Following Natural Magic

Cool air lightly brushes my arms as I breath in twilight freshness. Out for an evening stroll with my Beloved, frogs, crickets, and cicadas serenade us with a tapestry of natural rhythms. My heart opens as my mind relaxes. I am present.

Natural Light Show

To the south the sky is shading from blue to black, a backdrop for a pageant of planets that arc across the sky. Venus shines brightly, a jewel against the eggshell blue of fading sunlight over the western mountains. Jupiter sails after her against a darker background. In the south Saturn, most distant of these celestial lights, sparkles highest up the sky. Towards the southeast fiery red Mars is rising, as clouds blow past him. The waxing moon, that was a crescent above Venus ten days ago, is perched above Mars tonight.

My Beloved and I are alive to the evening, our senses in conversation with the magical/spiritual aspects of the natural world, walking out into the mystery and magic of Being. In an open space we pause to consciously soak up the richness these experiences. I notice a fullness in my chest, some ball of fear that is pushing me. In the natural spaciousness thoughts of distant concerns are triggering me.

Facing the moon and the arc of the planets spread above us, I focus inward, downward, connecting with my core, anchoring into my body. I breath. Shortly I move, dancing on the earth, feeling my connection to her. Dancing myself down into my body. Stamping, rocking back and forth, jumping up and down. I’m focused on the spaciousness of my Being, while allowing this ball of energy to expand, to flow, to release.

Feeling clearer after a while we walk on. I pay slow attention to my feet, each step, as I am slightly giddy. The moon is casting shadows in front of us. The fear has moved through, like the clouds passing over Mars, and I feel only Joy now. It expands out of me, including my Beloved, the frogs, the shaking aspen leaves, the smell of wet earth. I am back in the magical conversation. Amazed at the sounds, the smells, I move slowly now to allow myself to experience each piece of the world more fully.

How have I gotten here? Being open to the moment, open to Spirit and the magic that is always present, permeating ourselves and the world, is part. Letting go of mentally reaching out into the world, so I can be present right here and now, is part. There are lots of things out there to engage with. People to heal, friends to connect with, issues in the news. But for now, I have let the celestial and earthly beings bring me to the place they live and play. A spiritual place where magic is natural.

Finding my Self, my core, I find Joy, I am Love. There is power in the experiencing of small things, in this place of Being. Power is not out there, not in the engagement with our fears, not in the mind, but right here, right now, in our Selves.

The practice is always to be present with what arises. But never let go of the Joy, the Love. Even, especially, for excitement. And for all the shadowy feelings that arise, bring the Joy and keep them company. They will surrender, transmute, and fade. If I engage them directly, try to fix them, argue with them, persuade them, then I am wrestling with the tar baby. My power goes out, and I fade into fear and unconsciousness.

Let the natural magic guide you to your Being, which is Joy, is Love, and you will be in your power. Live always from that place.

(© 08/2018)

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Threading the Needle with Love

Threading the Needle with Love not Fear

Sometimes I make a change in life which completely makes sense. It feels like the right choice. And my guidance backs it up. But the change still kicks up a significant emotional charge of grief, fear, and/or anger. A few months ago I was moving things out of my latest office when this happened. My beloved looked at me with her keen insight and asked me what was up, bringing my attention home from the busyness of managing the move.

Parts of me want to push the emotions away, to make me feel better, and today I give myself space to simply observe them. I don’t want to make my self wrong, but I can choose not to follow its lead. These emotions are something old surfacing and I pause and welcome them into my awareness (like Rumi’s Guest House). As I focus on staying present, a whole constellation of memories, feelings, and beliefs flow past. Witnessing them, I anchor on my breath and the sensations I’m feeling in my body.

For the first time in over a decade I am not moving my things to a new office. There is no new office. So I am handing my furniture over to people who will sell it for me. The other day I had a phone conversation with my landlord, which felt cold, unfriendly and “all business”. This triggered a belief that I don’t operate well in business. It comes down to expecting I will have to fight to get what I think is right to happen. But I don’t want to close my heart and play a dog eat dog sort of business game. My heart wants to stay open and play with people who understand the power of a win-win approach.

I brought that expectation with me into the move today. Part of me simply wants to run away and hide. Away from fearful people playing fear games around money. It’s a powerful physical sensation in my chest. A bit hard to breath. I come back to witnessing my breath, and all the rest.

How do I thread the needle between fight and flight? To be present as my Self, true to my heart, and to neither be pushed around, nor to engage in battle. I stand in the now empty room, asking this question of my Self, of Spirit. Just holding it amid the swirl of releasing emotion. Show me how to do this thing in a good way? How to release what doesn’t serve me, all my fears, and show up in my power without having to fight?

