Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Author: Debra Basham

  • Hello, Fear!

    I am listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn talking about the difference between thinking and awareness. The gift in listening is that it has turned off the fears of dying, and the preoccupation that there might be something wrong with me. I can point to the “facts” connected to my concerns, such as that my right abdomen is very bloated (an ongoing symptom I have had following the hysterectomy I had in November 2012), and the observation I have had for a few months that my right breast is lower than my left. 
    My mom was terrified by life. Admittedly, I learned fear there. Perhaps Mother’s Day is a perfect time for me to forgive her for teaching me fear by taking responsibility for who I am now as an adult. I can begin by integrating what I know about thinking and awareness: the difference between that which flows through the mind—in terms of thoughts, feelings, and emotions—and that which is aware of these things. 
    Jon said the Buddha said all of his teachings can be condensed down to one sentence, “Nothing is to be clung to as I, Me, or Mine.”  Mindfulness is not about suppressing your thinking, it is about not self-identifying with those thoughts, feelings, and emotions that flow through your mind. 
    “When not examined in the larger field of awareness, thinking can run amok.” Our thoughts, feelings, and emotions can make us miserable. It is not my mother’s thoughts of fear around her life that are causing me distress today; my distress comes from my identifying with her thoughts, feelings, and emotions. 
    I value the use of metaphor, symbolism, and story to help get a person out of primitive brain (fight or flight response) and to get into the relaxation response. A great free online source is available at Lightworker.comand I chose to use the Inner Child Cards: 
    What is real about my fear something is wrong with me physically (abdomen bulging and right breast sagging)?
    Eight of Swords  
    The children in the Eight of Swords card are walking, through a cave or labyrinth that represents a soul journey into unknown territories. A labyrinth often has one winding path that leads towards an ultimate goal. It is often used in initiatic procedures. When deep transformation occurs, we are often guided into the secret places of our minds in order to resolve old karmic patterns and subliminal fears. Oriental mystics say that the true self resides in the cave of he heart. We must go there to restore our wisdom.

    The spider represents the enigma of the web, which weaves in and out of itself. Our minds are similar. We reshape and recreate our thoughts continuously. The snake, coiled in a figure eight-the symbol of infinity-is the psychic power and life force within. This snake reminds us of the ancient kundalini energy wisdom that travels up and own our spines, and has been likened to a fiery dragon , sleeping within the root chakra. The ability to readapt in life situations is essential if we are to successfully respond to the calling for change and maturation.

    You may feel that this is a trying time in your life. Put worries aside, for you are entering a sacred journey. Overcoming fear is possible if you are willing to confront its deceptive face. Perhaps you are not honoring this time of initiation. The way to do so is to illuminate the deep fears that block your life and be ready to come to terms with their potent meanings. This is a unique opportunity to clean the house of your psyche. There is always light at the end of a tunnel.  

    And a general question: What is real about death?   
    Ace of Crystals
    In northern folklore and legend, a belief exists that during the winter months when the Earth is silent and asleep, under her blanket of snow the gnomes are busy weaving crystals from the light of the Moon, Sun, and stars. When the rebirth of springtime arrives, the gnomes offer these precious gems to the sky, and through the gentle rain of springtime, magnificent rainbows are created.

    The hardworking gnome in this card has uncovered a beautiful crystal for you. The time has come for you to accept the promise of hope, unity, and abundance that this crystal brings. The rainbow in the sky is a bridge uniting heaven and Earth and representing the harmony of all people. The Chinese called the rainbow the t’ai chi, or “Great Ultimate,” uniting yin and yang.

    When the Ace of Crystals appears in your reading, great potential is being uncovered and tremendous possibilities are present in your life, for this card depicts a dynamic rebirth on the physical level. You may be birthing something magical, be it a baby, a business, a book, a relationship, or a new phase of self-expression. You are blessed by the presence of the glorious crystal brought to you by this humble gnome. An ace in any suit says, “Yes!” Begin anew. Many ideas and dreams that have been hidden for years are now revealed. Join the light of a new day. Blessed be.

     

  • Life-Saving Change of Plans

    The young couple lived very full lives managing a bed and breakfast/retreat center. One winter morning, they went to church with plans to stay for the potluck after the service, however, they decided to go straight home. Sitting down at the table for lunch, he thought he heard someone calling out but could not determine a source until he walked out the back door and realized a guest had fallen through the ice and was fighting to get out of the frigid water!

