IMPERFECT Lady

A complete set of One.

 

How do you know when to stop?  When is it time?  What inside of us says ok that is enough?  Somehow we continue to do things over and over and over, until.

 

Who decides the Until, when to say when, when enough is enough?

 

What changes inside?  The saying, “the straw that broke the camels back” or “that was the last straw” means there is a point where we are incapable of going further.  Is there a line that we will not cross and we are unaware of it until it happens?

 

The endurance of the body and mind to continue in a pattern over and over and over again, and its capacity to hold more than it seems possible to hold, is remarkable. 

 

It is so intriguing to me that out of the clear blue or so it seems it stops and simply says, “no more I am full!”

 

I wonder if like our belly signal of being full, can this button get out of whack and we pile stuff in long after the full signal is given, like a faulty switch.

 

We then ‘overeat’ years of abuse by failing to say I am full, I can fit no more in, but yet something gives.

 

We are overeating things that are not good for us.  Like getting used to eating foods that carry no nutritional value, we are used to people with no self-love value.

 

Our lives become accustomed to craving the antics and the behaviors that carry nothing for our self worth, our self love, nothing that we can use to empower ourselves, instead it continues to whittle away at the person inside, until it seems the self disappears.

 

The self disappears inside, but oddly enough it pops up outside in a million different places and people.  Our sense of self is now contingent on others good opinion, for we lost our self inside.

 

How surprising it is that abuse diminishes the person inside, but it grows mighty large outside.

 

We will find it in everyone we meet, in all the things we own and the ones we don’t own yet, our self seems to be illusive and everywhere, unmanageable at best, relentless and demanding, forever one step ahead of us, we are now seekers of self chasing it outside, for we must have given our self away. 

 

Given our self away not once but a million times, until we are shattered and scattered into a million pieces.

 

How then do you get your self back inside?  How do you now go back and retrieve all that you gave away? 

 

How do you start to little by little, piece by piece, a tiny section here and teeny section there, bring it all back in?

 

In Dysfunction the sense of self is obese and no one even knows it.  It is large and covers areas beyond what the mind can hold.

 

The dysfunctional sense of self is outside of us and it is in anything and anybody who walks by.  We feel owned by the world, owned by others, and our own sense of self is nowhere to be found.

 

Without another person standing in front of us, we disappear.

 

I am amazed as I write this to understand how the self worth is diminished inside, while the monster outside seems to grow in leaps and bounds.

 

It pushed me back in my chair to realize that my whole sense of self was lost when my “outside” crashed.  I was left without me.

 

I was a whore for love and peace I discovered a few years back.  I gave myself up for others satisfaction, others needs, others this and others that.  I gave myself up in a million and one places, until.

 

My Until was when I could see clearly who it was I had given myself to.

 

I gave myself away.

 

I didn’t even care what they did to me, I was careless with me……

 

When I finally saw myself I was a broken mess. 

 

I am still in the ‘reconstruction’ phase and when I am feeling out of power that an outside source has more power over me, I know that my sense of self is inside.

 

Tirelessly I work pulling and tugging to get my sense of self back out of that item or person.

 

I usually can tell I am in there, when I feel that I own that. When my feelings get hurt depending upon what they do or don’t do, you can safely bet I am inside.

 

Bikram on his Yoga CD says, “If anyone can steal your peace, you are the loser.”

 

What I didn’t know was that I was the loser of self!

 

I now am finding myself in the oddest places and people. Yet I can see my intentions.

 

My intentions were to fill them up with whatever it was they thought they were missing.

 

It is incredible, we are all going around losing ourselves and then grabbing a sense of false self from others.

 

What if instead we stop this madness and Be whole without the other?

 

Like Byron Katie says, skip the middleman.

 

You be you and I be me!

You keep you all of you, and I will keep all of me.

Two people fully loaded a complete set of one!

 

I move as One.

 

 Expectation.

- anticipation of something happening: a confident belief or strong hope that a particular event will happen

-  notion of something: a mental image of something expected, often compared to its reality.

