ordinary people over priests, compassion over rituals, and justice over judgment. Jesus traveled with a group of rural hippies who were critical of a religion controlled by Roman yuppies. Jesus was nominally Jewish, knew nothing of the later Christian movement named after him, and was intolerant of the intolerance of the temple. He seemed to appreciate nature and laughter and food. I don’t know what he thought of pastrami, but he certainly had his own way of eating, praying and loving with intention.

Jesus was living the truth of many ancient traditions that life is beautiful and every person and every experience contains some golden nugget of truth. There is an ancient story from India that points to the universal truth of unity.

The God Brahma got sick of being alone. So he created the goddess, Maya. Just for fun, Brahma and Maya created a whole world of illusion; sun, stars, planets, oceans, animals. Then they said, “Let’s create an animal that is so intelligent and aware that it can appreciate this wondrous creation.” So they created humans.

Then the game began. Maya cut Brahma up into millions of little pieces and placed a piece of Brahma in every human being. Maya said to the human beings, “ I am going to make you forget who you are, then you can try and find yourself. You will spend a lifetime searching for your true essence.”

Every now and again, a little spark of light awakens in each of us. It comes at odd moments, sometimes with thoughts, sometimes while eating, praying and loving, but also in spontaneous moments of new awareness. As more and more people have more and more moments of waking up to their true essence, the world becomes a more peaceful place.

Religion is one place that this awakening happens, but it’s not the only place. For many people, it doesn’t happen in religion anymore because religion has over identified with its labels and confused the label with the reality. If one religion or another still gets the job done for you, that’s great. If not, or if like me you don’t want to be limited to one perspective alone, then look to the life in front of you for inspiration. It’s all there, all inside of you, all at your feet. As Franz Kafka wrote,

You need not do anything.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
You need not even listen, just wait.
You need not even wait,
just learn to be quiet, still and solitary.
And the world will freely offer itself to you unmasked.
It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Reposted from Soulseeds, which is now my main blog. Please visit.

Sprituality and Fun

2011-03-13T18:12:00.002-04:00

A woman was in the hospital, near death. The family called their pastor to be with her. As the pastor stood next to the bed, the woman’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Gasping for breath, she motioned for the pastor to come close as if she needed to urgently tell him something. He couldn’t understand what she was saying so he handed her a piece of paper and pen. She used her last bit of energy to scribble something down and handed it to the pastor, and then she breathed her last. The pastor placed the paper in his pocket and decided to read it later. He forgot about it until it came time for the funeral. As he was giving the eulogy, he remembered the note and realized that he was wearing the same pants. He decided to spontaneously add it to his eulogy. He said to the congregation, “Before Jane died, she handed me a note. I haven’t read it yet but knowing Jane I’m sure it has a word of inspiration for all of us. He opened the note and read it out loud, “Step away from the bed. You’re standing on my oxygen tube.” You could say he put his foot in it twice.

Do you think that death is a laughing matter? Do you ever laugh at funerals, either because people share humorous, heartwarming stories or for no apparent reason? It’s a fairly common phenomenon, and probably some sort of coping mechanism, for people to laugh at times of tragedy. Robert Fulghum even says that “laughter is the cure for grief.” Why does humor heal? What is the power of fun? One of the most famous eulogies was delivered by John Cleese at his fellow Monty Python comedian Graham Chapman’s funeral. Chapman co-authored the Parrot Sketch where the guy takes his parrot back to the pet shop and tries to convince the shop keeper that the parrot is in fact dead. Cleese began his eulogy by saying, “Graham Chapman is no more. He has ceased to be, bereft of life, he rests in peace, he has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last and gone to meet the Great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky.” The Cleese eulogy was followed by the remaining Monty Python members doing a rendition of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

In the eulogy Cleese spoke about the ability of Chapman to shock people. Then he ended the eulogy by saying something interesting about the value of shock. “The thing about shock is not that it upsets some people. It gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realize in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives are not actually very important.”

One of the reasons that fun and laughter are powerful spiritual tools is because they play with your assumptions and society’s rules. Laughter and fun give you ways to tear apart the straight jacket of personal and social conformity. Life is not always predictable, our rules and conclusions are not always as permanent as we imagine, and it’s always possible to take alternate perspectives. Through the power of laughter, you open up a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.

