The Benefits of Risk Taking

Last night I watched a mostly unknown Ukrainian tennis player beat the number four player in the world. I’m glad I’m writing his name because I certainly can’t pronounce Alexandr Dolgopolov. This guy was awesome and so fun to watch. It was extreme tennis, full of improvised shots and nonchalant flair. He played like he had nothing to lose. So he was free to give it his all. It made me think about taking risks. I want to live my life like Alexandr Dolgopolov plays tennis, and take more risks.

Are you a risk taker? Consider these questions-

Do you look for 100% certainty before making decisions?
Do you talk to strangers?
Do you challenge people in authority?
Would you take out a loan for a vacation?
Would you apply for a job you feel under qualified for?
Do you share private thoughts and feelings with new acquaintances?
Would you go sky diving?
Are you willing to be a minority of one on matters of personal opinion?

If you answered “no” to all, you are a safety first kind of person. The world needs people like you. You offer much needed skepticism and caution on issues of change and risk. As long as you feel fully satisfied in your caution, then have at it. Or else maybe you answered “yes” to some. Maybe you are cautious in some areas of life and not others. Maybe you would quit a well paying job to follow your passion, but not jump out of plane in a million years. Or maybe you would climb the steepest ice covered peak but never challenge your boss under any circumstances.

Do your own risk assessment and trust your instincts. Think about taking some risks in new parts of your life to remind yourself to step beyond your comfort zone. As a parent, I want to empower my kids to get to know their own risk boundaries and growth points. However I also want my kids to know that certain things like texting while driving are bad risks. Learning your own boundaries around risk taking is about living with forgiveness. We too often pass up risks for fear of being trapped, because we forget that life offers second chances. Risks are part of life’s inbuilt signposts. Risks either give you momentum to continue or a warning to stop. Either way, you know you’re alive. As Anais Nin said, “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”

When it comes to matters of the heart, life calling or personal development, we could all do with a little nudge in the direction of taking greater risks. In order to be all that you can be, and push beyond self limiting boundaries, you will need to take some risks. These inner risks are far more heart stopping than physical risks but the payoff is enormous. I heard an interview with a group of climbers who described the relationship between climbing and risk taking. One said, "I climb so I don't feel like a robot, so I feel like I'm doing something that is motivated by the 'self.'" Another said, "There's a freshness to the climbing experience that clears away the weariness of routine and the complexity of social norms. Climbing brings you back to a primal place, where values are being created and transformed." Risk taking is part of how you discover the boundaries of where you end and others begin. When you push off from the guard rails of society’s norms, you get a clearer sense of who you are at your essence.

Without risk, you would never escape from the prison of who you think you have to be to satisfy the critics into the fullness of your true self that always was. The irony is that you need to take risks in order to move beyond the small self that keeps itself alive by believing there is too much at stake. There isn’t. There is more of substance in a tennis ball than in the small self’s delusions of permanence. It’s all changing, all the time. The greater risk is to mistake a memory or an idea for the way things really are, for then you risk missing the moment. At your essence you know what is true risk and what is ego’s games, and you know that risk is necessary because on the other side of the risk lies freedom.

As you blossom, you realize that there are very few real risks because there are no mistakes. When you are grounded in inner peace, whatever you do is appropriate and if you have to adjust your course, you do that and move on without self blame or judgment.

We live in a world that offers few certainties. The fearful have just as much risk of tragedy as the bold. Put your fears at ease. Remind them that you are whole and lovable, abundant and brilliant to begin with and this essence doesn’t need to be protected. Shine a light on your fear and it will be revealed for what it is. What fear called risk will soon be revealed as opportunity.

As Glenn Close’s character says to a group of acting students in her recent film Heights, “For Christ’s sake, take a risk sometime this weekend.” Its good advice, on stage, on a tennis court and in life. Take a risk, if for no other reason than to remind yourself that you are alive and you are open to the adventure of whatever’s unfolding. Take a risk to remind yourself that the beauty of life is that it offers no certainties. It is open and dynamic. Open your heart to love. End a relationship that has run its course. Make a decisive career move. Initiate a difficult conversation. Ask someone on a date. Book the sky diving adventure. Speak to a stranger.

Be safe by all means. But don’t forget to truly live while you are alive. To end with the words of one of my favorite American philosophers, William James, “It is only by risking that we really ever live at all.”

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The Sweet Sound of Surrender

Do you sometimes feel like you are holding on for dear life? Holding on to people and places, perspectives and plans, as if you’re holding a baby in a shower. You imagine that to loosen your grip even a little would lead to disaster. After all, it’s a baby, delicate and tiny, and it’s slippery. True enough, but the thing is that you’re not holding a baby in the shower. It’s more like you’re holding soap and the tighter you hold it the more likely it is to slip through your fingers and crash to the floor.

What would happen if you stopped holding on for dear life and tried letting go for dear life? Let go of your carefully laid plans and your tightly controlled life in order to claim the dear Life that is waiting to greet you. It’s bigger and better than anything you could dream up with your over protective mind. Your protective mind convinces you that life is too fragile and too serious to leave anything to chance. But what if life is not as serious as you imagine. What if the hokey pokey IS what it’s all about? Practice a little hokey pokey right now. Put your toe in and feel the waters of surrender, then pull it out and compare the feeling- surrender or control, which feels more alive? Put your hand in and feel the temperature of trust, then pull it out and see if you feel anywhere near as alive as you did inside surrender. Practice dipping into surrender, and then in moments of abandon, put your whole self in and feel the freedom. Put your whole self in and shake it all about to fully experience what it is to truly be alive. Put your whole being in and bow before the moment, with all the innocence you can muster, and declare yourself its humble servant.

Once you’ve done the hokey pokey, trust me, you won’t want to go back. It’s like your first time downhill skiing, terrifying and enlivening at the same time. Or the first time you free fall in love, frightening and irresistible in the same breath. In these moments, surrender becomes your new reality. You discover that you enjoy this new dance after all and wonder why it took you so long to give in to surrender’s charm. It’s these real life experiences of new freedom that give you insight into the true self, the one that was always meant to be and has nothing to fear or protect. Surrender is the prelude to transformation. It’s the hokey pokey theory of transformation- put your whole being in surrender’s dance and turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.

Here is a short list of things that most of us would love to surrender- beliefs that are an affront to your common sense, self limiting beliefs, co-dependent relationships, financial burdens, lingering grief, unsolvable problems. What else would you like to surrender?

Here are some of the benefits in surrender- you feel more spontaneous, less inhibited, your experience more surprise (which is close to wonder), less anxiety, less baggage, better sleep, greater wellness, more peace of mind. And more.

So are you up for a little boogie on the hokey pokey dance floor of surrender?

