September 2008

Image credit: Jef Poskanzer

I once lived in an apartment in an older building where there were mice. I used to hear a scratching sound coming from inside a living room wall every night. This went on for a few months. Then suddenly there were no more sounds. One day I came home and the apartment stank like the smell of something dead. Sure enough the caretaker found a dead mouse behind the living room wall. What he also found was a beautiful, small gold broach pin between the folds of a piece of fabric, tucked under the dead mouse! I guess our little mouse had found himself a shiny, beautiful treasure and was hoarding it in his nest. I don’t know whom it belonged to, but I kept it as a reminder that all beings are attracted to beauty, even little mice.

In the Native American tradition, the Beauty Way is the path of living in harmony with one’s self and all creation. Walking the path of beauty is to embrace the sheer pleasure of being human, living in a manner, where your thoughts, speech, actions and way of being are in harmony with all of creation. It is to find the sacred in everyday living. It is to honor simplicity and to discover the magic of reality, when we see with the heart. In The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, the lonely young prince befriended a fox. The fox told him his secret, “…It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” In seeing with the heart we connect to our inner wisdom and see the inter-connectedness of all creation, we live in contentment, we walk in beauty!

Here is a beautiful Navajo prayer:

Beauty is before me
And beauty is behind me
Above and below me hovers the beautiful
I am surrounded by it.
I am immersed in it.
In my youth I am aware of it,
And in old age I shall walk quietly
The beautiful trail.

Photo credit: hypertypos

I remember Alison, a four-year-old girl in my Montessori preschool class. Her mother passed away when Alison was two years old. Alison kept to herself mostly, not interacting with any of the other children, and when she did her manner was gruff and standoffish. One day Alison was in front of the easel painting a picture. She called out to me in her gruff manner, “Hey, come here!” This was a welcoming gesture from her. I went over and stood next to her. She pointed to a little cocoon like part of her painting and said, “My mother lives there.” What do you say to that? I just stood there in communion with Presence in the sacredness of that moment. I reached out and squeezed her hand and we stood there in silence for the longest time.

Many people who carry the burdens of physical or emotional pain do not feel safe to speak of their pain and may not know how to let go of the weight they carry around. Their hearts become closed and their way of interacting with others draws even more hurtful experiences to themselves. Their behavior is an unspoken crying out for love and to be acknowledged; the wise person knows how to look for these signals and to listen with their hearts.

To be a kind, sensitive listener is the gift that we can give to people who are hurting and wrapped up in their anger. It is not helpful to give advice or to correct this type of behavior, they do not need to be told that they are wrong. By listening with gentleness we can create a safe space for sharing that allows others to express their needs. In time a relationship of trust and respect opens the heart of the hurt person. A space of safety is available to them allowing them to let love in again.

This relationship of opening of the heart, sharing love, reaching out to others is the greatest gift that we give to each other. The communion of hearts allows for healing to occur. When we give to others we also receive, it’s a two-way exchange. When we listen with our hearts we are in harmony with ourselves and are able to help others from a place of serenity, strength and love. My experience with Alison, when she opened up to share her secret with me in a moment of intimacy, was a gift she gave me that I will always cherish.

image credit: Corey Leopold

Christopher Robin wondered out loud what Winnie the Pooh was doing, walking around the copse of trees so many times with his friend piglet. It dawned on Winnie that he himself was making the tracks that he was following. It wasn’t a woozle or a scary thing in the vicinity after all. Winnie said, “I have been Foolish and Deluded. I am a Bear of No Brain at All.” Christopher Robin in a soothing voice said, “You’re the Best Bear in All the World.” Pooh said hopefully, “Am I?” Then he brightened up suddenly. Christopher Robin in showing love and kindness to Pooh in his moment of low self-esteem helped him to restore faith in himself.

It is so easy to fall into the trap of beating ourselves up whenever we make a mistake or mess up. You know, like calling ourselves names, saying things like “I can’t believe I did that.” etc. Remembering to love ourselves anyway in those moments must be practiced until it becomes a habit. What does “love yourself” mean? We hear that a lot: “You need to love yourself more.” What does that look like? For me it means most of all, self –acceptance, an acceptance for the stage I am at in any learning situation. I work at this as I always want to know how to do something already and I am impatient with the learning process.