I keep breathing. Slowly the fear moves through and I am able to inhabit my body again. Threading the needle by holding firmly to the question, I find spaciousness and the answer comes to me: just BE in my heart, hold to that and engage from there. Let go of the fears and memories as they arise. My strength is in my Being.

Later, I arranged to meet with the man who had triggered my fear, to turn over my keys. I didn’t need to, but it felt right to be present with myself and with him in that way. When we do meet all is cool. My fear is behind me, and there is no sense of the competition or conflict that I had projected into the relationship. He is actually friendly and helpful.

Staying with the fear and letting it move through not only cleared me, but it has brought me to a different outcome in the world as well. Staying with my Self, resting in my heart, I have been able to move from there in a good way after all.

(© 08/2018)

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Choosing Liberation

Green Tara

Have you ever experienced your mind hijacking your awareness? Mine seems to often have its own agenda (all in my best interest :-), about what I ought to give my attention to. It particularly likes to solve fearful problems or explain why I am powerless to change things, which leads me into sadness and despair. When I want to change my experience/story/life I have to contend with the mass of imbedded choices that my mind uses to guide my attention.

These choices are embodied in webs of thoughts that trigger emotions, which provoke more thoughts. Then I go online, or talk to someone, I often find “confirmation” and the mind/web wraps me up tighter and carries me away. This is what has been called Samsara, illusion. Especially the sense that I have no choice about what my experience is. There is little joy in going on this ride.

Although in the moment these mental/emotional states feel compelling and inevitably “real”, I do have a choice about wether to give my attention to them. The other day, in the kitchen making diner for my beloved, an old narrative arose involving isolation and helplessness. It’s a very old narrative. I remembered the experience of buying into it, curling up in isolation and helplessness and giving up on the world. This was the moment of Grace: that I recognized the track before I stepped onto it.

I looked at that option and said to my mind, no thank you! I’d rather make a nice diner and be happy with my beloved. I saw that I had a choice about how I showed up emotionally in that moment, and making that choice I began to feel differently. I started signing kirtan, let go of the old story, and gave my attention to simply being present. And the present was OK.

It’s not about fighting the story, or my mind, which is doing what it does because it thinks it will help. The original motivation and choices were often emotional. Emotional charge is what captures my attention, and is what I must release. Consciously taking my attention away (just as you change the channel, if a show is upsetting or unpleasant). It’s not about engaging my mind and discussing things with it. It would like nothing better. You pick option B and make a different choice. Own your attention and shift its focus. What would you choose if you had a choice? because you do.

The Green Tara Mantra

Lately my beloved and I have been doing the Green Tara Mantra. This invites Tara (Bodhisattva of Compassion) to take away all our suffering, the mental web of illusion that the mind presents as reality. The Mantra has been used for millennia by Tibetan Buddhists seeking liberation for themselves and for all sentient beings. So it has a lot of juice to it. Moreover Tara, an aspect of the Divine Feminine, is a powerful being in her own right.

If I had thought about it, I might have expected that Tara would help the mental patterns, beliefs and habits to dissolve, so that all the hinderances, fears, and attachments, simply went away. That would be nice, wouldn’t it. My experience seems to be a bit more subtle.

Rather than fading silently away, my old patterning has been coming up more, not less. But as it arises I also remember that I have a choice about how to relate to it. This is the Grace that I am receiving. I get to make a concsious choice. Doing this I claim power back from my mind. I claim the power to be my Self and experience Life from a higher perspective. I claim the freedom to be present in each moment and make new choices that create a new story.

Chant to Tara, pray to Christ or either Mary, or surrender the flowers of your mind to your Guru. Maybe your mental cages will arise one last time, so that you can make the conscious choice to step out of them. The cage is not you. You are Self not the ego mind and it’s stories. Each time you have this awareness, the ability to choose becomes stronger and easier. Each time you take another step towards liberation.

(© 05/2018)

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Attention and Experience

Filtered Image

Daily experience is made up of the things we give our attention to. You may say that the world/life is just there and what we experience is given fact. However there are layers of choice involved in how we experience each moment. All the stories and the engagement of mind with the world are actually optional!

Where we are in space depends on all the life choices that have brought us to be at home in a specific house, or at work at a specific job, or walking along a specific trail or street. Who is present with us depends on another long line of (possibly overlapping) choices. A beloved, a child, a dog, just ourselves or a whole group of people. Consciously and often unconsciously, I have made the choices that have brought me to this moment and populated it with a specific cast of characters.