But I hear your protective mind now. “He doesn’t understand”. It’s saying. “Life is slippery. You’ve got to be careful. In any case, you’ve worked hard to liberate yourself from surrendering to the will of a judgmental God and the snare of a controlling religious system. So what’s all this about surrender? I thought we were done with surrender.”

Two Extremes of Surrender

We are and we aren’t done with surrender. It depends what you mean by surrender. There are two extremes of surrender that we do well to avoid, and instead find a middle path that takes the best from both extremes. Let me illustrate with a visual comparison from New York City. If you visit 5th avenue in Manhattan you find two very different buildings on opposite sides of the street. On the west side at 630 Fifth Avenue you will see the 1920’s art deco building financed personally by John Rockefeller, the Rockefeller Center. It’s a monument to post WW1 optimism and humanism. Standing tall at the front of the building is a massive, seven-ton, 15-foot tall bronze statue of the heroic Greek god of weightlifting, Atlas. Atlas stands strong and tall, his muscles straining, with the world on his shoulders. Atlas was the most powerful God/man of all time, and yet strains to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders, a punishment for his revolt against Zeus.

On the east side of the street stands a building that was completed 50 years earlier, the neo Gothic St Patrick’s Cathedral. Designed to look other worldly with tall spires pointing to God in the heavens, St Patrick’s has a shrine to the boy Jesus behind the high altar. Jesus, maybe 8 or 9 years old, is effortlessly holding an orb in one hand. The point implied is that God came to earth as a child who would hold the weight of the world’s sin in the palm of his hand.

On one side of the street is the symbol of other worldly surrender, and on the other side is the symbol of “no surrender”. On the one hand, many of us have moved beyond the “whole world in his hands” version of God. We refuse to bow down to a God whose “will” is for some people to be saved from eternal punishment in hell. We refuse to surrender our intellect by submitting to pre-scientific ideas about the afterlife and we refuse to give unthinking loyalty to questionable ancient texts. We refuse to surrender our personal responsibility by submitting to the will of God as often presented by churches. Many of us would feel that we have grown up and beyond surrender as a passive white flag, waiting for God to act in the world.

Christopher Hitchens said it well,

“Faith is the surrender of the mind, it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It’s our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me…. Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.”

Or else this fun story shows the dilemma for a modern person to surrender to a supernatural being.

A guy was driving to an important meeting and couldn’t find a parking place. Looking up toward heaven, he said “God, I surrender to your power. Find me a parking place and I will go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life and maybe even give up tequila.” Miraculously, a parking place appeared right in front of him. He looked up again and said, “Never mind. I found one myself.”

While the superstitious view of surrender is problematic to many of us, the alternative presented by Atlas is equally problematic. Considering the weight of the burdens you carry and the weight of the burdens your loved ones carry, burdens that you wish you could step in and ease, if only you COULD carry the whole world on your shoulders. But you know you can’t because you have tried and when you tried, the soap ended up on the shower floor. You are powerless to control your life to your ego’s satisfaction, and you are certainly powerless to save the world around you from suffering. Even the titan John Rockefeller, as successful and generous as he was, couldn’t solve the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the face of the deepest personal demons and society’s gravest challenge, even Rockefeller couldn’t hold that burden on his shoulders.

I’m interested in a third path of surrender that runs straight down fifth avenue taking the best from both the east and the west, well clear of blind submission and somewhere short of vein narcissism. I believe there is a middle path, and I believe it is a truth that is intuited by spiritual traditions of all varieties as it is intuited by self aware people in all times and places.

Surrender as Universal Truth

Whether its surrender to a higher power, submission to a guru, trusting your highest self or accepting reality as it is, surrender is one of the most profound universal truths. Take Islam for example. The word “Islam” is an Arabic part of speech relating to the divine name and means surrender, or maybe more accurately “come peacefully”. It’s interesting that most religions are named after a person, eg Christianity and Buddhism or a group of people, eg Judaism, or a place, eg Hinduism, but Islam is named after its central theme which is surrender. Despite the common misperception of Islam as a religion of blind devotion, many Muslims, and particularly within the Sufi branch of Islam, practice surrender by giving up their own needs so that others’ needs can be met.

There is a story told about a Sufi elder who lived a quiet life. When the woman next door became pregnant everyone wanted to know who the father was. In order to protect the real father, she gave the name of the Sufi elder. The village insisted that the Sufi raise the child. The Sufi made no fuss and said, “Alright. Leave the child.” Years later, the mother got married and finally confessed that the Sufi was not the father. The village apologized to the Sufi and asked for the child back. He gave them the child and said, “Alright. Take the child.” He surrendered his own need to be right to put the needs of others first.

Christianity, like Islam, emphasizes surrender as obedience to a Creator God. However there is a new thought added to the notion of surrender by Paul. He spoke of surrender as “dying to self”. This gets closer to the Buddhist notion of surrender, which is to transcend any one fixed identity. Surrender the fixed idea of who you are and you will find liberation. Stop grasping the you that you were yesterday or the relationship as it was yesterday or the world as it was back then. The present moment is another name for the object of your surrender, with you doing the hokey pokey in the middle of the moment, becoming all you need to be.

This raises the question as to whether there needs to be a God as an object for surrender. It certainly makes it easier. But since when is surrender supposed to be easy. Even without a belief in God, surrender to your highest self, the part of you that holds your highest intentions. Even if there is part of you saying “live for yourself. Just do what feels good. Take care of number one.” there is a higher voice that calls you beyond narcissism. Surrender to this voice.

The Recovery movement also emphasizes surrender in its first three steps. It introduces the idea of rock bottom. When you get to the point where the burden feels too great and you’ve tried everything to solve the problem, including denial, avoidance, self destruction, and sheer will power, but nothing will do it, you hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is a psychological breakthrough point where you admit that you can’t do it alone. You ask for help, whether its help from a higher power, or a support group. The empowering thing about the image of rock bottom is that it’s from this point that you can build a pile of rocks to create something to begin climbing out of despair. Addiction or not, we all get to this point in life when you knock on the door of a friend, a therapist, coach or spiritual guide and say “help”. This is the point of surrender, and it’s not a negative experience. It’s a liberating experience to realize that you can’t do it alone, don’t have to do it alone. You’re better off not doing it alone. Surrender is an expression of humility, a readiness to seek help and a prelude to transformation. The transformation revolves around serenity or acceptance. Stop giving anxious energy to things that you can’t control and begin taking responsibility for things you can control.

