Letting Go

Letting go - what exactly does it mean to let go of something? Especially a part of yourself? You can picture letting go of a hand, a cat, a rope. You let go, they leave, or drop, or scamper off. But when you let go of part of yourself what happens? It's still there. It's you. Even if you don't want it to be you, if it's there as part of you, there it is.

There is this other letting go, releasing what you are holding onto so you and it can both evolve. In a way that is the same thing with letting go of parts of yourself. But rather it is letting go of your resistance to knowing it is part of you. Rather than resist, you get to embrace it, which means to feel that part of you.

This is different than accepting it. Accepting is like saying "Okay, I know this is here. I guess I'll just have to deal with it." There is still resistance in that - whether it is the resistance of victim - "I can't help this part of me", or of drama "It's me! Oh god! It's me! What a horrible thing!" or of "NO!!!" It's still resistance.

Embracing, or allowance is "Wow, this is part of me. When I let myself feel it, actually feel it without the resistance, I get to know more of who I am." It takes a great deal of willingness to be curious, and to feel things you don't really think you want to feel. And willingness to let yourself be who you are, warts and all.

So if what is up is that you have an 'insane need to be accepted,' for instance, as a friend of mine just asked me about, maybe you can feel the difference in yourself between "Oh no! I have an insane need to be accepted!" and "Oh well, I have an insane need to be accepted."

For a moment just go into that need, and feel it. Feel all the parts of the desire - for acceptance as you are, for love, for approval, for all of it. Just let yourself feel what is there. These are parts of you, like little abandoned children. Of course they want to be accepted. Of course they want approval and love.

And you, as the parent in the situation, the Self, are really the only one who can give them, the parts of you, love and acceptance. And the only way you can do that is by letting them be a felt and known part of you.

Make sense? The exercise is to slow down and feel what is true in this moment. You don't need to make a story out of it. The more you do this the less you will even feel a desire to make a story to explain what you are feeling. Just keep coming back to your body, to your breath, and to what is actually up for being felt in this particular moment.

When I hear people talk about "letting go of bad habits" or other 'negative' parts of themselves, I have an image of all these different strands, like of a rope, which we are trying to one by one peel away. When you approach the different parts of yourself with allowance it feels to me like the separations between the layers get dissolved and the whole becomes integrated.

There is a great deal said in the spiritual world about one-ness with each other, with the Divine, with whatever. In my experience none of that can happen without one-ness within yourself. When you dissolve the separations you have put up to protect yourself from knowing who you are you become more whole. Then you start realizing that you are one with everyone around you, with the world, with God. It may look like "need for acceptance" is a bad and wrong part of you, that should be removed, but it is just one more little waif hoping to get back home, inside of you, inside of God.

Slowing Down With Your Breath

Take a deep breath. Hold it for just a moment then let it out.

What do you feel in your body as you do this?

Do it again. Inhale deeply, expanding your ribs and up under your shoulders, down into your belly. Fill up as much as you can, then let it out.

What do you notice? What do you feel?

This time take a smaller breath in and then let all of the air out of your lungs. Exhale completely. Take a moment there. Slouch over to push that last bit out. Now sit up again without breathing in, to create a vacuum. Then open your windpipe and let the air flood back in. Fill all the way up.

Now settle back into normal breath.

What do you feel in your body? How deep into your belly did the breath go? Could you feel your upper lungs expanding the space between your clavicle and your shoulder blades?

Notice how many sensations you feel in your body just from exaggerating your breath. How cool is that? How cool is it that even if you have taken deep breaths a million and a half times in order to slow down it still works? It still connects you into your body. It still oxygenates your brain. It still puts your ego's attention onto your body for a moment and away from its vigilance on your social life.

Taking a deep breath has to be the simplest and most universally known method for slowing down.

Let's do a little exploration. Take another deep breath. Pay attention to the sensation of your ribs expanding. Exhale. Feel your ribs relax. Breathe into different parts of your ribs. Where do they expand easily? Where do they resist?

For contrast, try to use your muscles to expand your ribs. Can you feel the air moving into your lungs? Exhale with your muscles squeezing your ribs. How much effort does it take? How much air actually moved in and out of your lungs?

Here's another experiment. Exhale just by collapsing your body. Curl your body down, starting with your head to your chest and keep going, letting the air push out as much as you can. Now sit up again, letting the air come in. How much air does this move in and out of your lungs?

Try expelling the air from your lungs by contracting your diaphragm. Pump the air in and out just by moving your diaphragm.

Okay. Now breathe a normal, deep inhale and exhale, letting your ribs relax and ride the movement of your lungs. What do you feel in your body? Where are your thoughts?

Slowing down into the moment means quieting your ego. The ego does not have any jurisdiction in the present moment. It exists in the future and the past. You could say slowing down into the present moment gets you out of your ego. Or you could say getting out of your ego brings you into the present moment. It's the same thing.