    She called 911, while he grabbed a sled and raced to the lake. Lying down on the sled, using the runners, he carefully pushed himself across the ice to the open water where his guest was now unconscious in the water. When emergency workers arrived, they threw a line and pulled them both off the ice.

    Unknown to them at that time, the guest had left the house at 12:35, fallen through the ice where some underground springs caused open water under the snow, and had been submerged in the near-freezing water for over an hour before being discovered! Using warming blankets, the emergency team worked for almost an hour trying to no avail to warm him enough to even measure his temperature. Arriving at the hospital, his internal body temperature was only up to 80 degrees.

    He regained consciousness. After spending the night in the intensive care unit under observation he was able to be discharged the following day

    When the owner of the bed and breakfast was later sharing about having arrived on the scene as they were pulling him out of the water and about his amazing recovery, someone said the body’s systems all shut down in hypothermia so that is probably what saved him, the owner quickly clarified, “It was a God thing. He is now working in full time ministry.”

    For sure, the last minute change of plans of this couple to not stay for the potluck was life-saving!

  • Three Candles

    He had suffered great abuse as a child, and while his was not an easy story to share, he was nearly finished writing his memoir. He had come to an open mic event for writers. The evening began with a potluck meal and casual conversation before the sharing began.

    He began reading about himself as an innocent 5-year-old child, tied to a radiator, left in a rat and roach infested room in the dark.

    As he read the horrendous account of what he had survived, the lights when out! The entire neighborhood was suddenly plunged into total darkness.

    Three candles burned on the counter—having been lit by the hostess.
    3 candles

    The lights flicked on and off a few times, and then off again. He moved over by the candles and continued reading in the dim light.

    As he finished reading, the lights came back on.

  • In Her Authority


    I have been revisiting a pattern of physical pain that was years ago key in my journey. Back then—ah, interesting—it was a “back” problem that caused me to quit my job and totally redirected the work I do in the world. It is how I became interested in holistic health, and it is something I am profoundly grateful for.
    Over the winter I had some slight symptoms, but this past week I have been experiencing a lot ofdiscomfort in my left hip, knee, and leg. It is odd that it comes and goes. Some times I have barely been able to hobble around, and other times I have had absolutely no sensation of discomfort.
    This morning I looked up hip and leg problems in Louise Hay’s Heal Your Body. Ah, fear of going forward in major decisions, nothing to move forward to…. The affirmation: I am in perfect balance. I move forward in life with ease and with joy at every age.
    I drew an Angelic Messenger Card. The messages are by Meredith L. Young-Sowers, and the photography was done by Carol Duke. You can access them online, but I was blessed to be gifted a deck by a friend who had allowed us to rent her home on Pine Island the past three winters. In the three years of using this deck, I have never previously drawn this card!

    #14 Inner Authority
    Present Challenge
    Gaining confidence in using your inner wisdom to sustain relationships.

    By drawing this card of Partnership you are being urged to reconsider your opinion of yourself. In appreciating your own inner beauty and inestimable value you become better able to support and interact with the diverse opinions and attitudes expressed by others.

    You may be feeling that others often disregard you, fail to meet your needs, or override or undervalue you and/or your efforts. You may feel sometimes overshadowed by others who have more inner authority. You long to be fully united with your own true nature, to eliminate the inner hollowness and find renewed deep health and purpose. This card comes to you in order to encourage you to nurture your inner authority so that you are better able to move into meaningful and fulfilling relationships.

    Angelic Message – Inner Authority

    Inner authority is spiritual energy born from union with the Divine. Inner authority is seen in what you say and what you don’t say, in the quality, tone, and reverence with which you approach all living things. When you speak out of love, out of commitment, out of determination, you are ordering the forces of energy within you and the Universe toward the harmony of purpose, and explosion of power. This inner combustion takes place when you turn your attention inward and give time to your spirit.

    You do not need to ask permission to love yourself, because loving yourself is the natural state of humanness. You are encouraged by the Universe to find and live the fullest expression of your own unique nature; nothing less is sufficient to you or God. Your inner authority develops as your need for outer authority diminishes and as you listen continually for the voice of your inner mind, your spirit.

    Possessing inner authority is at the core of creating and sustaining lasting relationships and spiritual community. True community is based on each person’s willingness and ability to maximize each opening to spiritual growth while also honoring this process in the others. People have an underdeveloped inner authority from a lack of commitment to the purpose of their own life, which is to give rise to their spirit’s fullest bloom.

