Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Tag: SCS Matters

  • Inter-Are

    I have been wondering about the distinction between self care and nurture (kindness and wisdom) and “distraction.” Might we be doing wholesome actions such as exercise or journal writing, or playing music, without being skillful?

    Additionally, I wrote to Barbara Brodsky, Founding Teacher of Deep Spring Meditation Center, asking about all of this. “We are encouraged to skillful practice of support practices, Metta, Tonglen, etc., that are a part of Buddhism. Might it also be appropriate to develop skillful support practices that come from outside of Buddhism? For example, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Tapping on the meridians, while being present with difficult body or mind states, and saying skillful statements can support insight and release of painful karmic patterns. One does not try to avoid the emotion, one feels (touches) the emotion, then moves through a process of working with the emotion at the level of energy and awareness.”

    Barbara clarified that the primary distinction isn’t the specific practice but what truly has drawn the practice forth. Was the motivation genuine kindness or was fear present, thereby was the real desire to “fix” something?

    Barbara went on to say that all support practices from any tradition are helpful when motivated from a spacious and kind desire to attend, rather than from a contracted fearful need to fix.

    Barbara said the ‘Daily Quote’ from Aaron clarified the question perfectly.

    When we release some of the self-identity and separation, we come to feel our interconnection with everything. The tree dances with the wind not because the wind forces the tree but because the wind and tree literally inter-are. They share the same core of being. The wind is the tree; the tree is the wind. And so they dance together. You can dance with life in the same way. ~ Aaron

    Barbara’s summation was simply, “When our practice comes from that place of interconnection, we are attending with skillful support.”

    At the relative level we appear to be separate, but at the ultimate level, there is no separate self. You can understand that no wave is separate from the ocean. The wind and the tree and you and I dance with life. We inter-are….

  • Rob Swartz

    Sacred Stories

    While in a client session, she suggested a soul purpose reading with Rob Swartz, a man she had just spent the week with on retreat.

    Her client said, “Rob Swartz! I just listed to his podcast!”

    While she had met Rob at the retreat, she did not know about the podcast.

    Rob’s podcast is l-o-n-g, but you will probably find it worth every second, as it is touching on everything from politics to suicide to atheism. What a gift!

    These are sacred stories. Pay attention to happenings in your life. Do you have a story to share? Send email to debra@scs-matters.com.

  • The Aftermath

    You see, I have this weird, but in my experience, validated faith that if I surrender myself to my own words, the ones that came without too much cogitation or premeditation, they will lead me to a place I didn’t know I’d be visiting; they will show me 1) What I didn’t know was on my mind when I started, and 2) What I didn’t know I knew about that particular subject.

    Sydney Lea, page 195, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, by Diane Lockward.

    Sitting in my Snowbird Poets group, I placed my fingers on the keyboard barely breathing and witnessed The Aftermath.

    Time is nonexistent, Dear One, non-exist-ant

    Standing barefoot
    I am aware
    of things I am too young to know

    Stripped of my innocence
    when he climbed on top of me
    in the courtyard
    beneath the Viburnum

    That snowball bush was in full bloom
    while I was not
    yet
    but soon would be

    Ten years later
    I hear from some
    deep drug-induced fog:
    “If we don’t get her awake
    she is never going to
    have this baby!”

    Then: “It’s a girl!”

    53 years later
    my twenty-year-old granddaughter
    takes off on a bicycle
    as a sinking feeling
    of fear
    flashed fast across my face

    Of course, she was right
    I would have let her brothers go—
    without so much as a second thought

    But the Viburnum will bloom
    again and again
    unlike a young girl’s innocence

    Debra Basham 03-18-2019

    See Processing.

    Pearl Bailey says there’s a period of life where we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.

    Bailey’s words sing the truth. I had come from a legacy of women who had worn the shackles of sexual shame. My mother had a first marriage she did not tell us about, and I did not learn until I was in my forties that she had discovered she had a sexually transmitted disease at the same time she found out she was pregnant for me.

    I became pregnant on New Years Eve, three weeks before I turned sweet sixteen on January 22, 1966. I got married, and I was forced to leave high school in tenth grade. (See Loved and Wanted: Listen to Your Mother.)

    My daughter, and my granddaughter have carried that legacy of sexual shame, but none of us need carry it any longer. It is time for all women to be free….

