A friend’s recent inquiry prompted me to question how well I really knew my mother. We all have beliefs about our parents that ultimately, regardless of how well phrased, come down to our sense of being loved. My friend asked if mother had gone through a mid-life crisis. It was difficult to answer. Mom is always so calm, so quiet, so not in crisis. She doesn’t express herself openly. As I thought about it I realized how very different I am and wondered if mother’s lack of expression, what appeared to be a lack of love, had propelled me upon my path of self-discovery and radical self-expression.  

No one escapes life’s ups and downs, so mother couldn’t have either. Looking at her though, it appeared that she did. Even when Dad died, she carried on; she didn’t cry. This steely woman was my model for how life is lived. She internalized life, so much so that it was, and still is, hard for me to see what is really going on. Realizing now, that my understanding of mother is vastly incomplete, I question how well my sons know me. We know our version, the interpretations that validate our beliefs. We don’t, nor can we, truly know another. Absorbed in understanding ourselves, we rarely see the truth surrounding other’s lives.

Only recently did I come to learn that mother was born without tear ducts and is unable to cry. Hearing those words broke my heart and opened me to a new understanding – that I didn’t know her at all. I couldn’t imagine not being able to release the pent-up frustration and emotions that inevitably accompany life. When at last I understood, it explained so much.

You would think if you were unable to cry you would learn to jump up and down or scream and yell – anything to shake off the tight, constricted energy of loss. She didn’t. Perhaps that is why she holds her Bible close. Those skills would be helpful now. She is about to lose her leg from the knee down. There’s no medical explanation. The veins carrying the blood to her calf and foot just quit working. She doesn’t cry or scream. She hasn’t a physical outlet, no way to dissolve the energy of tragedy. There must be a million screams residing within her.   

As a child watching my parents, I unconsciously made decisions about who I would be, about what I would copy and what I would change. Those unspoken agreements were foundational for the pact I made with myself to honor self-expression. We each do this. Our pacts vary, but they are pacts none-the-less. Honest, self-aware expression, what I now call radical honesty, grew in importance over time, until it became the key tenet of my life.

Gratitude is thick and rich for this reflection on mother’s life. It has given me new appreciation of her challenges and choices, and a greater understanding of how her life experiences now flow within me. Yes, they flow in apparently different directions. Yet, they flow from the same origination point, the same human experience. When we look only at our personal experience, rather than the magnificently divine and so much bigger picture, we miss connecting to the mystery of what is actually stirring here. So much more is happening than we realize and it’s rarely what we think. Anything is already possible; marvels of growth and expansion are taking place. Gifts are offered to each of us this day. Will you see them? Will you seize them?

Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

When we are willing to love

For the past two years I made the pilgrimage to the Sisters, Oregon Folk Festival. It’s a pilgrimage because it offers more than fabulous musicianship. It offers mind-blowing, concept cleansing, knee-dropping spirituality when we open to finding its presence.

One entertainer, Ellis, caught my eye this year. Standing alone on the stage with her guitar, Ellis offers a unique sound, one-of-a-kind songwriting and a heart as big as the festival. There were few who saw her that didn’t fall in love. It was her infectious smile, unregulated laughter and insightful words (words uncommon for one of her young years) that claimed my attention. She had a way of cutting right to the core of the human condition and making us laugh uproariously as she took us into her world.

During a break between songs she gently spoke of searching for a way out, and that what we really search for is a way in. As I listened, I thought back to my original reason for starting down the spiritual path. I thought I was searching for a way out – a way to silence the voices in my mind constantly tending to my short-comings. That, to me, was a pilgrimage worth its weight in gold. Were I to be victorious I knew life would look like heaven on earth, the Promised Land – worth any price I had to pay. In triumph, I would be adequate and worthy.

I didn’t know then that I really searched for a way ‘in’, a way to include more, relate more, to love more … to be fully here, participating, expressing, and connecting with all those I wanted so badly to leave in my dust. Had I known then, what I know now, I couldn’t have entered the path so innocently or been so willing to engage my dragons and demons. Looking back, it may have been a blessing to not know.

Although … knowing what I searched for might have helped me move more quickly and brought the real pot of gold into clearer view. Had I realized that loving more was the Holy Grail, the key to joy and self-love, surely I would have dropped my defenses and unabashedly embraced life. Had I, I would have discovered that anything is possible when we are present and willing to love. All the tightness and knots of life are because we choose ourselves – our ways, beliefs, needs – instead of choosing love, instead of being present this moment’s reality.

