How Noticing Changes Things

I am practicing being present with myself and the world. I am moving a little slower than usual, noticing what is happening within and around me: eating without listening to the radio or watching anything on the computer; walking with awareness of the movement of my body, the shifting of weight, the feel of the sidewalk or floor beneath me; pausing in my apartment or on the street when I feel myself moving away from the moment and all it holds, waiting until I am present before I resume the task I am doing.

And one of the things I notice is where, without conscious choice, I move away from awareness. I spend the day consciously with my breath and being as I meditate and pray and do my yoga, as I prepare my food and wash my dishes, as I write. But then, moving to update my financial books, I feel myself shift gears, disconnect from my own moment-by-moment experience, pull up some energy from deep within me for the task in front of me.

And I wonder: what is it about this task, about writing numbers in columns and adding figures that I unconsciously assume requires that I move away from awareness? I want to turn the radio on and listen to the news or find a podcast that will entertain me while I do the books. Why? Because I don’t particularly like this task. I do it because it has to be done. But I don’t really dislike doing it either, although I anticipate possible problems and small irritations- forgotten receipts, missed entries that must be tracked to make the totals come out right. So what? So, . . . . it seems I want to get it done but do not want to be present for the doing.

No big deal really, and there’s nothing wrong with listening to a podcast while I do the books. But I’m curious to see what happens if I choose to be present with even this task. If I cannot practice being present for something as mildly challenging as a less-than-exciting task, what hope do I have of bringing my full sustained attention to situations that are truly painful- a searing headache, the grief of a friend, news of violence in the world, the challenges of caring for two parents with Alzheimer’s?

The trouble with being absent from even this moment, is that it too quickly becomes a habit, something I hardly notice, something that easily begins to feel “normal,” difficult to drop and an impediment to remembering to bring myself back to mindfulness. A structured daily practice helps me remember, brings me back to the moment, my breath and what is, but the point of such a practice is not to offer an hour of presence before I go back to preoccupation and a lack of awareness. The point, the intent, is to increase my ability to be present with it all- inner and outer conditions that are ever changing and the still center that remains constant.

So, I’m grateful to have noticed the kind of task- mundane, repetitive, and not particularly creative or entertaining- where I move away from being present. And I find that when I catch myself and stay here fully, the task is. . . just a task.

And then it becomes something more. I find myself grateful for having the means to purchase what is needed, (thus the receipts that need to be recorded,) some income that can be taxed for the collective caretaking of my community, the ability to do my own books and take care of this small aspect of keeping life and limb together.

Where there was a flicker of irritation, a desire for distraction, there is the gift of gratitude- not reached for, but found simply by being present.

Waiting

To wait when waiting feels unbearable
When action seems imperative
But there is nothing to be done.

To trust that what is needed will be provided
When human resources are limited and needs are great
And distrust is more available, but divisive and destructive.

To accept
What is unacceptable
Because to fight with what is adds suffering to pain.

To be attentive
When the mind is clouded with exhaustion
So that opportunities to hold with tenderness are not missed.

To be with the anxiety that arises in muscle and bone
Not letting it drive action or paralyze
Allowing breath to create mercy around the anguish.

To take a break
When the fear-driven mind screams for constant vigilance
So the mind and heart and body can find respite and rejuvenation.

To receive the help offered
From others and from the Great Heart that holds us all
Letting gratitude temper grief,
fullness counter fear,
and compassion carry us all.

~Oriah


(For those of you who don’t know, both of my parents have dementia- my father advanced Alzheimer’s, my mother, early stages. My father was moved to a psychiatric facility -100 miles away from his home- last week because his aggression escalated to the point of choking a caregiver (despite months of great care and strategies to calm.) He is in a ward for those who are violent because of mental illness- not really where he belongs but there simply is no bed available in the psycho-geriatric ward better suited to his needs. My mother of course is deeply distressed.)

Walking Asleep- Dancing Awake!

Last week I began working on the two books that keep coming to me in dreams, working in earnest, taking myself to one of the university libraries daily (where I am not connected to the ever-seductive internet.) I’ve covered the walls of my tiny apartment with flipchart paper where I make notes with (literally) a hundred different coloured markers, beginning to feel out the armatures of the books, to sense and see where vivid threads fit into slowly revealed tapestries.

I work for hours and then return to the apartment to make notes and reread what has been written that day. And there in the privacy of my two small rooms I find myself both spontaneously dancing (again, literally) with the ecstasy of returning to the center of who I am and, at unexpected moments, coming to my knees in both gratitude and sorrow- gratitude for the reunion with myself, and sorrow at the full realization of how far from home I had wandered.