    A Course In Miracles

    LESSON 60

    God is the Love in which I forgive.

    God does not forgive because He has never condemned. The blameless cannot blame, and those who have accepted their inno­cence see nothing to forgive. Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God’s Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me up to Him.

    I do not have written permission to share these words from Each Day a New Beginning: Daily Meditations for Women by Karen Casey © 1982, 1991 by Hazelden Foundation, but the message must be shared:

    For too many of us, feelings of shame, even self-hatred, are paramount. No one of us has a fully untarnished past. Every man, every woman, even every child experiences regret over some action. We are not perfect. Perfection is not expected in the Divine plan. But we are expected to take our experiences and grow from them, to move beyond the shame of them, to celebrate what they have taught us.

    Each day offers us a fresh start at assimilating all that we have been. What has gone before enriches who we are now, and through the many experiences we’ve survived, we have been prepared to help others, to smooth the way for another woman, perhaps, who is searching for a new direction.

    We can let go of our shame and know instead that it sweetens the nuggets of the wisdom we can offer to others. We are alike. We are not without faults. Our trials help another to smoother sailing.

    I will relish the joy at hand. I can share my wisdom. All painful pasts brighten someone’s future, when openly shared.

  • Processing

    Our granddaughter spent this past week with us. It has been six years since she had done that, and it was quite a week! As her mom said, “You cannot spend a week with Gammie without processing!”

    Our first processing was my bout with an intestinal bug the day she arrived.

    The second processing was my missed opportunity. Stacey and all the kids refer to a winter visit with us as retirement training. True to form, our big evening event after watching Wheel of Fortune was a game of 500 rummy at the dining room table, during which Courtney said, “I am wishing I had my car.”

    My missed opportunity was to just be honest with her and let her know I understood her feeling. Instead, I launched into an unskillful articulation of why it was best for us that she not have her car.

    We did not have an overt scene, but there was definitely a loss of rapport, and as soon as the game of rummy was over, she retreated to her room.

    I took the lump in my throat to bed with me.

    The following morning, I continued processing as I sat with my journal (See Writing Down Your Soul).

    Gratefully, after she got up, Courtney and I sat on my bed for over an hour just talking heart-to-heart about LIFE. I shared my painful history around the sexual double-standard. I admitted to having been unskillful the previous night, and I thanked her for not giving up on me.

    We spoke of significant things including: my mother’s having hidden a first marriage; my pregnancy at age 16; the culture that forbade my attending school because I was sexually active and a bad influence on the other girls; Courtney’s mom’s divorce from her dad.

    Generations of sexual guilt and shame has been carried by the women in our lineage.

    Courtney and I took turns with the tears…

    Thursday night she sang karaoke at the American Legion and she killed it! One women came over to our table after Courtney’s first number and said, “My husband has an amazing tenor voice. Your singing moved him to tears.”

    At the end of her last number, the DJ took the mic and announced, “We have taken a vote, and Courtney R. cannot go home. We are going to adopt her so she can stay here with us on Pine Island.”

    It was such a HUGE night of affirmation for all of us.

    Retirement training continued….

    Friday morning Courtney played shuffleboard with her Gampie and all afternoon she sat in our TV room with him and a half dozen of his senior citizen friends playing mountain music and singing.

    After the music, Courtney decided to ride her bike over to Ragged Ass. She did not ask to use the car. She said she would go for a little while before dinner. She asked me to send her a text to let her know what time dinner would be.

    Our rockin’ Friday night was to be spaghetti dinner and dominoes with some of our Michigan friends. Her last night of spring break.

    As Courtney took off on her bike, I had a sinking feeling. I could not even tell you exactly what it was, but our good friend, Nancy, saw it in my face and asked me if all was well. I said, “We will see how it plays out.”

    A few moments later, as I finished putting the house back together after the music gathering, I could not find my phone. I had John dial my number. Courtney answered! “I took Gammie’s phone by mistake.”

    As we hadn’t finalized the time for dinner, and now I did not have my phone, I asked John to send a text message to our friends asking what time we were planning to eat. Dinner would be at 5:30.

    Because I knew we would be out for the evening, and busy off-island all day on Saturday before taking Courtney to the airport, I had several things needing to be attended to. I asked John to send Courtney a text message telling her I needed my phone. He did that.

