Slowing Down

The Gift of Seeing Beauty

2011-02-14T20:12:00.001-08:00

Ada Lou Williams grew up surrounded by beauty. She lived in a beautiful house on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. Her Irish mother and Welsh father filled the house with music, friends, boarders, delicious food and carefully chosen beautiful things. Her grandfather ran an art and framing store in downtown Seattle. It was like her own private museum when she went to visit him. He gave her books on art, and started teaching her how to draw. In high school she fell in love with the voice of James Melton, an operatic tenor. In college she fell in love with "the cutest boy I had ever seen," Bowman Ross, whom she married.

Ada Lou surrounded herself with beauty her whole life. She studied piano in high school and painting and sculpture in college. Like many of her generation she was a collector, but every single thing she collected was actually quite lovely, from the dolls, to the commemorative plates, to the sets of dishes, to the stamps and, of course, the books. She didn't just collect books for the sake of what was in them. She found the most beautiful editions, with the most beautiful illustrations she could find.

She always had a thriving, stunning flower garden. It was easy to grow great roses in southern California… once she and Bowman had hauled in truckloads of compost and good soil and worked out the irrigation. It was much harder to grow beautiful roses when they moved back to Washington. But she still managed to do it, despite towering evergreens, the ever present threat of mildew, full time work and raising three daughters. She used to send out pictures of her flowers, because they were so beautiful. Because how do you contain that much beauty just in the moment you're witnessing it, all by yourself? You have to share it.

She also saw beauty in everyone around her. It was partly her nature and partly her practice. Years ago she told me that she thought her purpose in life was to Love. And she did. I don't know a single person who met her who didn't feel embraced by her. For a while there, when she was teaching high school students and coming out looking rather naïve, missing certain errant behaviors, it seemed like maybe it was a problem that she always saw the best in people. But I think not. She taught me through stories and example that every single person is lovable, no matter what.

True, she also got tired of people, and irritated with people, and mad. She was human. But she always 'looked for the highest expression' and she usually found it.

The thing is she didn't always see the beauty in herself. As she gained weight, as she aged, as she was repeatedly less than perfect, as she had a harder and harder time doing the things that she loved to do, she had a harder and harder time giving herself that unconditional love that she continued to shower on everyone else.

She and I were talking the other day about Divinity. She had all sorts of words from her religious studies about the perfection of God's expression (us), and being a beam of Divine Love. I asked her if she could actually feel that, if she had any sense of herself that was close to that perception of perfection. "Well, when I was in college." "That's when you knew you were perfection?" "That's the closest I ever got." "It was downhill from there?" "Yep. Pretty much. Downhill from there."

Ada Lou, my mom, died on Monday, Feb 7, 2011. She told a lot of subtle jokes as she was waiting to leave. I don't know if that comment about 'downhill from there' was one of them or not.

My family is naturally feeling a lot of grief at losing her. We all loved her very much. We all love each other, too, but she was the center of that love - the one who brought us together, our matriarch, our example of 'how to feed the multitudes, even if only a third of the multitudes are here.' She read us the best children's stories, showed us the best classic movies, sewed us the best Christmas pajamas and made the best ever sticky buns and lemon meringue pie. She was the one who made sure we always felt abundant, at least in food and at most in love. And even though she was frequently the center of stress at family gatherings with her need to make it all perfect, she is also the one who put the effort in to make them all so very, very beautiful.

I love my mom. She was frequently my champion when I had conflicts with others. She was always there as my champion when I doubted or subterfuged myself. I wanted to be her champion, too.

My sisters and I expressed our love for her in numerous ways. As she aged and her health started to decline we frequently expressed our love by trying to change her – to make her more healthy. Every once in a while she would take in what we said or offered with interest, but mostly she smiled and ignored it. Eventually she got pretty fed up with it.

You know, even though she didn't seem all that healthy to us, she still lived 79 years, and was present, intelligent and funny up to the end. So what do we know?

I finally got the message to quit suggesting 'things she could do to be healthier' a couple of years ago. It was very hard for me. I had to face all the reasons I went into healing, and discard a whole bunch of them. This not only dramatically changed my relationship with my work; it also made it much more fun to hang out with my mom, for both of us.

It was also round about two years ago that I inadvertently took on a whole new assignment of helping her heal. My focus was on my own emotional healing and growth. But the side effects included a lessening of the burden on her.

That was when my parents moved out of their home of 39 years on Ames Lake and into a condominium in a retirement community. I had moved in to the house with them a year earlier, supposedly to help them out as my dad was recovering from cancer. But after a year I think she couldn't stand living with me anymore, so she moved out. Yes, there were other reasons. They were going to sell the house, downsize - move somewhere they could handle. But I think probably even one month of me not wanting to eat non-organic food cooked in her aluminum pans, that she had cooked with her whole adult life, was more than enough for her.