How do you know when it’s appropriate to laugh at tragedy, and when it’s not? Personally, I take my cues from the people involved. I have fond memories of visiting a woman who was in her last days. You will be glad to know that I didn’t tread on her oxygen tube. She was a spunky flirt of a woman to the end. She asked me if I would make a phone call for her. I asked her the number. She said it was in her phone. I asked her where her phone was. She pointed to her chest. I didn’t know what she meant until I saw her phone hanging by a cord that went around her neck and rested under her nightie. She just smirked and kept pointing to her chest. She wasn’t going to help me get the phone. She forced me to dig in and pull out her phone, get the number and then put the phone back. We both laughed and laughed. It took all the tension out of a difficult situation. People involved in traumatic situations will usually give the cues as to what’s appropriate.

Fun and Transformation

Fun is not only fun. It can also be transformative. I heard a story that illustrates the power of fun to transform seemingly hopeless situations. A few years back the Toronoto Maple Leafs were in last place in the Canadian hockey ranks. They had just set a record for the worst start of any season. Despite being one of the wealthier teams, they hadn’t won a single game. They were the Detroit Lions of Canada. So when they gathered for practice after yet another loss, the players expected to be given a thorough dressing down by the coach, followed by extra drills and a tough training session. Instead the coach shocked them by suddenly and randomly throwing tennis balls at the players. For the next couple of hours, the Leafs played dodge ball on ice. The players skated around frantically, pegging balls at each other, smiling and laughing up a storm. At one point someone even grabbed the coach and used him as a human shield while they both got hammered with balls. While they were having fun, the players forgot that they were the worst team in Canada. Sure enough, a few days later, the Leafs won their first game of the season and went on to win several more. The team had been transformed by fun.

The transforming power of fun is that you can try out a different reality in your mind, see how it feels, get comfortable with it, rehearse it, and live it into existence. You release the tension out of a situation and inadvertently find new solutions that you hadn’t even thought about. Some people have a rare gift of introducing fun into tense situations, but we all have the ability to do it if we are mindful.

There are also evolutionary benefits to fun. People have created serious science out of tickling. Tickling simulates a playful version of a mock attack. We tend to be ticklish in the same parts of our bodies that are vulnerable to attack. Tickling is a shock tactic. You can’t tickle yourself for example, because there is no surprise element. But at the same time a young baby will laugh more when tickled by mom than a stranger, because it’s easier to know that it’s a mock attack from mom than a stranger who could be REALLY attacking you. So tickling has evolutionary adaptive functions. In short, play prepares us for the real challenges of life by finding the boundaries of what feels right and what feels inappropriate. Fun is a fine line as any parent who has hidden for too long or any politician who has frightened a baby can verify. We all have to know where to end the fun and games before the tears start.

Spirituality and Fun

Fun is important to all species. Animals in the wild engage in ferocious mock battles. Magpies wrestle, foxes jump on trampolines and elk frolic in puddles. Bears charge rivers, monkeys somersault down hills, and elephants doodle with sticks in the earth. Fun even crosses species lines. Polar bears have been seen horsing around with dogs, and monkeys playing with tigers. Fun seems to be a universal instinct.

A study of Alaskan grizzlies showed that the ones that played the most were the ones most likely to survive. Another study showed that if you take play away from lab rats they develop behavioral problems and become bad lovers. And we can’t have that, can we?

Fun is important, and there are loads of examples of fun and laughter in spiritual traditions. There is a Japanese proverb that says, “Time spent laughing is time spent with the gods.”

An Apache Indian creation myth tells the story of the creation when God first created all varieties of animals and laughed uproariously at their peculiar shapes and funny behavior.”

“Then he made a man and spoke to him, saying, ‘Laugh!‘ The man laughed and his laughter caused the dog to jump and wag its tail… His laughter helped to complete all that the God had initially brought into being at creation.”

“At last the man was caused to fall asleep, and he dreamed a creature like himself, a woman. When he awoke to find her more than a dream he began to laugh and she laughed too. They laughed and laughed together… and that was the beginning of the world.”

