I’m so often struck by life’s generous and wise synchronicity – how often just the right thing appears at just the right time.  Yesterday, I opened The Endless Practice, by Mark Nepo, to the following passage.  Perhaps, it will touch you, as it did me.

Emerging, Again

       "Short of being killed we always emerge from difficulty in a stronger if rearranged form.  And waking as human beings, where the human is finite and the being is infinite, there’s always more spirit in us than one life can carry.  By our very nature, each of us is challenged to grow out of one self into another….

       "We blossom and outgrow selves the way butterflies emerge from cocoons.  Mysteriously, saying yes is one of the ways we begin to emerge.  Saying yes is how the infinite spirit we’re born with keeps moving through us into the world, redefining us each time it emerges….

       "Meeting the transformations that hardships hold is a deep form of saying yes that makes every soul on Earth blossom….

       "It takes inner fortitude to stand firmly in what we’re given, no matter where it leads.  That we can stand at all in the face of pain and fear is nothing short of anonymous magnificence.  So never diminish or underestimate your worth or connection to the nature of things, because stress or pain blocks your sureness.  An archer’s bow is always stretched before it releases its arrow, as the arc of a soul is always stretched before releasing its wisdom."

Mark Nepo, The Endless Practice, pp. 61-62

Killjoy Thoughts

       I’m amazed again and again at how easily and automatically I abandon the enjoyment of life in the moment, thanks mainly to well-practiced, ruminative, anxious, self-judging, combative inner pathways – old habits of negative thinking – and hours spent wrestling with the inner judge, conjuring fearful “what ifs”, having imaginary conversations to deal with imagined scenarios.  What a deadening energy drain.

       Neuroscientists say we are wired with an automatic tendency to focus on what’s negative.  There was a time, during our dangerous past as a species, when this negative perceptual bias was adaptive.  It kept us alert to the possibility of a tiger lurking in the bush – and, therefore, more likely to survive.  However, it also made us more likely to miss the luscious piece of fruit hanging nearby. 

       This negative bias is not so adaptive now.  It’s time re-train the brain – to disengage from killjoy thoughts, to consciously cultivate a joyful presence in the moment, to see the beauty around us and feast on the luscious fruit of right now.

Author’s note:  I know it’s been a while since I last posted.  Other priorities, of late, have claimed the lion’s share of my time and energy and may continue to do so for a couple months.  During that time, postings may be irregular.  I remain committed to our conversation and will write when I can.  Blessings!!  

Fluid and Free

       As a new year embarks, I think of life as a near-infinite series of hellos and goodbyes. 

       Life’s journey asks us to greet what comes with open eyes and open heart, to respond from a place of embodied integrity and, then, to release and let go – softening inside to the next moment, the next hello.

       The New Year reminds us that we are free.  Each moment offers a chance to experiment, to alter an old pattern, to be fully present and original in this moment – no matter how often in the past we have been (or how often in the future we might be) absent and automatic. 

       The season invites peaceful fluidity.  As we soften - resisting less and less - hellos and goodbyes melt into each other.  We find stillness in life’s ever-present movement.

Merry Oneness

       “God is an infinite secret hiding in the open, waiting for each of us to slow enough to inhabit our aliveness through our bareness of being.  When we can do so, we become conduits of spirit that continually converge toward an ultimate unity.”   (Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, p. 81)

       Christmas speaks to us of oneness.  In the person and teaching of Jesus, the secret that hides in the open – that we cannot be separated from God or from each other - is revealed and celebrated.

       Relax.  Soften.  Let life live you.  Celebrate connection.  Celebrate oneness. 

       Merry Christmas!

Vulnerable and Safe 2

       This morning, as I was practicing what I wrote about yesterday, I wondered if it would help to write a bit more concretely about how we can stay present both with our feelings and with the ground of being.