I stayed in the house, ostensibly to fix it up so we could sell it. There was a lot to do, on many layers. I'm still here, still working on it. It has been quite the journey for me to repair and renovate their house, my childhood home. Every single job has had layers and layers of emotion along with the peeling paint, water and rodent damage and rot. Working on the physical location where I learned most of my emotional holding patterns has been a very powerful way to delve into them for healing.

And, as I said, there was this side effect that I was delving into my parents' emotional patterns, too. I found them in myself and in the fabric of the energy of the house.

In the last two years the emotions I've encountered have included a fair set of permutations of "fear," "I believe I am not enough," "I am unwilling to be responsible for my journey" and "I feel unlovable." It's like each emotion has its own disco ball's worth of facets to feel, and they came up one at a time so I wouldn't miss any of them. It's been a great journey, well worth all the hassle of ripping out showers and kitchens and replacing old plumbing and wiring.

The path I take when such things come up is right to the center – sometimes directly, sometimes it feels more like negotiating a maze – to the center of whatever it is that I am feeling, so I can really feel it, own it and gain that part of myself. The usual result is a new level of freedom, and choice, and self-love and definitely self-knowledge. And peace.

But the really interesting part in relation to this story is that every time I felt through something particularly big that was related to my parents, they changed. Now, it can also very accurately be said that I changed, and changed in relation to them. I don't know which is more true. But I do know that we are all connected. A shaman I studied with described what happens in our families as "We help pull each other up the ladder by doing our own work." Each time I visited them after clearing another major physical and emotional manifestation of rot/self-judgment they seemed calmer, like they had less to struggle against.

This hadn't been up for a while, as I've been working much more on my business than on the house, but when my mom went into the hospital two weeks ago I started paying attention again. This time there was no external house project to do. This time it was her, and us, directly.

I tapped in to her and into myself, both when with her in the hospital and when on my own. I had ten days of hooking my energy up with hers and asking "what do I feel in my body, emotionally and physically? Can I become more present in it and allow it to transform?"

Okay, yes. I was trying to heal my mother again. I was also using the opportunity to heal myself. I didn't want to leave anything unfelt, if I could help it. And I wanted to give her a boost, whether she was going to stay or go - especially if she was going to go. If I could help her complete her journey here, before she left, I wanted to do it.

This time it wasn't about simple things like feeling 'not enough.' We went hard core. We went right to contempt for the human journey, and human life has no value, and the choice between life and death.

The night they took her to the hospital I went there as soon as I could. I sat with my dad at her side through a whole series of examinations and the same set of questions from various different doctors and nurses. I listened to the machine that kept freaking out because her heart rate was over 160. Over 160??? Holy…

Once it was decided that yes, indeed, she needed to be admitted, and she was admitted, and was about to be moved to a regular room, I left.

As I was driving home I kept thinking about all the times we had tried to help her get healthy, and I wondered why they hadn't worked. Why was my mom, of all the people I knew, in such resistance? Was it me? Did I just do it all wrong? Was I too obnoxious? Did I talk too much and listen too little? Did I bring in so much judgment that she wouldn't hear it anyway?

I slowed down, and I asked. An image of her lying in the hospital bed came into my thoughts. Only it was exaggerated. She was large, swollen and even less able to move than she had been that night. There was a leering voice that said "This! This is the body I have made! This is the body I have made which perfectly expresses my contempt for being human!"

It made me laugh. Perfect. It seemed absolutely perfect.

"Contempt for being human" might sound a bit extreme, but every one of us carries around some amount of that contempt for the human journey. Every denial of emotion, every attempt to avoid an experience we're having, every desire to fix a situation before we feel it includes at least a little bit of that contempt. You could also call it "I wish I hadn't chosen to do this human journey," or "the human journey, especially all this pain and suffering, was a really big mistake."

What a funny thing to actually hear its voice. And hearing it that way instantly dispelled all of my judgment around it. Of course we create the bodies that express our experience of this journey. Of course we do.

My neck, which had been mildly out of sorts for months, since I did a funny, wrong, twisting-reaching-thing with a drill on a ladder, had gone painfully into spasm the day before she went into the hospital. I'd been at her house that afternoon, doing a bodywork session on her (that she actually asked for…) but I didn't connect my neck pain with what she was going through until I started going in to my neck to find what was there. I even realized later that I had done that funny, wrong twisting thing about a week before she went into the hospital last fall because of a relatively minor stroke.

I have been feeling into the pain in my neck for a very long time now, along with having numerous bodywork sessions. But I had never gotten to the heart of the emotion of it, and the pain has never completely gone away. I'd had glimmers, and many of them had to do with my relationship with my mother. But neither I nor anyone working on me had landed on 'the thing' that let it release.

On the second night my mom was in the hospital the pain was totally up. I was tapped in to my mom, and asking what there was to feel. Looking… feeling… Duh! My neck was there to feel. Okay, what was the emotion?

This was one of those maze ones. I had the clue of the throat chakra being the center of our balance between the belief that we have no value, and our willingness to know ourselves. Value, Life, Life has no Value, human life has no value… what is the value of human life? I was feeling this question for my mother and myself. What was the value? As I paid attention the pain kept getting more intense, like searing white-hot fire. I went further in to it.