-  expected standard: a standard of conduct or performance expected by or of somebody.

 

There seems to be two ways to BE in this world, either walking with our expectations simply laid out ahead of us, or we are walking naked without expectations, surprised endlessly with what arrives?

 

You may not even know that you are smack dab in the middle of expectations, until you are frozen and unable to move without hurting someone?  We even have expectations that we will not hurt another, like that is our business?

 

I am beginning to see that all we can literally hurt is another’s expectations of us.

 

If I have expectations of another, it literally puts them in a position of being a puppet for me.

 

My expectations are requirements from them.

I am taking a part of them and owning it.

 

Is it possible to own a piece of someone and would you want to and why?

 

Why do I need a part of someone else? 

It seems really odd to me now, but I used to live in the land of expectations, in the sea of owning another’s life.

 

I used to own my children’s lives and I used to want my sisters and brothers to act a certain way for me, to make me feel special to make me feel loved and appreciated. 

 

It was a break through moment for me when I told my son, “Your job is to be a 12 year old boy.  Your job is not to make me happy.”

 

What a revelation that was for me.  Inside buried deep was this odd seeking device that was always looking for others to bring a part of me to me.

 

Like my son’s job was to make me a good mother?

How does that work?

 

Well in my old mindset, a good boy equals a good mother.

A bad boy equals a bad mother.

In order for me to be good, he had to be good.

There was no separation between the two of us.

 

When I separated from my mother, father and siblings, I could see where the dysfunction lay. We all were co-dependent upon each other.

 

I had never stood alone and separate, I never even had a free thought or moved in a direction that the whole did not approved of, I needed to make sure I didn’t mess up others expectations of me and ruin their good opinions.

 

Have you ever done the three-legged race, where you have to move in sync with someone else or you fall? That was me, I was forever tied up to someone’s leg.

 

That other leg was an expectation.

 

I cannot explain the weirdness to walk alone unencumbered by that third leg?  The freedom brings a lump to my throat. 

 

When I undid the ties, they too became free. 

 

I remember feeling so inept at walking alone. It was like this whole world was a foreign land.  I hardly ever made an independent choice one that was outside of an expectation of another.  In fact I always did my level best to not step out of line with the third leg.

 

It is pure joy to move along as one, to no longer need to ask the many legs if they want me to go in a certain direction.

 

I just sit with myself and see what it is I want to do, what honors me, what brings me peace inside.  I have no expectations even of myself.

 

I never know what it is I will do today or even in the next few hours.

But reality will arrive and I greet it and then I move.

 

I move as One.

 

I am dying to live!

 “The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don’t read what they write, don’t ask them what they believe, just observe what they do.”    Ashley Montagu

 

And what I am learning about myself is to watch what I do.

Just simply watch yourself, what your day consists of, where you go and what you do. 

 

Today I offered advice to a friend to simply do simple things.

And then I followed my advice and drove up to watch my husband and son as they worked on their project, clearing the land for a deer camp.  Just being there in the woods with them, seeing the changes of our land, seeing their excitement and to hear the possibilities of their dreams. 

 

My girls came too, and recalled the times spent catching frogs in that pond, then commenced to have a contest who could catch a frog first.

 

An hour of my day helping to carry branches, clearing the site, being involved in their world, making memories, adding on to life’s color.

 

“Life happens at the level of events, not words.” Alfred Adler

 

What I know to be true is that we are events happening all the time.  Some days the only event is being tired, or being bored, but nonetheless it is an event.

 

I am going to watch what kind of event I am.

 

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by day, in all the small uncaring ways.” 

Stephen Saint Vincent Benet

 

I wonder if we care about the wrong things, until death is at our doors?  Can we literally be careless with life until we are like dead men walking?

 

I am thinking we can be alive, breath coming in and out, but really living life is so different than just being alive.   

 

“One must lose one’s life in order to find it.”  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

 

I feel like I was reborn and that I am learning how to really live in my life, to experience and to be aware of many things.