The writing I love is open-ended (as in, I don’t necessarily know exactly where it is going,) a discovering that takes me deeper into my own life, my own heart and the world. And I have not had a sustained period of following this fire that lights my way for many years. This, this writing, this following of the creative fire, this welcoming of Spirit in the form of words and image, story and colour- is how I touch the Mystery, the essence of who I am.

And I abandoned this to be married.

No doubt, in time, I will write more about how this happened. And no, it was not my ex-husband’s fault, although our neuroses and blind-spots dovetailed nicely as so often happens in intimate relationships. I can say that now, returning to the joy this writing brings, I find it hard to believe that I would have bargained this away for any promise or dream. And yet, having worked with groups and individuals for more than thirty years I wonder why I am surprised. I have often seen people abandon their deepest soul desires to do what they have been taught they “should” in the hopes of earning love. Of course, we don't earn love.

It's both humbling and frightening to know that even after all I have learned, I am still capable of abandoning myself, still willing to risk life itself when I am walking asleep. And the commitment to being fully with myself, to following the fire that lets me offer something to the world cannot be made once-and-for-all but must be lived one step, one breath, one moment at a time.

So, here I am- simultaneously humbled, ecstatic, sorrowful and filled with joy but most importantly: grateful and writing!

Leaning into Mercy

I am working with forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of those slippery words- a term bandied about so often by spiritually focused folks that it can become almost meaningless. Who would argue that forgiveness isn’t a good thing, a desirable thing? We all know that forgiving someone else releases us from resentment and other less-than-fun-or-enlightened states of mind and heart.

But reaching for forgiveness because we think we should, won’t work. Saying we have “forgiven and moved on” doesn’t make it so. In fact, pushing for or adamantly claiming to have accomplished “moving on” is probably a clue that we have not so much dissolved or left behind old resentments as we are trying to outrun or bury them, afraid of the pain that lies beneath an armour of anger and glimpses of grief.

How do we forgive another or ourselves when real pain and deep suffering have been caused?

It seems to me that forgiveness is less an action than an outcome, less of a goal than a naturally occurring state of grace that comes when we learn to meet hardness with softness, judgement with mercy.

So, I am working with mercy, learning to breathe into the hard places in my body- the armoured belly, the tightened jaw, the lifted shoulders- with a soft inhale. Mercy is the quality of heart-mind I seek to cultivate- kindness toward myself and others in our human frailty; tenderness toward what is feared and toward fear itself; gentleness with aspects of self that feel brittle, stretched too far and weary.

I am leaning into a mercy that is larger than myself, asking to be shown how to have loving-kindness toward all that is unresolved in my life and my heart and the world. I am following the scent of mercy offered to me by the Heart that holds us all, hoping to find my way in each moment into being merciful with myself, others and the world.

In November 2009 I started writing this weekly blog poste. I committed to posting every Wednesday for a year. Now, eight-three postings later, I am heading into a couple of months of retreat to focus on writing a new book. I’m tempted to simply say I’ll be back in September and not post any new blogs for July and August but. . . .I want to leave it more open-ended than that. So, for now, I’ll see what comes. Posts will probably be shorter-snippets of where I am internally or geographically- and I can’t promise they will appear every week- but, let’s see what happens.

Letting Yourself Go

A few months ago, in a somewhat mysterious response to a newsletter I sent out, a reader sent me an email admonishing me- “Whatever you do, don’t let yourself go!” It seemed unrelated to the subject of my newsletter (which was about not waiting for our proverbial ducks to be lined up before we do what feeds our hearts and souls.) I didn’t personally know the emailer but, for a moment, I wondered: had she seen me recently and observed something I should know about? I’m guessing that she wanted to encourage me to do what she believed was necessary to find a new mate since I am single once again.

Admonishments to avoid “letting yourself go” have always make me simultaneously cringe and wonder: What might it look like if we really did let ourselves go?

We’ve all heard the phrase, sadly too often from women referring to other women. Years ago, watching the taping of an interview with a well-known author, I was startled when another woman leaned over and with a conspiratorial lift of her eyebrows said, “Oh my. She has really let herself go, hasn’t she?”

To remain silent implied agreement. On the other hand, I didn’t want to verbally stomp on the woman who’d made the remark (well okay, part of me did- but I know that that kind of reaction is unlikely to do little more than elicit shame and defensiveness.)

I looked at the woman being interviewed. She’d been on a multi-city speaking tour and flown in from the west coast for the interview. She had gained weight since her last publicity photos had been taken, and there were dark circles under her eyes.

So, I just said, “She looks weary. It’s hard to take good care of yourself when you are travelling and giving so much to others.”

