Baby's Breath

In your arms
with fearless sleep and waking
fear becomes feather
and rises
divine currents
free falling into grace.

Roxie

What If It's NOT a Beautiful Morning?

I'm not one of those people who wake up energized and ready to face the day. Unfortunately, my biological system doesn't seem to know that and it insists on waking up the minute the early morning light seeps in around the edges of my window-darkening shades.  IT is energized while my mind is full of less-than-enlightening thoughts.  It seems like there should be a way to use some kind of spiritual practice to open my soul to the day.

I've tried various things.  For example, I used to say at bedtime:  "God, let me sleep well, have happy dreams, and wake up joyful."  Since I now have a "higher power" who's supposedly in charge of my life, I am loathe to ask for anything that specific.  I feel compelled to accept whatever the higher power doles out even if it's insomnia and morning dreads.  As I think about this, maybe that's not quite right.  Surely, a higher power would want me to sleep well and wake up joyful?  Maybe I should join that loving intent and go back to that bedtime ritual. Hmmm.

I've also tried energy exercises as soon as my feet hit the floor and saying the Serenity Prayer as soon as I'm conscious.  Nothing seems to alter the discomfort and dread that a new day evokes.  It has to do with living alone because when I have overnight visitors, I do wake up excited and ready to be with them.  As I think about it, I always liked to see my ex-husband's face in the morning even when we were near the end of our marriage.  I like to go to bed alone but really would like to crawl into someone else's bed when I first wake up.

So, what spiritual practice might ease me into the day?  Here's my brainstorming list:
(1)  Start singing!
(2)  Fake laughing out loud until you really start laughing (a Buddhist practice, believe it or not).
(3)  Breathe deeply and say the Serenity Prayer until you mean it.

Do any of you, my readers, have any ways that work for you?  Please share them in the comments section.  I'm desperate!

Here's what actually does happen and it's not spiritual.  I wake up and briefly hate the light coming in around the shades.  My stomach growls and I have to go to the bathroom.  I stall for awhile and then grudgingly surrender to urinary needs.  I crawl back in bed and turn away from the window.  I think about whatever is worrying me and eventually I drift off to sleep again.  I wake and go through the same process probably 3 times before I'm willing to get up.

Notice the theme of light juxtaposed with words like hate and grudging.  I was at a spiritual workshop yesterday and at the end, ironically, I drew the card that said "light."  Among other wise and wonderful things, the reading that went with it said, "lighten up!"  It said to reduce the clutter around me and in me including reducing negative thoughts.  I'm quite sure that hating the morning light falls into the category of negative thoughts.  More than that, if "light" is my spiritual mantra for this part of my life, then that light that I'm hating is my teacher, is a grace, is a gift from the universe.  I need to find a way not to spit on a spiritual gift.

Here's what I'm going to do:  Post a sign on the window that says--"Welcome Light."  Then, I'm going to raise the shades and open the curtains.  Well, maybe I'm not going to do that second thing.  I'll start with the sign and see what happens.

Other experiences and ideas out there?  Roxie

Spiritual Evolution: Hard Work and Grace

So, I've been reading a book called Emergence by Barbara Marx Hubbard.  I am struck by how similar her concepts are to those in other spiritual discourse.  She speaks of our wounded children or ego or the parts of life that are the common suffering of the human condition as our "local selves."  She speaks of the higher power or our essence as "Essential Self."  She goes one step beyond to what she calls the "Universal Human."  She thinks we are, as a species, evolving towards this universal humanhood.

Our local selves are the many voices within us that speak from the locale and timeframe during which they dominated within us.  For example, my teen-age local self burst out the other day when I was being pressured and corrected publicly by a peer in the name of spirituality.  She said, "No!  So, back off!"  That outburst, while completely understandable given the circumstances, was not what my essential self might have said.  My essential self might have said, "I don't choose to respond to that question."  The little girl in me might have looked to the moderator of the session to protect me.

Interestingly, the other women in the spiritual circle, resonated with my teen-age voice and felt it spoke the truth.  How hard it is to do spiritual work whether we couch it in Hubbard's terms, the terms of recovery groups, or the terms of organized religions!  It's hard to discern when a local self speaking from the pain and challenges of teen years still is speaking a necessary truth in our adult life.  This is where Hubbard is really helpful because she believes in the integration of all those inner truths and voices.  She sees the Essential Self as shepherding our inner family towards the higher good.  To do this, she must gain credibility with the unruly inner children or local selves.

