Living and Loving
Sacred Stories
She was visiting with her young granddaughter, out for a walk near the canal. They saw this turtle.
As the turtle began to move away from them, her granddaughter motioned to the turtle saying, “More turtle.” She had learned to do that with the dog.
The turtle stopped, turned around and came back their way!
Imagine recognizing divine intelligence everywhere. Breathe into the wildflowers, “Grow.” Tell the coronavirus, “Soften.” Whisper to your sweet spirit, “Fly…”
In the U.S. the 4th of July represents freedom. People often think of freedom as freedom FROM something outside of us, but true freedom is an inside job, and nothing outside of you needs to change for you to enjoy it.
Wednesday night I was unable to fall asleep after John came to bed, so I got up and came in on the bed in the office. At 2:00 am, I was still awake, but I fell asleep some time after that.
At my normal waking time (about 6:00 am) I was enjoying a very stable (lucid) dream state, and I knew I had a choice (or not) to feel (or not) tired. It really isn’t sleep that restores one—we are restored by alignment. What is alignment? Activation of your parasympathetic nervous system….
I have previously posted several tips on activation, but maybe it is worth another quick reminder: (See PNS is BIG; A Chilling Way to Calm Down; Covid-19.
For decades I have enjoyed the benefits of doing a Self-Full Body Connection or meditation or prayer at bedtime so I fall asleep in alignment. I use this metaphor: If your TV is on channel 19 when you fall asleep, it will still be on that channel when you wake up.
With all the stress around the globe, most people are running the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) much of the time. Now, like never before, it is vital to bring ourselves back into alignment again and again.
Ram Dass said that compassion is the ability to see how it all is. When you are worried about “X” or “Y” or “Z” your body is processing EVERYTHING via the sympathetic nervous system. Even if you worry yourself to a solution about SOMETHING, your TV is still set on channel 19.
I saw a beautiful quotation by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer: “When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.”
How amazing that without being fabricated,
This mind, which is unborn and primordially pure,
Is spontaneously present from the very beginning!
This self awareness is naturally free from the very first,
How amazing that it is liberated by just resting — —
At ease in whatever happens!
Flight of the Garuda
Lama Shabkar, Tsogdruk Rangdrol
Think about activation of your sympathetic nervous system as being the storm. Not something outside of you, but what is happening inside. Think also about activation of your parasympathetic nervous system as being coming out of the storm. Also not something outside of you, but what is happening inside.
Sacred Stories
She sent a tree emoji in a text message to a friend, including one with the yoga tree pose.
A little later during a gathering via Zoom, several people expressed how trees help them get or stay grounded and centered. Late arriving to the group, one woman explained that she had been painting a tree, and even turned her iPad around to show the group the trees outside her window!
While her phone’s ringer was off, she had received a text message from another friend. That friend was sharing a video of her baby daughter looking out the window, talking to the trees.
The baby was so engaged with the trees she did not even respond when her mom softly called her name a couple of times.
The only words in the text message were: She knows about the 🌲 🌳
Sacred Stories
During break time on the last day of their meditation retreat, out for a bike ride, she stopped to take photos of some gorgeous blossoms on the side of the road.
She had ridden this same route the day before but had not noticed the blossoms. How could she have missed them? They were so beautiful and there so many of them!
Her fairy image was an Aboriginal-like child with wings where the ears would be!
In the middle of the fairy’s forehead was a spout, out of which light and love and wisdom and blessing poured down upon anyone who was looking up at the tree.
After sharing her drawing, she learned that the noun ‘catalpa’ derives from the Creek katáłpa, a compound word that translates literally as “winged head.”
I feel a little bit like the morning after Christmas, or the ninth day of Hanukkah. For the closing sharing of this eight-day Intensive/Retreat—the culmination of a two-year commitment to study and practice—I had written: When I logged on this morning, Dallas was the only other one online. I asked him about his virtual image in his background – a waterfall. I showed him a photo of me, also at a waterfall in Maui. We had a lovely visit and I am so glad we shared…
That photo of me at the waterfall is framed and sits on my altar helping me value the dharma path that began long before I knew the word dharma.
I was born in fear and I was living in fear. Not MY fear, but THE fear. My mother was informed that she had syphilis simultaneously with the discovery that she was pregnant. My first trimester in her womb was spent with my mom at a sanatorium being treated. She was angry, embarrassed, afraid….
My alcoholic father had had sex with someone else, and that is how my mother got infected. I knew nothing of this until in my 40s when I began to have awareness of feeling unloved, unsafe, and unwanted. I was a successful professional, happily married, and I had had a good relationship with my mom. Nothing could account for those feelings, but I knew they were there.
