Streams of thought....april 24th, 2014

“It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.” –   

Christian Nevell Bovee 

It is early in the morning and the aroma of my freshly brewed cup coffee is still filling the air… the sun is beginning to shine through the venetian slats… the warmth of the sun filtering through the window glass is creeping along my desk.  The sounds of the day are awaken as is my own spirit. 

It is a new day.  One that is filled with no deadlines of classes or papers.  Yesterday, I sat in my chair after a moment of mediation and wondered aloud to my cat, Tigre, “what will we do today?”  Her empty glance at me looked as if the words fell into her ears and her look told me all that I expected to hear.  She looked towards me flipping her tail as if to say that it was my issue to deal with and then she looked away. 

We find ourselves many times moving from one busy schedule to another like high flying artist that glide from one high swing to the next.  Our only safety net is the one that we have created in our own minds. We move from one event to another… always… expecting... another… event… to be there for us… to… grasp.

I was wondering a few weeks ago about this issue of “passion”. 

I was in the midst of a therapeutic shift that unbeknownst to me was already in place, much like a hidden treasure in the kitchen cupboards of your grandparent’s home.   This shift that I was going through was like finding a part of me that I had never recognized before and all I could do was smile.  In fact after I had become aware of this shift, I sat with my therapist relating to her my discovery and she gave me that same smile; as if to say, that she was glad that I finally found it too. In the midst of this shift, I came to some important life questions and one of them was about the detection of “meaning”. 

So, I started to ask myself, “What do I feel pulled to?”

 As I moved through this transition from one phase to another, I sat down one morning to do some of my writings and I came across this idea of “passion”.  I began to wonder more about what “passion” looks like and how does it make me feel to have it in a healthy fashion this time. 

See, I had fought for so long against the unhealthiness of my body that I had almost forgot what it is that I am passionate about… other than survival.

It has not been that long ago when I would wake up and the first thing on my mind would be whether or not my body was going to be consumed with an infection.  At that time, my day consisted of trying to get back to a “normal” life while giving myself daily injections of antibiotics through my “pic-line”?  My passion during that time was just to get healthy; so, that I could get back to a normal life… a different life than before… but a normal life.   

Now, I sit here at my desk typing out a few words and not wondering what life will look like but more about how will I act it out. This the life that I have chosen and I find meaning in it.  I had never really expected it to look like this when I was younger. The sounds of wind chimes in the background… the smell of hot dark coffee blending with the warmth of the sunlight on a solitude morning… me with my thoughts playing as the wind chimes in my soul. 

What is passion?  In many ways it is our alarm clock.  It is our sunlight peeking through the venetian blinds of our imagination.  It is the companion when the fears and the successes of life have faded away to only come out again on “special” events.  It pulls us into the direction that our sense of being longs to go in.  Passion is the act of being who we truly are meant to be.  The quote above says much more than we may see at a first glance. Passion is the act of the kiss.  It is the movement of the artist that glides his hands… or her voice… or their feet… that reflect a heart of intimacy in displaying who they are within themselves. And the kiss is not an act of function but of celebration.  However, it is the love or affection that we have for what we are passionate that sanctifies it… or in other words sets it apart from all others.  Sometimes we meet some individuals with the kiss of greeting… a small sign of more than just acknowledgement of handshake. With passion we kiss someone that we know much more intimately. When we know a person with intimacy…someone that we have a deep abiding, almost bubbling, affection for the kiss becomes much more than just an act.  It is a sign of what they mean to us.

Passion is much more than an act of writing a check to an organization.  Passion is much more than saying that we support a group of individuals. A deep affective passion moves us from our slumber and pulls us to an intimate act of setting apart a space of our being so that we can reflect a deeper better part of who we truly are in this movement of time. It is the willingness to be almost consumed with the thought how do I do this well and how does this give me a sense of meaning that soothes my own soul.

We all have a something or someone that we believe in and we believe in it so much that we tell others from time to time.  We all have a sports team or a politician or a band or a movement that we claim as our own.  We wear the caps and t-shirts.  We put the bumper stickers on our cars. We go to rally events so that we can be in a community of supporters. However, do they make us want to get out of bed so we can find a way to engage with them?  Passion will do that. Passion will pull us not push us.  We detect the greater sense of passion and we cannot escape it gravitational yearning for us to engage with it.