To be open to doing and going places where before I had a preset of no.

 

Doesn’t it sometimes seem that the ones closest to death hang on more preciously to life, and those of us who ‘believe’ we have many years are so careless.

 

Do you know, are you sure, dare you be careless?

 

While we still have the choice to live while alive, let’s do it for the ones who have no choice.

 

Live like you are dying, and aren’t we all?

 

I am dying to Live!

 

Notice.

The right-mind according to Dr. Jill, “is all about the richness of this present moment.  It is filled with gratitude for my life and everyone and everything in it. It is content, compassionate, nurturing and eternally optimistic.  To my right mind character, there is no judgment of good/bad or right/wrong, so everything exists on a continuum of relativity. It takes things as they are and acknowledges what is in the present moment……to my right mind, we are all equal members of the human family.”

 

My left mind is the tool I use to communicate with the external world.  Just as my right mind thinks in collages of images, my left mind thinks in language and speaks to me constantly.  Through the use of brain chatter, it not only keeps me abreast of my life, but also manifests my identity.  Via my left brain language center’s ability to say “I am,” I become an independent entity separate from the eternal flow.  As such, I become a single from the whole.

 

From the book, My Stroke of Insight, by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.

 

Just knowing that there are two minds, “I am of two minds…” I wonder where that saying came from.

 

Anyway, just knowing that inside of my head is an instrument that has two sides, two separate ways to process life, helps me understand my unravel or my fall into what I call reality.

 

Isn’t it amazing that we can be inside of us looking around and using this side or that side of the mind to process our lives? 

 

And I believe we switch from side to side unknowingly most of the time! 

There are times in my life that I am at total peace, where I am overfull of gratitude that it literally overwhelms me.  When I am in my right mind creating wonderful Art and not even knowing there is a me, just Art.

 

There are also times that ME is front and center, and I am way an individual and very much defensive in my stance against life, reality and others.

 

What would happen if we just rode along for the ride, to welcome thoughts coming and going, to even welcome which side of the mind we are experiencing life with, to see this body as a body and not take it all so personally.

 

I am learning that the more I am disconnecting my sense of self in things, the easier it is to just be.

 

It is when we treat each incident in life as a personal part of who we are.

 

The body runs alone, it surely doesn’t need us to tell it what to do, we are not forever reminding it to breathe, to digest food, to pump blood, it all seems to move gracefully without our input.

 

The world also runs without our running agendas, we really have little control of anything, not the world, our bodies, or even our thoughts.

 

It seems it is all run for us.  Like we are the queens of life itself.

 

Sit back and watch and listen to all that happens for you.

As I sit now, I am in a Library by the lake, birds fly by from time to time, boat motors by slowly, a woman sits nearby, raindrops are tapping lightly on the window, voices in a distance, warmth of the laptop on my lap, so much to take in, in this one breath.

 

For now I am viewing life from the right mind and using my left mind language center to tell you about it.

 

I am just a woman sitting here observing.

How much time do we observe, compare to the times we literally are talking against what is happening.

 

Talking or whining about what is happening. Like our long drawn out dialogue will change anything outside. Is that when we get lost in our left mind file room sorting out what should have happened, what we could have done, instead of being with what is.

 

Mindlessly is really meandering around oblivious to what is occurring, we are not aware of reality, the sky, the birds, the ground, the flowers, our bodies wonderfully operating silently without any recognition, we are meandering around in our heads instead.

 

Mind talking in our heads is so loud sometimes we can’t see for the loudness.

 

That now stresses me out, and I have to walk outside sometimes to get back to now and then I seem to switch to Right mind.

 

I am happy that I have both sides, and I am happy to be aware of them and their functions.  I am in utter amazement at this body and how life unfolds.

 

We literally have no idea what will happen next.  It is like being in an action adventure, being the main character and not even knowing our lines, it will all depend what will happen next.

 

Isn’t it a cosmic joke, that we focus on ‘owning’ things, when all along, there is so much at our fingertips, even our fingertips are ours to use.

