Divine Within

       Lately, in seated meditation, I’ve been hanging out in what I call the Divine Within – a quiet, vast spaciousness inside, where the center of individual being merges with the center of all being.  

        Mystics of all traditions speak of this spacious, silent, sacred emptiness, where all is one.  Each tradition teaches ways of journeying there.  Traveling to the deep quiet is natural for us.  We each find our own pathways.

       My recent travels begin with the breath.  I inhale universal energy – love, light, mercy, tenderness, compassion, the good stuff – into my heart and gently follow the exhalation downward toward the center.   For me, the center seems somewhere in the lower belly, in an area Qi Gong practitioners call the lower dantian.  Others may sense it elsewhere.

       As I move into the quiet, the sensation of breathing fades, along with everything else.  Only the quiet remains – sometimes as a cavernous silence, sometimes as a faint hum – often lasting only for the briefest of moments – often lasting longer. 

       Distractions, of course, visit regularly.  Once aware, I gently invite myself back to breath – inhaling the good stuff and exhaling again toward the quiet.  The more I treat myself to sacred silence, the easier it is to keep returning.  Meditation practice is more about returning than it is about staying.

       The Divine Within is home to all of us, a place of rest and re-creation, a place of quiet companionship with the universe.  From this perspective, with some practice, meditation becomes less a discipline and more a vacation – a welcome respite from fretting and doing, the delicious experience of simply being.

       Treat yourself. 

       One of the most important principles that has guided me well – when I’ve remembered it – is the idea that if I want anything to change, in myself or in someone else, I have to first approach it with acceptance and love. 

       Here is a passage from Mark Nepo that resonates with me.

Looking with Love

“Our best chance to find the Oneness of Life is by looking with love into everything and everyone we meet.  Looking with love is a form of saying yes.  We give birth to everything we look at with love, including our own soul. This shining forth is the one gift we’re born with that is always near, though we often lose sight of it or lose faith in it. …

“Like sunlight, looking with love is a warm presence that helps everything looked upon find its strength.  The presence of love is how questions grow under the moon in the open patch of yard; how in our pain we suddenly find a way to create peace; how being with each other, in the midst of great difficulty, creates a sense of home.”

Mark Nepo, The Endless Practice, p. 65.

Love’s Entanglement

       Maybe it’s the Valentine’s season. 

       Lately, I’ve seen a number of couples experiencing powerful entanglement issues that leave them feeling hopelessly mired in relational turmoil.  I learn so much from these encounters – sometimes through the humbling experience of finding my own interior dramas caught up in theirs.

       We bring our wounded, unfinished selves to our primary relationships – hoping the relationship will offer the comfort, security, loving connection and validation we seek.  Inevitably, at some point, the relationship will activate, and aggravate, those very sore spots we were hoping to soothe.  And therein lies the healing potential of love’s entanglement.  In our most intimate relationships, life invites us – gently, persistently and, eventually, insistently – to face ourselves and to take responsibility for our own healing.

       Navigating love’s entanglement requires heart and mind to work together – in healing partnership.

       First, we need to listen deeply to the wisdom and intelligence of the heart – the center of compassion within us that identifies and honors what we yearn for:  safety, acceptance, peace, freedom, connection, love, being valued, known, appreciated and cherished.  The heart points us toward which of these in particular we need most.

       While the heart directs us toward what we need, the wisdom and intelligence of the mind shows us how to satisfy our heart’s desire.  When I listen to my inner grown-up, it becomes absolutely clear that I have to assume full responsibility for the care of my wounded heart.  I need to attend to it and offer it what it needs.  No matter what anyone else does, it is my job to befriend me.

       I am in charge of the love I give.  I am in charge of my readiness to receive.  I am in charge of my self-acceptance and my freedom to be.  I can’t delegate these tasks to anyone else. 

       I am in control of what I give to me and what I give to you.  I am not in control of what you offer me or how you treat yourself.

       Loving connection flows from a sacred commitment to ourselves and from the recognition that we need relationship with others.  Loving connection requires humility and self-affirmation, vulnerability and appropriate self-protection, assertion and a spirit of compromise.  It requires knowing and being known.  We listen to ourselves.  We listen to each other.  And while we are not in control of a relationship’s economy, we can learn wise ways of operating with each other that make it more likely that we will both get more of what we need.

       In his book, The New Rules of Marriage, Terrence Real offers a cornucopia of savvy suggestions for mutual empowerment in relationship.  For example, it’s usually much more effective to ask for what we want rather than complain later about what we didn’t get.  He also endorses the win-win question:  “What do you need from me so that I can help you give me what I want?” (p. 177)

       Wisdom sometimes calls for direct communication and sometimes invites us toward more nuanced ways of relating.  For example, if I want more playfulness or light heartedness in my relationship, it may work better to just start behaving that way – rather than initiating a serious conversation about how to be more playful.

       When we become entangled, the instinctive move is to do more of the same, more of what’s familiar.  With mindfulness, we open our eyes and notice what’s ineffective.  We listen deeper.   We see life’s invitation to stretch, to grow in skill and care. We unfold toward a more complete version of who we are. Then, interestingly enough, we begin to experience the happiness we’ve been seeking all along.

       Life is kind.  God has a sense of humor.  Relationships are messy.  Entanglement in love is inevitable.  Let it teach us.  Let it deepen us.

       Happy Valentine’s!

      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.