    Inner authority comes not from an immediate material or spiritual “success” but from perseverance. You gain inner authority with the belief and inner expectation, that you do have an essential inner beauty that is priceless, worth struggling to uncover and to know. You’ve come into this life having already lived and blossomed before in many extraordinary ways. Your search now is to uncover this lifetime’s essential core so that you may also indirectly absorb the learning from past lives. Your journey is the awakening of your inner authority, and this voice, this spiritual energy, can contribute to your fulfillment in relationships and act as the force to bring you and your Earth into peaceful times. 
    Spiritual Opportunity
    The guidance available to you through the flower image on this card is to take a long, hard look at the future you hope to create and to realize that it will never be simpler or more difficult than in this moment. The multiple colors, shapes, and designs within this flower show you, symbolically, that your life is never all good or all bad but is rather a continual blend of the emotional and spiritual experiences and energies. Your life is never totally clear of obstructions or factors that need resolution. The challenge is to begin to create, one moment at a time, knowing that today, like tomorrow, will have its conflicts.

    Your guidance suggest that you can step up to today’s opportunities because you have the seeds of spiritual love and awareness already in your life, now within this magnificent blend of sorrow, joy, loss, and gratitude. In placing more emphasis on exploring your own inner authority, you’ll be less easily sidetracked or put off by the demands and expectations of others and more able to create the future you choose.

    Application

    Write down what your inner authority spiritual voice “sounds” like to you. Observe the people and circumstances in which you already use your inner authority. How does it feel when you use this more aligned inner energy? Why don’t you use it with certain others? What do you need in order to use this inner authority voice more often?

    Ask those you live with or your closest family members or friends to discuss the idea of an inner authority voice. Ask each person to share with you information about the times and the ways they are able to use their own inner authority voice. Ask each person how each can help the others call forth their own inner voices more often. Place a small sticker on your daily calendar identifying the days in which you feel you are actively using your inner authority and thereby reinforcing this new alignment.

    Letting this amazing message seep into my consciousness, I felt myself affirming God’s will in my life, and for just a moment I slipped into an old belief system that God might be asking me to do something I do not really want to do (or feel capable of doing). Almost instantly I gratefully recalled these words of truth I had just read yesterday in the Deep Spring Center Thought for Today!
    As I was sharing all of this with a dear friend, I noticed that throughout the document the voice to text function had replaced “inner authority” with “in her authority.” Our world is recovering from the Patriarchal view of God as a strong-armed father who knows best. What an injustice to this quiet, sacred, vibration of the Divine within our hearts. 
    I have begun affirming the truth: I am in perfect balance. I move forward in life with ease and with joy at every age IN HER AUTHORITY. You are welcome to join me. I think we might just be rewriting HIStory.

  • # 28 Courage

    It was March 16, 2015. She shuffled the deck, and randomly chose a card. The card she drew was number 28, “Courage.”

    courage

    Application

    When you feel yourself on a threshold of change or choice and are unsure what to do, try praying, “Dear guardian angel, please allow me to benefit from this change and to know the course of action I should take. Allow my guidance to be shown to me in such direct and obvious ways that I can be at peace, knowing I won’t overlook or fail to see the guidepost. Let my intention for service and right choices be heard clearly, and let me trust that what comes to me will benefit my life appropriately.”

    Angelic Messenger Cards by Meredith L. Young-Sowers (Photography by Carol Duke)

    As she entered the information into her journal, she noticed she had drawn this same card exactly one year ago!

  • Missing Glove

    Claudia - glove and photo
    One of her gloves was missing. She searched her car, checked the house, and even called the last home she had been in the previous day asking if she might have left a glove. She distinctly remembered having put both of her gloves, along with her hat, into the basket on the shelf in the coat closet when she came in from work.

    When they heard the crash, she and her husband were nowhere near the closet, but when they discovered the basket on the closet floor, there inside it was the missing glove!

    She noticed the flag honoring her father’s military service was on that top shelf. Perhaps it was taking up too much room so the basket was not secure? Taking the flag down from the shelf, she placed it with some other items of his she had in the spare bedroom. Turning to leave the room, she heard another CRASH.

    The framed photo of her father’s mother and father had just fallen over…. Nothing else on the dresser was disturbed, and she knew immediately she was being communicated with from beyond.