What was I feeling? I was feeling pain in my neck! I lay in bed just feeling in to that intense pain, following the maze of truth and distraction. Finally I managed to find my way to stand squarely in the pain in my neck, feeling the question 'what is the value of human life?' And the answer I got was 'This is the value, this pain.'

Now, that might sound terribly strange and wrong. But it is also profound. We're here to journey, to feel, to live in these limited human bodies. In that moment I had intense pain all up and down around my cervical vertebrae, in the core muscles of my neck. That was my current experience of being human. It had a tremendous amount of value, if I was willing to feel it.

In that moment, when I felt the value of being able to feel the pain, this little vibrating shudder went through it all and most of the pain went away. It just dissolved.

I say most – definitely not all. There was still a threat of seizure at the top of my spine, like a pool of dark, hot congestion. In Chakric consciousness that area is the moon center, where lies the choice for Life or Death. For days after I felt the value part I was wondering "okay, so what is this question of life or death? What does it mean to choose Life? Does it mean to choose to live in a human body? Is this about the choice to live or to die?" Seemed like it could be, given the circumstances. But nothing shifted, and I kept thinking I was really missing something there.

Friday night I went to a Kirtan in the city. Kirtans are a version of what I loved to do as a child and in college – singing to God with a group of people. Most of the songs at Kirtans are in Sanskrit, but it's the same thing as the nights of singing hymns at the Principia chapel.

As I was singing I kept tuning into my mom. At that point we didn't know which way it was going to go. When she first went in they talked about several different things going on, but none seemed to be at a critical, life or death point, quite yet. We hadn't spoken 'You may be about to die.' Yet on Saturday afternoon, after one night there, she told me that she was afraid of dying.

She knew I was the one to say that to. In my perception of the world, dying is one thing you really don't need to be afraid of. I told her everything I know about death – about the freedom you feel, about the Joy of connecting with your Divine Self… I told her about all sorts of things that I feel like I know, and then wonder how it is that I know them other than that I've heard them and they feel true.

Except that I do feel like I know this. I have such a clear connection with the non-physical realms, to think of death as a permanent ending, as anything other than a joyous going home, seems just wrong. As one of my friends said, I embrace death with a passion, just like I do life.

This was that conversation when we spoke about Divinity. After that she didn't say anything more about being afraid of death. Death became her longed for friend. A few days later we were discussing with her whether or not she should undergo a surgery to remove the fluid from her lungs, so she would have a chance of surviving. She said "I have been trying to die for three days now, and it hasn't worked."

I found that so endearing – imagining my mom, in her human body, late at night in the hospital by herself, trying to die. Like she could do it from her human self.

She decided to have the surgery. She had woken up that morning wanting to live. So she said yes to the surgery and in a few hours it was done.

She wasn't happy when she woke up from the surgery. She was in pain. And she had a breathing tube down her throat. And she couldn't talk. She wrote in my sister's hand, with her finger, "Pill," which was short hand for "I want a pill with which I can get out of here right now."

But that was the response to the surgery, and she recovered from the parts that were just about the surgery rather rapidly, much more rapidly than the doctors expected. If her body could heal so well from that it looked possible, to us anyway, like she might actually heal the rest of the way, too.

I felt genuine in my support of her going either way – recovery or death. The thing is that I could see the death option as including a whole lot more freedom than the life option.

At the Kirtan that Friday night I kept crying when I tuned into her. She felt so vulnerable, so confused that she had to go through this. I sang and I cried. Sitting there, surrounded by people I love but with the focus of my connection with my mother, I felt her feeling alone, and small, and not at all up to it all.

After a while of this singing and crying, my light body hands found their way to pouring light and love into her kidneys and heart. I wondered if I should be pouring energy into her, if she wanted to die. Instantly the top of my neck seized up. Was sending love into her really going to delay her exit if she wanted to go? Maybe it would just make her last days more comfortable. My neck relaxed.

Then I thought it was pretty silly to think that my sitting there, in Seattle, imagining myself with my mother, was going to have any effect on her at all. Again the top of my neck, my moon center and my jaw froze into intense, searing pain. I quickly asked myself what did it matter if it was real or not? What if I just let myself do what I was led to do and let it be whatever it was? Everything relaxed. Whew!

It was like my moon center was my sphincter of allowance, or something. I kept playing with it, and my body kept responding. Second guessing myself=searing pain in the moon center. Allowing myself to do what I was doing without censoring it=open and relaxed moon center.

Maybe that is what it is to make the choice between Life and Death – to choose to allow yourself to exist as who you are in this moment, or not.

The next day my son and I went to see my mom in the hospital expecting to say goodbye. Dad had called saying she had a very rough night. But when we got there she looked way better than she had before. She had energy. She could speak. She was funny. We both had great conversations with her, and loved on her. She looked so much better we tried to convince her to allow them to put in a feeding tube, so she could get some nutrition. She finally said okay. We walked out of there feeling like maybe she was going to recover after all.