Perhaps though, it is our search to find a way out that hones us and breaks us open enough to accept love’s possibility. Had someone told me to just love I would have deemed them crazy. What? Love those who hurt me? I wouldn’t have been able to hear Ellis’s words were it not for countless dances with my now darling demons.

Our search for a way out is a wondrous teacher. It perfects us with each dead-end, until the pilgrim ceases. Along the way it shaped us into the face of acceptance, adoration, compassion, and deep abiding love. A friend dropped me a note the other day. In it she wrote, “… and yet the richness that pours through you now comes from the depths as well as the heights.” Her note captures the essence of the spiritual quest and the possibility that awaits us all. Anything is possible – even finding ourselves absolutely adequate and worthy.

Ellis: The only truth is what we do with right now.

Gayle: Will we choose love?

Your comments are appreciated.

…and they lived happily ever after

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.” ~W. H. Auden~ Poet (1907-73)

How’s it going for you right now? If you are like most of us (me included), it is getting pretty intense. It seems like one thing after another is popping up and sweeping through my life. Life is a bit like standing in the middle of a war zone while bombs explode all around, not sure whether to duck and cover, dart left or right, or flip the channel and hope the screen changes to a more benign picture. Sound familiar? What happened to happy endings and walking off into the sunset happily ever after?

The ground I stand upon is breaking apart quickly now. The last holdouts of ego are being burnt away. Evidently when I invited God to clean house, He took me seriously. Everything I still held dear, my relationships with family, the lives of loved ones, financial where-with-all, everything with the one exception of Love itself, is vacating the premises. And, it is painful. There are no white knights coming to save me and I have no hope that the cavalry will be coming round the corner anytime soon. I wrote a note to a friend yesterday and it says it all. (I am glad she is a good friend … can’t imagine getting a note like this one.)

“I feel like I am sitting in the fires of hell burning down to the last puff of smoke … painful it is to say the least. Details aren’t important. Thank you for your love and warm embrace. We all need those around us to hold the space as life has its way with us. Ours is to be with what is regardless of the contents. Most of us think that if we listen to the Divine voice we will be protected. Not exactly true. We will be present … which is another way of saying alive instead of being dead (caught in illusion) or not being with what is. That’s all I know right now. Listening doesn’t make life Good. It makes us alive, capable of being here for each other. It is only mind that believes life should be other than it is and that is in the fire. I can smell it crackling and sizzling on the coals.”

Standing amidst the incoming volleys is the most courageous of human acts. Choosing to neither run nor hide, but to stand right in the middle and feel the pain is hard but, not doing it is unthinkable to me. That would mean consciously choosing to be absent. Maybe that is why anti-depressant use has doubled in the last few months. They dull our experience of life and make it appear more bearable. Life is painful. Life isn’t always joy and happiness. It includes watching the suffering of others and being present to their pain and to our own as well. But, if we aren’t going to be present, we are simply one of the dearly departed – absent and incapable of being of service to each other.

I wish I could get a hold of the Brothers Grimm. I would ask them if they knew what they were doing when they wrote all those fables that programmed little children to believe life is a wonderful fairytale with a happy ending. Perhaps they lived on a less remedial planet and had access to the advanced information that is only available once this part of me that is separate burns away. Maybe they knew what I am only now glimpsing, that once the vessel is purified, life simplifies, and all that remains is Love. Perhaps once the last embers turn to ash, there will be greater understanding. Running and hiding or revoking permission is out of the question. I choose life with all of its messiness, with all of its potential. I am here. Perhaps that is the white knight – being present. I hear the bluebirds singing their happy tune and the sunset is stunning. Can you see it?

“For those who immerse themselves in what the fairy tale has to communicate, it becomes a deep, quiet pool which at first seems to reflect only our own image; but behind it we soon discover the inner turmoils of our soul – its depth, and ways to gain peace within ourselves and with the world, which is the reward of our struggles.” Bruno Bettelheim ~ child psychologist and author (1903-1994)

Following an unseen, but strongly felt signal …

One day you realize you have been following an unseen, but strongly felt signal. When you began following the signal’s broadcast, its pulse, it was like moving towards a light emanating from a far-off lighthouse. You didn’t know where you were going. You just knew, perhaps not even consciously, that you had to take the steps necessary to get wherever there was. On this birth-day, a day of conscious dawning, the possibility of Discipleship awakens, awakening the God-pulse within and its imperative to join the Pulse of All.