 

Imagine what your hands touch in a day, what they do for you, just little fingertips.

 

Our bodies are ours to use, the planet is set up with a zillion things for us to use.  Whether we see the sunsets and sunrises, the flowers and intricate designs of the clouds, they simply are there.  We did nothing for them.

 

The more you see, the more there is to notice, the more you hear, the more sounds appear.  It seems that it was just there waiting for you to notice!

 

No need to get ahead, to plan ahead to even contemplate the future, the future is here, while your busy trying to get somewhere, somewhere arrives!

 

What is there for me to do, but notice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emotional Watcher

I watched a person in the throes of anger, not a full- blown rage, but just anger and then the unsettledness that followed.

 

It comes into the room in a burst and gets added steam, runs a short while and then seems to disappear.  Where does anger go to and where did it come from?

 

When I was recanting the situation to my family, a few smirks fell out, an eye caught an eye in a knowing nod.

 

I knew then that they witnessed me in this same ‘fit’.  It was like an ism of me that they understood.  Like a bad irritating habit that they accepted of me. A twitch.

 

The definition of anger is a strong feeling of displeasure or hostility.  And resentment is, indignation or ill will felt as a result of a real or imagined grievance.

 

If we are feeling a strong feeling of displeasure, is that because we feel we should always be in pleasure? Is it possible to be in pleasure all the time, is that reasonable?  Are we angry at the person or ourselves for falling out of pleasure.

 

How is it possible that something outside can steal our inside feelings?  Don’t we own them?  If not, who does?

 

And resentment can be felt as a result of a real or imagined grievance, so it doesn’t even matter if it is real or not, we seem to respond the same.

 

I am very intrigued by all of this?  How feelings come in whether they are real or not, doesn’t seem to matter, we act the same!

How can we know if anger is justified, and is it ever justified or to who is it justified?

 

What triggers it? Is anger an emotion?

 

e·mo·tion

A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.

2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance: spoke unsteadily in a voice that betrayed his emotion

3. The part of the consciousness that involves feeling; sensibility

 

 

A mental state that arises spontaneously, so we don’t have to think emotions, they just seem to arise.

 

Our bodies bring these forth or is it the mind?

 

Are all emotions in each person the same?  If so, how can it be that some respond to them and others do not?

 

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, in her book “My Stroke of Insight” said, “I define responsibility (response ability) as the ability to choose how we respond to stimulation coming in through our sensory systems at any moment in time.  Although there are certain limbic system (emotional) programs that can be triggered, surge through our body, and then be completely flushed out of our blood stream. My anger response, for example, is a programmed response that can be set off automatically. Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience.  Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger is completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over.  If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let the circuit continue to run.  Moment by moment, I make the choice to either hook into my neurocircuitry or move back into the present moment, allowing that reaction to melt away as fleeting physiology.

 

So now it seems that some of us seem to tag on to the emotions and take the full ride, others see them come and go and not jump on!

 

I wonder why? 

 

“The left brain, according to Dr. Jill, is the story teller, and draws conclusions based upon minimal information.  For the longest time I found these antics of my story teller to be rather comical.  At least until I realized that my left mind full-heartedly expected the rest of my brain to believe the stories it was making up!  Throughout this resurrection of my left mind’s character and skills, it has been extremely important that I retain the understanding that my left brain is doing the best job it can with the information it has to work with.  I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between what I know and what I think I know.  I learned that I need to be very wary of my storyteller’s potential for stirring up drama and trauma.”

 

So then is it possible to watch, be aware of our selves and decide when to hop on or not?

 

Who hops on, the left brain and its storyteller ways?

What if no storyteller lived inside, would we just have the emotion passing like water under the bridge?

 

Who needs anger, what is the use of it?

It seems mostly a defense mechanism.

 

If you had nothing to defend, would you then no longer jump on the anger train!

 

I am going to welcome anger in and see if I can become friends with it!  Maybe then it will not catch me unaware!