       When I’m present to the world of feelings, I am in effect saying:  “Yep, I feel scared.  Yep, I feel angry.  Yep, I feel hurt, sad, embarrassed, ashamed, excited, nervous, jealous, joyful ….  Yep, I feel a yearning inside.  Yep, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Yep, I wish I didn’t have so much on my plate right now.”   My intention, here, is to acknowledge and accept whatever I’m experiencing.  It is what it is. 

       When uncomfortable feelings arise, my automatic response takes me right to my head – either to analyze and figure out the feeling so I can control it and make it go away or to dive into the swamp of thoughts and stories that bury me more deeply in the feeling, keeping me mired in it, preventing it’s natural movement through me. 

       When I’m more mindful, I move into my body and into my heart.  I breathe.  I hold my feeling self in that larger, heart-space inside – a space that’s not always easy to find.  For some of us, visualizing helps – imagining ourselves literally being held or being enveloped in the heart of the universe, or perhaps surrounded in light or cherished by a loving presence.  For me, there’s no clear image; rather, a felt sense of a vast, nameless, quiet energy field of compassion and kindness.  While I locate this field within me, I sense that it’s also around me and beyond me, yet not separate from me.  Over time and with practice, I’ve become more familiar with this quiet, inner spaciousness. 

       Meditation practices can connect us - both to our felt experience and to the larger ground of being in which experience happens.  Meditation helps us make room for the mystery that we are both the experiencer and the immense, loving witness of the experience.

       In mystery’s embrace, we find wholeness – our smallness and our vastness, our vulnerability and our safety.

Vulnerable and Safe

      “One aspect of the endless practice is to feel both the depth of our feelings and, at the same time, to stand on the ground of all being which exits independent of what happens to us.  Often, we slip to one side of this:  either denying the impact of our feelings in order to stay grounded or we’re swept away by the strength of our feelings and lose the larger perspective.  Being fully awake comes from staying close to both, when we can.”  (Mark Nepo, The Endless Practice, p. 24)

       Psychology and spirituality come together as we hold this dual awareness.  We acknowledge our feelings – notice them in the body, name them, let go of the stories behind them as we stay present and breathe with the pure experience of feeling.  At the same time, we remember and open to an immense, compassionate and wise presence within us, tenderly holding us in love.  As we feel what we feel, breathe and allow ourselves to be held in this larger space, healing naturally occurs.  Wholeness happens.

       Fully human, fully alive, fully connected, we embrace our vulnerability and our safety.

Asking Gratefully

       In his new book, The Endless Practice, Mark Nepo suggests a paradoxical unity in two apparently contradictory activities: asking for what we need and accepting what we’re given. 

       “Asking for what we need is a practice in being present and visible that lets us become intimate with our own nature.  Accepting what we’re given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.”  (p. 59)

       Listening to what we want/need connects us intimately/respectfully with ourselves.  Letting loved ones know what we want/need connects us intimately/vulnerably with them.  Noticing what we have, with a grateful heart, connects us intimately/joyfully with life.

      Listening, disclosing, thanking – beautiful ways of saying yes to relationship at all levels. 

       Please and thank you come together.  Gratitude infuses every request.  Having happens.

       Happy Thanks-giving.  Happy having.

       Darkness has long been associated with evil and suffering – as in dark forces and dark night of the soul.  The season reminds me of another darkness – a darkness at the center of our being – a profound silence, the fertile emptiness of an eternal now, a haven, an oasis, a womb that - moment by moment - nurtures, births and transforms us.

       As the days grow shorter and the nights longer, we are invited to rest in this deep, gentle, healing quiet.  At 2am this morning, a poem came.

Befriending Darkness

The season of darkness

calls us inward

calls us home.

A cozy home

awaits us

warms us

wombs us.

The season of darkness

calls us inward

calls us home –

our mansion with many rooms.

Some we visit often.

Some we seldom enter.

Some we’ve yet to discover.

We enter the darkness

as we enter life –

not knowing the future.

Ego peers ahead

predicting, planning

feigning control

seeking escape from unknowing.

We enter the darkness

as we enter life –

not knowing the future.

Wisdom softens, listens

musters integrity

and heart

for just the next step.