    She did not reply.

    A while later, I asked John to clarify exactly what he had said to her in the text message to about my phone. He had written, “Gammie needs her phone.”

    More time went by and still no response.

    I looked at John’s phone to see what time he had sent the message.

    He had also sent her a message saying dinner was at 5:30 so she needed to be back to leave at 5:15.

    I told him it was unfortunate he had done that as it had given her an implied permission it was OK to not return home with my phone before then.

    I was trying to calm down, willing myself to accept what was happening, but as time went by with still no reply to the text messages, I was having a harder time finding my center.

    John and I were both becoming more and more triggered, and clearly we were reliving a difficult event when Courtney had come to Michigan the previous summer.

    John grabbed his keys, headed for the door saying, “I’m going to get her. I’ll throw her @$$ in the car and put the bike on the rack.”

    (The bike rack was on the car, because we would be returning her borrowed bike to the friends we were having spaghetti dinner and playing dominoes with.)

    I told John going to get her and embarrassing her would not be kind to any of us and would only make things worse. Already after 5:00, it was too late for me to take care of the things I had wanted my phone for, so we both needed to just calm down.

    I called Courtney. “Baby, I need you to come home. Your grandpa and I are in a big drama that all started because you took my phone and then didn’t answer our text messages. Since you’re in the middle of it, we need you to come home and help us work through this.”

    When she came in, she was red-faced from racing home on the bike in the heat, and she was obviously now upset too.

    Fortunately, it only took us a couple of minutes of processing to realize John had been sending the text messages to my phone — thinking that was the only phone she had! She obviously was not checking messages on my phone.

    We all saw choice points….

    Courtney said she could have returned with my phone as soon as she realized she had it.

    John said he could have asked rather than assumed if she had her phone too.

    I said I could have used John’s phone to send the text messages myself rather than asking him to send them. I knew she had her phone.

    It would have helped if I had noticed he was sending the text messages to my phone rather than hers when I had looked at the time of the messages!

    It was important to me to have Courtney know her Gampie had been so triggered that he wanted to ‘drag her @$$ out’ and I had stopped him from doing that.

    I thanked her for helping us release not only the difficult time of her visit the summer before, but more importantly, an old pattern of the painful triangle of parenting between Debra/John/Stacey. John would let me be seen as the bad guy.

    We all cried and we hugged and Courtney said it really bothers her to be yelled at.

    I clarified that I had not yelled at her. I had been emotionally upset, but I had told her what was going on and I had stated clearly what I needed from her.

    We were able to recover without any additional processing; and I think we all enjoyed our spaghetti dinner. I know Courtney enjoyed winning at dominoes!

    She sent this precious text message while waiting at the airport:
    “I loved my week with y’all! Even the processing…. haha.”

    Here are two treasured photos taken at the same restaurant near the airport: the first in 2013 when she was 14, and the second after an amazing week of processing with this beautiful woman who calls me Gammie.

    This may be the most significant week of processing of entire my life!

  • Beautiful White Butterfly

    Sacred Stories

    She had traveled to India by herself. As she arrived at the airport, she felt a bit nervous, wondering just how in the world she was going to manage to find her way around.

    A beautiful white butterfly suddenly caught her attention.

    She became mesmerized watching it.

    A few moments later, it few off.

    As she exited the airport, she was surprised and delighted to see a car and driver, waiting, holding a poster with her name on it!

    These are sacred stories. Pay attention to happenings in your life. Do you have a story to share? Send email to debra@scs-matters.com.

  • Being Cared For

    Sacred Stories

    Her husband was coming home from the hospital, scheduled to have home care for about a month until the wound on his leg was healed.

    She was on the phone with the home care company who had failed to identify the leg infection previously when she suddenly had a very strong energetic visit from a friend who was in spirit.

    She backed off the phone call.

    It was as though her friend was right there in the room saying, “NO, NO, NO!”

    She worked with the hospital to get another home care company set up. This company specialized in the exact type of wound vac dressing her husband was coming home with.

    Sharing all of this with another friend, who also knows the woman in spirit, she simply wrote, “We are being cared for by everyone here!!!”

    These are sacred stories. Pay attention to happenings in your life. Do you have a story to share? Send email to debra@scs-matters.com.

