Archive for the ‘Healing’ Category

I have a friend who has conquered several addictions in her life.  It has taken much effort and courage on her part to do so.  And yet, she is still plagued by an incredible amount of fears that sometime nearly immobilize her but, more commonly, pop up just often enough to just keep her from actualizing her full potential.

Today during a phone conversation with her it dawned on me she’s addicted to fear.  It’s a strange statement to make, I know.  Why would anyone be addicted to fear?  Well, if that’s pretty much all you’ve ever known… it would be easy.

So I got to thinking how we in this country have been so conditioned with “manipulation by fear” for so long that, like my friend, we’re addicted to it.  We can‘t seem to get along without it.

After all, almost all media to which we are exposed can be summed up in the adage “Dog Bites Man” doesn’t sell.  “Man Bites Dog”…now that sells!  Why?  Because for a lot longer than I can attest to personally (hello? original sin?) we have been conditioned to respond to a negative rather than a positive.  And, like any conditioning, we’ve become used to it.  Like hanging.  Isn’t that how the saying goes? “If you hang long enough you get used to it?” Problem is, when you get used to hanging its death you’ve grow accustomed to… not life.

So it is with fear.

Whether it’s an erratic Dow Jones Industrial Average, a potential terrorist attack, a category 4 hurricane, possible flu pandemic, toxic green house gasses, or the endlessly broadcast, telecast and webcast stories of tragedy, thievery and criminality… we are hooked on being afraid.  And left unchecked, fear gets in the way of movement in a positive direction.  In fact, in the extreme, fear gets in the way of movement.  Period.

Our addiction makes us slaves… no matter how democratic and free we think we are.

What’s the answer?

Well, it’s like I told my friend today.  She kicked diet pills, gambling and smoking by going cold turkey.  Like Nancy Reagan suggested… by just saying “No.”  My friend got angry at herself each time she reached her tolerance limit because the substance controlled her.  She didn’t control it.

Now getting angry is not usually a good thing.  But when you use anger-energy to motivate your own Will to overcome that which has overrun you… then anger gets put to constructive use.  And after all, isn’t anger just another form of energy?  When used correctly, all energy can be used for the highest good.

My thinking is that a nation addicted to fear needs to go cold turkey.  But we need to start one person at a time.  So today, turn off or tune out or walk away from anything that emanates or generates fear.  Say “no” to fear and take back your life.  The alternative is slavery and death.

You’ve got a choice, you know.

It’s called Free Will.

The past two weeks have been challenging.  First recovering from a virus followed by a sprained shoulder… it’s been a lot of “non-activity” to ask of someone who is inclined to always be working on something. However, since I make it a practice to walk my talk I have to ask myself, “What is the higher lesson to be learned here?”

I think I have it.  The Universe has a rhythm.  In order to successfully live within the Universe, and in harmony with its rhythm, requires us to feel it and more importantly align with it.

I have a tendency to try to move things at my own pace.  This translates into impatience.  It’s kind of funny that I still find myself impatient since I tell my clients that impatience is “the absence of trust in Divine Timing manifested as a need to control outcomes.”

You’d think I’d remember and follow my own advice.

But, like everyone else, I have an ego that occasionally enjoys getting in my own way.  When I fail to recognize or acknowledge the rhythm of the Universe (also known as Divine Timing) I am under the illusion that my will can oppose Thy will and prevail.  And while I use terminology that is religious or spiritual to make the point, it’s somewhat misleading.

Energy is the source of All That Is, including us.  When we fail to align with the Universal or cosmic flow of energy, it’s like attempting to swim upstream.  Better to move in tandem with that energy, or wait it out, until there is a change of either speed or direction that is more supportive of where it is we want to go.

Nature is great example.  Plants have no ego.  They have a time to germinate, a time to grow, a time to bud and a time to bloom.  They make no effort to impose alternate timing or an alternate outcome.  If I can take some liberty and attribute to them a quality they may not exactly have… they trust the Universe.

I think someone tried to tell us to do the same when they said “To everything there is a season…”.

So, its now two weeks into this “slow down period” and the smartest thing I can do is align with it.  Having tried to do otherwise for these past fourteen days, I’ve decided today to begin doing just that.  I meditated for half an hour this morning and now have written this blog.  It is 10:30am.  I am about to spend the rest of the day on the sofa reading, watching uplifting DVD’s and… well…  not much of anything else.