  • Coffee Stains

    Ah, too many books were piled on her piano stool and end table, and then, “SPLASH!” Her previously full cup of coffee was now on the carpet, the drapes, and had drizzled down into the magazine rack.

    While she was busy cleaning up the mess, she came across a book that she had gotten free with a magazine subscription years ago. She had forgotten about it entirely.

    The book, How to Clean Practically Anything, opened to this section on cleaning coffee from carpet!
    coffee stains

  • Two Worlds


    Years ago, I opened a sermon with this illustration: Three guys have been stranded on a desert island for a very long time when one of them finds a magic lantern containing a genie. The genie grants them each one wish. The first guy wishes he was off the island and back home─and poof!, he is back home. The second guy wishes the same thing─and poof!, he is gone too. The third guy says, “I’m lonely. I wish my friends were back here with me.”
    It is really important to keep our wits about us when we are making our wishes, isn’t it….
    One of the things about wishing is that it can come as a result of not being present with or appreciative of what currently is. I have been very aware of that the past few weeks as we were preparing to leave Pine Island and come home to Michigan, especially given that the home we had been wintering in for the past three years would no longer be available to us next season.
    As a child, feeling homesick was a very common emotion, and I can bump into that feeling even as an adult, so I made a conscious choice to do my best to stay present. I wanted to neither feel grief about letting go of a space that had been very nurturing to me, nor to long for another place that is filled with people that I love.
    Wrapping my days with this intention, I organized my departure well enough to enjoy nature visits with Nancy, a friend I share both Michigan and Florida with. Nature seemed to respond to my intention in spades! 
    Visiting one of the nearby eagle nests, Nancy and I were treated to soaring eagle chick, not once, but twice! And the day before my departure, she and I had the most amazing dolphin sighting. 
    Our encounter was so prolonged, and unusual even in a setting where dolphins are common, I looked up the symbolic meaning of dolphin. Please honor the author by checking out the link for yourself, and enjoy this wonderful summary: 
    Christian symbolism conveys the dolphin as an aspect of Christ. Dolphins seen in Christian art are symbolic of resurrection. Some artists utilize the protective, stabilizing, compassionate demeanor of the dolphin as a message of wellbeing to the pure of heart. 
    Some artistic renditions speak of dolphins transporting the spirits of the faithful to Christ’s side upon leaving their physical bodies. 
    This dolphin meaning is mimicked in ancient Greece where legend tells us the dolphin was responsible for carrying the souls of the dead to the Islands of the Blessed.
    • Playfulness
    • Transcendence
    • Gentleness
    • Harmony
    • Intelligence
    • Contentment
    • Friendship
    • Community
    • Resurrection
    • Generosity
    • Power

    The following evening, as we had left Florida and were heading north, we walked to a small restaurant near the hotel we were staying for the night. As I walked the short block, I was having cellular memory of other times and places I had walked to dinner. It was so clear that dolphin meaning was working:

    This is a key understanding because the dolphin meaning is connected with themes of duality. It has to do with the dolphin being both fish and mammal. It is both of the water, and an air breather. Ergo, dolphin symbolism talks to us about “being in two worlds at once.”

    As I bid farewell to Florida and hello to Michigan via some delicious days with Stacey and Doug and Brad and Christina and Adam and Courtney in Tennessee, I say thank you to two worlds. There is great love for all!

  • Lily Lives!

    Late one Friday night, a mother’s car slid into an icy river. Fourteen hours later a fisherman spotted the car and called the authorities.

    When the rescue workers arrived at the scene, they heard a voice (not a child’s voice) calling “Help me” from inside the car. They found the mother’s body in the driver’s seat.

    Her eighteen month-old daughter, Lily, was in the back seat dangling inside her car seat—still alive!

  • Timely Phone Call

    She let the busy of her day keep her from sending the text message, but off and on, all day long, her friend kept popping into her head.

    As the evening dark was falling around her, her cell phone rang. She saw the face of her friend and answered saying, “So you got my message!”

    “Where are you?” her friend asked.

    “Did you call because you knew I was thinking about you?”

    “I did not call you. You must have called me. I am on the phone with my dad.”

    “You called me! My phone rang.”

    “Oh, my god…. Can I call you back after I finish with my dad?”

    She learned that stress was thick in that phone call with her friend and her dad. How did (at that moment) the phone dial another number? Especially her number….However it happened, the result was a loving connection that made a huge difference.