Given a location and a scene, there are also many internal choices about how I experience this moment. Human consciousness is only aware of a fraction of what our senses take in. There are filters that make the raw sensory data manageable. Though in the moment, these filters are largely unconscious, we have trained them our whole lives. Some of that training was conscious, much was, and is, unconscious. What do you give your attention to? what in an experience is important to your mind? As we move through life, what do we notice and what do we pass by?

Another layer comes from our modes of participation. Are we looking, or acting? feeling or thinking? how much attention is outside at this moment and how much is inside? We each have propensities for how we engage with our lives. Each style gives a different experience. The sum of all these choices and options is unique to each of us.

The layers of choices are bound up with the story or stories my mind has made up about who I am and how the world is. My mind is proficient at focusing on things that feed these narratives and their associated emotional tone. This ability for the ego to find supporting evidence has always been true. In today’s world of media and the internet it is even more so. Somewhere out there is any opinion or story that you can imagine, and many that you cannot. We get to choose constantly what sources we are tuning into.

What we give our attention to feeds our experience, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. This is our power as creative human beings, to use our freedom of choice to create our experience. And yet mostly we give up that power, allowing our mind to direct our attention as the ego wills, as our habits and patterns dictate. Giving it up to family, friends, the media and the internet. Then we really are powerless.

The mind uses its stories, especially the emotional ones, to engage and keep my attention. This is how it runs my life, creates my life. I have watched it reaching out and engaging the world in ways that sustain its story, or current mood. It keeps me distracted and engaged in its story. If the world is a mess, or dangerous, my mind works overtime to find “answers”. This is job security. It is supposed to be about my security but in fact it often means I’m distracted from joy, or opportunity. I’m so busy following my mind as it chases its tail that I have little time to be, or to consciously consider, who I am and what I am doing in the world.

The good news is that if we have made all these choices, we can also make new ones. You can consciously retrain your mind to use your attention to support a narrative that is more in alignment with your soul, your heart, your inspiration and visionary creativity.

There are practices for freeing my attention, so I can make new choices. More on how we can choose freedom and a new experience of life next time.

(© 04/2018)

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Sacred Touch

Sacred Touch

Touch is how we meet the world. Sacred touch is how we meet Spirit.

To the extent that we experience ourselves as separate individuals, we come into contact with everything outside us through some form of touch. Touch can be physical, emotional, mental, energetic, or even spiritual. Reach out and touch someone. But how do we touch them? what is the quality of our touch? what subtexts are embodied in it?

Touch can be passive or combative, defensive or seductive. All the qualities and strategies of our ego come through our touch. Sometimes we are not present in our touch, perhaps afraid and holding back, or disinterested and not paying attention, and our touch is lifeless, like the proverbial dead fish. We neither give nor receive anything more than a small symbolic acknowledgement of another’s presence. We may have come to believe that engaging the world is always a contest or battle, something about winning and losing, controlling or being controlled. Then we are likely to bring fear and anger into our touch, mistakenly believing that this is power. Here also there is little giving and no receiving.

None of this is sacred touch. Sacred touch is touching with awareness that we are sacred and that what we touch is sacred. In Spirit we are part of the web of Life, the expressed consciousness of Source. Quantum mechanics teaches that we are part of the fields that comprise the Universe. Modern society does not teach us to live, or touch, from this understanding or awareness.

When we reach out to a person from our Spirit, we do so with curiosity, compassion, and love. Touching from our own Sacred core we automatically engage the Sacred aspects of the other. As Spirit in me touches Spirit in you touching becomes a Sacred act. Nothing really fancy about it. It could happen anywhere anytime: making love with your beloved, or simply smiling at someone in the grocery store.

Sacred touch is an act of being present with someone else. It is an offer to engage, to connect, to communicate, to bridge the sense of separateness and explore something outside of our selves. Sacred touch doesn’t expect anything. It is freely offered, but not insistent. It is open to receive, but does not take. With presence and awareness touch comes alive. Awareness is listening, mindful curiosity and appreciation about what I am touching. When I touch my beloved with attention to how her arm feels in this moment, it is a very different touch than a hasty pat. She feels that difference and responds accordingly. When you receive a massage, you know immediately if the person working on you is paying attention. Their awareness is in their hands and they are present with you.

In Sacred touch there is receiving as well as giving. With attention I become aware of my beloved’s energy, her tension or relaxation. I can even become aware of how she is experiencing my touch. Giving love I empathically feel her receiving love. Separateness fades and we are creating an experience of Love and Joy together. We are touching each other. Through my hand and her arm our Spirits meet.

Sacred touch is being present in yourself and offer your presence openly to your partner or the world. When you are open to receive what you touch touches you back. Experiencing life in this way there is learning, growth and the ongoing generation of Love. Sacred touch empowers the global Love field, which nourishes us all. Thank you for playing.

(© 03/2018)

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