Except awaiting a change of speed and direction, that is..

Allow me to preface this by saying that as a woman and former divorce lawyer of 13 years I, in no way, condone domestic violence nor do I think that what Mel Gibson has been tape recorded saying is in any way acceptable.  In fact, he has said things that are deeply disturbing if not legally actionable.

However, how and why we choose a partner is always complex. While it is true that verbal abuse and physical threats are never to be sanctioned, what is often overheard by others not directly involved can be but a partial insight and oftentimes misleading.

The choice for two people to be together, for better or worse so to speak, is a mutual choice.  Hopefully, that choice is made out of want rather than need.  But this is not always the case.  In fact, most people come together seeking to fill a lack or void in themselves in the hope that the presence and love from the other will fill it. This is rarely a conscious intention.  And while its never a good way to find a significant other… it’s a very common and human one.

I speak from experience.

When my marriage began to wither, I became at first frustrated by, and later angry at, my spouse’s emotionally detached behavior.  There was a subtle pattern of emotional manipulation that at times drove me to the brink… although I recognized it only in hindsight.  We stayed together. He manipulated me in a very passive/aggressive way as my frustration and anger mounted.  Ultimately, I yelled a lot and said things I’d retract today if I could.

Listening to the Gibson tapes, I was struck by two things.  First, and most obvious, his rage.  But secondly her calm.  I hear myself in him.  I hear my former husband in her.  After all, what is she even doing having these conversations with him?  Why, after prior encounters with his rage, is she still hot-tubbing with him and sleeping in the same bed?  Why is she so calm knowing it escalates and infuriates his anger? What does that do for her?

I hear him saying (however crudely) that he wants certain things from her.  I also hear her saying (admittedly between the lines) “I am trying to love you but you need help.”

This is a co-dependent, enabling and very destructive relationship at best.  But it’s too easy to get caught up in the blame-game and condemn the loudest voice. 

Both these people need help.  Both need to get to the root of their own personal demons and they definitely need to be apart in order to do that internal work . Something drew them together and that something was powerful.

Now it’s about the constructive and wise use of that power.

I don’t believe in fairy tales.  However, when human beings are willing to go the extra mile and do the tough work, miracles are possible as are happy endings.  I have no idea what that looks like in this matter but I wish them both well and send them both healing.

As a Spiritual Coach I’m hearing a great deal lately about people not knowing what to do about, or how to handle, all the change and uncertainty that’s in the air. Because I consider myself an expert on facing change (>read that as LOTS of life experience dealing with the unexpected) I’m pretty comfortable giving out advice on how to effectively get through the unknown.

Its simple, really.  Well, simple to understand, anyway.

The secret, and its really no secret at all, is that anytime we are asked to move from where we are comfortable to someplace unknown, fear comes up.  Now some people will say they don’t experience fear. To that I would reply that there are gradations of fear ranging all the way from a mild discomfort to being completely immobilized.  No matter where you fall along that continuum, at either extreme or someplace in between, the remedy is the same.

Patience in the process.
Trust in the Source.
Release of the outcome.

We live in such an accelerated world that we’ve forgotten what it is to wait.  I mean really wait.  Not wait for a seemingly snail’s paced fax to be sent and arrive because, say, e-mail is down.  I mean really wait.  As in lovingly wait for Nature… or God… or Life to take Its course.  Not only don’t we know how to wait, we don’t even realize that the act of waiting…particularly done in annoyance or frustration… is an impediment to living fully in the present.

That’s where Trust comes into play.  If you can accept that change is inevitable… which it is… and trust that all change is for the highest good… which it is… then there’s no need for impatience.  Because things will unfold as they are intended and. while that’s completing itself. you can go about fully engaged in everything that’s in your life at the moment without care or concern for the outcome.

With patience in the process, trust in the highest good, and absent care or concern for the outcome there is no need or place for fear.

As I said. Simple to understand. Challenging to live.  But since I’ve done it many times, so that its become second nature so to speak, I can tell you with certainty it works.

Give it a try.  It sure beats the alternative.
 

It seems that its becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with all the news.  You pick the category and there’s some breaking story in it.  It really is information overload. 

What’s a person to do?