Surrender Beyond Submission

A surrendered way of life is anything but passive. It’s more alive and proactive than anything you experience when you think you can control life. Don’t confuse submission and surrender. Submission is passive. Surrender is active. Submission is deadening. Surrender is enlivening. Submission squashes the ego; surrender transcends it. Submission is when you give in. Surrender is when you give up. Submission is something you consciously do and maybe you hold on to resentment as you do it. It is often more superficial and obligation based. Surrender is a point beyond conscious decision where you intrinsically and subconsciously let go. As Blaise Pascal said, “All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling”. The only conscious steps you can take are to remove the barriers to surrender like peeling back the layers of an onion.

How can you tell if you are submitting or surrendering? If you feel guilt or a loss of personal power, you are likely submitting. If you feel more alive and more yourself in an essential way, then you are likely surrendering. If you feel put upon and isolated, you are likely submitting. If you feel liberated and connected, then you are likely surrendering.

Two monks were travelling in the woods when they met a woman who couldn’t cross the river because of the current. One of the monks asked her if he could pick her up and carry her across. She agreed. They crossed the river and let her down. They went their separate ways. After another mile or so, one monk was feeling anxious and troubled and finally told his friend, “You were wrong to carry that woman over the river. It is against our tradition to touch a woman.” The monk who had carried the woman responded, “My friend. I set the woman down miles back. You on the other hand are STILL carrying her.”

In this case, the decision not to carry the woman was based in submission to tradition’s rules. The decision to carry her was based in surrender.

Are you carrying people, relationships, ideas, beliefs, plans, that you would be better off surrendering? Prepare yourself for a sweet surrender by peeling the back the layers of self protection. Yes it might hurt. Yes it’s frightening. Yes it will be different. Yes, you might need to give up some cherished idea of who you are, some familiar comfort you find in the grief. But surrender is a prelude to something far greater- a transformation that will leave you feeling so alive that you will wonder why you didn’t try this years ago. You neither have to surrender your highest values nor do you have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. Surrender to the moment and all its beauty.

In the words of Elvis, your heart will be on fire, burning with a strange desire to be one with the moment. All the stars will tell the story of surrender’s love and all its glory. Make this a time of magic, and a time of love. Won’t you please surrender? Namaste.

The Pursuit of Happiness

If you were given the choice between a lottery ticket and a set of water skis, which would you take? If you took the lottery ticket and won, you could buy all the water skis you could ever want, travel the world and ski in every lake you find. On the other hand, if you didn’t win the lottery you would be left with nothing. So you may be better off taking the water skis. Of course, if you took the water skis, you would run the risk of suffering an awful accident and becoming a paraplegic, so maybe the lottery ticket would be the safer bet. Dilemmas! Dilemmas!

You live with constant choices like this. What will make you happier? This job or that? This partner or that? This location or that? This amount of money or that? What if happiness doesn’t come as a money back guarantee with these choices?
Recent research questions our assumptions about what brings happiness. It suggests that one year after winning the lottery, people are no happier than they were before they won. So maybe the lottery ticket is not the better choice. Then again, some researchers suggest that one year after becoming a paraplegic, people are no less happy than they were before the event. In other words assuming one person won the lottery and another person became a paraplegic on the same day and at that time they were equally happy, chances are that one year later they would still be equally happy.

Your small sense of self craves external validation. Society and the media play right into this delusion and convince you that events and possessions make you happy or unhappy. Certainly when people move from living at a survival level, where only their basic needs are being met, to having a roof over their heads and a steady income, the increase in happiness grows with the income. But studies show that beyond about $70,000 per year, happiness levels begin to plateau. Multiplying your assets from $70,000 to 70 million dollars does not necessarily multiply your happiness. Money might make misery easier to live with, as Mark Twain said, but it can’t buy happiness.

It’s true in relationships as well. The day your fiancé leaves you at the altar will likely feel like the worst day of your life. Talk to some people who have been through this experience a year later, and they will feel that it was the best thing that could have happened. We tend to magnify the significance of events, when in reality they are unlikely to have a lasting impression on our sense of fulfillment in life.

There is a famous Jewish tale about happiness. King Solomon, who was extremely wealthy, wanted to teach one of his palace officials a lesson in humility. He sent him out on a wild goose chase to find a magical ring. Solomon told the official, “If a happy man looks at the ring, he becomes sad, and if a sad man looks at it, he becomes happy.”

The official spent months in search of the magical ring. Finally he asked a merchant in Jerusalem, “Have you by any chance heard of a magic ring that makes the happy wearer forget his joy and the broken-hearted wearer forget his sorrows?”
He watched the merchant take a plain gold ring from his carpet and engrave something on it. When the official read the words on the ring, his face broke out in a wide smile. He went back to Solomon

“Well, my friend,” said Solomon, “have you found what I sent you for?” To his surprise, the official held up a small gold ring and declared, “Here it is, your majesty!” As soon as Solomon read the inscription, the smile left his face. The jeweler had written three Hebrew letters on the gold band: gimel, zayin, yud, which began the words “Gam zeh ya’avor” — “This too shall pass.” At that moment Solomon realized that all his wisdom, wealth and power were fleeting things, and one day could all be gone.

If only we could take more of a “this too shall pass” approach to life, we would suffer so much less. No event is an end point. No incident is the last word on life. One of the ways you can pursue happiness is to allow life to ebb and flow all around you, and not hold on to any event or possession too tightly. Whatever you are going through right now is not the end of the story. There’s always more. There will be mysterious twists and turns that you can’t even predict.

So what is real happiness? The World Database of Happiness keeps track of how people appreciate life. Their survey asks two questions. The first is, “Are you happy right now?” The second goes a little deeper and asks, “All things considered, are you satisfied in life? Are you content?” It’s this second question that gets at the heart of the issue.

All things considered, taking a broad view of life, are you satisfied? Are you content? I don’t mean in this moment, or even this day, but overall. Even if you feel that money is tight or circumstances are running against you right now, are you content? Jesus said, “Happy are the poor in spirit.” The word in Greek is makarios. Makarios is used in Greek literature to describe the bliss of the gods who were not affected by the changes of life. Another translation of this verse could be, “Oh the unending bliss of the poor in spirit.” The poor in spirit are content because they have come within an inch of losing all hope. Because they know how it feels to be on the edge of spiritual devastation, they hold only loosely to things, and perspectives. Those who trust that all things come and go at the right time are content and at peace

The same applies to those who mourn. Oh the bliss of those who mourn, because they go deep within themselves to embrace and heal the sadness. It’s because they’ve embraced sadness that they know what it is to embrace gladness. Oh the bliss of those who mourn because they know that emotions are fleeting and changeable.

A spiritual teacher was once asked by his students, “Why are you so happy? You are surrounded by suffering and loss, so why are you happy?” The teacher picked up a crystal glass and said, “I love this glass. I love the way it sounds when I touch it. I love the way it glistens in the sun. And yet one day, no doubt, my elbow will knock it off of the table and it will break. I love this glass because I know that it’s already broken.”