Bringing your attention to your breath makes your ego focus on your body, which takes its attention away from its social conditioning. Any time you bring your attention to your body it slows your ego down. It has to, because taking care of the body is the ego's primary job. This gives you a chance to pay attention to what you are feeling underneath your ego's attempts to distract you.

Spiritual and spiritual/physical disciplines like meditation and yoga teach many, many breathing techniques. They have wildly different focuses, from quieting your mind to building up energy, from cooling your body to heating it up. Some focus on bringing your awareness more into the divine, some more into your body. As practices they all serve to open you to more of your Self. They're also quite fun to explore. And, remarkably enough, every one of them will serve to slow your ego down.

Pranayama is one of the most basic meditation breathing techniques. It is a simple technique which opens the connection between your physical body and your Divine Self.

Simply put, Pranayama consists of breathing in one nostril, holding your breath, and breathing out your other nostril, then breathing in the second nostril, holding your breath, and breathing out the first. By focusing the breath to the different sides of your body it balances the two sides of your brain.

Want to give it a go? Great.

Make yourself comfortable sitting up. Place one hand in front of your face, with your thumb next to one nostril and your middle finger next to the other. Place your index finger between your eyebrows, the resting tip putting slight pressure on your third eye. You can close your eyes or not.

Block off one nostril by pressing your finger against the side of your nose and breathe in through the other nostril. Let your inhale take about 4 seconds – slow and steady. Hold your breath for 4 more seconds. You can kind of sit your breath down, resting your ribs. Now release your finger, opening that nostril, and press your thumb against the other side of your nose, blocking that nostril. Let your breath come out the opposite side from where it came in.

Rest after the exhale for a count of four. Now breathe in through that same nostril. At the top of your inhale rest in your fullness, switch sides again, and breathe out through the other nostril.

Repeat this for as long as you like, inhaling on one side and then the other.

If you find you can only breathe easily on one side just be gentle with yourself. Do it a little bit and let it go. Our bodies naturally make one side of the nose more available to breathing than the other at different times of the day. It has to do with which side of your brain is most active at different times. Pranayama aims to connect the two sides of the brain to bring them more into balance. I have found that a few days of practicing this technique tends to balance out my sinuses, too, so that they are both more open.

You can choose your focus while doing Pranayama. I learned it as a spiritual practice to open to my God Self. My teacher taught us to focus our physical eyes towards our third eye. This puts pressure on the pineal gland, which lives right there at the front of your brain behind your third eye. We were also taught to contemplate the mantra Om (Universal Love).

You don't have to do this, but of course you can. It can help to remind you of how much more of you there is than just what is apparent in the 3^rd dimension.

Now, after reading this and maybe playing with your breath a little bit, how do you feel? Do you feel calmer than when you opened this page? Do you feel more connected with and available to yourself? Take a moment here. Give yourself this treat. In this moment let your connection to yourself be the most important thing you can do. Breathe.

The Discipline of a Jedi

I just watched the Star Wars movies with my son, all six of them, in about a week. I remember watching the first one thirty-two years ago. We stood in line for hours outside the UA cinemas in downtown Seattle, the only local theater playing it. The line was so long we had to wait through two showings before it was our turn. It was an event. It was a revelation. Special effects and spiritual message and exciting action all in one package, designed specifically for us, the new generation of Jedi.
Well, that’s what it felt like, anyway. That movie changed what we spoke about. It heralded the New Age, both in movies and in the world at large.
So this week I watched all six movies with my 10 year old son. We watched one a night, with one night off, on DVD’s on a big screen TV hanging on the wall of my bedroom. Times have changed.
I know they’re movies. And yet the second trilogy, two of which I hadn’t seen before, hit me as intensely as the first trilogy hit me 30 years ago. I found myself talking back to it a lot, if for no other reason than to tell my son there was more to the concepts than was on the screen. It’s so on the edge of brilliant, demonstrating the limitations of traditional ways of looking at right and wrong, light and dark.
I kept thinking “Won’t somebody help this boy feel his emotions so he doesn’t judge himself so deeply?” What the movie presented was true, yet missing the vital key that would, indeed, bring the Force back into balance. Rather the whole set-up was perfect for sending Anakin deeper into self-hatred and self-doubt. I really wanted someone to show him the way out, but no one knew what it was.
I’ve also been training since I was a little kid. I’ve had various teachers and travelled various paths, but they have all led, in one way or another, towards Self-Realization. This isn’t training to be a Jedi, though it feels like it sometimes. My studies have taken me across the universe of my Self. I have faced the dark side. When I talk to my teacher I feel like I’m conversing with Yoda.
Only my teacher’s wiser. She might not know how to use a light saber, or throw people across the room with her immense power. But she does know what to do with emotions, both dark and light. And, really, which is scarier? Facing Darth Moor or feeling your fear that you will never be enough? I’ll give you a hint – once you’ve faced, and felt your way through, your fear that you will never be enough, Darth Moor becomes pretty irrelevant.
They work so hard, those Jedi. They are so disciplined. They train themselves to keep their thoughts on others, on good, away from fear and anger.
What if their discipline was rather to feel their way into their fear, anger, doubt, hatred, hope, lack of worth, love, anxiety … in short every emotion that came up? What if every time Anakin Skywalker’s grief came up about losing his mother, someone could guide him into it, rather than away from it? What if Yoda, or Obi Wan, could sit with him while he cried, and hold the space for him while he felt his way to the depth of that loss? Then he would have a chance of finding out that his mother was still with him. And, more importantly, he would be able to claim that part of himself that he had lost, which had been deemed unworthy, or bad and wrong. That’s the part that was waiting for him on “the dark side.” That’s what made him so powerful, and yet so cut off from the part of him that knew Love, and loved Life.
Again, I know it’s just a movie, and they had to set the story up that way to create drama and conflict. But isn’t that the way emotions have been held for most of modern humanity? There are good, or desirable emotions, and bad, or undesirable emotions. There is the good God and there is the bad God (the Devil). There are successful ways to go through life and unsuccessful ways to go through life.
We separate ourselves from that which we do not want to be by judging it and making it not about ourselves. “I feel this, but it isn’t mine. See? I hate it! And I wouldn’t feel it anyway if that thing hadn’t happened or that other person hadn’t done that thing. As soon as I fix whatever is wrong this feeling will go away and I’ll never have to be bothered with it again.”
Sound familiar?
Here’s the discipline of a modern Jedi, working to bring balance to the Force: “Everything I feel is mine. I am Responsible for my Life, which means that everything that comes to me is something I asked for in order to know myself more. I will allow myself to feel all of my emotions, without getting sidetracked into the drama or the story. I am on a grand treasure hunt for my Self and my connection to the greater Universe. Every emotion that I feel is a clue through which I can know more of who I am.”
It’s not an easy discipline. But it’s totally worth it.