Women still tend to be judged largely (and sometimes exclusively) by their appearance. For my purposes here I’m not going to analyze why that is, or try to figure out how much of that has to do with species survival (appearance of healthy fertility) or the proclivities of a youth obsessed culture. At fifty-six, I have a whole new appreciation for trying to figure out what it means to “age gracefully” while wrestling with the contradictory temptations to embrace or resist “letting myself go.” What is reasonable self-care versus denial of reality? To colour grey hair or not? To slow down or try to reverse the slowing metabolism weight gain or accept a few extra pounds? (It took me thirty years to find the courage to have my ears pierced so the debate about plastic surgery is not even on my radar!)

Some of this is, of course, about health. But a lot of it isn’t. Every day millions (both die-hard materialists and those who see themselves as “spiritual”) are dieting, exercising, using creams and supplements and treatments with the not-so-secret agenda of preventing visible signs of aging.

But, what if we were to consider consciously “letting ourselves go?” What if learning to let ourselves go is about the freedom that comes when we stop considering, worrying about, anticipating or trying to guess how others might see, evaluate or judge us? About anything- our physical appearance, our spiritual “progress,” our relationships, our opinions, our work or how we spend our days. What if “letting ourselves go” is the gift of aging as we come to know and accept who we are in our strengths and weaknesses, as we give up hoping to wake up tomorrow as someone different- someone thinner or smarter or more “spiritual?” What if “letting ourselves go” is about letting go of the aspect of self that is preoccupied with looking “good” in the eyes of others or according to some internally held ideal?

This freedom grows in little ways. Some days I dress up. And some days I go out (as I would not have done a decade ago) with my hair hastily pulled back in an elastic band, face scrubbed bare, in a sweat suit and what my sons would call “old lady running shoes.” And I am delighted to find that the choice about how I present myself is increasingly determined simply by how I’m feeling, with no regard for what the clerk at the post office or the man at the juice bar might think of my appearance.

The phrase “letting yourself go” implies a kind of giving up, a stepping away from some effort deemed necessary to live fully. But what if the things we are stepping away from (worrying about what others think, crazy cultural standards for physical beauty, measuring our own or another’s worth by their possessions, or “success,” or impeccable meditation posture etc.) are things that in fact inhibit our ability to live fully, at peace with who and what we are? Such peace need not preclude change and growth, but it is not driven by a desperate desire to be other than we are.

So to the reader who emailed her well-meaning warning: It’s too late. I am, each and every day, learning to let myself go. And I like it. So much less trying, so much more joy. So much less fear, so much more love of self and life and others- just as we are in this moment.

Here’s to letting ourselves go!

Blossoming

I am posting a day early this week to catch the energy of the Summer Solstice today in the northern hemisphere (with a nod of appreciation for those in the southern half of the globe who are at the Winter Solstice, adding the gifts of deep dreaming in the dark to the collective.) Here in the north, it is the day of the longest light, the season of blossoming. And how do we as human beings- one of the many expressions of the sacred life force- blossom? By living fully as creative- sensual-spiritual beings. To consider what this might look like in our lives I offer an excerpt from my book on creativity, What We Ache For:

”Consciously cultivating and refusing to separate our spirituality, sexuality and creativity is the way we tend the life of the soul, individually and collectively. It is the way we unfold.

. . . . Our spirituality is our direct experience of that which is paradoxically both the essence of what we are, the stuff of which everything is made, and that which is large than us. We can call it God, the Sacred Mystery, the Great mother, the divine life force, fertile emptiness, clear light awareness, love, beauty, truth. The possibilities are endless. Some experience it through the practices of a religious tradition. For many life‘s holiness touches them unexpectedly when they attend a birth or sit at the bedside of someone who is leaving this world. Sometimes a direct experience of the sacred comes when we simply bring our full attention to an ordinary moment. . . .

. . . . Our sexuality is our awareness of the inherent juiciness of life lived in physical form, the infinite variety and vividness of colour, taste, scent, sound and touch in which we participate and from which we draw life. . . .Our sexuality is the way we live and appreciate an embodied life, which includes physical ecstasy and agony. It is the orgasmic rush that runs through the limbs when you lie on the forest floor staring up through the towering pines swaying in the wind. It is why a soaring melody is appreciated not simply by the mind, why the opening it creates for touching and being touched by what is sacred and nameless is felt in the body, experienced as a sudden and surprising ache in the chest. It’s what makes us want to sit still in the centre of the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, move and arch our back in the warm sun after a long winter, savour the taste of food prepared with care and thanksgiving. . . . Our sexuality includes all the ways we physically experience and are intimate with another, the world, ourselves.

Our creativity is the soul-deep impulse in all human beings to go beyond the perceptions of the senses to the conception of something new. . . . Observations give birth to ideas: words become a poem; sounds become music, light and colour; pigment and canvas become a painting. It is an inherent part of creation itself to produce new forms and human beings are not separable from creation. . . .