I knew I would benefit by uncovering the pain.
In a hypnotic regression to the womb, hearing Les Crane sing Desiderata to me through headphones I had total realization of those feelings. Later I asked my mother if she could help me understand. She told me of the syphilis.
Many of you were there when I shared this as part of “Listen to Your Mother” and it is still available on YouTube.
The fear I lived with, the feelings of not loved, not safe, not wanted arose out of the human condition. I am so grateful to know the truth. Those feeling, any feelings, are not me nor mine.
Instead of sharing all of those words as my closing, I simply shared a series of photos of the sky taken from the window in the guest/room office where I was “on retreat” for those eight days, and where I am now with my fingers on the keyboard, looking at the ever-changing sky:
Two years ago,
we did not know that
there was going to be
a COVID-19 in our future.
But of course,
there would be something
in our future.
Some challenge.
And you are meeting it with
wisdom and open hearts.
Please do not forget to imagine…
to hold your heart open
and picture an earth free of disease,
free of hatred
—an earth in which
all sentient beings
can truly flourish.
May it be.
May it be so.
As you see, so you share
As you share, so you become
I am on retreat, and am living the spirit of the law (rather than the letter of the law) by writing a blog post. This intensive / retreat is the culmination of a two-year “Path of Clear Light” study with Barbara Brodsky and Aaron (and a cast of other enlightened teachers). The past semester has been working with sacred darkness. Groundwork is now being laid for a third year: Co-creating with Spirit. This focus is how we move from being in tension to the intention to invite and allow support. Namely this: How do we INVITE the world as we want it to be? How do we INVITE the expression of the self as we wish it to be?
We were led on a guided meditation and then instructed to take paper and crayons or markers or colored pencils and draw this sacred wish for our being in the world. Most of us in my small group commented on our unskilled artistic abilities. There was no lack of skill in the articulation of our sacred wishes….
I did a doodle process where you place a writing instrument on the page, close your eyes and move it around until guided to stop. Open your eyes and turn the page different directions until you see something come into view. The rules are you can embellish or not, add or not, highlight or not. I like those rules.
The words on my drawing that are featured in the top center of this post were written with my nondominant hand. The words on the right side of the drawing were not.
I am the world around me.
What you give birth to has it’s own independence and free will. (Aaron had said this, but including this one might be influenced by learning that I am going to be a great-grandma.)
Everyone has a double and a mirror opposite. Find yourself.
Life expression is joyous.
In my doodle, I included a small section of a process called Zentangle which I learned from Carol Myers. Those words are: I AM LOVE.
Yesterday and today I have thought of the title of the book “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations of Voice” by Terry Tempest Williams. Her mother bequeathed Terry all of her journals, with the promise not to open them until after she had passed. Three shelves of journals were blank….
I opened email this morning to the BK Thought for Today:
No Complaining Zone
If you approach life complaining about what’s missing then you’ll be dissatisfied. Satisfaction comes from knowing things can always be improved but at the same time appreciating what is right in your life right now.
And Aaron’s Daily Quote:
When you say, ‘Thy will be done,’ you’re not saying, ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ you’re saying, ‘I obey this sacred sound within me, this sacred wisdom and clarity and love. I will listen for that and no matter how quiet it is and no matter how loud ego’s voice is, I will keep coming back to that sacred vibration within the heart. That is the will I will follow and not the voice of the ego.’
Perhaps this new world is simply the sacred vibration of love and clarity in a no complaining zone….
I sincerely hope there is not a limit on the frequency of blog posts, as my process is being jarred profoundly by EVERYTHING.
This morning I saw Facebook photos of Stacey (my daughter) and her friend on the pontoon boat on Sunday. Beautiful smiling faces, cheek-to-cheek, looking into the camera: I instantly became aware of the contractions. I am currently writing my July Beyond Mastery Newsletter article for July on the theme of maskers and nonmaskers, placed alongside the story of the Sneetches, by Dr. Seuss.
Further amplifying my inner uneasiness was the reading this morning of poems by two of my Florida poet/friends: “A Disheartened Heart” by Gail Berreitter, and “Second Sight” by Helen Fox. Please understand, these poems are both excellent writings, but they hit too deeply at the core. Slipping in beside the dystopian sentiment expressed in the poems was my confusingly constant companion question about Stacey: How does she arrive at the conclusion that it is OK to expose folks?
Underneath that question is the pain: Less and less do I feel it possible to be with her.
More and more I hold sadness around all of that.