Slowing Down: the Basics (part 1)

Julie Andrews is singing in my head "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When you read you begin with ABC, when you sing you begin with Do, Re, Mi… The first three notes just happen to be Do, Re, Mi…"

To Slow Down you begin with … listening to your ego. (tried to make that rhyme in three syllables, but couldn't.)

Surprised?

You start by listening to your ego. There are several reasons for this. First, you start on the layer that you're on, whatever it is. And if your ego is going off, telling you a great story about everything that needs to be fixed, that's the layer you are on.

Second, the ego is programmed like the town crier. When it has a message to deliver it feels obligated to keep delivering that message until it is heard. By listening to the message, and acknowledging it, you let your ego off the hook. It gets to relax.

The third reason to listen to what the ego is saying is that by listening to it you begin to unmask it. The ego's stories are much more powerful when delivered without you noticing.

Have you ever studied or read about subliminal advertising? You know, when frames with pictures of popcorn are inserted into the reel of a movie to make you want to dash out to the lobby for a bucket of buttery, salty goodness? You don't know why you all of a sudden had that craving. You just did, you think. That's kind of what's happening with your ego. It's back there, in the background, where its mechanisms are hidden, so it has great effect. It's the man behind the curtain, if you will, pressing levers and buttons, producing a very compelling picture that you tend to believe is your life.

As long as it operates behind the curtain, or between the frames, it gets to stay in charge. It's not that it necessarily wants to be in charge, any more than the wizard of Oz does. But it thinks it has to be in charge. So it tells its story, it pushes its buttons, it inserts its frames in the movie in order to make you react the way it thinks you are supposed to react.

And for the most part you do. The ego is very clever. And it has the inside scoop on what makes you tick. It knows exactly what story to tell you to keep you within your comfort zone of anxiety and lack.

Just a quick reminder: your ego is not your enemy. It is doing exactly what you have programmed it to do. Slowing Down is not about destroying your ego. It's about changing its programming. Slowing down is about training your ego to let you know what's actually happening in any given moment. This allows you to grow, to get more out of your life, to have more of yourself, to become more whole. Eventually it allows you to approach enlightenment. You don't actually get to enlighten when your ego is in charge, simply because your ego is the one charged with holding up that curtain which keeps you from knowing your Self.

Now back to listening to the ego, and starting to take a look at that curtain.

What is your ego saying? How do you know it's your ego? And what do you do with the message once you hear it?

All you have to do to know what your ego is saying is to listen. It could be telling you a story about how somebody did something that is causing you so much trouble. It could be a regular reminder of who you are – "I am so and so's lover. I wish I had a motorcycle. I don't like peas." It could be that song playing in your head.

Whatever it is, if you start to pay attention you will hear it. It's the layer on top. And a few deeper layers, too. You just have to turn your attention to it. Then you will hear it.

Don't try to get deeper into it until you have actually heard and acknowledged what is up on the surface. What's there? What are you thinking?