I'm told this happens all the time. People rally in order to say a proper goodbye.

That night my dad called me from her room, crying, saying she had refused the feeding tube. He put her on the phone. I said "Hello mom." She said "I want to die. I don't want any more pain. I want to go home." She said it more forcefully than she had said anything in years. I think she expected me to fight her on it, given what I'd said earlier.

"I'm so happy for you." I said. "I love you. You are going to have a great journey. Thank you so much for being my mother." She liked that answer. "It has been a pleasure," she said, "every single moment of it." We went on like that for a little while, just expressing our love and gratitude for each other.

The next morning, Sunday, we all met again at the hospital, to discuss. Her choice was clear. We just all had to say we agreed so my dad could feel okay about it. And we did. The doctor agreed, too. So we asked them to remove the saline drip. Remove the antibiotics. Let her go.

They said it might take up to a week. But the nurse suggested one of us stay with her, just in case. My mom was in and out of consciousness at first. We wanted to be there whenever she woke up, so she wouldn't feel alone, so she would know we were with her.

Sunday afternoon she asked my sister Mary, "Do you think I'm chickening out?" No. Hardly.

I asked my son on Monday morning if he wanted to come with me to the hospital. Yes, absolutely. So we went. He brought his computer, to have something to do. I sat and meditated, when I wasn't talking to the various people who came in. She hadn't woken up except for very briefly about an hour before we got there.

My dad was going to go home when we came, but he stayed. He kept trying to be practical about it, and go home while I was there, but he didn't want to leave.

In the moments I was able to meditate I focused in to the lines of attachment keeping her here, and helped to dissolve them. Again, I had that choice of second-guessing what I was doing or just following where I was led. I followed.

After several hours I was thinking I had to go, to get ready for a client, but I looked at my dad and he was sound asleep - completely out of the body sound asleep. Ah, I thought. He's with mom.

Leaving without saying goodbye to him didn't feel right. Neither did waking him up. So we stayed.

When he woke up 15 minutes later he remembered that the nurse said she needed to move mom every couple of hours so she wouldn't be in pain if she woke up. He went to get her. The nurse came in with a helper, saying it would only take a few minutes. We waited outside.

Very soon she came back out. She said she wasn't going to move her, because it was clear she would be gone within the hour.

Whoa. Okay. Call Mary and tell her to come right now. Call the client and cancel. Less than 24 hours is really different than maybe a week.

I also rushed down the hall to the bathroom. When I came back in my dad was standing by her side. "I think she's gone." But then there was another breath. I went to stand by her with him. We were both just watching. Was she gone? Another breath. Was she gone? Another breath.

And then I felt a sudden thwunk in my heart chakra. And there were no more breaths. I was standing between her and the window. I think she had to go through me in order to get out.

It was kind of strange, afterwards. Mary came in about ten minutes later, having sped down the freeway singing hymns. She cried. We talked. Then we just sat, thinking of things to say. We called our other sister. We sat in silence. After a week of holding vigil it was hard to realize we didn't have to hold vigil any more. Well, in a way we still did. We were holding vigil for her body, for ourselves, for the moment to be completely done. And there was a bit of paperwork to get through.

When we finally left we all went to their home, so dad wouldn't have to go back there all by himself. When we were all there we went in. But we still didn't have anything to do. Or, more accurately, it wasn't time to do anything, yet. It was time to just be, to feel this moment when our worlds had dramatically changed.

Being in my mother's house, filled with her things but not filled with her, I felt like I had never seen it before. I kept walking around their house, looking at her things, the things my mother had collected and displayed.

I've had a lot of judgment around all the stuff my mom surrounded herself with. It felt overly busy, an obsession, a distraction from what was important. Did she really need yet another set of dishes? Did she really need yet another Madame Alexander doll? She barely had room in the lake house, with the over 3000 square feet that they were living in, bother the packed furnace/storage room in the basement. In the condo it was that much more crowded. All that stuff seemed like such a heavy burden to carry. How could she even know who she was in the face of it all?

Also I always felt a big disconnect between the picture she tried to show the world – lovely, elegant, graceful, happy – and the judgments she held about herself – not lovely, not elegant, not graceful, not happy. Even though I could see that the things she surrounded herself with were beautiful, I could never see them without that filter. How much of it was her judgment, and how much mine, I don't know, and I don't know if it matters. It just always stood there, in the way, coloring the picture.

That afternoon, after she died, it was completely gone. Mary and I walked around their house, looking at her things, and everything was simply, exquisitely, beautiful. The delicate tea cups with the flowers for each month. The paintings. The porcelain figurines. The books. The plates with the birds on them. The furniture. Heck, even the fake flowers looked beautiful.

Without the filter of my judgment - my need to make her other than what she was - and without the filter of her judgment – that she didn't measure up to her own standard of beauty - I could finally see why in the world she would want these things in her life.