  • The Substance of All Things

    Art is remembrance.
    It is love.
    It is like a sword
    that distinguishes
    between appearance and reality.
    ~ Rupert Spira

    I have been wondering just what it is that allows some people to find joy or see beauty or create art where it might have been missed by another.

    Musing is jogged by such mundane objects as coconuts and trees and chickens! My sweet friend, Carol L. Myers, with her recent display:

    Not only did someone take time to create these coconut faces (below), someone also displayed them where others could share in the joy.

    And someone paid great attention to detail.

    Artists are like that. Artists pay attention. An artist can see something that has been there all along, but not noticed, and an artist shares what is there with the world.

    Butch Farubetti looked at a Norfolk Pine that had been cut down and saw a ‘hidden treasure’ inside.

    In The Art of Peace and Happiness (Presence, Volume 1), Rupert Spira says this about art:

    An apparent object is never itself beautiful. True art is neither representation nor abstraction. It is revelation—the revelation that love, rather than inert matter, is the substance of all things.

  • Heart in a Tree

    Sacred Stories

    Her day was done, and her thoughts peacefully tucked, beyond the soiled ground, which soaked up the rain drops. While yet, the sun glowed with radiant delight. A sweet glow of tangerine mist filled the sky, as her heart settled near the base of the tree.

    She sat reflecting, the moment, of stillness, and felt two hearts close to hers. Her mom, and now her dad.

    Her eyes drifted to the middle of the tree.

    A heart with much fullness embraced her, drawing her in.

    She felt a breeze, and wiping the tears from her eyes, she heard a whisper. She listened again. She heard it with her ears. She listened yet again, and this time it came from her heart:

    “I will never leave you. My heart surrounds yours. I will be with you. Trust your heart, I will guide you. We love you, Mom & Dad.”

    These are sacred stories. Pay attention to happenings in your life. Do you have a story to share? Send email to debra@scs-matters.com.

  • Customer Service

    You have to love it when lessons come so closely you are able to see both sides of a coin clearly…. That has been my recent experience around customer service.

    Stopping by a Little Free Library, I was so surprised by the thoughtfulness of leaving a pair of reading glasses on the shelf!

    The ‘readers’ came in very handy for my daughter, Stacey, so she could pick out a book for rainy-day reading as she enjoys retirement training with us for the week.

    Although I had the receipt, returning a light switch that did not match my switch plate cover was met with, “You will have to come back tomorrow when the manager is in. She is off on Monday.”

    Mentioning that I was 9 miles away, and that I had arrived by bicycle (I was wearing my helment), produced no mercy. I felt the annoyance, but once out in the parking lot, I thought to return as ask about any other times of business the manager was not normally there.

    The following morning, I drove back, and asked to see the manager. A different cashier said the manager was in, but she was in the office on the phone placing an order. As I waited, she and I chatted between customers. She had been born in Mexico, her mom lives now in Illinois. When the time became L_O_N_G, she said, “I am going to just take care of this for you. You have waited too long, and you should not have had to come back in the first place.” She completed the transaction just as the manager came around the counter, still on the phone, making eye contact with me and nodding her head, yes.

    When I got home from the hardware store, I realized I must have only received change for a $10 rather than my $20 when I had met friends for coffee earlier at the Getaway Cafe.

    Driving back to the cafe, I excused myself, and said, “When I was in earlier, I think you may have given me change for a $10, rather than my $20.” Handing him my business card, I went on, “If you are over $10 when you settle your drawer, just send a text or give me a call.”

    Taking my card, he opened the drawer, and handed me a $10 bill, saying, “You take this. I get busy and it is more likely you are right. If I am short, I will call you. You should not have to drive back because of my mistake.”

    Later that day at meditation, I shared all of this as a way to notice how, looking at all of our interactions as customer service, what is the impression I am making in the world….

  • Acorn

    Sacred Stories

    At the conclusion of the retreat, everyone pitched in to clean the common areas. As she was stacking chairs in the meeting room, she found a small acorn.

    She picked it up, and took it home.

    A couple of days later, she picked up the acorn and held it in her hand as a “touchstone” while she meditated. When she finished meditation, she opened the Daily Word to read the message for that day, she read these words: As I hold a small acorn…

    These are sacred stories. Pay attention to happenings in your life. Do you have a story to share? Send email to debra@scs-matters.com.