How do you know if it is your ego or something/someone else? First you have to listen. If the message you hear is something like "You are Loved. You are One with God. Thank you for bringing your presence into this moment. I am so happy you are here." It probably isn't your ego. You don't do anything with that message other than soak it in because it is the Truth.

If you hear "Aliens have infiltrated the Seattle Center and will soon be taking off in the Space Needle", well, it depends. If that's the sort of thing that sets you right off into paranoia, it's most likely your ego trying to distract you from an emotion it thinks would be too dangerous to feel in this moment. Yes, emotions are more dangerous to the ego than aliens. Much more dangerous.

If, on the other hand, you signed up with the Men in Black, it may be that implant they put in your head, and perhaps you'd better get a move on.

Which brings us to what to do with that message once you hear it. Sometimes the ego's messages are useful, important information. Your ego is the one telling you not to step in front of the bus. It's usually the one telling you "You're late. Leave now!" In both cases you might want to pay attention. Your ego's job is to keep you physically safe. It's very useful that way. The more you pay attention to it when it delivers these messages the clearer they will become. It wants to be useful, so put it to use doing that job.

However, this other job your ego has taken on of keeping you emotionally and socially safe has way more to do with limiting you than with helping you negotiate time and traffic. Your ego wants to keep you safe, within the confines of what is known as your limited human life. It will use all the tools at its disposal to distract you from knowing things that threaten that safety, like what you really feel when your boss hands you another stack of work.

Slowing Down into your thoughts gives you a look at the first line of this distraction. "I'm so mad!" "I hate this." "I don't have enough money." Even "I love her" can be a message from the ego when it comes embedded in lack and/or limitation. All of these messages are designed to reinforce your vision of yourself, and to keep you from noticing this moment and the richness it contains.

So what do you do? Pay attention, listen to the message, acknowledge it and move on. You are slowing down, right? You don't want to engage your ego in a fight by trying to talk it out of the message it's trying to deliver. You don't want to pretend the message isn't there, or your ego will have to turn up the volume. You don't want to jump right into fixing whatever your ego is telling you is wrong. All you have to do is listen, acknowledge, thank it for the message, and then keep slowing down. Even if it is telling you "You are the worst piece of excrement the universe ever laid," listen, acknowledge, thank it for the message, and keep slowing down.

Allow it to tell you the story. You don't need to believe it. Your ego delivers the messages it thinks are important for you to hear. It doesn't often tell you the Truth. Remember, the ego is the one holding up the curtain so you won't see you are God; that you are in charge of your life. Listen. Acknowledge. Keep slowing down.

Another thing to realize about the ego's stories is that they are multi-media. They have images. They have words. And they have chemicals. And thus they feel very real. In order to substantiate its stories the ego releases adrenaline based hormones into your body. You'll recognize them as fear, hatred, need, doubt and such like. Your body gets flooded with these chemically induced emotions and you believe something is terribly wrong. So you try to figure out what to do. When you think about your physical safety this makes great sense. When you think about your emotions it doesn't make quite as much sense. But oh well. We'll get into that more later. For now just consider that as one more reason to listen to the story without taking it quite so seriously. Pay attention, listen, acknowledge with a "thank you for the information" and then keep slowing down.

Next – Slowing Down into your body.

It's all good. It's all God. Slow Down!

Now, where's that popcorn…?

 

The Anxious Ego

Our egos can be so sweet. They're like 4 year olds. You can always read a 4 year olds' emotions. If they're happy, you know it. If they're scared, hungry, itchy, you know it.

Similarly, you can always tell when a human ego feels out of control, or afraid, or in lack. Well, sometimes you have to learn to read the clues. The basic rule is that whenever feelings such as bliss, Joy, Life, Love, Trust, Certainty, Oneness or Self-Aware give way to feelings such as distress, victim, anger, fear, doubt, separation or denial, that's your ego in charge. And most of the time when your ego is in charge it is out of control.

This is actually a good thing. Human egos weren't designed to be in control. They're like the younger brother who was never meant to be king and thus didn't get the training. Or the court jester, or maybe the cook, or a scullery maid. The scullery maid might have fantasies about being royalty – what a lark, not having to clean, good food! But if the scullery maid all of a sudden found herself in charge of not only the whole palace, but the whole kingdom, well, she might find herself a bit out of her depth.

If that metaphor doesn't work for you either (what's so wrong with a scullery maid becoming king?), imagine if you were all of a sudden president of the United States. Movies like "Dave" aside, what would you do in Barrack Obama's shoes? If you didn't have a cabinet or aides to help you figure it all out? Feel just a tad bit overwhelmed?

So imagine, for a moment, that you are your ego, and you all of a sudden find yourself trying to manage a human life. It's a pretty big job, especially an adult human life, with all its responsibilities and obligations and dreams. And what tools do you have? What skills? A bunch of adrenaline-based emotions and the ability to keep your human body safe. Granted, most of us have had training from the moment we were born, or at least started walking, on how to do human life with the ego in charge. Think of every rule you've been taught, every principle absorbed, every delineation between yes and no, good and bad, right and wrong. That's all training for the human ego to be able to run things. The human ego also has the advantage of being like a tremendously powerful supercomputer which can take in all that information, process it, and turn it into predictions, expectations and decisions about what to do, think and say.