All things considered, are you satisfied? Are you content? True happiness is realized in the broken places of life. Your life glistens in the sun and chimes with the sound of acceptance. It’s beautiful even with the cracks. When you have come to terms with your brokenness, you don’t need to pretend you are anything other than you who you are in each moment. When you have accepted that each situation is what it needs to be, you stop resisting reality. As the Tao te Ching says, “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.” Stop striving to preserve meaningful moments by putting them in a bottle. Stop trying to make your possession immortal by storing them on a shelf. Let life come and go around you with humble curiosity and open ended wonder for this too shall pass.

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The Universal Law of Cause and Effect

The 2004 movie Crash begins with the sound of two cars colliding and a voice-over. Horns are blaring, tires are screeching, metal is crunching, and then with the distant image of out of focus lights flashing, the following voice over is heard:

“It’s the sense of touch. Any real city, you walk, you brush past people, people bump into you. In L. A. nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

It’s the voice of one of the drivers. His companion says:

“I think we got rear-ended. I think we spun around twice. And somewhere in there, one of us lost our frame of reference. And I’m gonna go look for it.”

The rest of the movie is a riveting tale of cause and effect bumping into each other as people find and lose their frames of reference, positive outcomes spring from near disaster and vice versa with a brilliant weaving of plotlines leaving the impression that all the players and their fates are ultimately related, mostly unpredictable and rarely fair.

In one of the interrelated plots, two young guys carjack an SUV and accidentally run down an Asian man who is just getting out of his van full of the Cambodian immigrants he is about to deliver as slaves. They dump the Asian man in front of a hospital where he survives and gives his wife the payment check for the slaves. Meanwhile the carjackers take the Asian man’s van unaware that it’s full of Cambodian slaves. They discover the Cambodians as they are in the process of selling the van. The eyes of the guy buying the van light up. He offers them $500 for each slave but they think better of it in a moment of conscience and set the Cambodians free. You’re left wondering who the heroes are, who the villains are and what the moral of the story could possibly be.

The reason I enjoy Crash so much is because its plot is like life. It blindsides your expectations, spins your emotions until you’re giddy and rear ends your assumptions. Sometimes, events that seem to be wholly evil, are used for good. Sometimes, the best intentions and altruistic actions lead to destruction. The beautifully frustrating thing about life is that we are always in the middle of a sequence of interrelated plotlines, bumping into each other. The truth is that we don’t know what the future holds, but we dare to believe that everything we think, do and say has an impact, whether we see and understand it or not.

Flooded with Tragedy

Is it just me or do others feel worn out from all the tragedy of the last week? In the week that we honored the memorial of the earthquake that killed over 300,000 people in Haiti and made a million people homeless, we suddenly had to make some sense of the Tucson shootings and horrendous floods in Australia and Brazil. When will it end, all this bumping into each other and innocent suffering? What is the meaning in it all? Maybe most importantly, is there anything we can do that would make a real difference? You want to make a difference, don’t you? You want to believe that your actions have an impact.

One of my favorite 20th century philosophers was Michel Foucault. He expresses well the post modern frustration with any absolute systems of knowledge or certainty. He said of his own writing that “I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.” He said of his own personal growth, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”

He wrote about the history of power, knowledge, sanity and punishment in order to show the constant evolution of contexts. He said something that relates to our desire to make sense of tragedy. He said, “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”

As I relate these words to the idea of cause and effect, we could say that all actions have reactions, but the reactions aren’t necessarily predictable. Or maybe it’s more like a game of chess, where the very next move may be predictable but the moves beyond that become increasingly difficult to predict. While on vacation recently I played chess with my 12 year old nephew. It turns out he is very good, and I am very ordinary at chess. I feel pleased with myself if I make a move where I take into account the very next move in the game. In the meantime, he tells me that no matter what I do, he’s going to beat me in five moves. And he does just that. It’s a demoralizing experience being told that no matter what you do, you will lose. It’s a demoralizing experience to live with integrity and have no idea what benefit it will have 4, 5 or more situations out from where you are now.

The law of cause and effect either requires freakish ability to read the future, or else it requires a lot of patience and trust. In other words, causes may have their effects but the effects might be beyond anything we can know or control. Small causes can even have enormous effect, like the flapping of a butterfly wing that causes a hurricane on the other side of the world. But from our position, always in the middle of the drama, we can’t always plot the moves from butterfly flap to hurricane.

On the one hand this is empowering. Even actions that seem small or start out small may create waves of positive change in the world. On other hand, you may not see any connection or worthwhile outcome. It may even seem like your efforts are counterproductive. And yet there is something resilient in the human spirit that persists. Even though you have no certainty that your best efforts will make the slightest difference, you do them anyway. You do the only thing you can do, the only thing you have any control over, you stir your hand in the pond, see tiny ripples begin to disperse and let go of the outcome.

Cause And Effect in Spiritual Traditions

Most of the spiritual traditions teach some form of the law of cause and effect. Whether it’s a theistic tradition that teaches that the Creator God is the ultimate cause who keeps account of good and evil in the world, or non theistic traditions like Buddhism and Taoism that teach that the law of cause and effect is built into the very nature of life, and the universe itself keeps balance, most traditions encourage some sort of personal responsibility through the teaching of cause and effect.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus’ parables have a fascinating perspective on cause and effect. Luke Chapter 13 tells its own mini Crash story before one of these parables. It’s hard to piece together the details, but with the help of Josephus we can guess that the corrupt Roman official Pilate wanted to build an aqueduct into Jerusalem and he funded it with money he stole from Jews on pilgrimage. The Jews gathered in a crowd around Pilate and demanded their money back so Pilate sent soldiers into the crowd dressed in civvies to send a message to them. Pilate’s soldiers had no idea who the protestors were and indiscriminately killed many in the crowd. They died on the same altars to which they were making sacrifice. Hence the mingling of their blood with sacrificial blood. Later on while building his ill gotten aqueduct, part of the structure collapsed killing 18 people. Before coming to the parable, consider the parallel between these events and events of our time. There is a part of us that would like to see justice done with Pilate killed under the falling structure, but life isn’t like that.

Consider Pilate, and consider Jared Loughner as you listen to this quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

In Jesus’ world they believed that everything happened for a specific reason, and that God would bring justice to every evil act. Jesus took a radically different approach. He said that all people are equally guilty and suffering bears no relationship to justice. He said that ALL should “repent”. Don’t think of repenting as beating your breasts with guilt. Think of repenting as paying attention to life with greater openness. Stay open to the unfolding of life because you are always in the middle of it, dependent on all that came before you and paving the way for all that comes after you. Your life and actions are that significant even when there are few specific effects and outcomes you can draw from your actions. The parables speak of a reversal of fortunes where the only logic is grace, and call for patience and forgiveness along the way. Without patience and forgiveness, the law of cause and effect can be a harsh and manipulative truth.