Particularly in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, laughing is greatly emphasized. There is a quote usually attributed to the Buddha that says, “When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.” It’s a great thought although not quite accurate. It likely comes from a Tibetan text that says,

Since everything is but an illusion,
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection,
One might as well burst out laughing!

(From chapter 1 of The Great Perfection’s Self-Liberation in the Nature of Mind, by Longchenpa (1308-1364)

From the Muslim tradition, a beautiful image comes from the Sufi poet Hafiz who said, “Me and God are two giants in a tiny boat, bumping into each other, and laughing.” Imagination and fun are gateways to wonder and possibility.

It’s harder to find the fun in Christianity but it is there if you look hard enough beyond the pious Churchianity that many of us were raised on. The Gospel of Judas was discovered in the 1970’s, and believed by many to be compiled in the 4th century, around the same time as Constantine was making Christianity very serious, and very focused around beliefs and practices. Meanwhile Judas was portraying Jesus as laughing hysterically at his disciples. When he saw them gathered intently around bread and cup, he burst into laughter and said they were worshipping a false God. Maybe they were taking themselves and their beliefs a little too seriously, imagining that their practices could get them to God. It is laughable to think that you can look outside of yourself for God. Looking for God outside of yourself is like wandering around looking for your sunglasses when they are on top of your head all along. There’s nothing wrong with beliefs and ideas about God, nor with rituals and practices. It just requires the humility of playfulness to avoid setting up false gods.

Fun and Perspective

There is yet another effect from laughing, and that is that we have the ability to laugh in the face of the unthinkable and create a little distance from the trauma in order to gain new perspective.

There is so much death and suffering in the world. It seems like there is a new natural disaster every week at the moment, now with hundreds, maybe thousands of people dead in the Japanese tragedy. Meanwhile they’re still looking for bodies in Christchurch NZ and a fresh round of floods is hitting northern Australia. Since Katrina, not to mention last year’s gulf oil spill, Mardi Gras has become an occasion synonymous with rising from the ashes of disaster. Is it appropriate to have fun at a time like this? Maybe it’s one of the most powerful things we can do. It’s like raising a fist to despair as if to say, “You can’t have me. I won’t give in.”

Four rabbis were gathered before the desecrated temple in Jerusalem in the first century. Three of them were weeping. The fourth, Rabbi Akiva, was laughing uproariously. The three rabbis were shocked at his response and said, “Why do you laugh?” He responded to them, “Why do you cry?” They said, “This temple that we have adored has been burned to the ground by the Romans. Foxes now roam in the space where up to this point, only the most enlightened of all Jewish leaders could even tread. How can you laugh? All is lost.”

Akiva said “that is why I laugh because now I know the prophecy has been fulfilled. Until the temple is completely and utterly destroyed there will be no new temple. I laugh because I know the prophecy has been fulfilled.”

I’m not suggesting that laughter is always appropriate, but at times it is a coping mechanism as if to say, “Alright I’ve hit rock bottom here. The only way is up, and that’s where I’m heading now.” Things seem so bad right now that it’s comical, but I can beat this and rise from the ashes. I will get the last laugh by climbing on top of the very rocks that have shattered around me and use them to give me a leg up.

Laughing As a Sign of Spirit

Do you remember Guido in the movie, Life is Beautiful? The story is set in the time of the holocaust, and Guido, his wife and 5 year-old son are being held in a concentration camp- Guido and his son in one camp, and his wife next door in the women’s camp. Guido breaks the oppressive spirit of the camp with humor. In one scene Guido commandeers the PA system in the camp and sends a message to his wife, who doesn’t know if he is dead or alive. Guido says he wants to make love to his wife in Italian so the solders can’t understand him. In another scene Guido volunteers to be the translator for the German soldier who is barking orders about different rules that the prisoners must follow, or be killed. Guido translates it completely differently. What he says is a message in Italian to his son. He tells his son that this is all a game, and if you follow the rules of the game, you can win. If you win the game you get a beautiful big tank. The son’s eyes grow wide as he listens to his father, while the soldier barks out order about death. In the midst of unthinkable sadness, Guido gives his family hope.