But, still, it wasn't meant to be in charge. It was meant to keep you physically safe. Every time something unpredictable comes up it goes on alert. It has to scramble to get back in control. You might know some people who spend most of their time trying to get in control in one way or another. Even when it does feel in control there's the nagging doubt, or awareness, that the control is fleeting. So it works harder, tries to get a better handle on the rules, does everything it can to prevent that feeling of out of control so it won't have failed its job. Even if its job isn't to control your life, its job is to keep you physically safe, and it figures if it's in charge it's going to keep you emotionally and socially safe, too. Which, by the way, is impossible. Especially if you have the spark of Divinity in you, which you do, which wants you to evolve and experience Life.

So who is meant to be in charge? You are, your Divine human. That's the part of you tapped in to all those lovely emotions I listed up above - Love, Trust, Oneness, etc. You are the one that can experience being in the moment. Your ego doesn't even really exist in the moment.

And this is why the ego can seem so sweet. It really is trying its best to do the job. It's just forgotten what its job is supposed to be.

For me the most poignant ego moments come when I've been fully centered in my Self in the present. I've been immersed in Love, Wholeness, Trust, Oneness with everything around me. From here everything feels fabulous, exists both in infinite possibility and also in perfection just how it is.

So it can come as a disappointing shock when I find myself feeling less than again. It could be less than perfect, less than whole, less than appropriate, less than anything. It can feel like I've failed. Why can't I sustain the bliss? Why do I always have to return to lack?

If I catch it quickly enough, while I'm still feeling some of that grace of connection with my Self, I can recognize what's happening with a sort of bemused, benevolent smile. Ahh, I've slipped out of the moment and my ego has stepped back in to take over, and it doesn't know what to do.

It's as if I have suddenly found myself standing on a platform in Michael Phelps' body having yet another gold medal hung around my neck. My ego has absolutely no idea what it did to deserve this. And, what's worse, it has no idea how it will ever be able to make it happen again.

The human ego doesn't know how to do bliss. It can do happy, with the expectation of losing happy any moment. Egos don't know how to do at-one-with. They do competition. They don't know how to do Love. They know how to do need, and longing, and desire.

So they send out distress. They express their doubt. You begin to feel lack again.

Of course, being in the moment and bliss aren't the only times the ego loses its footing as master of the house. That's just the time when it's the sweetest, because then the ego has actually had the experience of letting go. It has had a chance to go be that 4 year old again, with only 4 year old responsibilities. And it takes it a while for it to remember, or reengage, the elaborate structure of controls it created to handle being in charge before.

That is a great time to take a deep breath, slow down again, and appreciate both the ego, for being transparent and for trying so hard to do the job you gave it of managing your life; and to appreciate yourself, because you just stepped out of time for a moment and connected with your higher self. You just suspended judgment long enough to feel Love. You came into yourself. How cool is that?

So your ego comes back in and freaks out. That's okay. Next time it will take longer for it to start you into lack again. Time after that it might be even longer. And if you remember, right then, to slow down again, and embrace your ego like you would a little child, you may be able to get back to that feeling of grace right then, in a way which will help bridge the distance between being in time and being in the Now.

Slowing Down into Not Enough

Today I gardened. It was the first fully sunny day in weeks, or at least that's what it felt like. We have had the sort of weather Seattle is famous for – the weather that makes Seattlites walk around with crazed, desperate looks in their eyes. It's the sort of weather that, after even the most wonderful day or evening with friends and fun and even entertainment, when you walk back to your car in the rain, again, and you have to drive home in the rain, once again, it just makes you want to cry. Or move.

So here I was, today, gardening, soaking up the sunshine like a Kansas prairie soaks up rain after a drought. And, like the dry, dry prairie, I felt like I could only take it in to the top quarter inch of my skin. It felt like the sunshine would have to pour into me for days in order for it to be enough.

Enough. That was my theme today – What is enough? When have I done enough? Am I enough? It took a few rounds of anxiety washing over me before I slowed down enough to recognize it. Then I did. Oh, right! Right now I feel like I'm not enough.

I had a whole host of stories describing how I was not enough in this situation or that – not enough to handle the task of getting my parents' house ready to sell, not even enough to finish weeding this one flower bed, not enough to get what I want, not enough to deserve love…. I also had a whole host of stories explaining that I am, indeed, enough. How could I not be enough?

But neither of those actually mattered. What mattered was that I was feeling "not enough."

Usually when I slow down and feel whatever it is I'm feeling it takes about two seconds and it's done. Compare this to resisting feeling the emotion and/or staying in the drama of the story, both of which can take forever, and slowing down sounds like a great recipe for peace.

