Be Here Now

    88-year-old spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, author of the classic text Be Here Now, is failing physically and readying himself for death.  In connection with a recent talk, Ram Dass was interviewed by David Marchese for a September 2nd New York Times article.  My friend, Dan, sent the article my way.

         In response to a question about his teaching, be here now, Ram Dass replied:

         “In each moment, go into the moment.  Our minds take us back and forth in time.  I teach a moment.  And I teach that we identify with the ego.  The ego is a mind warp, and most people don’t identify with their soul.  They’re worried about excess meaning.  The soul witnesses the ego and witnesses thoughts.  ‘Be here now’ gives people an opportunity to re-identify outside of their thinking-mind ego and into that thing that’s called the soul.  It is the perspective from which we could live a life without being caught so much in fear.  To re-identify there is to change your whole life….

         “Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts:  Those are the daily attention-grabbers that make it so that you can’t come from your mind to your heart to your soul.  The soul contains love, compassion, wisdom, peace and joy, but most people identify with the mind.  You’re not an ego.  You’re a soul….

         “Go to the spiritual heart and there will be a doorway to the next plane of consciousness:  soul land.”

         Presence in the moment connects us with heart.  Heart leads us to soul.  Be here now.

Heart’s Healing Path

         Last week, while guiding a group meditation, I received an insight about the connection between the heart, the emptiness and the energy of universal love.

         We started the meditation with a focus on the heart – a grand central station, which receives and radiates love.  The heart is like a divining rod or a gyroscope for love.  When we ask the heart to guide us toward universal love, it leads us to the emptiness – the deep quiet at the center of being, which is the wellspring of all love.

         From that inexhaustible source, love flows freely and naturally to the heart, where it radiates as we intend.

         Sacred emptiness - where the center of each being and the center all being come together - is the source of all love and all healing.  Spending even small amounts of time in this deep quiet renews and restores us.

         Sitting in meditation - hands on my lap, with palms up and fingers relaxed and apart - I invite the universal energy to gather in my hands.  For me, this produces a tingling.  Others may feel a temperature change.  When inhaling, I imagine this palpable love energy flowing from my hands into my heart.  When I exhale, I follow the breath, guided by love, into the quiet within.  Each exhalation takes me deeper into quiet.

         A slight variation skips the hands part.  I breathe love energy directly into my heart, then follow the out-breath from the heart into the quiet.

         Distractions?  No problem.  Gently - patiently persistent - we begin again and again and again. 

         We each have access to the deep quiet, the emptiness within.  It’s the wellspring of universal love, the source of all creation and re-creation, our resource for healing and re-programming.  

         The heart knows the way.

Hunger Games

         For several weeks, I’ve been on an extended hiatus – spending hours late into the night reading science fiction, following sports, skimming news headlines, studying the bridge column, chuckling over the comics, solving Jumbles.  These and similar activities were entertaining, but not deeply satisfying.  The enjoyment did not bring joy.  I was entertaining myself, but not nourishing myself.

         My soul has been hungry – and the more I fed it poorly, the hungrier it became. 

         Sleep suffered.  Exercise suffered.  Spiritual practice suffered – as did my writing practice.  Weekly Wisdoms have become “periodic posts.”   (Actually, Periodic Posts may be a more appropriate title for this blog.) 

         So, what am I learning as I review this period of spiritual hunger and see the cycle I’ve caught myself in? 

         Mainly this:  Slow down and listen!  Don’t run from the hunger.  Attend to it gently from the wisest, most loving part of myself. 

         When I slow down and listen, I can feel the difference between a sugary treat and food that really nourishes.  At the spiritual level, I can feel the difference between what deeply satisfies – and what doesn’t.  I can feel the difference between escape and true connection.

         The quiet feedback from deep within is a trustworthy guide.  In my case, it calls me to care for my body with good sleep, nutrition and exercise.  It calls me to nurture my soul with regular meditation and QiGong practice.  It invites me to soften to the beauty of each moment and surrender to the mystery of oneness. 

         When I listen deeply - caring for body and soul - all those other entertainments, done moderately and mindfully, can shift from escapes to sources of joy – no longer hunger games.

Odd Moment Loving

         Odd moments, when there’s a lull in activity, occur hundreds of times a day.  Typically, during these moments, the mind wanders automatically to old habits of inner chatter.

         What if we paid more attention to where the mind goes?  What if we made a conscious effort to develop a new habit? 

         We could use our odd moments to practice inhaling and exhaling universal love – nurturing ourselves and others with intentional breathing.

         What a wonderful way to enter the flow - to have fun and feel joyfully alive!

         Love in, love out – odd moment loving.