Thank goodness for laughter and for those who are able to create fun in tense situations. Mardi Gras is the perfect time to consider your own relationship with fun. Are you burdened by unsolvable problems? Are you overwhelmed by the sadness and suffering in the world? Laugh, not at the suffering and not in a callous way, but in such a way that you remind yourself that a new reality is always possible. If you can’t find anything funny, conduct a preemptive strike on fun. Laugh on suspicion of something ordinary and every day. Laugh at your own routines. Laugh at your over active imagination. Laugh at the absurdity of chaos. Laugh at the frailty of life.Then surrender to new perspectives that only open up because you let the air out of your nervous energy. Fun is a pathway to spirit, rerouted surprise, laughter’s short cut. The spirit of fun in me greets the spirit of fun in you. LOL! Namaste.

Waxing Lyrical About the Moon!

2011-03-10T09:51:00.003-05:00

I love the moon at this time of month. Its “waxing crescent” and if that isn’t the name of a yoga move, it should be. There’s something playful about the tiny slice of light and its daily game of hide and seek. I keep expecting to see a kid fishing off the end of it with his knee under his chin. This slender crescent is seen in its glory in the morning which is also my favorite time of day. I get up early, a zillion thoughts in my head, barely knowing where to begin, and the silver slither watches over me without judgment. There is something benevolent about the moon as it both impacts human mood and behavior and also shines down without preference.

The moon has always been a cause of great wonder. It waxes and wanes in diverse beauty and shines an endless stream of light on science, poetry and every day inspiration alike. A 4,000 year old verse from the Rig Veda, a sacred Hindu text says “O Moon! We should be able to know you through our intellect; you enlighten us through the right path.”

The moon brings together science and spirituality, intellect and emotions, ancient and modern hopes and dreams. It’s a curious irony to westerners that the first Indian moon landing took place just recently in 2008. A week before the launch, millions of Hindu women fasted, according to ancient custom, until the first sighting of the moon’s reflection in a bowl of oil. They do this as part of an ancient belief that it will safeguard the welfare of their family. It’s a beautiful parallel, nature and humanity both reaching toward and reflecting the other, people looking for moon magic even while technology lassoes possibility and pulls it a little closer to here and now.

The magical qualities of the moon don’t seem to be compromised by getting up close and personal with the giant ball of silly putty in the sky. As scientific advance chips away at superstition, like thinning slices of a fading moon, imagination still runs free. Wonder affirms both the curiosity of science and the collective imagination of people and cultures. The moon is its own metaphor for the relationship between science and spirituality, with its yin/yang shades of light and dark, receiving and reflecting the sun’s rays. Her front porch is lit with guiding light, while the inner parts of the house are in deep darkness. She is whole, no matter how little we see or understand. How whole the moon! What a wonder!

The prized gift of wonder is the ability to see yourself as a participant in a greater whole. You are a player on life’s stage with a love so large it can travel to the moon and back, shedding beauty and softness on the whole and never lose its luster. In the words of the classic 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life, wonder “throws a lasso around the moon and pull it down, then you can swallow it…and then moonbeams shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair.”

Wonder is a uniquely human trait with its adaptive evolutionary qualities. It allows you to suspend judgment, consider new possibilities and shift perspective. Wonder is like a stray flower in winter or a light hearted story at a funeral. It has the ability to upturn your assumptions and turn up your optimism. Wonder allows you to experience the world in a new way; with fresh, unprejudiced attention.

When the child sees in the moon a giant rabbit standing over a kitchen table, maybe the child is intuiting something about the wondrous kitchen table wisdom of the universe. What wisdom is contained on that dusty, cratered orb! How many stories the moon has heard! How much life it has seen!

Wonder taps into the miracle of being alive and the joy of sharing in new life. Every moment is a miracle, every person pure magic. As a father, I wonder at the single cells I contributed to the miracle of new life. Each cell is so small that it’s invisible to the naked eye, and the nucleus in the center of the cell that contains the DNA is even smaller. And yet if you unraveled the DNA of this single cell, unwound and uncoiled it, it would stretch to over six feet long. Now if you are like me and you look eye to six foot high eye with your child, you are looking eye to eye with the miracle and wonder of life. In my case, I’m looking at a six foot bundle of creative potential with the world at his feet. Then I lower my gaze to my second, and I see a five foot bundle of gentle compassion who holds the world in his heart. Then I lower my gaze still further to my four foot miracle of sweetness with my heart wrapped around her finger.