And it is. But sometimes something else is going on. It could be the difference between feeling an emotion and facing down a belief. Today this belief that I am not enough kept coming up. It seemed that I had made an agreement with my ego that today I would look at it. Just keep bringing it up until it is done.

My teacher Judy Christenson has taken me through similar beliefs, or habits, before. Last summer, for instance, something came up which I had no idea how to deal with. Her advice was to just notice it and name it – "This is where I'm trying to make everyone else responsible for my self-worth."

So I paid attention and named it, for days. "Oh, this is where I'm trying to make my lover responsible for my self-worth." "Ah, this is where I'm trying to make my son responsible for my self-worth." "Ach! This is where I'm trying to make my work, my friend, this stranger, the weather, my reflections… responsible for my self-worth."

It got to seem kind of ridiculous. And I started to feel a bit desperate. How could anything outside of me give me self-worth? It can't. If nothing else can give it to me, how do I get it?

I actually reached a place of deep despair for about ten minutes. It felt like I had been busted in the most thorough way possible. "You don't get to make anything else responsible for your self-worth!" Fine. Then, really, how do I get self-worth?

That's when some final bit of resistance snapped, and I slowed down the rest of the way into the present moment. And I found it. Not so much self-worth, but Certainty that I exist. In that Certainty the question of do I have self-worth or not felt pretty irrelevant. That's a question the ego asks – "Do I have any worth?" When you are connected to your Self you are You, and those questions just don't matter.

That was a very profound moment for me. And here I am, 8 months later, asking if I am enough. Great.

No, really, great! Bring it on. I suppose it is possible to be human without having these question lingering in the background, or foreground. But it isn't my experience. And I'd much rather name the questions and bring them into the light than have them lurking in the shadows creating havoc. When I pay attention I can begin to give my ego a different assignment. Instead of its shadow job: "prove to me that I am not enough," it gets the helpful job: "show me everywhere that I believe I am not enough."

Then I get to name it. And by naming it accurately, and letting myself feel whatever is there, I get to transform it from resistance to myself into self-knowledge. Taking a cue from Judy my mantra of the day became "This is where I believe I am not enough."

Mantra is a beautiful, powerful thing. For thousands of years Hindus have studied the energy, or Shakti, of sound. They believe that chanting sacred mantras brings you into alignment with your Divine Source and can literally change your life – remove obstacles, bring you abundance, open your heart to God.

That might sound silly. How can chanting words over and over again change anything? The idea is that the sounds of the mantras vibrate at the level of Divine Truth. Speaking, singing or even thinking the mantra brings that vibration into your body and consciousness, and transforms it.

The same sort of vibrational transformation happens when you allow yourself to feel the emotions of this present moment. Again, it is a matter of aligning yourself with the truth. It is the truth of this, your, human moment. This moment is Divine. It is currently the most relevant and important part of your journey, even with all its apparent warts. Speaking the truth of this moment, and feeling it, brings you out of resistance to it, out of resistance to yourself. It brings you right smack into the present and into your Self.

For me, speaking the truth of my moment for the greater part of the afternoon sounded like "This is where I believe I am not enough." Speaking that truth, when it was the truth, brought me right back into my center. The anxiety would disappear.

Any time I felt the wash of anxiety again, or anything disturbing the calm, I checked in. Was this where I believed I wasn't enough? Yep? Okay. "This is where I believe I am not enough."

That took the adrenaline right out of it.

Actually, my mantra started to morph. After an hour or so it sounded more like "This is where I'm not so sure that I'm enough." That one cracked me up.

After five hours I had managed to weed about 1/5^th of the flower bed I was working on, which was one of four main areas that need to be weeded. I checked in and found that rather than feeling stressed out about how much more there was to do, I felt really great.

I actually felt the kind of gratitude for life that people talk about after facing death. Those niggling doubts and lack felt completely irrelevant. This – breathing, feeling the sun, touching the earth, getting to feel what it feels like to believe I am not enough, and then to remember that I Am, and enough doesn't even matter – was enough for me.

Keeping my Heart in my chest

Why is it that sometimes it's easy to slow down, and sometimes it really isn't? What makes the difference? And when it isn't easy, in other words when our resistance is so great that it takes a powerful motivator to get us past it, where does that motivation come from? How much motivation does it take?

In every moment you have the choice to slow down and pay attention, or not. Both choices are valid. Even if you can slow down enough to realize you really don't want to slow down, you've made a choice, which puts you more in the driver's seat of your life. The more you slow down, the more present you become, the more Life you get to experience. It's that simple. And yet it's not always, or even often, what we choose.

This morning I have a journey happening that has to do with self-containment and my heart. I had a great realization Friday night, and then I had a few more revelations yesterday. This morning my choice is to either ignore what I realized, and what that realization feels like, and go on into drama, which can be fun, OR to slow down and stay with this self-containment, which doesn't feel all that comfortable yet, as I haven't fully integrated it. This is my choice: deepen my self-containment or go into drama.