Ada Louise Ross saw beauty. She saw it in the world around her, and in the people around her, and in the source of all things. She was tapped in to beauty and Love. It was like she had a direct line that was always open, always available to her.

In the hours after she left her body, and after I wandered around her house, after I went home, I started to marvel that she was able to keep that line open, with everything that she went through. How was it that she was still able to recognize so much beauty, even when she was in pain? Even when she had so much self-doubt? Maybe that's why she gathered so many reminders about herself, so she would always be able to look, and to see beauty no matter what.

And then something else occurred to me. Maybe the miracle wasn't that she was able to keep seeing beauty. Maybe the miracle was that she was able to journey so many things that didn't look so beautiful. Maybe the miracle was that she was able to feel pain, and limitation, and self-doubt, and separation, and unlovable, and worthless in the face of all of that beauty. Maybe the miracle was that she was actually able to feel "human life has no value" in the face of how miraculously, beautifully valuable human life is.

It's now been a week since she died. My journey has continued, with the help of friends, family, time and regular inspirations from my mom. The other day my sister and I cleaned out her closet, at my dad's request. He thought it should be done, and he thought it might help him be there, in the condo, if there weren't so many reminders of her human frailty around. So we did it.

It was so much fun. I loved going through her clothes. It was really amazing, actually. I'd pull out a colorful shirt, or a dowdy pair of pants, or one of her many flower-printed dresses. I would remember her wearing them, and I would just feel so much love. I felt so grateful that she had that body that wore those clothes. I felt such sweetness that she, this Divine beam of light, had allowed herself to spend 79 years in a physical body, with all sorts of limitations and difficulties and pain and joy and love and sharing and desires and disappointments and achievements and anger and irritation and appreciation and loving and giving and dancing and not being able to walk and holding so many babies and sitting at the side of so many who died…

I felt more and more permeated with love for and from her, and with appreciation for the beauty of this human life. She gave me so many things in my life. I had been holding all the work I'd done in her final ten days as my last big gift to her. But I think maybe this was her last big gift to me, the gift of clearing away all those judgments so I, too, could see all that beauty.

Ocean of Thanksgiving

2010-11-29T22:19:00.001-08:00

I am grateful for indoor plumbing – for faucets that open to fresh, drinkable water right in my house; for hot water waiting for when I need it; for flush toilets, and bathtubs, and showers…

I am grateful for my kitchen – for sharp knives and steel pots; for blenders and stoves and refrigerators; for cupboards full of dishes and spices and cans of food. I am grateful for all the meals I've had. I'm grateful for people who feed me. I'm grateful for people who eat what I've cooked.

I'm grateful that when I've forgotten an ingredient I can get in my car, drive to the store, buy the ingredient and come back home, all in less than an hour even though I live a far stretch out of town.

I'm grateful for my child, and the light, humor, love, growth and new video games he brings into my life. I'm grateful for his father, who helped bring him into my life and to his other mother for helping to give him this amazing life I get to witness.

I am grateful for my friends, and family, and clients, who never cease to teach me something I didn't know, and who regularly give me the chance to show up with what I do know.

I am grateful for my Subaru. I'm grateful for all-wheel drive, for the heater, for the air-conditioner, for the engine and the tires and the radio that takes me way further than the car itself ever could.

I'm grateful for roads, and stoplights, and snowplows and street sweepers. I'm grateful for policemen and women, and for every other person on the road who makes it possible for thousands of cars to drive at high speeds right next to each other with hardly any accidents.

I'm grateful for electricity, for all the many ways of turning it into light, and heat, and movement and information and entertainment.

I am grateful for engineers, and inventors, and artists, and teachers, and soldiers, and carpenters, and health care professionals and athletes. I'm grateful for every person who shows up ready to express her or his personal vision, even if it is just for the architecture of the sandwich for their lunch. I'm grateful for my cats and my chickens, for the sensation of reaching under a warm hen to get the eggs. I'm grateful to imagine what it is like for the chicks that stand up to keep their bodies tucked in her feathers when she moves.

I'm grateful for pets, and domesticated animals and wild creatures. I am grateful for forests and loggers and tree huggers. I'm grateful for oceans and fish and deep sea photographers and transoceanic flights.

I am grateful for this state of gratitude, which is so much more than being happy some particular thing or person has come into my life. It ceases to be specific about anything at all. I feel awe-struck gratitude for every single thing I see or that comes into my mind. I am grateful for apparent duality, so I can see all this amazing, infinitely varied, creative expression that surrounds me in my human experience. And I am grateful to be part of this Divine dance.

And I am oh, so grateful for every one of you dancing it with me.

What if Self Awareness, in Love and Appreciation, went viral?