Now as you look at your four, five or six foot miracles, consider that if you took all the DNA from all the 50 trillion cells in each young body, and unraveled and uncoiled it, it would stretch to the moon and back multiple times. It’s no accident that this is also the amount that you love them. To the moon and back…. multiple times. That’s how far a parent’s love stretches and it’s also how far human wonder reaches.

Wonder could even be another name for God, the mysterious symmetry that defies any names or description, the moments of magic that change everything. As the Swedish Nobel Prize winner, Dag Hammarskjold said in his book of meditations, “Markings”,

“God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.” Dag Hammarskjold

You could replace the word “God” with wonder and it would have the same meaning in the quote. Your relationship with wonder is only limited by your imagination. The moon is a constant reminder of the mystery that goes by many names and no name. Shine on you crazy diamond. Fill us with the light of your lunar wisdom. Teach us to bask in the beauty of it all, scientific curiosity and spiritual imagination alike. All of life has a unity. Each moment is filled with enough beauty and mystery to keep our attention locked in wonder’s gaze forever.

The silver light, which, hallowing tree and tower,
Sheds beauty and deep softness o'er the whole,
Breathes also to the heart, and o'er it throws
A loving languor which is not repose. Lord Byron

Please visit Soulseeds for resources that celebrate nature and wonder.

The Physics of Love

2011-03-07T11:57:00.002-05:00

So many of the problems we experience in life are due to the illusion of separateness. We imagine that we are alone and isolated. The answer is to wake up to the oneness that is already and always there. The problem is that we so often don’t recognize each other. You know the old saying. “Jews don’t recognize Jesus. Protestants don’t recognize the Pope. And Baptists don’t recognize each other in Hooters.” The tragedy is that we fail to recognize each other; the beauty, the potential, the wholeness, and we fail to recognize the oneness of life; the beauty, the wholeness, the symmetry, the wonder of life.

The problem is that we think we see things and people as they are. We don’t. We see them as we are. We can only see the beauty outside of ourselves once we are able to see beauty inside ourselves. If only you recognized the light within, your jaw would drop in awe of your own wholeness. If only we recognized the light in each other, we would go weak at the knees in astonishment at the beauty. Kindness would instantly replace hostility and oneness would immediately replace division.

Oneness or unity is a universal theme that is emphasized in many traditions. Judaism expresses it simply as “I am.” Christianity describes it as “the love of God from which we can never be separated.” Various circumstances can make us FEEL separate and isolated but this is just a protective mechanism. The oneness is just hidden in those cases. Just as the various traditions speak of oneness, so nature manifests unity in diversity. Last century, the British evolutionary biologist J B S Haldane was asked, “Mr Haldane, you have spent so many years studying life. What do your studies of life tell you about the nature of God?” Haldane replied, “God seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.” He was referring to the fact that there are millions of different species of beetles on the planet. Why? There is no obvious reason why there should be millions of species of beetles. It’s an expression of diversity. Mind you, I’m not arguing the case for an intelligent creator, but for the intelligence of creation itself, the wisdom of diversity, creativity for its own sake.

Science and Inclusive Spirituality

Alongside spiritual traditions and nature itself, science is another source of wisdom when it comes to oneness. One of the features of inclusive spirituality is that it finds wisdom in many, maybe all, traditions. Some people find wisdom in predominantly one tradition. Others find wisdom in many traditions. Either way, it’s fine. Wherever you find wisdom, take it and let it move you a little close to the light of who you are. Science is one of the wisdom traditions that inclusive spirituality looks to for meaning and guidance. The incredible thing is that ancient wisdom from many spiritual traditions resonates with the wisdom of science, all of which resonates deep within our human intuition. Not only is science compatible with spirituality. It actually confirms many ancient spiritual truths, such as oneness.

It’s unfortunate that we often think of science as being based in facts while spirituality is based in feelings or intuition. We mistakenly think that science is values-free or objective, while spirituality relates to values and a particular perspective. But that is the lowest common denominator of science and a narrow vision for spirituality. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences applies to both. Both science and spirituality are at their best when they take into account multiple perspectives and intelligences. Spirituality at its best deals in fact as well as intuition, otherwise it risks falling back into a magical or superstitious worldview. Science at its best incorporates the most comprehensive view of knowledge that includes head and heart, fact and intuition. Otherwise it risks not knowing why certain facts are important.