What choice? you might ask. Of course you make the choice for self-containment, right?

Or what choice? You go for what is most entertaining, right?

Or you go for whatever you feel like going for, right?

Because it's all good. It's all God.

Okay, this morning might seem too obvious of an example, because I have already slowed down enough to recognize that I have a choice. Given that awareness I'm going to choose self-containment every time. It may take me a while to get there, but I really do prefer it.

Ah, but here's a big part of the resistance to slowing down – If you do slow down you recognize you have a choice, and that can take the fun right out of staying in drama. If you slow down you start to remember that you are Responsible for your life. If you slow down you start to feel your emotions. If you slow down all sorts of things start to happen which threaten that great story you have going about who you are. Yikes!

So what gets us past that resistance? Sometimes it is that you just want to pay attention. Paying attention feels great. It brings in Life and Love. It gives you more of your Self. Once you're there it is much more interesting than drama.

But it isn't always all that easy to make the choice towards your Self, even if you've already made it a thousand times. Especially if you're going into a part of yourself that has been shut off for a long time. Then it's like going into a dark crawlspace full of cobwebs and spiders, maybe without even a flashlight.

That's when our Self has to use other ways of getting our attention. You probably aren't going to go into that crawlspace unless the plumbing needs fixing, or your child's cat is stuck under there. Often the only things that will get us to slow down into those most hidden parts of ourselves are that the drama starts to hurt, or we get tired of not having what we want, or our bodies start to show up with disease. Then we'll pay attention. Maybe.

Friday night I was in a great space. I was slowing down just out of the sheer pleasure of being present with myself. It was the middle of the night and I was wide awake. It could have been shakti, since I'd just spent two completely ecstatic hours at a Kirtan fully immersed in Divinity. It could have been the chai I had at dinner. Whatever it was, there I was, wide awake. I was thinking/meditating (yes, these can co-exist) about the evening and the week and what had been coming up. I was thinking about Love, and self-containment, and what it is to seek Love with someone else.

I started to see an image of my heart. It looked straight out of some Hindu painting - bright, orange and red like it was on fire, beautiful and illuminated, a sacred thing. In the image I was carrying it around outside of me, trying to find it a home.

I'd never seen myself that way before, but I could feel that that's how I've been pretty much my whole life. I could see myself approaching a long line of people saying "Hey, will you take care of my heart? Will you? Will you keep my heart safe? Will you?"

As if it had never occurred to me before in that moment of relative illumination I realized I could bring this heart I'd been carrying around into my own chest, into myself, where it belongs.

I did. It lit me up like a lantern. I could feel the energy of it radiating all through my heart chakra and up into my throat. It felt like a fire, a healing fire. I couldn't believe I had kept it outside myself for so long.

That lasted for several minutes, until I wondered how long I could sustain it, at which point it promptly ceased. I tried to restart the fire, but that was that moment and I had moved on.

That's another thing I've been thinking about this weekend – the flow between the ecstatic and the mundane, or between the Divine and the human. It is a flow back and forth, like breath. The movement back and forth is what allows transformation. If you just stayed in ecstasy your human would never get to evolve. If you just stayed in mundane you would never know yourself as Divine. In the space between the two, in the interplay between the two, thinking and meditating can co-exist as a conversation between your human self and your Divine Self.

This moment with my heart was a great revelation. But the revelation is only the Divine part of the story. I still get to flow back into my mundane human, with that little bit of Divinity clutched in my hand so I won't forget. That's when the job starts of integrating, practicing and retraining myself to pay attention in this new way to this old part of myself.

Yesterday I got to practice keeping my heart in my chest, so to speak. And it took some practice. I kept thinking of the phrase "Keep it in your pants, buddy," only it was "Keep it in your chest, buddy." Right! Got it. What was that again?

I went to a lovely class about Matrika Shakti, or the energy of sound, and sent all kinds of sacred vibrations into my heart and throat, and the rest of my body, too. Afterwards I went to the Green Festival, just for an hour, to see what I could see.

One of the things I saw was a booth where a couple of alternative medicine doctors were muscle testing people for nutritional needs. I signed myself right up. I've had a few things come up with my body lately – the sorts of things that just kind of bug me but don't seem that serious. Well, they don't seem serious except that they indicate something out of balance which could lead to bigger problems.

When it was my turn I was told that my thyroid and my heart are in distress and that this is throwing my hormones all out of whack, causing my symptoms. There's a lot of information on how all of those work together which I am not going to go into. Suffice it to say what I learned sobered me right up. The message? "Pay attention and take care of it!!!"

The stunning, and obvious in hindsight, part of all this is that these organs in distress are right where that sacred fire was sending all that healing energy once I brought my heart back into myself Friday night.

I guess you could say that holding your heart outside yourself and trying to find other people to take care of it rather than holding it within yourself might possibly create a lack of balance within yourself. You might say that. You might also guess that bringing your heart back in might start a rebalancing. One can hope.