Well, may I suggest silence.  Its a beautiful, and healing, alternative.  I know because lately I’ve begun to meditate.  Now please don’t write me off as some mystic, or former hippie, who is looking for some way to “drop out.”  I am, and always have been, a Type A personality.  If I’m not in motion, or using my brain in some challenging way…well such reckless frivolity has always been the very definition of “lazy” in my book.  No, what led me to meditation was a combination of 1) coaxing from a dear friend and 2) more “news” than I could handle. 

What I’ve learned from meditation is that there’s more to learn in silence than in all the news that’s fit to print…or broadcast…or telecast…or tweet.  In silence exists an internal knowing that transcends words.  Really. You can’t describe it.  You have to be it. When you are being it, what you feel is everything you’ve ever sought.  Truly.  Now my assumption is that what we all ultimately go in search of is inner peace. I mean, really, isn’t all that we aspire to and seek done in the hopes of acquiring some satisfaction that always seems just beyond our reach…or so transient it was hardly worth the getting?

Well, here’s breaking news.

Inner peace comes from within!  Duh!  You’d think that would be self-evident.  However, we humans with our opposable thumbs and high tech world are still running around trying to find it outside of ourselves. Duh, squared!

So I could have posted this blog entry about Iran’s launch into space, or the White House leak about the cooperating terrorist who tried to blow up a plane Christmas day with explosive underwear, or the yet again declining DOW, or the rumor that the Jolie-Pitts are on  the rocks…but here’s the thing.  I’d just be adding to the information overload.  So instead, I decided to share with you the sound of silence. 

Once in a while, its really sweet to have nothing to say… and even less to listen to.

It was just two days ago that I posted about the drought in Venezuela and its potential impact on the government of Hugo Chavez.  The point of the post was to call attention to the power of Nature in relationship to the power humans like to think we wield.  Now comes a devastating earthquake in Haiti with massive destruction and as yet untold numbers of lives lost.

Its all Natural law at work.

I’m not certain about global warming and whether we’ve created the problem, exacerbated it, or if it even exists at all.  There seems to be a plethora of science on all sides of the argument.  What I am certain of is that for thousands of years we have, at best, ignored the other forms of life with which we share planet Earth and at worst, exploited them for our personal pleasure and gain.

All bills come due, not just our national deficit.

While we are myopically focused on trying to stay afloat during an economic downturn and pass universal health care, we’re neglecting to notice the warning sign emanating from Earth.  She has had enough. I say “she” because “giving” is a characteristic of the Divine Feminine.  The Earth, and all of Nature, know how to give.  They give repeatedly and without demand, thus ensuring the cycle of life and all that it takes to sustain it.

In a groundbreaking book titled “The Chalice and The Blade” Riane Eisler explores, with specificity and over 50 pages of source notes, the archaeological discoveries and historical records that now point to both Paleolithic and Neolithic societies previously believed to be patriarchal which, in fact, were matriarchal.  Matriarchal… without wars, and deeply aligned with and respectful of Nature.

So somewhere we went off track.  Somewhere we decided that it was all here for our use and abuse.  That self-satisfaction was the goal and greed was the means of attaining it.  It has gotten us only so far. 

It appears we’re arrived at a critical evolutionary pause. Unlike those who see Armageddon, or some other cataclysmic event as the obvious outcome, I believe we have an alternative. 

We can restore the Divine Feminine and all that She stands for to Her rightful place alongside the Divine Masculine.. and by that restoration reinvigorate our values, behavior and language with the dignity and respect due every living human being and thing.

In having denigrated and abandoned the Divine Feminine we also abandoned ourselves.

The bill is now due.  We can pay it with our lives or we can enter into a repayment plan whereby, over time, we replenish through thought, word and deed the abundant bounty that was our birthright and which we so carelessly undervalued and exploited. 

It is time to stop taking and start giving.

No one better exemplifies this quality of giving for the highest good of all concerned than the Divine Feminine… Mother of All That Is.  In Her restoration, we restore ourselves unto ourselves.  And in so doing, discover not a tragic end but rather a glorious new beginning.

There’s a standard joke that goes, “There are only two things in life you have to do.  Die and pay taxes.”  Perhaps that’s why we devote so much human energy to fending off death and managing our financial resources. 