 

Emotions must come in and out like thoughts, and our breath.

 

Maybe like our breath they are meant to come and go, and not become ours personally!

 

Let them be the breath of the universe, let them come and go showing you different expressions of life.

 

To be alive is to have emotions!  I can’t imagine being emotionless, but maybe we can allow them to pass and not get so carried away and out of control.  To just stand face to face with an emotion, honoring it.  To welcome it in, and to greet it, but not to own it and place our sense of self on it’s back.

 

Bird watchers do not become birds, they just watch them, I will watch my emotions, be an emotional watcher!

 

 

I vote no roles!

What happens when you no longer fit your roles, when you can’t step into the role and do it?  When the costume and lines no longer fit, you can’t even pretend to pretend it is working, not even one little bit.

 

Roles seem to shadow our actions or maybe make us act in ways we wouldn’t typically act or accept behaviors due to another’s role.

 

I am beginning to really hate roles and how they seem to have more clout than what is really going on.

 

The role of mother never worked for me as a kid.

My mother did not wear the same costume as other mothers, there seemed to be a crack in the façade, like she couldn’t really pull it off. 

 

I too have the same affliction, that beneath the role is me, and most times me and the role are not in agreement.

 

Mothering doesn’t work on big kids.

 

My mothering doesn’t spew forth love and kindness, it instead states that which most will not say.  My mothering will not lie especially just to make you feel better.  Instead I walk fearlessly into your life and tell you things you know, but don’t want hear, much less do. 

 

It seems that roles are living out our lives, that the roles take precedence over the person beneath the role.

 

I am not tired of being me, but tired of trying to mother kids too big to mother.

 

The Role of mother needs to be shut down after a certain age.

 

Behind the role of mother and daughter lie two women.  That is what I want to address.

 

Let the roles die, let the actions that are attached to the roles die, and let us deal with each other woman to woman.

 

Woman to woman, maybe now we are close to being on an even keel.

 

Even keel, fair or in balance, where one is not tipping over the scales and making the other resentful.

 

Unbalanced relationships were where I was raised and I was forever dragging along someone who for what ever reason didn’t carry their own weight.

 

I no longer have an interest to accept less, to concede and allow imbalance to be ok.

 

The roles and titles seem to carry excuse cards or set up bars of a prison to which there is no escape.

 

Families are with us forever, until death do we part, no matter what actions are tossed at us from the role of sister, or daughter, or whatever.

 

I am so tired of dealing with roles instead of the people hiding behind them.

 

Step away from the role, lay down the title and let us see who you are?

 

Now who are you as we stand eye- to- eye, with our actions and past behaviors as our only measure between us?

 

How does each one of us measure up?

I will not cheat and say you are better than you are, and I want no favors from you.

 

Let us just stand in the land of what is.

What is it you are doing and what is it that I am doing.

Who are you and who am I?

 

Let us meet each other for the first time.

Again.

 

When we met the first time, you were but a moment old.

You were a child and I the mother, now you are a lady.

 

It is impossible to mother a lady! 

 

I know that when I lay down the cloak of mothering, we will both have to stand alone, naked but for ourselves.

 

I am no longer able to have the upper hand, just because I said so, and you no longer can hide behind the innocence of a child.

 

We will meet in this space called now, bringing only ourselves, no roles.

 

Free to stand as an individual, freed of actions and rules that no longer fit.

 

Disposed roles, what happens to them?  Where do they go?

Is there a place where old roles go?

Or a place where you can find new ones that fit better.

What will our new roles be to each other?

Can we be role less and just be two ladies?

 

I vote no roles! 

 

No improvement needed.

…we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are.

                                                                          Pema Chodron

 

That line of subtle aggression against who we really are stood out for me and has been tumbling around in my head.

 

Aggression isn’t that like fighting?  How is it that “improvement” turns into aggression?  That is scary to me that the opposite is happening and we do not even know it!

 

What is that when your body turns against itself, and destroys its own cells? 