Love Seeing Love

         The Hindu salutation “namaste” is often translated as “the divine light in me bows to the divine light in you”.  I resonate with this reverent acknowledgement of our essential nature and our essential oneness.

         According to my favorite cosmological story, at the very beginning, a creative and intelligent emptiness – the nameless mystery some call God – burst into the energy of love.  Love, the first expression of God, gradually cooled to become everything and everyone.  So, in this story, everything and everyone is love.  Divine light is love.

         I invite you to try a thought experiment.  For the next week or so, whenever you look at someone or whenever you look in a mirror, imagine this:  Love is seeing love.

         Namaste! 

Love-Flow

         Love is a complicated, sometimes loaded, word.  Its meaning changes with the people using it and the context in which it’s used.  Despite its baggage, it’s the word around which I organize my soul’s purpose in this life stream. 

         When I speak of love in my teaching and writing, I’m referring to universal love or unconditional love - as distinct from egoic (personality-oriented) or romantic love.

         For me, love is a verb and a noun.  As a verb, to love means to flow freely with the positive, intelligent, creative, healing energy of the universe – the energy that permeates everything and each of us.  As a noun, love is the flow of universal energy - a dynamic process of receiving and radiating. 

         If we try to radiate without receiving, we exhaust ourselves.  If we hoard energy and try to receive without radiating, we get spiritually constipated.  Receiving and radiating are equally essential to love-flow.

         Love is unconditional.  It makes no judgment about the worth or value of whom or what we love.  It’s like the radiance of the sun, which shines on everyone and never withholds its energy because someone isn’t a “good” person. 

         Love is intrinsic to who we are.  At the heart/soul level - the deepest level of being - love is what best defines us.  And, when we’re most connected to heart/soul, this flow is not just who we are, it’s what we do.

         Love moves through us.  We don’t have to earn it or work to create it.  We simply need to soften and surrender to its flow.  This is a bit like stepping into the current of a river and allowing it to carry us – simply, naturally, effortlessly.  Love does the heavy lifting.

         Simple, yes.  Easy, no.  The theory course on unconditional love is not that difficult.  The lab is where it gets tricky.

         We’ve learned so many ways to impede the flow of love – so many ways we block ourselves from receiving and radiating.  Habitual emotions, stories, beliefs, expectations and patterns of behavior – mostly related to fear and unworthiness – trick us into tightening down, creating barriers and holding ourselves back from the river of life.

         As we focus on receiving fully and radiating freely, we become more mindful of our barriers and, hopefully, more compassionate toward them.   As we inhale universal/unconditional love into our fear and unworthiness, we gently invite these obstacles to melt away.  Gradually, they do melt.  And if, again and again, we breathe love into our hearts and breathe love out from our hearts, we will deepen our capacity to receive and radiate – fully and freely.

         With persistent practice, new habits of love-flow take root and blossom.

Cultivating Contentment

         It’s easy for us to get caught in habits of discontentment, where our inner world focuses on the negativity of what’s missing, what’s wrong or what could go wrong.

         A couple years ago, knowing he’d been dealing with some physical pain, I asked my friend Rich how his shoulder was feeling.  He said something like:  “It still hurts some.  But then I remind myself of the thousands of other body parts that feel great and are working just fine - and I feel grateful.” 

         I was awed by that response.

         As a psychotherapist, I know the benefits of what we call “cognitive restructuring” – making conscious efforts to alter habits of thinking that don’t serve our highest good.  We can cultivate contentment by deliberately noticing what’s good in our world, appreciating the beauty around and within us.

         Spring Forest QiGong offers another approach.   In that system, contentment and discontentment are associated with the lungs.  Lately, I’ve been breathing the energy of contentment into my lungs and exhaling discontent - picturing butterflies flitting off into the universe, where all energy can be transformed into some aspect of love.  Often, after just a few breaths, I feel contentment as a warmth that begins in my chest and melts into the rest of my body.

         I soften and relax.  My body smiles.  Cultivating contentment opens pathways to peace and love.      

Unblocking the Flow

         I’ve come to see the flow of life as an unrestricted movement of love-energy within us and between us.  In this flow, we freely receive the loving energy of the universe, and we freely allow it to move unimpeded through us and radiate outward from us. 

         After infancy, few of us continue to flow freely with love as a consistent way of being in the world.  We block the flow by not receiving, by not radiating – or both. 

         For me, old stories of unworthiness and old rules of engagement interfere with receiving.  Old hungers and a tendency toward self-absorption trick me into being stingy and less giving with love.  Self-protection strategies and assumptions of scarcity block the flow at both ends: receiving and giving.   Under those conditions, love’s economy cannot boom – or bloom.