When we begin to learn self-acceptance, we make a space within ourselves to create something new. We are not resisting ourselves anymore and there is a willingness to be shown the next step in our healing journey. In Is It A Woozle?, I mentioned how noticing our thought patterns is an important part to changing our reality. It means the willingness to die to the old familiar part of ourselves and to change our thought patterns in alignment with the new reality that we want to create. This is not an easy task to undertake. There is a lot of kicking and screaming in the dying part of the ego and fear of the unknown in the new way of being. Self-acceptance is the saving grace at this stage. Self-acceptance allows love in, making us feel more safe and able to trust the process of change.

Self-acceptance or self love is saying to ourselves, “Right here, right now, I am doing the best I can for who I am.” Whether we are at the kindergarten or the university stage of our growth process, this attitude gives us permission to make mistakes, to learn at our own pace, to forgive our foibles. We are not looking to compare ourselves with others and we are content with our own learning process. Making change with this outlook makes the journey to the path of wholeness a beautiful experience. As we accept ourselves as we are, we accept others as they are. Our openness is comforting to others and our simple presence can be a joy to be around. Go ahead, it’s OK to say to yourself, “You are the best!”

One fine winter day Piglet saw Winnie-the- Pooh walking round and round in a circle. Piglet asked Pooh what he was doing. Pooh answered that he was tracking something. He pointed out the tracks in the snow and Piglet wondered if it could be a woozle. The two friends made about four rounds of the copse of trees and Piglet was getting more frightened because there were a lot more tracks now. Maybe there were a few wizzle or who knows what. Piglet made an excuse that he had something to do and made a hasty exit, glad to be out of danger again. Christopher Robin who was sitting up in a tree watching them, came down and said, “ Silly old Bear, what were you doing?” Pooh realized what had happened and said, “ I have been Foolish and Deluded…”

This cute story is not unlike a lot of us; we keep thinking the same thoughts over and over, creating neural pathways, habitual patterns of thoughts that frighten us, we are fooled and deluded by the tracks we make in our own minds. We keep following these thoughts looking for the boogey-man until something or someone like Christopher Robin comes along and shines the light on what we are doing. Just like Pooh, we are deluded by our own habitual scary thought patterns.

Someone once said, “Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.” We fall into bad habits without really meaning to. Our experiences create pathways when signals are sent between our brain and neurons or nerve cells and these are called neural pathways. We come hard-wired with a lot of neural pathways at birth and we keep creating new ones with every new experience. When we habitually do something we keep following the same neural pathway, which becomes deeper the more you do it. Just as water follows the same channel, until that channel is blocked and then creates a new channel to continue flowing, so too when we feel blocked we create a new outcome by channeling our energy in a different direction.

Breaking bad habits takes a lot of effort. We first have to get ourselves out of the entrenched neural pathways of the old habit. As we are creating new pathways for the new habit, we come upon much resistance, creating blocks in the pathways, like blocks in the water channels and new pathways have to be created until the new habit becomes entrenched. It is said that it takes at least twenty-one days to form a new habit.

In my post Change The Channel I mentioned that sometimes we create our own mental prisons and the more we hesitate to do something about it, the more difficult it becomes. It’s like Pooh and Piglet, getting more frightened as the tracks got deeper. When we become frightened and don’t like our life as it is, we need to stop and examine the kind of thoughts that go around and around our minds. This is such a new concept for a lot of people. We are not taught that our thoughts create our reality. For example if we keep thinking that we are unworthy, we keep following that neural pathway and keep attracting the experiences that reinforces our unworthiness and therefore we decide that the world agrees with us.

Marcus Aelius Aurelius said, “ Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.” Noticing our thoughts is a victory in itself, since we are unconscious of these thoughts because we have been thinking them for so long. That’s when healing begins, when we can separate ourselves from our unconscious thought patterns and begin creating new ones for what we really want. These new thought patterns must be practiced until we create a new healthy pathway.

In yesterday’s post I quoted from Victor Frankl where he said that we all have the freedom of choice of attitude in any given set of circumstances. Here’s a joke by Steve Bhaerman who authors jokes and scripts under the name of Swami Beyondananda. This is taken from Guidelines for Enlightenment: “The most powerful tool on the planet today is Tell-A-Vision. That is where I tell my vision to you, and you tell a vision to me. That way, if we don’t like the programming we are getting, we can simply change the channel.”

Like Victor Frankl, Swami Beyondananda tells us that we have a choice in the programming we give our minds. We can always change the channel if we don’t like how we are feeling. If even we do not have a choice in changing our outer circumstances, we are still free to choose how we relate to it. Our thoughts determine how we experience any given situation.