While spiritual traditions teach a form of cause and effect, many of them warn against concretizing, forming conclusions for all time. Remember the Taoist story about the farmer whose horse runs away. The neighbors say “That’s awful.” The famer says, “How do you know this is not a good thing?” Sure enough the horse returns the next day with another horse. The neighbors say, “You are lucky.” He says, “How do you know this is not a bad thing?” The next day his son rides the new horse, falls off and breaks his leg. The neighbors say, “You poor man.” He says, “How do you know this is not a good thing?” The army comes through town the next day, taking all able bodied boys with them, leaving the farmer’s boy because of his broken leg. The neighbors gather and say, “We’re so pleased for you.” The farmer says, “We’ll see!” The story could keep going, but you get the point.

We are in the middle, with causes and effect bumping into each other all the time. Or else out of the Sufi tradition, learn from this story about multiple causes.

“What is Fate?” Nasrudin, the wise fool used in Sufi stories, was asked by a Scholar.

“An endless succession of intertwined events, each influencing the other”, Nasrudin replied.

“That is hardly a satisfactory answer. I believe in cause and effect”, said the Scholar.

“Very well,” said Nasrudin, “look at that.” He pointed to a procession passing in the street.”

“That man is being taken to be hanged. Is that because someone gave him a silver piece and enabled him to buy the knife with which he committed the murder; or because someone saw him do it; or because nobody stopped him?”

Do Good Anyway

Relate this last story to the Tucson shootings. There is value in looking for causes. It enables us to learn from the past and break destructive patterns. Just beware of concretizing. Various people have pointed to gun laws, the treatment of mental illness, and the political language of violence as possible causes of the shootings. Did Jared Loughner create mayhem, or did we fail to stop him by seeing all the signs? These are all valid inquiries but may not yield any absolute answers. Maybe causes are always complex and interrelated. While the causes are complex, the effect of the shooting is in our control. As President Obama said at the Memorial on Wednesday night, lack of civil discourse is not the cause of the shooting, but from here on we can make sure that civil discourse is an effect of the shooting.

The one cause that you can trace with some accuracy is your own thought patterns, conscious and subconscious. Where you can trace your tendency to blame and judge back to a critical thought pattern, you can begin to change your mindset and that matters. Begin with awareness. Notice the connection between self limiting and judgmental thoughts and all of this bumping into each other. With this new awareness, start changing the script beginning with healthy thought patterns.

From healthy thoughts, move to life affirming actions. The spiritual principle of the golden rule that transcends any one tradition is the ultimate expression of cause and effect. Do to others what you know you would want yourself. Don’t do to other what you know is harmful. Even if you don’t see the immediate connection between your loving actions and any earth shattering effect, do good anyway and believe that the universe will keep record and bring a balance of love in the world.

Stephen Colbert coined the phrase, “Reality has a well known liberal bias” in his famous roast of President Bush in 2006. Here is a slight variation on the phrase in relation to cause and effect- “The universe has a well known compassionate bias.” This means that you and I can conspire with the universe to spread compassion in the world. As Martin Luther King said “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” You’ve got to believe this is true and keep going. The path of human kindness is hard, unpredictable and rarely fair. You are in the middle of this path and have no idea how the story ends or even if it ends. So keep at it, do what you can and make sure that the arc of your best intentions bend towards a more decent world.

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, said,

If you put love where there is no love, you will find love.

If you put peace where there is no peace, you will find peace.

If you put hope where there is no hope, you will find hope.

Namaste.

Compassion in Life’s Crucible

Love prevails despite overwhelming evidence – thorns have roses, tears have heart and trauma has strength. Like the earth from which you emerge, and the Love that sources your life, you have incredible resilience to get back up after a setback, dust yourself off and keep moving forward with grace. In time you find that there is wisdom in wounds, perspective in pain and growth in grief. As much as you want to run, learn to stay with the pain. It is preparing you for a life of depth and compassion. Stand fearlessly in the flames of suffering with an open heart and a strong will.

The crucible of your life experience has fused you into the capable and compassionate person you are. This can’t happen without a few cracks and scars. The only people who get through life unscathed are those more interested in self preservation than genuine connection. You carry your burn marks as a reminder that you have stood in the middle of suffering, your own and others, without shrinking back or hiding the pain.

I will never forget the time I had to hold my two year old son down while doctors performed a lumbar puncture. He looked at me with such betrayal. It broke my heart to hear him scream, but hurt even more to see his confusion that the people he thought he could trust most in the world were in this moment his torturers. They might as well have stuck that needle in my spine and twisted it the way I felt that day. Many parents know the agony of watching children suffer and being unable to remove the pain. It’s a universal experience, at least for anyone who dares to get close enough to another to care.

Compassion is not just a platitude. It’s a bodily experience. The ancient Greek word for compassion was “splagchnos” which was also the word used for bowels or intestines. This was the word that Bible writers used to describe the compassion Jesus had for those who were suffering. Splagchnos means what it sounds like it means. It’s a guttural word that indicates a visceral reaction. The bowels were regarded by the Greeks as the site of primal passion, while for the Hebrews they were the site of more tender affections, like kindness. Compassion has many faces and modes. Compassion is a bodily reaction that leads to a deep desire to alleviate suffering. It isn’t a surface response, like “isn’t that awful”. It is a passionate sense of being burdened by suffering and wanting it to end.

Science reinforces the physical basis of compassion with an understanding of mirror neurons. Neurons fire in your brain when you perform actions. Mirror neurons fire when you see someone else perform an action, giving your brain the sense that you are performing the same action. Mirror neurons explain why you smile at someone who smiles at you, or yawn when someone yawns. Mirror neurons explain why kids pick up the same mannerisms that they have spent years mocking their parents about. And most importantly, mirror neurons explain empathy. When someone is suffering, it’s more than metaphor to say “I feel your pain.”

Many people are feeling this bodily compassion for the victims of the horrific assassination attempt and fatal shootings in Tucson, and the victims of flooding in Australia and so many other global tragedies. Its also the anniversary of the massive earthquake that tore Haiti apart. It’s one of those times when there doesn’t seem to be enough room in the world to hold all the pain. And yet the space in our collective heart is larger than any pain.

The group who will create a guard of love and protection around the Tucson funerals this week to ward off the hatred of protestors will be dressed as angels with white wings. This is compassion dressed in white and expressed in a bodily way. The stories coming out of Australia of young children drowning to save their siblings is compassion in action. Compassion has to be expressed in some form or other, or else it slips back into being a platitude.