2010-09-28T21:37:00.001-07:00

What if, as easily as clicking "Like" on a Facebook post, you could choose Self Awareness? What if you could know, right now, that you are Loved, ALL of you; that every single part of you is perfect, Divine? What if you stopped wanting to hide all those messy human bits from yourself and from God? What if you started to Love them, and want to know them more and more? And the whole cacophony of your human experience suddenly became transparent to you, and through it you could see yourself as the god you are?

What if in one instant you could remember that all of you is worthy of being loved, of being felt and known, even your feelings of unlovability and unworthiness? What if all of a sudden you recognized yourself, if the veil lifted, and you began to dance this dance in Joy, thrilled at the beauty of your choice to be Here?

And what if when you clicked "Share," in that one instant, you could remind all of your friends of their choice to be here, too? And they remembered? And they reminded their friends. And within a few days the momentum of our collective journey tipped from one dominated by a need to control life, to one filled with the Joy of opening to the Possibilities of Life.

What if Love and Appreciation and even Excitement at Knowing Who You Really Are was a gift you could soak in through your eyes, and share through the tapping of your fingers? Held and transmitted through the channel of thousands of open hearts.

What if Self-Awareness went viral? And we all woke up?

Being Here Today

2010-09-07T21:28:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday. It’s a beautiful, misty/rainy Washington day. When I went down to let the chickens out this morning the lake looked positively magical. But the lake almost always looks magical from down there, in the garden. It looks benign, welcoming, like a big pool of peaceful, that floats into everyone who gets near it.

One of my teachers said that every year at your birthday you meet with your ‘council’, your group of guides and ethereal teachers. You go over the past year, check in with how you’re doing, and get yourself set for the next year. You also choose whether you’re going to stay another year or not.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I think about it. And this year that choice of do I stay or not has really been up. I was thinking it was a tantrum – the sort of the Christ consciousness coming in, from unlimited being, to the limited 3D human existence, and saying “WTF is this?!?!?!” Okay. Maybe your Christ consciousness doesn’t swear. Mine does. Or it says “What the…?” and my ego takes over with the rest. “You’re right! This is ridiculous! We’re supposed to be God here! What is this ‘paying bills’ and ‘feeling aches’ and ‘feeling alone and separate?!’”

I could go into that. Maybe another time. These tantrums are certainly very real and I’ve had my fair share of it in the last couple of years. One of the most pronounced aspects of them is that there is usually nothing going on – nothing wrong, no crisis (well, okay, there is what feels like crisis, but it’s comparatively nothing to what is happening in the world.) and yet you feel like it is really stupid that you would waste another minute in this limited reality. But today I’m talking about something else, which turns out to be more serious than a tantrum about being here.

Like I said, I thought it was a tantrum. And then I thought it was the birthday question, since it’s gotten stronger the closer I’ve come to today. Then last night I read a new channeling from Adamus of the Crimson Circle. He said that the energies of the last couple of weeks have been particularly intense and have felt very chaotic, and that a particular question is very much up – “Do I want to be here?” And that for those of us who are at this place in our evolution the chaos of the recent energies will keep feeling like chaos until we answer the question. And we can’t lie.

If you’re interested in this you could click here and follow through to the channeling from September 2010.

It’s uncanny and rather affirming for me when I read something like this and it names everything I’ve been going through. Like the part about trying to convince yourself the answer is ‘yes’ by making lists of why you’d want to stay. My list was looking lie: 1) my son, and … my son … and … uh… is that it?

Sometimes that’s it.

It is not that I have a hard, or painful, or in any way overly challenging life, except for the constant challenge I give myself of evolving. And that challenge is what makes the whole thing worthwhile. I love having a body. I love exploring in this world. It is just that I can taste my unlimited Divine Self, and, frankly, I really miss it. I’ve been here a really long time (not talking 47 years, more like thousands of lifetimes). I want to go home.

Last night after reading Adamus I decided to meditate on it until I had my answer. No lies.

A couple of years ago in Judy Christensen’s class in Ashland she had us all answer the question “What do I really want?” We were to slow down, as slow as we could go, and then ask ourselves what we wanted.

So I slowed down. I got so slow my ego stopped breathing my body (left, in other words). Okay, this is slow enough. Now, what do I want?

The answer was immediate and beautiful. “I want to Live. To experience Life!” And so I did. In that moment I said “yes” to my Self and just felt what it was to be alive. What a rush of Joy and Life filled my body! It wasn’t about anything material that I wanted. Just the pure experience of being human. I wanted THAT.

This is an interesting thing, this difference between the human self experiencing being human, and the Divine Self experiencing being human. Because for most of my existence, anyway, my Divine Self has sort of been out there, watching me, connecting with me, but not being here with me. (Me, in this case, being my human self) I started inviting my Divine Self in several years ago, because I wanted to feel it and so it would help me out. I had no idea what a thrill it was for it to be here until that meditation, though. THIS is what we came for. To be Divine unlimited consciousness journeying limitation.