 

Inside of me, I had this mistrust, this feeling of being wary of those type classes, and I had to go and see just what was going on.

 

This sentence to me makes more sense than anything else I have thought about in regards to improving ones self.

 

If we were to do the total opposite, instead of aggression we had acceptance our whole demeanor would change. 

 

In the past four years that I have been on this life journey but with my eyes wide open, I no longer am fighting who I am and where I have been and what I have done.  When my sense of self crashed, I was without self.

 

Maybe if we remove the self, there will be nothing to improve, just feeling our life’s experiences.

 

Can you really improve the feeling of love?  How about the feeling of sorrow? What can we improve on those experiences?  How about when you experience the feelings of overwhelming gratitude, can we add a morsel more? 

 

I began calling myself by the things I was doing.  Perhaps because the Me of old, no longer existed, I became “the cooker girl.”

 

You then just enjoy the experience of the moment.

 

The cooker girl was never the same, sometimes her meals were wonderful, sometimes not so much, sometimes she would forget she was cooking and became a ‘reader girl’.

 

Life became much less serious, and I became more at ease with life.

 

I can see where I could have become aggressive with the cooker girl when she forgot, but by then I was accepting she was a reader girl.

 

If I were to try and take ‘cooker girl’ classes, I would learn how to do that action better, but it would not make me better or worse if I failed to learn how to cook better.

 

I still haven’t found my self, but I see glimpses of where I have been.

Clothes are done, so I must have been a clothes washer girl, quilts are finished, so I must have been a quilter girl, the blog is added to, so I must have been typing.

 

But at the end of the day, a body lays down, closes its eyes and rests.  Heart beating, blood flowing, all knowing what to do.  I do nothing but comply to its tiredness.

 

In the morning, resting seems to be over, I get up.  How can I improve on something I have no control over?

 

I was trying to think of what I would improve each day?

And thinking back I use to have aggressive thoughts of I should have done more, been this or that.  Yet I did what I did, it is over.

You can’t go back even a minute and do a redo.

 

We have original minutes, and original experiences in real time.

And if you focus on you, you lose the moment, if you even talk between the experience and you experiencing it.

 

Try thinking and being in joy, or sorrow.  Both seem to eclipse the sense of you.  That is how most life is, except you may have a running mind saying stuff over the top.

 

Have you ever driven miles and not remembered driving, for you were so deeply thinking.  That is how life can slip by unnoticed.

 

I have no aggression towards myself.  I accept I do what I do as I do it, and have no regrets.  For if I knew better, I would have done better, but I didn’t.  I accept my not knowing.

 

When I find myself in the midst of being a ‘don’t know mom’ I embrace that as well.  And in the end, I do know and not a moment too soon…or too late.

 

I love the states of don’t know, for that means I am about to learn.

I love that I am not finished, that I don’t have to go out and seek to improve me.

 

I am me, completely me, fully me, with all my past unknowingness, and even my future unknowingness.

 

I can’t undo the past and have no desire to do so.

I can’t know the future, and have no desire to do so.

I can only be that which is asked of me in this moment.

 

I may be asked to cook, to be a mom, to be a wife, yet beneath it all, it is just this body some call mom doing tasks.

 

I love that line, “All it takes to become an Artist is to start doing Art.” Ellen Langer

 

You don’t even have to begin doing you, you already are!

 No improvement needed.

 

 

 

 

"Comfortable with Uncertainty," by Pema Chodron.

 

 When we start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are.  It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.” Or the scenario may be that we find fault with others.  We might say, “If it weren’t for my husband, I’d have the perfect marriage.” “If it weren’t for the fact that my boss and I can’t get on, my job would be just great. “And if it weren’t for my mind, my meditation would be excellent.”

 

But loving kindness – maitri- toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything.  Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry.  We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness.  Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It is about befriending who we are already.  The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.  That is what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

 

Curiosity involves being gentle, precise, and open – actually being able to let go and open.  Gentleness is a sense of good-heartedness toward ourselves.  Precision is being able to see clearly, not being afraid to see what’s really there.  Openness is being able to let go and to open.  When you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and good-heartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling loving kindness to others as well.