Looking back, had I realized where this path of Discipleship would take me, I would have either run and hidden, or walked ever more quickly down the path. My answer of course, would have depended on how far down the path I had already ventured. Early on it would have challenged my strong sense of self. Later, as more of the ego dissolved into God, I prayed for absolute deliverance and the reunion that only comes as me dissolves into We.

Discipleship is an interesting word. The dictionary talks about being one of the twelve personal followers of Christ. It also offers the option of disciple as a pupil or adherent of the doctrines of another teacher. The Discipleship I speak of has no doctrine or dogma. It is the discipleship of seeing and embracing all thought, all beliefs, all people. It is the discipleship of Love is its largest sense. The mind is unable to comprehend the enormity of the word LOVE. It means being unattached to our mind’s versions of what is right, what is important, what or who God is. It means cutting through the mind’s chatter to the space before thought and belief and waiting there for the amazement of Divine Instruction available as we step into the stillness.

A Disciple is one who knows there is always more to Love. The disciple has said YES to God dismantling all the ways we choose not to love, all the ways we protect ourselves and our ways, and dishonor each other in the process. With our YES we open to being tutored constantly by Divine inspiration and see that the mind is an uneducated play toy, far inferior to universal knowledge available when we are willing to sit in the stillness and not know. As we sit quietly we become divinely lazy … and give over the reins of life to a force more powerful and capable of truly authentic expression in this world. Discipleship first undoes mind’s control and hands it securely over to the Beloved and then it spurs us into action. Love as concept, love as Being-ness that stops with our awareness is not Love – there is still more to give over, to forgive back to the Oneness.  Discipleship is a continuous growth in a greater Love that eventually blurs the lines of separation until there is nothing left but God.

Your comments and thoughts are welcomed…

Co-promising Your Life

Does compromise feel inauthentic to you? It did to me. From the time I was little there was always a sense of loss associated with compromise. People have written books about the art of compromise. Supposedly, it’s deemed good to be good at it. It is something experienced early in life that stays around long-term. It is foundational in business and in our family life. It is often a turning point that actually allows decision-making to move forward. Whether at work or at home, when we compromise something important, it feels like giving in or giving up rather than moving forward. And it builds walls rather than a rallying point for action.  

Talking with friends yesterday, the word fraud came up and an article I had previously written popped into my awareness. The article was called Tinkering to Get the Fraud Out (June 2007).  I went to the Blog to re-read it and the first two paragraphs jumped out. 

Recently, I watched an interview with Brian Dennehy. As he talked animatedly about his long, illustrious career as an actor, one sentence he used grabbed me and I found myself reaching for a pencil to capture the juicy phrase. Of his performances he said he was constantly, tinkering to get the fraud out. As I listened I wondered if we are constantly tinkering to get the fraud out of our lives as well.

 

The answer came in three parts. Prior to awareness of choice our tinkering is automatic and not to get the fraud out, but to survive. We don’t stop to evaluate our attempts to protect and defend ourselves. We just do it. This is actually a free state of mind. From this state of ignorance, we act, from not knowing any better. Despite the free state of mind, nothing in our lives will dramatically change. Life will be predictable. Psychics will have no trouble telling you what tomorrow will look like, because it will look like today. Behaviors will continue status quo.

One of my friends broke the word compromise into co and promise. As she said it a light-blub flickered on and I heard, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. Compromise is a two-edged promise. Each of us is promised to God. That is our nature; it is who we are—God’s promise. We are divine beings. For some of us that promise is conscious, for others it is not. Compromise is problematic when we are consciously promised to God and act in ways that protect the mind—our ego.

Any time we fail to stand for truth and goodness something within us dies. When we deny or delay God’s awakening within us, a pale of darkness overshadows our Great Possibility. We bow to the small, egotistical mind, allowing it to take greater control of our lives. Our compromise glasses over the light and muffles our divine sound—that pulse within us. We dim. The pulse of Life, carried at our heart’s center, acts as a beacon for all wending their way Home to God. It beats within those who have chosen to undo the tentacles of ego and forgive everything mind has made back to the Holy. The reason for denial or delay doesn’t matter. The result is the same.