Thrill, yes. And cause for major tantrum, too. Because it isn’t used to being limited. Many times I’ve felt like I’m the little child holding the hand of the big grown-up who has no clue how to function in my world. (Much like my son does for me in the world of computers!) I’ve been here a while. I know how it works. “Just relax” I say. “Things take time here. What it is in this moment is not what it’s going to be in the next. This reality is mutable. Believe me. I know.”

This came into my thoughts last night. That was the answer from two years ago. What is the answer now?

I wrestled around with it for a bit, still trying to come up with the reasons why the answer would be ‘yes.’ But, then, finally, I caught myself wrestling, trying to control it. Okay. What if the answer was ‘no’?

I felt the flood of longing. I miss my home. I miss being one with everything. I miss unlimited ethereal individuation. I miss knowing, without any hesitation or doubt or separation, that I am one with God.

I was lying in bed at this point, meditating and yet feeling very much awake. I let myself know it – “I want to go home!!!”

About fifteen minutes later I woke up. And I felt really calm and happy.

Okay. That’s what I want. I want both. I want to be able to go home and I want to be able to be here. I don’t want to have to leave home behind, to impose separation from myself or anything else in order to experience being human. I want to be here, doing this, knowing myself as and feeling completely immersed in Love.

That’s what I feel down in my garden by the lake. No wonder I like it there so much.

So do I want to be here? It helps to have my beautiful son make breakfast for me and gives me little 2 minute massages all day for my birthday. It helps to have friends I love who love me. It helps to live surrounded by beauty.

Yet I still get a sinking feeling when I say that I want to stay. I find myself negotiating. Adamus talked about that, too. He talked about people negotiating “I want to be here, but I want to be young, and rich!”

Here’s how my negotiation goes: I am willing to stay. I want to finish this journey. But I want all of me to be here. I don’t want to be here if it means cutting off from my Self. I’ve had enough of that. I don’t want to put up with it any more. Of course, who is cutting me off? Me. Who can choose to listen to and allow all of me? Me. Who can choose to stay open to my Divine guidance, Love and Joy? Me. Who am I negotiating with? Me.

Okay then. Happy Birthday, Me. This is the gift I am giving myself: More, and more, and more, of the wholeness of Me.

Thinking, Feeling, Doing,

2010-08-27T21:31:00.001-07:00

One day three students of a shaman went out for a hike in the woods. They all studied with the same shaman, but each one approached the work a different way. One was a thinker – path of Thought. One was a doer – path of Action. One was a feeler – path of Devotion.

It was a beautiful day and the three friends were getting along great.

"They said it was supposed to rain today, but it isn't. I have my rain jacket, anyway. I'm glad it's light. This trail will take us almost 1000 feet up to the waterfall. On the way we should pass through a few different types of plant zones. I'm happy." said the path of Thought student.

""Race you to the top!" said the path of Action student.

"Are you kidding me? I could just stand right here in this magnificence. The way the pollen catches the light between these branches! The air! Something wonderful is going to happen today. I know it." said the path of Devotion student.

They started out on the trail. They hadn't gotten very far before there was a crashing in the underbrush just ahead of them and a great big bear stepped out onto the trail. It saw them and reared up on its hind legs, standing almost 10 feet tall.

"A bear!" said the path of Devotion student, and she knelt down on the trail in front of the bear. "I give myself up to be one with the Eternal Being!" And the bear ate her up.

"I've got a gun in my car. I'll go get it!" the path of Action student shouted and ran back towards the cars.

The path of Thought student stood looking at the bear, and at his guide book. He said "There aren't supposed to be bears in this part of the woods."

The other night a friend of mine was describing a book he was reading, called "God Is Not One", which gives overviews of the world's 8 major religions and points out the really fundamental differences between them. I started rifting on how the differences within any given religion are sometimes more profound than the differences between the religions. Like any person could be part of any religion, but the sect they choose would be according to their personality. Like if I was a Muslim, I'd probably be a Sufi. Or if I was Jewish I'd probably be Kabbalistic. If I was to define myself as Hindu it would be as a Kashmir Shaivite. My friend caught on that and asked if this sect was Philosophical, Karmic, or Bhakti. Huh? Are those the only choices? Well, according to this book all of the Hindu sects can be categorized as one of these three.

Now, I don't know if it really works to divide as multi-faceted a religion as Hinduism into only three types of sects, but it made me think of the story above. Philosophical = path of thought. Karmic = path of action (your actions determine your Karma and therefore your place in the cosmos). Bhakti = path of devotion. Bhakti is all about devotion, and open heart, and just pure Love. So maybe it's true.

But I'd be hard pressed to define Kashmir Shaivism as just one of these three. There is a very strong philosophy – (to quote Wikipedia) "Cit - consciousness - is the one reality. Matter is not separated from consciousness, but rather identical to it. There is no gap between God and the world. The world is not an illusion (as in Advaita Vedanta), rather the perception of duality is the illusion." You can spend years uncovering the hidden nuances of that philosophy. And I have learned many practices connected with Kashmir Shaivism, meditation and breath techniques as well as emotional/mental/spiritual exercises which a path of action person can put to good use in furthering their enlightenment. And many of the people I know who is most immersed in this version of Hinduism are total Bhaktis. For them it's all about Love and Openness and the Oneness of everything.