         We tighten, rather than soften – closing instead of opening.  We mistrust ourselves and this natural flow.  We mistrust others.  We mistrust life.  Of course we do.  We’ve all known hurt and disappointment in our attempts to connect in love’s flow. 

         May we approach ourselves with mercy and compassion as we work to free ourselves from the imprisonment of fear, shame and old habits of mistrust.

         For me, one key is to open regularly and receive deeply from the inexhaustible wellspring of love that is this universe - to bask from above and below, from around and within.  Trusting this dependable abundance reassures me that it is safe to love extravagantly – as nature intends.  Trusting this abundance brings a smile to my face and joy to my heart. 

         Healing love radiates like the sun.

Vibrating Light 

         The Guarani, a deeply spiritual indigenous tribe living in South American rain forests (Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina), have a healing tradition that is passed down through the generations and is grounded in the healing power of love.  From the Guarani perspective, each of us is an energy field of light and love. 

         Elizabeth Cosmos writes of her experience with the practice of Ama-Deus, a healing approach rooted in Guarani spirituality.  Here’s a passage that speaks to me:

         “The main point in our evolution is to view and know life from a spiritual or energetic perspective.  The indigenous people and the mystics understand this and safeguard it with their lives, and now, some scientists are building a language for the subtle fields.  We are finely vibrating oscillating bodies of light interwoven with the electromagnetic bodies of others, of the earth, and of the Universe.

         As we learn this language and perceive from the heart, the veil of separation will dissolve.  There is no separation in the physical world and the spiritual world.  Viewing life from an energetic perspective sees all life as one, whether from the subtler spiritual planes or the denser physical material planes.  An energetic perspective simply gives a more complete picture, and this perspective follows that all life is sacred and intimately connected.”

Elizabeth Cosmos, Ama-Deus: Healing with the Sacred Energy of the Universe, pp. 154-5.

Liberating Love

         Human love, as commonly understood, is a messy affair.  It tends to spring from an evaluation of the beloved – what’s lovable and not so lovable in him/her.  It also evokes self-evaluation - questions about one’s capacity to love and worthiness to receive love.   

         From the perspective of young ego, love is exhilarating and dangerous - a high stakes venture, where the prize is precious and the risks, devastating.  Egoic love is entangled with, and strangled by, fear and judgment.

         We fear being rejected or abandoned or cheated or used/abused by the other. We fear the humiliation of self-judgment when love is unrequited.  No wonder we hold back.  No wonder we self-protect.  No wonder we become strategic and controlling.

         At another level, none of this angst is necessary.  At this deeper level, love is neither scarce nor dangerous.  It’s the energy that holds everything together – from atoms to families to this planet.  It’s abundant and unavoidable - the energy of everything, the energy of who we are. 

         At this level, the flow of love is natural and effortless.  Navigating human interactions may still be complex and confusing, but love is simple.  And, while love is a natural and effortless flow, it requires intentionality and persistent practice to make a more permanent shift away from the egoic paradigm of separation and scarcity. 

         Liberating love is a process - and I’m still a learner. While much has been written about this process – and much more could be – I offer three brief suggestions. 

         First of all, we need to realize that humanity can move beyond an egoic approach to love.  In this growth process, we humans typically move from “immature ego” (where we’re way out of balance - either overly preoccupied with self and disregarding of others or overly preoccupied with others and disregarding of self), to “mature ego” (where there is a healthy balance of care and regard for self and others), to immersion in the flow of universal, unconditional love – our true, natural state.

         Second, every day in a regular way, let’s declare our intention to soften and open to the flow of universal love.  My practice is to do so first thing in the morning, face-to-face in front of a mirror.  Often during the day, especially before important interactions, I remind myself of this commitment to flow.

         Third, let’s use our breath to practice being in the flow of love.  For example, we can inhale the energy of universal love from below, above, around and within; and then exhale love in every direction and especially toward what’s right before us. Sometimes, I picture golden light entering through every pore, gathering in my heart, and radiating out from my heart toward others.  Sometimes, as breathe in, I focus on a felt sense of love coming into my heart, then radiating outward as I exhale.  There are many ways to practice.  It’s important to find what works for us - and stick with it!

         When we approach relationship in the flow of universal love, we cannot be depleted, we cannot be cheated, we cannot lose ourselves.  We don’t become invincible or invulnerable.  We’re still human.  We still experience the full range of human emotion.  Ego, however, is not in the driver’s seat.  Flowing with universal love frees us from attachment to outcome and, ironically, allows us to have wonderful outcomes – powerful and positive effects on those around us.

         With persistent practice, receiving and radiating love becomes more habitual and more natural.  We move into harmony with our love nature.  We feel a deeper sense of integrity and connection – and peace.

         We liberate ourselves.   We liberate love.