What wisdom do you draw from your tough times? What flood of emotions do you feel about friends and family in Australia? What wisdom will we all draw from the Tucson shootings? What growth will emerge from the grief?

Begin with tears. Eyes shed tears to find focus. Tragedies remind us all to recommit to our highest values. Beyond all the speculation and political finger pointing, pause in compassion for innocent victims of violence and confused perpetrators of violence. Feel the pain, then let this felt pain turn into compassionate action. When you hold this compassionate space, everyone and everything becomes a mirror, reflecting a universal love that holds all pain and all joy in absolute and unconditional embrace.

May all people dwell in peace and loving kindness, beginning with me, beginning NOW. My heart is open. It’s been bruised, burned and broken. But it’s still beating and has greater capacity for love than any amount of pain or hatred.

Ps- please visit Soulseeds for affirmation and kindness resources.

Slowing the Pendulum, Practicing Balance

This is my annual jetlag talk given around 24 hours after arriving back from Australia. It’s said that jetlag lasts one day for every time zone you cross. In that case I should be back to normal by September. When one of the kids asked me the time on the flight home, I said, “Where? In Sydney, Auckland, LA, Chicago or Michigan?” Jetlag is a strange, disorienting experience. You feel out of sorts, out of balance, for several days. I now understand that jetlag is caused by messing with the body’s need for daily cycles of darkness and light. The body clock considers light and dark its alarm for when to rest and when to get going for the day. So when the body clock is confused, your body loses its balance. It’s not just a travel problem. We spend too many daylight hours under unnatural light, and then at night we sit with the glaring light of fluorescent bulbs, televisions and brightly shining alarm clocks. Most of us are lucky if we experience solid darkness for 5 or 6 hours out of 24. The human body is built to follow nature’s patterns. It needs exercise and sunshine and it needs darkness and rest in order to heal and restore its balance.

Balance is my theme. Nature models balance. Spiritual traditions teach balance. We crave balance. While on vacation, I was struck by an intense, optimistic energy around 2011. It’s going to be an amazing year, and the space of vacation fired me up to get all aspects of my life in optimum shape. I want to take my relationships, my community, my health, all my life aspirations to the highest levels of excellence. I want to have it all. I can have it all, just not at the same time. I have to pace myself and create balance in my priorities. What are your priorities for 2011? Are you setting your sights towards excellence? What are your issues around balance?

We crave balance and yet balance is so profoundly lacking in our lives. We create our own jetlag of consciousness, out of sorts with who we are and out of balance with life’s natural order. We live in multiple time zones, allowing the past to rule our current choices and letting the future drift onto the radar of our present experience far too often.

We tend to charge recklessly from one thing to its opposite, and the natural pendulum of life becomes more like a wrecking ball. Even as you read this you may be imagining that this is going to be an encouragement to slow down or spend more time resting. That thought is part of the problem, as you swing to an extreme. We go all of one way looking for the answers and when we don’t find them we think “what’s the point” and swing right back the other way. We are misdiagnosing our unhappiness.

You imagine that work is the problem and if you could just retire all your problems would vanish, only to discover that you aren’t comfortable with all the extra time alone with yourself. You imagine that a person or a place is the problem, only to see the same issues turn up in the new relationship, the new city, the new job. You imagine that the Republicans are the problem only to discover that the Democrats aren’t strong enough for your tastes.

The problem isn’t work, and the problem isn’t Republicans. The problem is your inability to stay in the middle, sourcing your life from your inner core that isn’t dependent on outer circumstances for contentment. This inner realization liberates you to live appropriately in any context without fixating on any one mode. There is a time to slow down, and there is a time to get a wriggle on. There is a time to change and there is a time to pull up a chair and learn from the current circumstance. Rather than looking for solutions in one extreme or another, the answer is found in what musicians call “Tempo Guesto”.

Tempo Giusto is free will to a musician. It means “the right pace”. The musician is free to discern the intent of the composer. Tempo Giusto suggests that you follow your instincts and create the performance that matches the context. The German word eigenzeit serves a similar purpose, much like the famous words from Ecclesiastes “there is a time for everything under the sun.” Learn from nature. Everything has its time, and you have the inner capacity to adapt to whatever is needed to manage the moment. Please note that “right time” is not to be confused with Island time. Remember the man who asks God, “God, how long is a million years?”

God answers, “A million years is like a minute.”

Then, the man asks, “God, how much is a million dollars?”

And God replies, “A million dollars is like a penny.”

Finally, the man asks, “God, can you give me a penny?”

God says, “In a minute.”

It’s all about perspective. This notion of right balance or right time is not an excuse for laziness. It’s a license for flexibility and intuitive wisdom.

Balance in the Traditions

Balance is one of the perennial truths. Perennial truths are nuggets of golden wisdom that turn up in many traditions. They are universal truths that individuals and cultures come to realize and experience in their own language and stories. They are often shown to be true by science, nature and instinct as well as spiritual traditions. They tend to be life principles that we innately know but often forget. Balance is one of these perennial truths. Let’s take a brief walk through some traditions.

Balance is a major emphasis in Buddhism. 600 years before the time of Jesus, The Buddha coined the phrase “the Middle Path” in an address to his monks-

“Monks, these two extremes ought not to be cultivated by the recluse. What two? Sensual indulgence which is low, vulgar, worldly, ignoble, and conducive to harm; and self-mortification, which is painful, ignoble, and conducive to harm. The middle path, monks, understood by the Tathâgata, avoiding the extremes, gives vision and knowledge and leads to calm, realization, enlightenment, and Nirvana. And what, monks, is that middle path? It is this Noble Eightfold Path, namely: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.” I don’t imagine the Buddha would mind me adding “right time” to create a list of the Ninefold Path.

The Buddha understood the Middle Path, or balance, through his own life experience. He was brought up a prince, in great affluence. When he first encountered sickness and death, he realized that his protected life had not prepared him to deal with the reality of suffering. He rejected his upbringing and all worldly pleasures, and swung to the other extreme. He spent all his time meditating. He discovered that this also didn’t prepare him to deal with suffering. He concluded that neither extreme, indulgence or deprivation, was the path to liberation. Instead he proposed the middle way between these two. At one time the Buddha sat by a river and heard a lute player in a passing boat. He understood that the lute string must be tuned neither too tight nor too loose to produce a harmonious sound.