Once we have heard our inner voice we are forever beyond the state of ignorance, that place where actions spring from not knowing any better. Be happy that we feel the pain of compromise. It is a blessing that numbness has not settled into our bones. A heart breaking is a divine gift. It too is a beacon, a pulse of God given freely to those who walk this path.

Fears will either play us or we can learn to play with them

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -  I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. –  Robert Frost

Days like these can work in our favor when we let them. It doesn’t appear that way, but it is true. Fear is on the surface. Everywhere we look businesses are missing. One day they are here. The next day they are gone. No one knows when the next shoe, let alone the last shoe, will drop. We feel vulnerable. Lifestyles and more are in peril. To risk sounding like I miss the point entirely, this is an uncomfortable time and place in which we find ourselves. Ego is tenaciously hanging on, conducting damage control, running its programs of fear. It is the hammering voice in our heads, and the soft yearning of hearts sick with worry, yelling at us to tighten down the hatches and protect ourselves from the devil winds to come.

These are obviously not fun times for most of us. Even those of us with money in the bank are feeling dread, wondering how far the economic spiral will go. The talk is depressing. As Ursula Bacon, a dear, wise woman told me this week, it is ‘depression talk’. She went on to speak about the power of our words. Even when we are talking about another’s viewpoint, our use of their words, validates that energy within us. Listening, night after night, to the news, gives the energetic thread added continuity. It is like a storm building. With enough wind it builds first into a breeze, then a gale, and eventually into a typhoon.

This morning another important piece to the puzzle fell into place when Earl Storm, a partner in Workplace Evolution, shared a quote he had recently heard by Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco. It is profound. “The future is not in front of us. It is inside of us.”

We are choosing our future, as Ursula said, with our words, with what lives inside of us. Fortunately for us, the beliefs we hold and the stories we tell ourselves aren’t buried as deeply anymore. All of our fears are coming out to play. They will either play us or we can play with them. The beauty of this moment is that our fears are visible if we are willing to look. We don’t have to dig or coax them out into the open. They are present.

We are at a crossroads. One road inevitably leads deeper into fear, anxiety and protectionism, leaving us more completely separated from others, less able to connect, and with a gaping hole in our hearts. This road appears, at first glance, to be our savior. It isn’t. It is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. No matter how much we insulate ourselves, no matter how much we rethink and analyze our situation, it will never be enough. Experience shows us this. There is no lasting calm. Upon this road, we devise and improvise layers of protective strategy, even when the only defense we can lay our hands on is mental maneuvering. Regardless of what we do the fears keep resurfacing with increasingly shorter intervals. Each time they resurface we fortify ourselves again, building a more impenetrable wall, effectively and efficiently separating ourselves from those with whom we are intended to partner and play.

Alone we are lost within the desert of our mind’s making. Together we can move beyond the crisis of spirit into an oasis of possibility. The second road, truly the road less travelled, leads to unity, to being in this together. It directs us into realization of our eternal and flawless connection with all beings. This road heals the hole in our hearts and allows us to flower into service and full use.

We choose. Granted, it is an extreme shift to turn and meet our fears, but so important. Fear is an insulator and it prevents us from seeing what is right before our eyes. Free of fear’s trance, we can see new solutions, creative ideas, and willing people with talents to help us find our way out of difficulty. We normally turn from fear rather than turning towards it, but we can choose to face fear now. And even if once again we choose fear, in the next breath we can choose differently. We are never beyond God’s grace. 

When we stop for a minute, we will see that in the short term, turning and meeting our fears is actually no more uncomfortable than turning away. Note the anxiety present now. It is an uneasiness that never seems to quite go away. It is not intended too. Its purpose is to show us where we are blocked, where we can’t say ‘yes’ to God’s vision for our lives, where we still have our hands locked onto life’s steering wheel. When we are stuck and flailing about within our heads, we miss the love notes, the divine messages that line our pathway. We create the mishaps from within our disconnected and protective state. This turmoil is far less than what is possible for mankind. We created it unknowingly. With this new awareness gleaned from self-understanding we can turn and make a stand for the Good within ourselves and within us all.

In the short term, meeting our fears can feel uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to. It is only uncomfortable to the degree that we hang onto our patterns and personal stories. When we put them down, even for a minute, we can feel the relief. Imagine what it would feel like to not need anything. We can experiment and allow ourselves to sit right in the middle of being happy with what we have. We can take another step and imagine ourselves living simply, unattached to any thing, gladly giving all that we have back to the creator’s keeping. Breathe it in deeply. Let it swell and fill the ache created by hanging on. When we are willing to loose everything, including our lives, we become a blank page upon which God alone writes. From there, anything is possible.  