. . . . Of course, in our culture, spirituality, sexuality and creativity are often separated. This separation results in a crippling distortion of all three and frustrates the desire of the essential and sacred life force to know and express its wholeness through a particular human life. . . .

. . . . Spirituality separated from sexuality- from an awareness of and appreciation for our physical life and material reality alive with sensual detail- loses its fire, the passion that is rooted in the celebration of the beauty and gift of physicality. Separated from creativity- from the deep impulse to take what is and make new connections, to weave together new forms from the strands of daily life- spirituality runs the risk of becoming empty, conditioned rituals that lose their meaning for those who participate in them.

Sexuality separated from spirituality- from an awareness of the essential sacred life force energy we are- loses its heart, its connection to meaning and the real intimacy of knowing the other as another manifestation of the same divine presence that lives within you. Sexuality that is separated from creativity becomes mechanical, ritualized, losing its capacity for the intimacy that comes from the mindfulness and spontaneity that creativity requires and provides.

. . .creativity that is separated from the other two faces of the soul loses its vitality, is diminished in its capacity to be a path for the unfolding of the soul. Creativity separated from spirituality is reduced to advertising aimed at manipulating the longings of the soul to sell a product. Creativity separated from sexuality loses its aliveness, the sensuality and passion of life rooted in the physical world. It becomes an intellectual exercise that does not touch the heart, stir the blood or feed the soul .”*

May you cultivate your awareness of your creativity, sexuality and spirituality in your daily life, refusing to separate these three and unfolding to be all of what and who you are.

May you welcome the light of the Summer Solstice and use it to blossom!

*(from What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul by Oriah Mountain Dreamer. (c) 2005. Published by HarperONE, San Francisco. All rights reserved.)

What I Learned

I love learning. Truly. There are times when I have only half-jokingly said that you can get me to willingly walk through pretty much any hell so long as I feel I am learning something in the process.

Every family develops a story, a way of ordering their small world in an attempt to ensure all essential roles are filled and some sense is made of the daily drama that inevitably ensues. In my birth family the story was that I was like my father, while my brother (who was a year younger than me) was like my mother. My father and I were fair-haired, supposedly even-tempered, and slow to anger, while my mother and brother were the hot-tempered, emotionally volatile brunettes. It made for a symmetrical if not necessarily accurate family portrait, and some very competitive broomball games after dinner on the rink in our backyard where, at forty below zero under a star-studded sky, my father and I played together to consistently out-score my mother and brother who were. . . well, not playing so well together.

Broomball victories aside there were many ways in which I was not like my father. But it did always seem to me that my father and I shared an endless curiosity about how things worked. He was the one who encouraged my dinner time musings and questions about faith, God, social justice and human responsibility. It was only as an adult that I realized how greatly our areas of interest differed with my father’s curiosity primarily and almost exclusively directed toward concrete problems while my own musings ran less exclusively but more generally to abstract, spiritual questions. Realizing this, I was all the more appreciative of how he had supported me in my esoteric and ethical explorations.

But, despite this difference, what I shared with and learned from my father was a delight in and willingness to learn- to go to what Buddhists call beginner’s mind- the mind that knows it does not know and is willing to learn. Dad candidly confessed what he did not know, never pretended to know something he didn’t, and was willing and eager to learn from anyone and everyone- regardless of age or position- if they had something they were willing to share. Although he had always done physical labour as a Hydro lineman, when he retired at fifty-five he set about learning how to use a computer- something he doggedly pursued by asking questions of library workers, computer store clerks, the kid next door and pretty much anyone else who appeared to be the least bit computer literate.

There is one story that stands out for me when it comes to understanding what my father taught me about learning. One day, long after my brother and I had left our childhood home, while trying to figure out how to make a household repair my father found himself needing to know how to calculate the volume of a cylinder. Neither my brother nor I were available by phone (although honestly I am not sure I would have remembered how if he had reached me.) He was not yet on the internet, and there were no math text books in the house. So, after trying unsuccessfully to figure it out my father called the local high school and asked to speak to a math teacher. When the receptionist asked why, he explained his problem and told her that he assumed a math teacher would have the information he needed. He told her that he himself had not graduated from the eighth grade and, if he’d ever been taught how to do the calculation, certainly could not remember it now. She put him on hold and, after a few minutes, a bemused sounding teacher came on the line and told him the formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder.

My father taught me to enjoy the process of learning for its own sake- for the beauty of the questions, the fun of the investigation, and the satisfaction of figuring something out or at least trying to. One of the hardest things about watching him journey deeper into the mental confusion of advanced Alzheimer's is knowing that this joy has been taken from him.

This coming Sunday is Father’s Day, and I am grateful that my father taught me to love learning, take pleasure in puzzling and embrace beginner’s mind over and over. Thanks Dad. I love you. Happy Father’s Day.