 Rebecca West, an English writer, wrote these words,

“It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.”    

 We wake up every morning with one of two feelings. 

We either wake up with emptiness in our souls that we spend all day trying to fill

Or

We wake up with an immense passion that we cannot wait to act out and share with all that we meet.

 It is the search for and the embracing of our soul’s passion that defines not just who we are but who people remember us to be.

 breaking script….Namaste

 

streams of thought....march 21st, 2014

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

How many times has this happen to each of us?  No matter how many times we look at a situation… or a neighborhood… or a relationship… or a favorite book we will see something that we feel that we have never seen before. 

A patient was sitting on the end of the examining table in a surgeon’s office; where they wondered what is going to happen next.  A few months earlier, they had survived a major surgery that eradicated a cancerous growth.

Now as the patient was sitting in the office, they reflect about the subsequent procedures that they had to go through in the past few months.  The body was slowing and effectively losing weight… denying them of a life that they had known before… while their re-occurring infections had become a way of life.  No one really knows how to move while living a life that is always in question. Their body betraying them over and over.  Yet the surgeon said that there wasn’t a serious infection.  How can this be the patient thinks to themselves?  How can it be that the weekly packing of wounds is nothing more than a minor event?

 

We look at life differently at different stages of our lives.  We come into our adolescence with a reckless abandon.  We are no longer “young children” with limitations. We are now teenagers with developing dreams.  We begin the pilgrimage of discovery.

We get our first job and there is a sense of accomplishments when we receive that first paycheck.  We head out to spend it because now we have freedom to choose what we want to buy because after all it is our money.

We fall in love.  We dream of a life with another person for perhaps the first time. We wonder what life will be like and what kind of home we will have together.  We see them in our thoughts and carry them in our hearts.

We hold our first born.  We wonder if we will be the best parent.  We wonder if people will write books about our parenting skills or maybe we will do parenting seminars on how amazing we were as the mentors and guides in this brand new life.

We lose the first person that we ever felt close to.  We may have lost them through a variety of circumstances.  They may have left because of divorce… or separation… or an illness…. or perhaps even through death.  The pain is too great to carry.

We write our first blog or article. We wonder if anyone will read it. We wonder if anyone will laugh at the humor in it or be provoked to reflect on an inner aspect that had been hidden away.

We get the difficult news that we have cancer.  No one wants to hear the “C” word.  It is almost as if people will look at you with some level of pity; while all the while they are thinking that you are going to die.

Life is about discoveries.  We can sit on our comfy couch and watch Netflix or the Discovery Channel thinking that we are becoming enlighten. Or we can get out of the four walls that we call a home and immerse ourselves into life itself.  Life is more than just walking, sleeping, eating, crapping, pissing, and/or dreaming of something better.  Dreaming without action is nothing more than a fantasy.  It is when we engage and act upon those dreams that it actually becomes life… moments of reality.  

Rollo May writes, “…keep in mind that being is a participle, a verb form implying that someone is in the process…” (1983, p. 97)  Nature by its very own essence is in a state of process.  We celebrate seasons of change because the earth is constantly evolving.  It is when we stop discovering something new is when we are in danger of not living or at least not living in a dynamic way. This is a beautiful life that we have the opportunity to live.  I am reminded that a rabbi once said that we all have a phenomenal gift and it is when we do not exercise that gift will the world become a poorer place.

We will come face to face with chances to learn something new about ourselves, others, or the world in which we live in. We will encounter the uncertainty of the next moment.  It is an inevitable event.  So…

What will we do with it? 

What will we need to do so that we discover more deeply the person that we truly are meant and desire become? 

What is the one thing that we have conveniently ignored?

I pulled my car over the other day and walked around a neighborhood that I had driven through many times.  I soon noticed yards… porches… backyards… people in ways that I had never seen them before.  It was not that the landscape had changed but what changed was my own perspective.  Maybe, like the surgeon, we need to stop looking at the malady with the same perception as we had been looking at it for the past few months or years.  Maybe we need to not get upset with the person who almost ran us over as we crossed the intersection while we were jogging.  Perhaps, we need to stop and try to tell the other person’s story with the emotions and vision that they have about the subject; so, that we can have a better dialogue instead of an argument.