The season of darkness

calls us home –

gently, tenderly.

Its cozy vastness

cocoons us.

Its silent emptiness

incubates fullness.

The season of darkness

calls us home

calls us to presence

calls us to now

whispers “everything’s here,

everything’s fine.”

The darkness births light.

Trust the darkness.

Trust your home.

Let it hold you

and behold you.

Let it birth you

and free you.

Befriend the darkness.

A Soul Story

        In the tradition I was raised, All Soul’s Day (November 2) is a time to remember and celebrate those who have gone before us.  During Thursday night’s group, through guided meditation, story sharing and candle-light ritual, we connected with loved ones on “the other side” – the other side of what I believe is a very thin veil separating us.

      In honor of the occasion today, I share portions of something I wrote a good dozen years ago, exploring ideas about soul and the human condition.

Softening to Mystery:

A Story of Us

         …Softening to mystery means saying “yes” to apparently contradictory things, to accept paradox, to live with ambiguity and a “not knowing” that does not allow us to pin life down, or to pin ourselves down.  It means opening to darkness and light, the infinite and the infinitesimal.  We cannot be easily sized or sized up.  In this story, we humans are mysterious indeed.  We exist in three levels:  Personality, Individual Soul and God Soul.

         The level of personality includes the material body with all its physical attributes and chemical quirks, the mind with its habits and patterns, and the ego identity with all its characteristics and attachments.  Even at the level of personality, where we are the most obvious and observable, we are quite the mystery.  Biological and social scientists spend their lives trying to make sense of us at this all-too-human level, where we are a mass of contradictions.  With all our weirdness and goofiness here, our capacity for the heroic and horrific, there is one constant:  we are finite beings.  The ego is going to die – and it knows it.

         While the personality is unique and temporary, the individual soul is timeless.  It is the uniqueness of us that transcends time.  God speaks creation in the eternal now.  Each of us can be viewed as a word in God’s vocabulary – all interconnected, part of one lexicon, each distinct.  At the level of individual soul, we are unique, eternal, and many.

         There is only one God Soul.  In some mysterious way, we all share It.  At this level of being, which I believe is our core, we are one with God.  Mystics in every spiritual tradition speak of this oneness.  Here, we are infinite, divine, and one.

         Softening to mystery invites us to include and integrate all of who we are.  In this story, each level of being is true of us.  Each has its unique reality.  And all three are woven together in seamless wholeness.  There is oneness in this “three-ness”….

          There’s an often-told Zen story about a monastery that was floundering.  Membership was dwindling in a climate of bitterness and back-biting.  Somehow, a rumor began spreading that one of the monks was Buddha reincarnated.  There was much speculation about who that person might be.  Soon, the monks started treating each other with new gentleness and care.  After all, no one wanted mistreat the Buddha.   The monastery grew to be a center of joy.  It flourished, attracting new members from miles away.

         In grade school, I remember being taught that we are children of God.  Many religious traditions and spiritual practices invite us to cultivate an awareness of our divine origin and connection.  As we soften to this aspect of the mystery, a reverence for ourselves and for others grows quite naturally.  We may even remember that, at the level of soul, we are deeply in love with each other and always have been.

         In this story, no matter how hatefully we behave, we still have a divine spark.  No matter how holy and evolved we become, we’re still goofy.  In us, both the sublime and the ridiculous find a home.  Softening to the mystery of the human condition invites reverence and compassion, humility and humor….

       Please enjoy playing with the mystery of who we are.  Story it in any way that feels right to you.  Just don’t expect to solve it.

Fall into Gratitude

       Autumn has long been my favorite season.  The colors and crisp air invigorate.  Recent morning runs through the woods take me over an endless carpet of reds, oranges, yellows and browns – through trees in various states of undress.  On this morning’s jog, a young deer kept right on nibbling, 15 feet away as Joanie and I stopped - motionless, watching.

       During these times in nature, the inner hamster settles down.  I remember gratitude.

       And, later, I remember the psychological research that connects gratitude and happiness.