         

 

I am a perfect guru of me.

 

Without the understanding of ordinary perfection, spirituality can put us at odds with our life.  The images we have been taught about perfection can be destructive to us.  It is like the Eskimo hunter who asked the missionary, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I still go to Hell?”  “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.”  “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”

                     

When I read that in Jack Kornfield’s book “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry,” I was taken aback.

 

First to see the application of Knowing and Unknowing, second to see the innocence gone, and third, the questioning of why.

 

I can visualize the child skipping along in the ‘adult’ world happy in their innocence, and we are the Missionary Priests that come along and offer a place called Hell.

 

There was another part that caught my attention….

 

We cannot know death.  Death remains a mystery.  When one Zen master was asked what happens when you die, he answered, “I don’t know.” “But aren’t you a Zen master?” continued the questioner.  “Yes,” he responded, “but not a dead one.”

 

I love how honest that answer is, for how can any living person ever know for sure for sure, just what death is all about.

 

Eccentricity means uniqueness, finding the freedom to be utterly one’s own person.  Even if outwardly we do not appear different, inwardly there is the fearless ability to be wholly the embodiment of yourself.

 

When the emotions are free and the heart can express itself without concern for the opinions of others, that freedom extends to every aspect of our character.

 

I was amazed to read that and to discover being eccentric isn’t odd at all, but rather being ones self.

 

The true task of spiritual life is not found in faraway places or unusual states of consciousness: It is here in the present.  It asks of us a welcoming spirit to greet all that life presents us with a wise, respectful and kindly heart.  We can bow to both beauty and suffering, to our entanglements and confusion, to our fears and to the injustices of the world.  Honoring the truth in this way is the path to freedom.  To bow to what is rather than to some ideal is not necessary easy, but however difficult, it is the most useful and honorable practices.

 

To bow to the fact of our life’s sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable.  As we learn how to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.

 

Those two paragraphs were in the introduction of this book.  I love how we only have to bow to what is, to accept all that comes our way.  And in doing so live a spiritual life and one with our hearts wide open, to accept the joys and the sorrows.

 

This book set out to show that even the Guru lives a life that is not stress free if they were to leave their ashrams and come and join us in mainstream life.

 

Pir Vilayat Khan, the seventy-five year old head of the Sufi Order in the West, confides his own belief:

 

Of so many great teachers I’ve met in India and Asia, if you were to bring them to America, get them a house, two cars, a spouse, three kids, a job, insurance, and taxes…..they too would all have a hard time.

 

In the end, we are all gurus in our own lives.

I am a perfect guru of me.

Looking for my Self!

Hi Blog, 

 

I have been writing about Self, where it is, how to describe it, how we can lose it, improve it, and how our Self leads us on a chase of a lifetime.  What is self?

 

Do you know? Can you tell me?  Where is it located, is there a spot that the Self resides in?  Is it in the brain, the mind, our thoughts, our bodies, our past, our future, the here and the now, where is Self.

 

My Self it seems has disappeared, I have a body, I have a mind, I think thoughts, I move about, I have feelings, I experience both sadness and joy, I am a quilter girl, an artist, but I can’t find Self in those things.

 

What is self?

 

I can become a cooker girl, do wife things, mother things, happy things, move in yoga, but where is Self?

 

If we take Self and let it stand alone like a good piece of Art, what does it look like?  How can you define it, what guidelines does it adhere to, what is its nature?

 

For something that is so indescribable, we sure have spent lifetimes improving it, learning how to become a better Self.

 

What the hell is it?

 

Self, give me the definition you have?

Show me my Self.

Where am I?

Do you all remember the story of the little bird who was searching for her mother.  She had no idea what she was looking for, for she could not see her self.

 

Isn't this the same?

 

I used to say, "I was looking for my Self, I didn't know who I was, or even that I was missing."

 

I still am.

 

I am looking for my self!