This morning, as I was meditating and feeling that choice to keep integrating my self-containment, or to take a break and head into drama I could feel the appeal of the drama. It's juicy. I'm familiar with it. I even kind of like how it feels sometimes, especially the part about what I think I'm going to get from someone else loving me. But, you know, I didn't want to hurt my thyroid anymore and I knew my heart could use more support, not more adrenaline. And, fortunately or unfortunately depending on if you're talking to my ego or not, I've seen the difference now with this whole offering up my heart thing. Outside me = empty. Inside me = whole. Okay then. Motivation noted.

I brought my focus into myself, into my heart, into my thyroid. I could feel how much I had still to integrate of the revelation and the sensation of bringing my heart inside myself. I could also feel how much healing my physical heart and thyroid have to do. If I needed any more motivation to slow down I have it now. My physical body has spoken loudly enough for me to hear.

I flow back and forth between my human and my Divine, integrating both ways. In this moment I feel a great deal of compassion for my human body, and its willingness to just be whoever I am, to manifest whatever my journey is. And I feel a great deal of gratitude that my body will bring my attention to the rest of me, the non-physical part of me, in case I need help getting focused.

It's all good. It's all God.

Saying Yes and Joy

 

This came in my inbox this morning. It's a quote from Abraham Hicks:

"Life is supposed to be fun. You said, "I'll go forth and choose. I'll look at the data, and I'll say, yes to this, and yes to this, and yes to this, and I'll paint a picture of the things that I want, and I'll vibrate about them, because that's what I'm giving my attention to. And the Universe will respond to my vibration. And then I'll stand in a new place where a whole new batch of yeses are available, and I'll say yes to this, and yes to this, and yes to this." You did not say, "I'll go forth and struggle into joy", because from your Nonphysical Perspective you know it is vibrationally not possible. You cannot struggle to joy. Struggle and joy are not on the same channel. You joy your way to joy. You laugh your way to success. It is through your joy that good things come."

Excerpted from the workshop in Los Angeles, CA on Sunday, August 2nd, 1998

That's such a nice picture, and on one level it's all true. But it's missing at least half the picture. That part about "You joy your way to joy," well, I was going to say it was right on, but there's something missing in that, too. How do you joy your way to joy? What does that mean? I guess what seems to be missing to me is the rest of the human part, the part about what brings you to Joy, and just what true Joy is.

When I set out on my journey to earth I think I said something along the lines of "I want a great journey. I want to know myself completely in this new medium called human life. I want to feel the experience of living in the physical dimensions, and I want to experience bringing unlimited God consciousness into limitation. I want to experience waking up."

So what I keep wanting to say "yes" to is human life. I want to say yes to my experience.

Now this involves a lot of Joy. Saying "yes" to what you are experiencing is a brilliant recipe for moving out of struggle and into Joy. For some people and in some experiences it really is that simple. You just say "yes". Bingo, everything's great.

Sometimes it isn't quite that easy. Because sometimes what you are saying "yes" to does not immediately feel like Joy.

When you look at the chakras in your human body, and what emotions are associated with what chakra, Joy lives in the solar plexus. This is a disc-like section of your body roughly from the bottom of the sternum down to the belly button. The solar plexus houses most of the integration organs, like the kidneys, the liver, the gallbladder, the pancreas and the stomach. This is where your physical self integrates higher energies with denser energies.

Another way to phrase what happens, physically, emotionally and spiritually, in you solar plexus is to say this is where you take Responsibility for your human life.

So here's what taking Responsibility means: Slowing down, recognizing yourself as the creator of your life, allowing yourself to experience the journey you have created, and thus stepping into this present moment. Therein lies your Joy – the Joy of getting to have this amazing experience called human life.

Note two things – the capital 'R', which distinguishes Self-Responsibility from social responsibility. My description of Responsibility didn't include taking care of other people, or doing things you don't want to do, or earning enough money, or getting enough sleep or any of that. Responsibility means paying attention to your emotional journey and letting yourself have it.

And, secondly, notice that I'm talking about Joy in human experience, not just Joy in happy times. The human experience is about all sorts of emotions and thoughts and creations. Sometimes it includes struggle. Probably the biggest struggle we face is this struggle against being in the moment and taking Responsibility for our lives. And yet there it is – struggle. One of the most brilliant things about this is that if you can slow down into whatever experience you're having, even struggle, you can find Joy in it.

Yes, it's fun to struggle. Why do we do sports? Why do we want action and conflict in our movies? Why do we like roller coasters? Because they're fun! Because they involve some level of struggle.

Every step you take to actually let yourself feel what you are feeling will take you closer to that Joy.

There's another part to this all, which is about what keeps us from feeling our journeys, which is basically the biggest barrier known to human and Divine kind, which is self-judgment. I'll get into that next.

Until then, slow down, pay attention, let yourself feel.