My friend, Jane Foster, so high risk, speaking of meeting for lunch sooner rather than later. (Our “bat cave” favorite restaurant was opening yesterday.)
I write all of this in my journal, then ask my inner being, “Where is the core of fear I feel?”
V: Are you sure it is fear? Are you afraid to die? Are you afraid to be dead? If it were not fear, what might it be?
D: It is a deep sense of sadness. Like the core loneliness of having felt misunderstood much of my life.
V: We know you just bumped into your mother’s social phobia. The world cannot get small enough for you to live without risk. To live a human life is the risk! But, what is at risk? Only a false identity is at risk. Who would you be without that false identity?
D: Free?
V: Free from what? Free for what?
(Note – at this point, I felt guided to turn to the Mala Recitation / Daily Recollection Barbara Brodsky put together, and I am drawn to these beads:
Bead 56: For one who clings, motion exists; but for one who clings not, there is no motion.
Bead 63: Whatever has the nature to arise has the nature to cease and is not me nor mine.
Bead 64: When wholesome thoughts arise, cultivate the wholesome. When unwholesome thoughts arise, abandon the unwholesome.
Bead 65: This is the way to purify the mind and remove the clouds that obscure the vision of ultimate reality.
Bead 70: All dhammas are empty.
Bead 71: They are not born nor annihilated.
The closing two lines from Gail’s poem:
No melody or thought
for a disheartened heart.
The closing two lines from Helen’s poem:
“What have we learned from this crisis?”
There were no definitive answers
Out riding my bike earlier, I would notice the repetitive fearful thoughts and just keep repeating Bead 64: When wholesome thoughts arise, cultivate the wholesome. When unwholesome thoughts arise, abandon the unwholesome.
This early morning is so quiet…. in the stillness of this moment I am feeling the dawn and I am keenly aware of the possibilities alive in this moment.
A melody awakened in my mind as I sat, and I let the stillness be enhanced by listening to a song I know well, by an artist I have personally met. “In the Stillness” is from the album Let it Shine, by Karen Drucker.
Two months ago today, I arrived home in Michigan from wintering in Florida. (See Nothing is Not the Divine.)
We began safe-sheltering in Florida on March 15, and we have continued to safe-shelter since our arrival in Michigan.
But things are starting to open up. When I ride my bike, the quiet is again more intruded upon by cars whizzing by.
How do we take the benefits from this “retreat” time as our lives move outward into the world again? How do/will I? How do/will you?
Deborah King, author of Be Your Own Shaman, and Heal Yourself and the World sent out a message about the June (05-06) 2020 full moon, which is also a lunar eclipse.
[T]here is an opening to bring the unconscious to the conscious level for healing and transformation.
And this full moon combined with the lunar eclipse has this depth tenfold…
In Vedic astrology, eclipses herald change. Combine that with Mars’s energy for making something happen, and Neptune’s energy for oneness, and we have a recipe for people gathering to create necessary change that’s long overdue.
People gathering…. Oneness…. Healing and transformation.
I was one of the first individuals in my world to choose to safe-shelter. I may be one of the last to choose to gather. It is certainly my intention to choose wholesome actions for the good of all.
Today, I will reflect on some of the gifts this time has brought forth. I have certainly made more home-cooked meals. I have not packed a travel bag since December 1, 2019 — the day John and Stacey and I left Tennessee and made the drive to Pine Island. This from a person who had spent most every Wednesday driving the 50 miles to Kalamazoo. I was seeing clients at Kalamazoo Psychology, various other offices, then at Borgess Integrative Medicine. Each week I would stay overnight in Parkview Hills. Over 20 years of co-writing and collaborative working.
The furnishings of the office here in Saint Joseph are currently boxed up, and everything has been moved to the new location. Touch therapies are scheduled to be allowed to open again on June 15.
Choices, choices, choices….
I have certainly done a lot of meditation and I have certainly practiced patience. I have ordered things I wanted/needed online. I have become acutely aware of the difference between wants and needs. I have been content to make do with what I have. I have been content and known how blessed I truly am, in the stillness of this moment. Groceries have come once a week or so, ordered on Instacart, and delivered to our door by good friends, Linda and Larry.
Linda told me last evening that she is going to start going to the store again. She has offered to continue to shop for us if we choose. That is so kind.
Not shopping is my current choice.
Linda said she likes shopping, and she has been out for a few things the past couple of weeks and has appreciated seeing for herself the appropriate precautions that are in place. She feels it is time for them to start generating a more involved living — of course, with continued wearing of masks and social-distancing.
Always we are making choices.
Today, let’s make the choices that create necessary change that’s long overdue….