There are some wonderful examples of scientists who conduct their work in the context of relationship. Take for example the British scientist Jane Goodall, aka “the monkey lady.” Goodall lived alone from 1960 to 1990 in the East African jungle while she studied the habits of gorillas and chimpanzees. Her contribution to the scientific understanding of monkeys is legendary. But her greatest legacy, like Temple Grandin after her who uses her genius to improve the treatment of animals in slaughterhouses, is her work in conservation and animal welfare.

Goodall approaches science as a relationship with her subjects. This was always the case. When she was 18 months old, she took a handful of earthworms into her bed. Her mother tried to explain that the worms would die unless there were returned to the earth, so she gathered them up and returned them to their home in the garden. When conducting her research in the forest, Goodall took the controversial approach of naming the monkeys rather than numbering them. She gave them names that matched their personalities.

Goodall tells a story that inspired her and explains the relationship with animals. An American, Rick Swope, was visiting the zoo with his family when he saw an adult male chimpanzee drowning in the moat around the enclosure. Despite the protests of his family, the warning of zoo keepers and the imminent threat of the other male chimpanzees of the group, he dived into the water and dragged the barely alive, 130 pound body of the chimpanzee to safety. When asked what had made him risk his life he answered: “I looked into his eyes. It was like looking into the eyes of a man. And the message was: Won’t anybody help me?”

Science, at its best, is a relationship of service and a vision of a more connected world. Some would say that relationship removes the objectivity of the scientific method. But on the contrary I believe it opens up the limitless dimensions of the discoveries as well as a clearer sense of why science is important and what it is truly contributing to the planet.

The Science of Relationship

Goodall models a scientific method that is based in relationship, as does Temple Grandin. It’s all about relationship. The universe is a series of relationships whether we live like that or not. It’s about relationships that stretch beyond those you care about and includes those who are far away and unlike you. This includes all species and all people, and it includes nature.

When asked if she believed in God, Jane Goodall: “I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I don’t know what to call it. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.”

The science of relationships suggests that everything is part of a living whole, and all of it is related to the source of creativity and life. This is part of the wisdom of science. You see through the lens of Hubble’s telescope and gaze into infinity, and you “know” that our concepts of beginnings and endings, size and scope, are limited and partial. You learn about the millions of species of beetles and know that there is more going on in the universe than just the ends and needs of humanity. Science tells us about species of ants that lived in tropical rainforests for hundreds of millions of years before humans came onto the scene, and you know that the universe has a life beyond human intervention. The wisdom of science is humility and wonder in the presence of nature and the ability to study nature with empathy.

The Physics of Observation

One of the distinctions that some people draw between science and spirituality is that the scientific method keeps an objective distance between the person making observations and the thing being observed, while spirituality seeks to cross these boundaries, if not remove them altogether. But this too is a false distinction. As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Science has evolved in its understanding of observation. Observation seems to at least somewhat impact what is being observed, like a watched pot that refuses to boil. The most obvious example is when you put air pressure in a tire. It’s likely that you will release some air in the process of observing the pressure levels. The Physicist Erwin Schrodinger conducted the famous experiment with a cat sealed in a box with poison. (Unfortunately Schrodinger didn’t share Goodall or Grandin’s concern for animal welfare) Until you open the box to observe the cat, it could be either alive or dead. The point is that the way you set up the experiment as well as your observation does affect the outcome. The outcome doesn’t exist until the observation is made.

A more serious discussion has taken place concerning the observation of light. Over the last 3 centuries, scientists have gone back and forth on the question of whether light is made up of particles or waves. Newton argued that light was made up of particles, but Einstein and others later showed that particles also have waves and vice versa. Quantum physics suggests that light exists as both particle and waves. When observed, light acts like particles, and when not being observed light acts like waves. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a neutral observer. The observation participates in the process.

This wisdom from science brings us full circle to the spiritual wisdom that is often associated with the Jewish text the Talmud, but is more likely from the author Anais Nin, “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.” You participate in every conflict in your life, as well as every opportunity at least to some degree. You co-create reality with your observation.