Interestingly enough, the only part covered in the Wikipedia article was the Philosophy. I guess path of thought people are more likely to choose to write about their perceptions of the world. My friend is clearly path of Thought. For one thing, he's reading a book about the philosophical differences between the religions. Obviously Steven Prothero, who wrote the book, is also path of thought, because that's what's most interesting to him to pursue.

I, alas, have a very hard time sustaining path of thought conversations about Spiritual growth any more, because for me it isn't real unless you feel it. But the way I get to feel it is through practices, like Slowing Down and meditation and movement and diving into my emotional experiences with the vision on of Self-Responsibility. And, obviously, I find it interesting enough, even compelling, to sit down and write about it.

Which are you? Do you give yourself over to one path? Do you resist one path in favor of another? Do you temper your experience with a bit of all of them? Have you ever found yourself being as focused and silly as those three students above?

My Inner Overlord

2010-07-30T09:20:00.001-07:00

I just met my inner Overlord in person. It was kind of like meeting a king or queen that you never even knew really existed, but always felt the impact of their edicts. Very strange. Very impactful. Kind of cool and rather frightening all at the same time.

I was meditating. Recently this thing has been coming up a lot about how important it is to me to do everything the right way. It's different from ordinary 'whiteness' – which is all about looking good, as in 'white-washing' yourself and your experience so you will be socially acceptable. My internal dedication to doing things the right way hardly ever leads to social acceptability, though I'm usually befuddled by that. Because if I'm doing everything right, shouldn't that make people like me? Ha. Besides which I usually fail. That was one of my big recent self-revelations, that I really can't do anything right. In fact I was doing everything wrong – at least according to the reflections that kept coming at me. It was devastating. Oh well.

This morning while meditating this came up, this thing about needing to do everything right. I followed it down deep into myself, through several layers of awareness. Then suddenly it was as if I had stumbled into the secret hidden chamber housing the great and terrible Oz – sort of the man behind the curtain only it felt an awful lot more like the powerful big head - a very large presence of unfeeling certainty. Yikes! I would say it was cold, as in completely lacking in emotion (all the while holding the triggers which release chemical emotions into my body). Yet it felt hot like the center of the earth. Just a cold, hot, unemotional, certain of itself Overlord controlling the underlying experience of my life. I keep wanting to say it was my ego, but my usual picture of my ego is a lot more like that man behind the curtain.

Okay, here's what it is – the big picture of the head (complete with thunder and loud booming voice!) is the drama that fills one's life. The man behind the curtain is the human ego, creating all the drama in order to control things and keep itself hidden. It's kind of comical because it's really so out of control and inept, and yet it creates enough distraction that it can keep most people fooled most of the time. The Inner Overlord (for want of a better term) is … the Divine Ego? I'll have to ask my teacher, because I don't know.

Anyway, I had a conversation with it. Wouldn't you? I asked it all sorts of questions about what was right and wrong. I wanted to get more information to know who this was (as in what part of me) and to get a better picture of what the rules are that have been controlling my life. I certainly don't always follow these rules. In fact during our conversation my awareness would slip up through the layers, seeing myself in different situations where I'd tried to defy these hidden rules, and seen the consequences. Because there are always consequences.

This inner Overlord doesn't care how things look on the surface, or if anything works. It just lays down the law and makes sure that it is followed.

Here's an example – it's a bit of a silly example in the larger scheme of things, but maybe it gives a good picture of the schizophrenia that results from these rules. I was looking around at the different areas in my life that the Overlord had rules about – i.e. ways in which I am supposed to do everything right. One of them is to speak foreign languages. It decided a long time ago that I should be able to speak as many foreign languages as possible. This is a way for me to be superior, successful, socially adept… and yet I really only speak English pretty well and have a good grasp of Spanish. When I saw this rule I asked, "Does this mean I should be studying more?" I have Rosetta Stone with many languages and rather like studying. Should I spend my time doing that? No. The rules say that I should already know the languages, and that spending time studying is irrelevant. How this is supposed to work I don't know.

Okay fine. Be perfect, now, and don't waste any time getting there. Hmm. How exactly am I supposed to do that? Oh, right, I can't. I'm a puny human. Riiight. There's the problem right there. I'm human. If I were still just God, without this ridiculous journey of limitation, there would be no problem.

Just so you know I'm doing everything right – I'm going to ask my teacher about this one. And it's great to have encountered it/unveiled it. No, really. I feel like I've just met a very disturbing and integral best friend, or something. Like I just found out I'm married to a mafia Dom. Or, heck, that I am one!

Letting Go

2009-10-21T10:02:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-05T11:30:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-12T18:57:00.001-07:00

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)

2009-04-23T18:14:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-14T22:03:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-11T23:44:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-29T13:38:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-26T14:53:00.001-07:00

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.