In the long term, committing to make your life a divine experiment means coming out from under the pall of fear. Along this path we learn to get out of our own way and allow God’s way to emerge. With a little experimentation, we come face to face with our greater purpose (and it isn’t to accumulate the most of everything or to make ourselves right and others wrong). It is to be of real use, to allow God to express through our simple vessel. The more simple we become, the more empty of self-wanting and self-importance, the greater the flow of Pure Expression.

It is an adventure if we choose to see it that way. I do. Life is this amazing mystery, constantly unfolding in new and different ways. Just as soon as I think I know where it is going, life takes a sharp turn, zinging off in a new direction. The audacity of it leaves me breathless in wonder. Seeing my self as a character in God’s script is quite exhilarating. No, I didn’t get my copy of the script, but that’s alright with me. I’d rather not know where it is going. It is infinitely more fun to follow God’s breadcrumbs, along His trail, grateful that I am a simple player.

Are there not… Two points in the adventure of the diver: One – when a beggar, he prepares to plunge? Two – when a prince, he rises with his pearl? I plunge! –Robert Browning

What would Jesus think now?

Courage is of no value unless accompanied by justice; yet if all men became just, there would be no need for courage. Aegsilaus the Second

Over the Christmas holidays the History Channel played many segments on Jesus—his birth, the lost years, his teachings. One piece in particular ended with a thought provoking statement about Jesus’ political message, a message with which many Bible scholars have resonated. Jesus grew up and taught in a time of great upheaval, a time when the Palestinians were being severely prosecuted by the Romans. There were immense divides between the rich and the poor. While his teachings always kept an eye on relationship with the Father, they were also firmly planted in the day-to-day lives of the people with whom he spoke. What caught my attention at the end of the hour was the statement that Jesus wanted to bring attention to the plight of the poor, the homeless, the sick, and to see his society evolve to the point where it would not stand for the abuse of any of God’s children. As I listened, the words, “what would Jesus think now”, rang in my ears. Would he be pleased with the way society had evolved?

Have you ever wondered why sometimes it’s easier to respond to an event that has just happened rather than to ongoing problems like homelessness, poverty, and illness? Why is it that we can act more easily for the event rather than for the state of life? The event feels as if there is end in sight; the other—life as it is—can feel hopeless. The energy of each is different as well. One energizes as we see the tangible results take shape. The other, life, can tend to sap our strength and commitment when we look down the long road and see little light.

If we are helping, if we are in service it shouldn’t matter, should it? Both can enliven us and make us feel connected, on fire with the truth of giving, but only when we approach each with True Love—the love of non-attachment, the love of being fully used, bringing our acceptance of the conditions with us.

This is where we get into trouble. It is our picture of a world gone wrong that gets in our way. It is our version of how life should be, of how we should be for our neighbors that prevents us from acting in ways to cure the ills that torment society. Our mind’s picture of what should be, no matter how Holy, creates a resistance in us that saps our commitment and strength, causing us to turn our backs on those in need, causing us to again create the world Jesus sought to remedy.

When there is an event—the more horrible the more applicable—our minds are stunned into silence and we act from our hearts, the only mover we have left. The mind no longer is in control that is, until it regroups and assumes control again. It is the mind’s overwhelm that takes our focus off Katrina, that prevents us from stepping up in fully reparative ways, to help those in poverty, illness, prison and neglect.

It is the mind’s overwhelm that prevents us from stepping into the streets to remind our government that this way of doing business, this command and control way of asserting our influence isn’t working, in fact, has never worked. Most importantly, to remind those we have elected to govern of their hearts, their desire to do good, their will to create a better world and the will of us all.

Our mind’s story about our future ineffectiveness prevents us from linking out hands and hearts and marching cooperatively to stop mind’s madness. Isn’t it time we took the short journey…a journey of mere inches…and began listening instead to our hearts. The journey involves a short leap of faith. All that is required is our willingness to shift our focus from our heads and step instead into Heart, a journey of a mere 12 inches.

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a Stranger and you Welcomed me,I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. Truly, I say to you, As you did it to one of the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me. Matthew 25