I once worked at what seemed like a monotonous job to my co-workers as a switchboard operator. I loved my job while some of my co-workers couldn’t wait to get off their shift. We were all doing the same tasks, greeting callers and connecting them to where they wanted to go. The difference was that I really focused on the service aspect, I worked at sounding warm and welcoming, to bring some cheer into the caller’s day. Some callers noticed that and were grateful for that brief uplifting moment with me. It was a gift I could give and in return I received my callers’ gratitude which was a positive experience for me.

The freedom to choose is a gift that we all have even if the society we live in limits that freedom in our outer circumstances. Many of us choose to live in mental prisons, surrounding ourselves with fellow inmates of helplessness, hopelessness, resistance, anxiety and fear. When we find ourselves in this miserable state of being, the more we hesitate to help ourselves out of it or to seek outside help, the more entrenched we become in the quagmire or our own mental prison.

The first step in freeing ourselves is to make the choice of willingness to change. How willing are you to make change, to make space for a new outcome? What are you willing to let go of? In making the choice to change we create a space for love to enter, for light to enter and shine into the dark recesses of our depression and be shown a way out. The universe is always bringing its messages of light, through a friend, a book, a TV program, or an animal we meet. We only have to make the opening and we will be shown the way.

image credit: Perla*

One of the most inspiring books I have read is Victor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning. In it he says, “Everything can be taken from a man but…the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” He helped himself and fellow prisoners at a concentration camp, to survive their sordid existence through a mental attitude of finding meaning in their existence, a spiritual domain that their captors could not destroy. When what I call the inner wow meets its nemesis the inner critic, we can choose to stay afloat by taking the path of the spiritual warrior, cutting through the lies our inner critic feeds us and choose to follow our wisdom and courage.

One day when I was doing some charcoal art work, playing with light and shadow, working from the negative space, I was so awestruck by the process; to see a picture come alive from just working with the negative space. It was an epiphany, I thought, isn’t that like when we work with the negative spaces in our minds, we can transform the darkest emotional states into life enhancing experiences? I remembered the times I did things that I was afraid of doing such as speaking in public and the feeling of exhilaration after I faced my fear and did it anyway. Marilyn Ferguson said, “Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.”

The inner wow is what I call this experience of freedom. We feel it when we see an amazing sunset, a soaring eagle. It’s those moments when we feel the oneness of all creation, and we know that life is good. I call it the inner wow because it is from within that we experience the feeling of freedom, the outer is just a catalyst that enables us to access that space that is our true nature.

The experience of the inner wow becomes more accessible to us when we find inner peace. Inner peace comes through being accountable for our actions, through acceptance of and respect for all others, and ourselves at whatever stage we are, on the spiritual healing journey. When we choose to stop the war with others and ourselves, when we choose peace, we silence the inner critic and choose freedom.

image credit: fotologic

We ask, “Do you have time?” as if time is something we possess. In Lewis Carroll’s, Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter said to Alice at the Tea Party, “If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.” He told Alice that she didn’t understand because she never even spoke to Time. Alice said she only beats time to learn music. The Mad Hatter replied, “He won’t stand beating. Now if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.” The Mad Hatter was right. We try to beat time in our frenzied schedules trying to make time for what we think is our “down time” only to feel more and more cheated of time, there never seems to be enough of it. We can live in a manner where time like the Mad Hatter said; “…He’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.”

We cannot hold back time or make it go faster. I know that because right now the plums in my garden are almost ripe for picking. For the last two weeks I have been eyeing those purple beauties, looking ever so delicious. I go every day and squeeze one or two to see if they are ready, but no. I even eat one or two and they taste sour. Yesterday I found a sweet one, but I know I have to wait a few more days until they reach the peak of perfection and the waiting would be all worth it! Everything has its time and its season, it’s the law of nature, we cannot hurry time. Patience is the virtue we draw on to respect time and its seasons.

For many of us that live in this new age of technology, we are so used to speed and efficiency; we have lost the art of waiting. We are a society with the need for instant gratification. We want what we want now and keep demanding for more, because we have not taken the time to digest and appreciate what we have. We hurry on to the next thing, hoping that’s where we will get satisfaction. We are stressed when we are in situations where we have no choice but to wait such as in traffic and grocery store line-ups. Many of us suffer from the “hurry up and wait” syndrome.