How does this happen?  Her truth, her loving kindness towards all those parts of the self must be so compelling that, over time, all the parts want to follow her, to be one with her. She becomes the loving mother that we may never have had.  Hubbard asks us to journal about a time when our mother failed us significantly.  She has us write what actually happened and then re-write the story imagining our mother as HER essential self, responding with loving kindness.  We relive that moment with our essential mother and a couple of things happen:  (1) we see the gap between what was and what could have been; we recognize what we missed and can assess the depth of our loss; and (2) we feel the moment reconfigured as a healing moment instead of a trauma.  For example, I wrote a story of my essential mother, the evolved Lucille, as getting up in the morning happy.  Just writing that line, I realized the depth of HER unhappiness and that I didn't know a happy mother.  That realization settled within me in a different way than my intellectual knowing of that fact has in the past.  Somehow, I FELT her essential goodness and love along with her failure to manifest that in my childhood presence.  It felt better to know that she, too, had not evolved to her essential self yet.  I felt re-mothered in a way.

Another thing that Hubbard presents us with as do 12-step recovery systems is the dysfunction of the evolving human condition.  We are hurt and dysfunctional and imperfect in our physical selves because we live in a world-wide culture that is dysfunctional.  The culture doesn't value love or kindness.  It doesn't take care of the weak or the sick in systematic ways.  It values a hierarchy of intellectual, financial, racial, gendered dominance and weakness.  It's useful to imagine our culture reconfigured as one that honors each and all with the same respect and love.  It's staggering to imagine this and to realize the depth of our cultural loss.

The hope is in the evolving.  I think of de Chardin here and his sense that we are evolving as a species towards the Christ, evolving as a species into god.  I think of the Buddhists who believe that no one person is fully enlightened until the species has achieved enlightenment.  What does this all mean?  On the one hand, each of us must work towards our personal evolution, enlightenment, recovery; at the same time, we must give a hand to others in their movement towards the same.  Additionally, we can support cultural efforts that support the dignity and growth of all.

And so, I apologized to the fellow traveler who had attacked my local self from her local self.  Loving my inner teen that defended herself, defended the current state of our evolution in a sense, I also reached beyond when I could to a higher state.  Spiritual evolution is happening.  We're in it.  It's both hard, hard work and grace.  Roxie

Not my life, not my problem!

I've been battling a back problem for almost a week and yesterday I pretty much cussed out the higher beings that govern my life.  I slammed doors and muttered as I picked up my doggie and fed her.  At the first slamming, she jumped and slunk off to her crate to wait until the storm passed.  I called to her and told her I wasn't mad at her.  She received my petting and assurances but went back into her crate anyhow.

Later, I was pondering her behavior and I realized suddenly that her moods are governed by mine--that everything about her little life is governed by me, not unlike how my life is governed by the gods.  There's more to it than that though.  I also remembered being a little person in a chaotic household and slinking away when my parents fought, trying desperately to please them and make them happy when things were calmer.

I concluded that Emma Jane came to me as a gift from those same gods that I've been cursing.  She models the profound connection between each of us and our higher power or god, if we prefer.  She turns her life over to me every morning and considers it a joy if I look her way.  How I wish I could do that with god!

So, this morning when I woke up discouraged and lonely, I did turn my life over.  I said, "It's yours, God."  And then I added, "Not my life, not my problem, Dude."  I came downstairs and the day looked different to me.  What did my god, despite my chronic lack of trust, have in store for me?  I wondered that with hope and anticipation, not dread.

Like Emma Jane, I await further developments with patience and good will.  Roxie

Where, Oh Where, Is God?

So, it's hard work to be spiritual, alas.  You'd think it would just be a part of our DNA and we would just incorporate it daily like brushing our teeth.  Not so.  If it is part of our DNA, it's often deeply buried by the time we reach adulthood.

No doubt we are born "trailing clouds of glory" as Wordsworth says, but as we develop, too often religion squelches the curious glory and creativity that are the hallmarks of our spiritual nature.  The Unity Church, among others, calls us "spiritual beings in a physical world."  And so it is.  We are perpetually torn by our dual natures.

How do we become one physi-spiritual being?  I don't know but I think that's the challenge.

Recently, I've embarked on a 12-step journey towards spirituality.  Once skeptical and even scornful of this process, I now see it as my best way to enlightenment.  The third step of the journey invites us to turn our will and our lives over to the "god of our understanding."  I'm stuck at this spot.  Every day, I meditate and pray to have the courage to surrender my will to some higher life force.

At the moment when I'm about to turn it over, I get a frisson of fear and I stop.  I've examined this fear and what comes to life for me is a wounded part of myself.  Authority figures in my life used religion and god as the ultimate punishment.  I find that's true for many people who grew up in strict religious families.  In my case, my mother had god in her pocket.  She would pull him out to support any stricture or punishment that she wanted to hand out.

One of her favorite ploys was to invite me to confide in her.  "Tell me about your date," she would say to my teenage self.  In a burst of hope, I would share.  The words would barely be out of my mouth when she would slam the door on my happiness and declare me to be evil and going to hell.  Then, she would tell me I couldn't ever go out with this or that boy again (the worst offense I can remember was holding hands).