Theoretically, in opposition to the joke, one could argue that someday we may actually figure out how to live forever or at least maintain the body for renewed life (cryogenics), or that a new form of revenue raising may be created so the need for taxes becomes obsolete.  Therefore, perhaps someday even the joke itself may become obsolete.

What is no joke is that the one thing we all will face for certain in life, and have to deal with, is Change.  How ironic, and sad, that along with all that is taught as part of formal, and informal education, we spend no time or resources in teaching how to traverse and manage Change.

Change isn’t something that happens in life. 

Life is Change. 

At every level of Nature, and within human nature, Change is the stuff of Life.  Its how things grow.  Without change there is no growth.  Whether its the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual worlds we talk about, its the Process of Change that moves us through trial and error towards a more fully developed and expansive existence.

The harm in not teaching the fundamentals of Change is that so much time and energy is wasted on resisting rather than embracing it.  Because there is something comfortable, even seductive, about what we know versus the unknown, we have a strong tendency to want to maintain the status quo… even if its a condition not particularly desirable, enjoyable, or supportive. 

But the status quo, by definition, is “the existing order of things.”  Its similar to another Latin word, stasis, which i s “the state of equilibrium or inactivity caused by opposing equal forces.”  The status quo implies an accepted, or at least passive, acquiesce to how thing are.   But nothing is how it is since everything is in a constant state of change.

So what’s the opposition to Change?

Precisely that it upsets the status quo!

Change necessitates being in a constant state of creativity in order to adapt to it.  The only thing I know we teach as being in a constant state of creativity is Creator. 

Uh-oh!

If we accept that 1) change is always occurring; 2) creativity is required to adapt to it; 3) Creator is in a constant state of creativity; then we will, by necessity, have to be as Creator is.

There’s the resistance to teaching and learning about Change!  The prospect that to embrace Life and live it fully requires us to be in a constant creative state of Being, such as Creator, is more responsibility than we want to take on.  Hence, our preference for the status qou.

But here’s the rub.  The joke, it turns out, is on us.  For in resisting Change, we defy the Law of Creation.  In defying Creation, we guarantee our own demise.

So perhaps we can dispense with all the time, effort and money we put in to postponing death or trying to figure out how to resurrect the body.  The short answer to that dilemma appears to be to live Life as Life Is… constantly in a state of change and thereby live forever. 

Death, it turns out, isn’t an ending but a transition to another form of Life.

Of course, its only that for those who know how to transition.  Who know how to Change.

I think that’s worth teaching, don’t you?

When you’re on a spiritual path, and all of us are whether we’re aware of it or not, you go through spiritual growth spurts just like any other growth process.  These are exhilarating times filled with optimism and faith. And, as you’d suspect, you also reach plateaus, or periods of “flat-lining”, when there appears to be no growth at all.  Finally, to our collective dismay, there are those times when it appears that some or all of our progress to-date has been lost…or at least seriously misplaced…and we wonder, in our confusion, where hope or inspiration may be found.  Often times, this is when we reach out and call a friend.

In such moments, well meaning
friends can empathize. They can even show compassion. That’s why we
call them.  But, if what you really need is a transfusion, there’s
simply nothing in a first-aid kit that will do the trick.  You must go to
the bank where the blood is stored. 

I have another suggestion born of experience.

Call God instead.

What it means to “call God instead” is to forgo the urge to ask someone other than yourself to lift you up.  It means to surrender, in the most positive sense, the unfolding of your life to the Power that has given you life.  It means to ask, out loud, for clarity as to your Life’s purpose and how to best manifest it.  It means to move your ego to a back burner and acknowledge that while you are not in control… you are in process of Be-coming that which you were designed to Be.

I choose the word “designed” here for a reason.

There is, in fact, a blueprint, for each of us.  A plan for our fruition and our purpose. There is nothing in Creation for which a blueprint does not exist… encoded within its very essence.  It’s how a rose “grows up” to become a rose and not a daisy.  For us, its encoded into our DNA.  The only difference between the rose and us is that we have Free Will to interfere with the encoding and a mechanism with which to effect that interference…called “ego.”  

When ego’s interference misleads us too far from our intended purpose (which, by the way, is to Be All That Love Is) we feel the dismay that sets in as a result of our self-imposed distance from Source.