Now turn your mind to Christianity. On first reading, Jesus showed little patience with balance. He seemed to be a radical, an extremist. He said, “If you are not for me, you are against me”, ‘Give up everything and follow me” and “If you are luke-warm, I will spit you out.” In fact the word “balance” occurs very rarely in the Bible. When it does occur, it is the Hebrew word “Mozen” and the Greek word “Zugos”. Both words refer to the poles carried across your shoulders that balance two containers. Each container needed to be a similar weight and in right position in order to maintain balance. What is the meaning of the teaching? I like to think of this as two containers that hold two different but complementary things; like strength and compassion, independence and accountability, patience and urgency, hope and realism, conviction and openness. You need them both in some sort of dynamic partnership.

In Matthew 11; 28-30, Jesus offered the gift of balance (usually translated as yoke) to those who felt heavy with life’s burdens. What did he mean? I imagine that he meant that when life feels overwhelming you have more options than you realize, and more capacity than you give yourself credit for. In my opinion the Christian teaching on balance is close to the idea of flexibility or skilful means.

Hinduism teaches the balance of karma. We tend to think of karma in too literal and linear a way, as if each action is balanced by some specific consequence in this life or another. I saw a bumper sticker that read, “If you can read this, I can hit my brakes and sue you.” It seems to capture the way we think of karma. Karma is not about justice or some sort of reassurance that others will get their just desserts. The way other people treat you is their karma. The way you react is your karma. Karma is a general worldview about balance. Things tend to work themselves out whether we understand the timing or outcomes or not. Balance, as Osho said, is staying in the middle while the universe holds the pieces in place. Your ability to stay in the middle is your karma, because if other people can push your buttons you will keep suffering.

Balance is expressed as moderation in Islam. Despite the recent surge of fundamentalism in Islam, balance is the essence of the religion. Balance is extremely important in Native American spirituality, which emphasizes the notion of harmony. In Navajo spirituality, the word “Hozho” indicates a deeply felt inner harmony. They used rituals to reestablish Hozho when it was lost. They had a unique way to honor returning warriors for example. The family talked to the local medicine man about what the man had experienced at war and they chose a ceremony based on the experience. Families were involved in the preparation and in ceremonial prayers, songs and dances. The ceremonies helped the Navajo war veterans and their families return to a state of balance, or beauty, within the universe.

All the spiritual traditions use their own language and stories to teach about a state of perfect equilibrium; mind, body and spirit in balance. The storms and changes of life can’t shake this balance. Not even a leaf stirs on the well rooted tree that is balance. It is a pond without the slightest ripple. It is the silence of a star filled sky. You know how to access your inner balance. You just forget from time to time.

Balance and the Inner Ear

As a global community, we seem to have lost our Hozho mojo recently. Our world is profoundly out of balance as evidenced by the awful and senseless shootings in Tucson. We have greater freedom than ever, but we don’t have the maturity to use this freedom well. We’ve multiplied our possessions, but lack the inner character to use them with integrity. Our homes are bigger and full of more gadgets, but the relationships inside them are broken. We have impressive, tall buildings, but short tempers. We have vast resources, but narrow viewpoints. We have more convenience, but less time to enjoy it. We have more medicine, but less wellness, more knowledge, but less judgment. We’ve learnt how to add years to life, but not how to fill those years with more life. We’ve conquered outer space, but our inner space lays undiscovered. The world is out of balance. The traditions and your inner wisdom know the way back.

Science has now revealed that the tiny hairs in the middle ear are the place where human balance is controlled. Information is passed from these hair follicles to the brain to stop us from losing balance. Nature is astonishing. It holds its own sacred wisdom. Consider this amazing connection. The Hebrew word for balance (Mozen) shares the same etymology as the word “ear”. Thousands of years before science revealed that our inner ear is the control centre for human balance, the Hebrews used the same word for ear and balance. Is this coincidence or some sort of inherent wisdom?

Coincidence or not, balance is a universal law. And 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, and you have the wisdom to find the middle way.

Balance is a Juggling Act

Balance is a juggling act. 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 beautiful 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. 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. Some of the balls, some of the time, are made of rubber. If you drop them, they just bounce back. The economy is an example of a rubber ball. It will bounce back eventually so keep this in perspective. But some of the other 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 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 wisdom.

May you hear your inner wisdom whispering to you about balance and inner capacity. When despair grows and you feel overwhelmed by the burdens of life, may you know the gift of deep balance. When confusion reigns and disturbed people open fire on children and civic leaders, may the earth and all of its people be restored to balance. Namaste.

Inclusive Christmas- The Recognition of Light in All

Merry Christmas… or Happy Holidays? Which do you say? Do you think it matters? How do you celebrate Christmas in an inclusive way? You may have seen the Ben Stein piece on Christmas that aired on the CBS Sunday Morning show, and has since been passed on by email multiple times. In it he said that as a Jew he wishes people would leave Christmas alone. Say “Merry Christmas”, and call them “Christmas trees” without apology. That’s what they are, so stop being so politically correct. He suggested that we have grown to worship Hollywood personalities more than traditions and because of that we have lost our values. What do you think? It’s an interesting commentary coming from a high profile Jewish man.

What does it mean to be inclusive at Christmas? Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is also more than one way to be inclusive. You can be inclusive in a way that removes points of substance so as not to offend anyone. Or you can be inclusive by creating such a broad perspective on Christmas that many people and possibilities are included. The latter might be better known as Universal Christmas. The former is what we often call political correctness.

Take for example the story of one company’s attempt to create an inclusive Christmas party. A Human Resources Manager sent a memo to all staff about the Christmas party, scheduled to take place on December 23 at the Grill House; with a cash bar and small band playing. Gifts, not exceeding $10, were to be exchanged on the night.

Staff received another memo the next day- “In no way was yesterday’s memo intended to exclude our Jewish employees. From now on we’re calling it our ‘Holiday Party’. There will be no Christmas tree or Christmas carols sung. Happy now? Happy Holidays to you and your family, Pauline.”

The next day another memo was sent- “Regarding the note I received from a member of Alcoholics
Anonymous requesting a non-drinking table, I’m happy to accommodate this request, but if I put a
sign on a table that reads, “AA Only”, you wouldn’t be anonymous anymore!!!! How am I supposed to handle this? Somebody? Oh, and forget about the gift exchange. No gift exchange allowed now since the Union officials feel that $10.00 is too much money and Management believe $10.00 is a little cheap. NO GIFT EXCHANGE WILL BE Allowed.”