The Physics of Connection

Physics is the study of energy in motion. Quantum physics studies the behavior of matter interacting with energy at an atomic level. Quantum physics suggests that the ideal of oneness that spiritual traditions have taught for centuries is actually built in to the nature of the universe. The 1982 physics experiment in France studied the behavior of two subatomic particles that were once localized and interrelated, then separated from one another by some distance. Even at a distance, however, a change in the state of one particle was observed to bring about a simultaneous change in the other. This is similar to the incredible stories you hear about twins who know are separated but continue to “know” what is happening in the other’s life. This concept of non local connection violated Einstein’s principle that nothing could possibly travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein called the idea of non local connection ’spooky action at a distance’.

As a way to wrap your mind around the implications of this possibility, think about homing pigeons. No one can fully explain how homing pigeons do what they do. It’s as if they have an invisible elastic band connecting them to their home. It gives them a sense of direction to return home even when they have no sign posts. The physics of relationships suggests that there is an invisible elastic band between you and other people, including other species in the world. Our intimate connection to each other is more than a metaphor. Quantum physics seems to point to the same truth as Lakota wisdom that doesn’t even have a word for “I”. It only has words for “we” and “us”. We could use the analogy of waves in an ocean. Each wave is unique and different, but never ceases to be part of the ocean. The ocean is one and all the parts of this whole are always connected whether we realize it or not.

Your thoughts are like homing pigeons. They come back to you, so make sure you send out thoughts that you are happy to receive back. I’ve heard that we have something close to 70000 thoughts per day. But more frightening is the fact that 90-96% of our thoughts are the same from one day to the next. We think by habit. Then we wonder why the results are the same from one day to the next. Change your thoughts and you change your life.

There is a beautiful extract in J. D. Salinger’s 1954 short story, Teddy. Teddy is a ten year old boy with enormous spiritual insight, and he is having a conversation with an adult on a cruise ship. This is Teddy’s insight.

“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all,” Teddy said. “It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

Love is like that. Once you come to realize that the world is intimately related, you and everything in it, you begin to see everything around you with new eyes. You feel more connected. You feel more compassionate. You feel like you are participating in something related and awesome, and so much larger than yourself. The boundaries between yourself and the rest of life begin to dissolve.

This has huge implications for our understanding of relationships. We tend to approach relationships as a transaction between separate people rather than as a sharing of intimacy from within the heart of love. We look for love outside of ourselves as if it’s separate from us. Inevitably other people will disappoint us, and so we will blame them for our unhappiness. We make an art of blame. We need to make ourselves right by making others wrong, forgetting that we are all one to begin with. This doesn’t mean that all relationships work. There is often good reason to end a relationship or a job or many other things. The problem is when we take the opportunity to create an enemy in the process, and all we are doing is creating enemies within.

Love By Numbers

The wisdom of science is just as ambitious as spiritual wisdom. It aims for unity. This is a great aim, but of course most of us only catch glimpses of this oneness. Most of us live with the challenges and ambiguities of life that drag us back into living separately. Don’t let your inability to dwell in unity become a new reason for guilt and shame. Just do the best you can in each moment. If you can’t quite get to oneness, then aim for halfness and let that be a spring board for progress. If you can’t quite forgive your ex, your former boss, your former church, your former God and become one with them, then become half with them. Become a quarter with them or whatever you can do at the time. Most importantly if you can’t fully accept and become one with yourself, then accept part of yourself. Let that partial acceptance blossom into ever increasing joy.

Learn to love the fractions, and wholeness will come a whole lot closer. If you can’t forgive all your enemies, forgive some of them. If you can’t forgive all of your faults, forgive some of them. If you can’t trust your partner all of the way, then forgive your partner with small things and let trust grow. Trust, empathy, forgiveness, understanding, even love itself, are all a process and a journey. Break oneness down into manageable parts and create a Fibonacci sequence of love and acceptance that will have mathematicians scrambling for their calculators. It’s all unfolding in perfect patterns of mysterious and deliciously unpredictable order. For in the end love has no formula. As the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore said, “I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.”

The light in me honors the light in you. Namaste.