With a change in our mental attitudes towards time, we experience time and life on a whole different level. When we live in the moment, appreciating what we are engaged in, not thinking of the next thing we have to do, time seems to go slower, and we are less anxious. We learn how to make every moment and every action of our lives sacred. We live with contentment and joy. We can use all of our actions as opportunities for mindfulness meditation, by focusing on the task at hand. Thich Nhat Hanh speaks beautifully about living in the moment in his CD: The Art of Mindful Living . When we learn to live in joy, focusing on the task at hand, we are tapping into the source of joy in our own hearts. No matter how monotonous or tedious the task, with mindfulness, we enjoy what we are doing. Then we are not looking for the next thing or person to bring us joy; we find that happiness that is lasting, right here in this moment.

image credit: Lachlan Hardy

A man was walking his dog and the dog got ahead of him and went out of sight. He soon saw a man looking very anxious approaching him. The man said, “Do you own a Rottweiler?” The dog owner said, “ yes.” The man said, “My Chihuahua just killed your dog.” The dog owner was incredulous and asked, “How can a Chihuahua kill a Rottweiler?” The man answered, “My Chihuahua got stuck in his throat.” It’s not how you would expect an encounter between a Rottweiler and a Chihuahua would turn out. That is the paradoxical nature of life.

In Shaivism, it is said that the one consciousness for its own entertainment, out of its own being, becomes the many, every sentient and insentient entity in the universe. This phenomenon is called the play of consciousness. Everything in this universe is consciousness, and the attributes of good, bad, ugly, high, low, etc. are our ego’s designation to distinguish ourselves as separate from each other. If this play of consciousness is true and even if it isn’t true it is a good philosophy to live life by: To see the interconnectedness of all of life, that we are basically all the same no matter what appearance or form we show up as. With this outlook on life, a whole lot of our problems such as low self-esteem, insecurity, religious and racial intolerance would be insubstantial or irrelevant.

In the famous line from the play, As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”, was Shakespeare alluding to this play of consciousness, that things are not what they seem, that we can live life without taking ourselves so seriously? This summer, I expanded our vegetable garden to maximize our food production and planted seeds in places that did not have the optimum growing conditions. When I fussed over the results, my husband would remind me that it was all just an experiment. This perspective made it so much more fun and I was able to accept failure with ease. This outlook that life is really just an experiment, that a lot of us are just making it up as we go along, really helps me to lighten up about a lot of things. I can be more forgiving of others and myself because nobody really knows, and a lot of us are acting as if we do. I myself like to take a stance of openness as I have seen my beliefs about life discredited many times. It makes me very uncomfortable when some people express their values as the truth, try to impose them on others or worse to punish others for their differences. I like to contemplate this line from the Upanishads, which goes something like this: Those who know don’t know. Those who don’t know, know.

image credit: net_efect

In the Japanese Zen tradition there is a wonderful teaching story of a seeker who went to a Zen master and requested to be a student. The seeker was proud of his previous accomplishments and was not very modest in his approach to the Zen master. The master invited him to have a cup of tea and poured tea into the seeker’s cup. The cup was overflowing and yet the master kept pouring. The seeker said, “The cup is full, it cannot hold anymore.” The master replied, “ And so are you. I cannot teach you anything new.” This story reminds us of the need to live each day with curiosity, to embrace whatever situations are placed before us with openness, and a willingness to learn.

We are living in challenging times where our very survival on a personal and planetary level is being threatened. It is obvious that we need to change our habitual ways of living and be open to a whole new paradigm, if we are to survive. How do we cope and continue to hold a vision of a future where the planet and the well being of all people will continue to flourish? There is no easy answer. I have found that the best solution is to take life one day at a time. We each need to take personal responsibility for our own wellbeing. How we live our own lives has a ripple effect on others whom we encounter in our day to day interactions.

The Reiki Principles are a good guideline for healthy living:

Just for today I will give thanks for my many blessings.
Just for today I will not worry.
Just for today I will not be angry.
Just for today I will do my work honestly.
Just for today I will be kind to my neighbor and every living thing.

Following these principles creates a spaciousness in our lives. It helps us to be open to other possibilities for something new to happen. The Zen Master, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, “If your mind is empty it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” If we continue to live like the seeker in the Zen story, without emptying our cups of old patterns, the outlook for future generations will be dismal. In following the Reiki principles we are being asked to open our hearts and minds to embrace a new way of relationship to ourselves and to others. When we face our challenges with an attitude of caring for ourselves and caring for others, we begin to heal ourselves at a level that affects our physical, emotional and mental wellbeing. If we each take the step towards ownership of our personal healing by living these principles, the possibility for a new world harmony is hopeful, and each day a new beginning.