This is the time to call God because God is where the original blueprint of You exists in its clearest form. 

Since God created You with the intention that You Be As You Are Designed To Be, it is God’s delight when called upon to shine The Light in order to show you, once again, the way back upon the path of your intended purpose.

By the way, when you make that call, you never get a busy signal.

God originated call waiting.

 
Last week my  Mother passed away.  I don’t use that phrase because I’m afraid of death. I use it because I’ve always thought we misunderstand death and so I don’t use the word.  It think “passed away” is pretty descriptive, actually.  I think we do pass away from the physical, material world and continue on in pure consciousness where having a body is superfluous. 

I can remember when I was about 14 years old and my Grandfather passed away.  It was my first funeral and I had never seen a body in a casket before.  As I stood there with my Father looking at my Grandfather, I said out loud, “Now I know there’s no such thing as death. That’s not Grandpop. That’s his suitcase.”

But back to my Mother’s recent passing

We had an emotionally distant relationship, she and I.  She was uncomfortable with the giving and receiving of affection.  As she once told me, “I never had that growing up so I didn’t know how.”  Sad.  But true.  So, you do the best you can under those circumstances, as I tried to do.  In her final years, after my Dad had passed away, and she had 10 years on her own for the first time in her life, we shared a few genuinely Mother/Daughter moments that had been all too infrequent in the many years that preceded them.

For those I will always be grateful.

But here’s the important part.

Since the funeral, I can’t remember any of her personality that was distant or judgmental or just plain irritating to me throughout my life.  Since her passing, it’s as if it all never happened.  All I can see is the beautiful Soul that was the woman I called Mother, who struggled with the same human issues each of us struggles with, and who exhibited rather incredible patience and strength in confronting life’s challenges.

In a much earlier blog, I wrote about how wonderful it would be if every day an angel walked before every human being wherever they went announcing their arrival with a shout of “Behold the image and likeness of God.”  How differently we would see and treat each other, and ourselves, if that actually occurred,  And yet it does. 

We are each created in the image and likeness of God and so this is who shows up whenever and wherever we do.  Only by how we choose to act do we determine how holy the experience is for ourselves and others.

I wish I had seen that angel announcing my Mother throughout my life, I think I would have seen her and our relationship differently. I’m grateful to be able to see it now without all the earthly stuff that masks Its presence.

Perhaps what I’m finally seeing is simply the Angel… I happened to call “Mother.”

size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>It seems getting to God is a team sport.

The holiest day on the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) is about to occur. I am re-reading a book I first read 30 years ago titled “A Course in Miracles.”  size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>These two facts, from a formal, organized religious perspective are seemingly irreconcilable. size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>..mainly because the book is about God, Christ and the Holy Spirit and Yom Kippur is …well, you get the picture.

size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>Irreconcilable. I’m sure that’s what most would say.

But I think the messages of Yom Kippur and “A Course in Miracles” are exactly the same.

size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>The holiday and the book are about Atonement.

size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>As a Jew, I’ve always felt the gravity and opportunity of Yom Kippur… yet I don’t think I ever really understood Atonement until reading the book.
size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>
Atonement is the undoing of what you thought occurred in your past.  Well, at least the undoing of whatever occurred to you or by you that was not loving.  It’s more than forgiveness, because to forgive there must have occurred something that needed to be forgiven…and whatever occurs that is not of Love never really occurs at all since only Love is real.  size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>

Everything else is illusion.

size=”3″ face=”Courier New”>Hard to comprehend, right?

But really, if we’ve been created in the image and likeness of God….and God is Love…ever expanding outward energy with Its only intention being to give All to All for eternity and infinity…then how can we be anything other than That from which we came and which continues to sustain us? And if we are That, then We Too Are Love and everything that is not Love…is not real.

The Atonement is setting aside, putting down, walking away from all that is illusion and turning toward That Which Is Real. Turning toward Love. Turning toward Creator.

Having turned, we then surrender to Who We Really Are and commit to Being Love..to understanding Oneness…to gifting to every other human being the same Love and Grace we have received as a result of Atonement.

It’s an interesting discussion I’d like to have with a Rabbi and a Priest…in the same room at the same time. 

I think the outcome would be One(1)ness.

Final Score: 
Separate religions O
Spirituality       1