So, at the moment when I'm about to surrender to the will of a higher power of my understanding, I freeze.  Will that god also slam me into worse circumstances than those I create for myself?  My history with the god of my mother's understanding is that he will.  He belongs to her.

I am seeking a god of MY understanding and hoping THAT being has my best interests at heart.  Namaste, Roxie

The Word Made Flesh

I've heard it said that we are "spiritual beings in a physical world."  What does that mean, really?  Where do the spiritual world and the physical world come together?  They come together in me!  In us!

How hard we strive to be good people, to understand the human condition, to help others, to pray.  We cry out for wisdom and sometimes it comes out:  "What the F-- does all this mean?"  Why do we hurt emotionally and physically?  Why do "bad things happen to good people?"  Who's minding the universal store, so to speak?  Somehow we think that by striving and seeking, we can make a difference. 

Well, we can't.  Tennyson was wrong when he wrote about the human condition in the final line of Ulysses, "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."  No amount of trying and of effort is needed. 

The principle is simple:  Love yourself.  It flies in the face of all the spiritual do's and don't's we've learned over time.  How can it be that loving ourselves IS the answer?  That is the answer because each of us is "the word made flesh."  We are the meeting place where the spiritual manifests itself.  Not the church or the holy books.  No one said, "The word is in churches and holy books."  No, the word was made flesh in a person.  In Jesus, in Buddha, in Mohammed.

The word is made flesh today in me. 

So the edict to love myself, just that, begins to make sense.  I start to wonder how to do that.  How can I love myself, how can I be my own best friend?

Some moments of enlightenment have begun to occur.  I was reading and working with my inner teen-ager the other night.  She was crying over the loss of her mother.  I began to ask her about her feelings and, finally, to tell her that it's a different time and place and that, today, she is loved and protected.  All of a sudden, a different voice took over and said:

"I have been trying to tell you all your life that I LOVE YOU.  Not because you're good or bad, not because you try hard or have suffered.  I love you because you're mine.  Yes, you have been brave and survived great hardships.  You know what, the hardships came because you didn't hear me saying I love you.  You are a vessel containing and expressing the God.  I love you with the tenderness of the good mother, with the protectiveness of the good father, with the passion of the good lover, with the loyalty of your best friend. I. LOVE. YOU."

In that moment I was swept up into the joy and peace of the universe.  Enlightenment.

This morning, everything seems in slow motion.  I am IN my body.  I feel the oneness of spirit and flesh in this slightly overweight, arthritic, aging body.  That's the best way I can describe my moments of enlightenment.  Time disappears.  Everything slows down to this moment.  Turning on the bedside light is an act of tenderness.  Enlightenment.  Roxie

And He Will Raise Me Up

Sometimes, our higher power or greater good comes through in unexpected ways.  We can choose to recognize those moments of grace or we can sleep walk through our days.  It's hard to see those unexpected and often tiny "ways" as miracles, but what if they are?

I've had such moments in the last few days and I've noticed them.  I was in Maine with family for the holidays.  I slept well every night.  Miracle.  It wasn't always easy.  Sometimes, I had to ask for divine intervention to keep all the inner demons in check. 

What does it mean to ask for divine intervention?  As I read somewhere, it's unlikely that the Big Dude or greater good is going to help your football team win, for example.  But it might help you or me have a gentler attitude when we watch that game.  Here's how I think of my higher being.  It's a "he" today.  He raises me up.  I rise to meet him.  Together, we become my higher power or greatest good.  That entity sees and accomplishes miracles.

That entity faces its less-than-helpful behaviors and tries something different.  Driving home from my brother's home in Maine, it was dark and there were predictions of a terrible storm the next day.  It occurred to me that I might get snowbound in my hotel where there was no restaurant.  Procrastination is one of my personal challenges.  My  higher self took charge.  It drove me into a convenience store where I filled my gas tank, bought bottles of water, granola bars, and yogurt.

The next day I was snowbound.  I was prepared and unafraid.  My higher power had seen to it that I had food and water.  Yesterday, the snow stopped and I went out to my car.  Snowplows had piled snow up all around it.  I took a deep breath and borrowed a shovel.  I shoveled for an hour.  When I was finished, my heart was pounding and I was shaking.  I wanted to go back in my room and not face the five hour drive home.  Truly a higher being took charge again.  Step-by-step, I carried my luggage through the snow to the car. 

Where are the miracles?  Two months ago, I would have worried all night about whether I should drive home and so I wouldn't have slept.  I wouldn't have filled the tank or gotten supplies.  I would have churned with guilt because I didn't go out to my brother's that day.  I would have blamed myself for everything and railed at the gods as well.

Instead, it was all in sync.  I was serene and living only this moment's challenges.  I did what needed to be done to be safe.  And, I was happy and grateful.  On the way home, I sang:  "And he will raise me up on eagle's wings."  That's how I felt.  How is that not a miracle?  Roxie