And the next day- “What a diverse group we are! I had no idea that December 20th begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which forbids eating and drinking during daylight hours. There goes the party! Perhaps the Grill House can hold off on serving your meal until the end of the party – or else package everything up for you to take home in a little foil doggy bag. Will that work? Meanwhile, I’ve arranged for members of Weight Watchers to sit farthest from the dessert buffet; pregnant women will get the table closest to the toilets; Gays are allowed to sit with each other; Lesbians do not have to sit with gay men; each will have their own table. Yes, there will be flower arrangements for the gay men’s table, too. We will have booster seats for short people. Low fat food will be available for those on a diet. No, we cannot control the salt used in the food. We suggest those people with high blood pressure taste the food first. There will be fresh fruits as dessert for Diabetics; the restaurant cannot supply “No Sugar” desserts. Sorry! Did I miss anything?!?!?!?!?! Pauline.

The next day a memo arrived with the subject line, “Vegetarians”- “Vegetarians, I’ve had it with you people!!! We’re going to keep this party at the Grill House whether you like it or not, so you can sit quietly at the table furthest from the “grill of death”, as you so quaintly put it. You’ll get your salad bar, including organic tomatoes, but you know tomatoes have feeling, too. They scream when you slice them. I’ve heard them scream. I’m hearing them scream right NOW!! Hope you all have a rotten holiday !

The next day there was a memo from the acting Human Resources Manager- “I’m sure I speak for all of us in wishing Pauline Lewis a speedy recovery, and I’ll continue to forward your cards to her. In the meantime, Management has decided to cancel our Holiday Party and instead, give everyone the afternoon of the 23rd December off with full pay.

Maybe you’ve had your own experience with inclusive Christmas that lapses into political correctness. The traditions get lost in what you can’t say for fear of offending someone. You end up saying nothing, standing for nothing and meeting no one’s needs.

Universal Christmas

I heard a story that captures a healthier approach to being inclusive. I’m calling it Universal Christmas.

Under a cultural exchange program a Texan family hosted a rabbi from Russia. It was Christmas time. The family took him to a local Chinese restaurant. At the end of the meal, the waiter brought the check and presented each of them with a small brass Christmas tree ornament. They all laughed when someone pointed out that the ornaments were stamped “Made in India”, but the Rabbi began quietly crying. The family assumed that he was offended by the focus on Christmas but he smiled and said to them, “No. I was shedding tears of joy to be in a wonderful country in which a Buddhist gives a Jew a Christmas gift made by a Hindu.”

This gets closer in my mind to a truly inclusive Christmas. It’s a celebration that brings together people from different backgrounds, different perspectives, and we are reminded that we are all related. Christmas has always been a blend of many cultures, traditions and myths. 4000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia the legend of Marduk emerged- Marduk conquered the monster Tiamat and set the scene for creation. Each year however the monster fought back. As a result, the days got shorter, the crops lay barren and life itself hung in the balance. Each year in late December they celebrated rituals that they believed would help Marduk win his battle with Tiamat. The ultimate sign of victory was the return of light, the lengthening of days.

Christmas was never a purely Christian celebration. It was always a mixture of various cultural practices. Well before the time of Jesus, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, and gave gifts to loved ones at this time of year. The Anglo Saxons and the Teutonic tribes of Germany had winter holidays with things like the Druids sacred symbol of mistletoe and the German symbol of the evergreen, and even the Norse had ancient symbols of gods in sleighs. While we now understand that the Winter Solstice is punctual and reliable, most of the early Christmas/ Solstice myths emerged at a time when the return of the sun was an uncertainty each year. They created ceremonies both as reassurance and as an encouragement to the gods to return. They created huge bonfires on hills to imitate the sun, and to lure it back. They decorated their houses with greenery to imitate the greening earth and to lure the green earth to return. When the days lengthened and the sun shone brighter, the earth began to green again, they believed their rituals had something to do with it. When the light returned, they stopped all their regular activities and had a massive party.

Jesus wasn’t the only significant birth celebrated at this time of year. Apollo, Dionysius, Odin, Opalia, wife of Saturn, and the Phrygian god, Attis, were all said to be born around this time of year. It’s possible that first and second generation Christians were so inspired by their experience of Jesus, that they created a birth story fitting of one of the great gods of their time and located it in December to connect the birth of hope in their lives with the return of light.

Initially, in the years leading up to the birth of Jesus, and in the first years following his death, followers continued many of the earth based seasonal practices. It was only later under the influence of the Roman Empire that the Christian Christmas was set in competition with these pagan festivities.

One of the universal symbols is light. At this time of year we long for a little sunlight, or maybe just the hint of sunlight. It is the season of Winter Solstice when hints of light break into the heaviness of dark days. The Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Devali, Kwanzaa, even Ramadan lanterns if the lunar calendar aligns, are all festivals of light. At least in the Northern Hemisphere, nothing is more associated with Christmas than lights. Even in the Southern Hemisphere with their long, sunny days at this time of year, people typically decorate their houses with lights and attend candle light services on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Light in All

You don’t have to lapse into political correctness, because the essential history and meaning of Christmas is inclusive. As Bart Simpson said, “Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas? The birth of Santa!”

We know a few things about light that the ancients didn’t know. We now know that the sun and the stars are always there whether we see them or not. It’s like walking into the dark night and shining a flash light. You see what is already there, awaiting your attention. One of the universal truths we celebrate at Christmas time is the recognition of light in surprising places. When it seems like you haven’t seen your inner light in months, it’s still there. Light a bonfire on the hillside of your consciousness and put yourself in the path of your own light. If seasonal depression is taking hold, and you haven’t seen the sun for what feels like months on end, and you begin to doubt even the changing of the seasons, let Christmas be a reminder of the light within. Put yourself in the path of its beam.

Author Annie Dillard said, “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.”

One winter day, a man discovered a thick layer of frost on his window. He started painstakingly scraping it off. “What are you doing?” inquired a curious neighbor.

“Removing the frost from my window,” answered the man, “so I can see outside.”

His friend saw that the labor was tedious and advised him, “Light a fire in your home – the frost will disappear by itself!”

The recognition of inner light is the universal Christmas message. Johns Gospel, the latest and most philosophical of all the gospels, doesn’t even tell a birth story. Instead the author speaks about the arrival of light into EVERY person. The author of John, writing around 100 years after the life of Jesus, had caught the universal Christmas message.

How will you celebrate an inclusive Christmas this year? See the light within. If only you could see yourself the way the rest of us see you, the beauty and hidden depths of your heart, you would fall over in astonishment. Thomas Merton put it like this-

“At the center of our being is the pure glory of God in us. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.”

If we truly saw ourselves this way, all fear and judgment would vanish. If we truly saw each other this way, kindness would overcome all darkness.

If I could give you one Christmas gift, it would be an awareness of your own light. Maybe a star would suffice. Maybe a house covered in Christmas lights. Maybe something you could put in the pocket of your mind and pull out every time you need a reminder. YOU ARE CHRISTMAS LIGHT! When the darkness feels heavy and burdensome, you are Christmas light.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Love, Light and Namaste.