Life is not a static adventure.  It is an organic movement that demands our interaction for us to fully be present.

Breaking script….Namaste  

streams of thought....february 12th, 2014

Sometimes I get a little lost in the journey.  Do you ever feel that way?

We get caught up in the movement that we exhaustedly sit down at the end of the day and we simply... with a sigh... wonder what happen.  We made plans. We set the calendars. We made lists. We did every conceivable organizational thing we have been taught or promoted to do but yet we think about all that we did not accomplish. We think back on the day and become aware of a lost fifteen minutes driving.... or ten minutes standing in line... or the phone call or project that took a lot longer than we had planned for. 

So, what do we normally do?  We begin to think that we need to just either be more disciplined or we need to plan better or we need to just be more focused... or perhaps... maybe, we need to give ourselves space. 

In the past four months, I have been working on my balance and flexibility.  It has been a difficult two years and the tension of the inner struggle for health has taken its toll on me. However, I know that what I am doing in the present is beyond my wildest imagination. I look back at photos that were taken prior to my diagnosis of cancer and I am reminded that I was not as healthy as I thought that I was at that time.  My body was betraying my own sense of health.  I was running and preparing to participate for a half marathon but the whole time my body was silently dying inside. The thing that I thought was normal was actually anything but normal. I have very little recollection of the first month after my first surgery but I do remember at times driving around the streets of Denver feeling exhausted and confused.  I, now, realize it was the lack of glucose and other vitally important nutrients. In that first month I had not eaten or drank anything of measurable value.

Four more surgical procedures later, I was walking out St Luke's Hospital for the last time.  Well, more like shuffling out of the hospital for the last time. A year after that last surgery, I am sitting here planning on going on an exploratory / immersion trip to Nicaragua. I will have my personal trainer certification from the NCSF at the end of the month. We will be in the second semester of a graduate school program in Counseling/Psychology at Regis University. We will be Level One certified in the practice of Reiki. We will start the completion of a book that will hopefully encourage and inspire others.

Inwardly, I smile that it took me almost a half a century to realize that the act of balance comes not from juggling a lot of projects or tasks. I am now aware that being stable is not the same as being sedentary. But the journey of health and healing came from within before it was seen from the outside.

I remember my yoga instructor, Julieta Claire, inviting me to come back to the practice of yoga.  I knew that I was going to be very limited due to the devices that I had to carry and was attached to at the time. To me the invitation meant more than the actual participation. Since that time, I have had not been able to practice with Julieta but I have carried on the practice in my home. I am aware that for me the invitation was an external gift of belonging. The internal gift of belonging is found in being mindful of my own longing to "be".  To be authentic. To be faithful to my own practice. To be content not in things but content within my own sense of self. To not be judgmental. To not be critical of self.  

The Buddha says that we should only speak when these four criteria are being met:

§  Is it True

§  Is it Timely

§  Is it helpful

§  Is it kind

Christ said that we are to love others as we love ourselves. But how many times do we forget the second part, "as we love ourselves" The act of metta.

A good friend Rachael Medd said, "To help cultivate a state of balance and stability; among the suffering and noise, [we need to know] what it is to be ‘alive’ and to be able to make sense of this, accept this and use this to not only realize, but explore… who we truly are."

When I read those words, I was reminded of what John O’Donohue wrote. He writes, “The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy” It is not an intimacy that is met by the presence of another but by the presence of ourselves. We become so deeply aware of who we are that we reflect it in what we do. It is on the “mat” that we are drawn deeper into gently embrace the spiritual tension that we feel.  We want to embrace the tension not in the sense that we approve of it but that we acknowledge it.  We are present with our own situation that we learn from the emotions that those tensions create. We become mindful that the presence of tension promotes within us the inflexibility of being able to give ourselves the space and the grace to just be whom we truly are.   O’Donohue leads us in seeing that the intimate awareness of who we are is the greater angel that comes along to interact with the emotions that insecurity and doubt may create. And this interaction is not an internal session of struggle but acceptance.  Because with acceptance comes understanding. This understanding leads us to know more deeply and safely where we need to redeem the lesser part of who we struggle to be.   Because without this redemption we lose our balance and stability.

Breaking script… Namaste