Tag Archives: Taoism

Come Closer

4 Dec

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Found this note on the sidewalk today.

When I saw it on the ground, I kept walking and I smirked a bit, I admit, thinking of the smart ass things one could write  on the note and leave back on his/her  car.

On my way back the note was still there, waiting for me to pick it up.

The receiver of such a message might have never even seen it, judging from it’s sidewalk location.

So much here in these few  words…

This note expresses displeasure and perhaps, he/she did have quite a difficult time trying to get through the car door.  It is annoying when some seem so oblivious to the idea of sharing space with others.  But I also imagine being on the receiving end of this note.  Would this note cause the receiver to park differently next time?  Would the humanity shared be bridged here?

I don’t think so.

I know all about annoying behavior.  I am so annoying.  I know I am.  My daughters say I repeat myself over and over again, which sends their impatience through the roof.  I don’t mean to, but often, there are misunderstandings if I don’t – rides needed that never show up, missed events, items forgotten…

Sharing space is tricky for me.

I have been overcoming clausterphobia since moving off the boat.  This condition has caused me to allow the voice in my mind to tell me that I can’t breath and I need to escape any way possible to get out of elevators, cars, classrooms…In this state of mind, there is actually no oxygen.  In these moments of blindness, human angels have appeared to me, helping me to breath, short breath in, long breath out.  A math professor across the hall, whom I have only seen in passing, got in my face, “Darth Vader” breaths he said.  And by helping me CLOSELY in this way, he helped me shift to where there was oxygen again, room in my lungs to take it in.   Breath. Life. Space. Options. Possibility.

Sometimes when my mind said it needed space, it actually needed the help of someone coming closer, as close as possible.  Paradoxical, that.

Right now my daughter and I are head to head.  I feel held over a barrel of ego and distortion through an incorrect lens.  This makes me want to get out; the circular dynamic  feels as if it takes all oxygen from the room, from the world…and yet if I can rest in the state of being (not mind) where there is breath, life, space, possibility – I can move in closer.

Could I park any closer to the shadows in my life?

Nope.

Addendum:  Just found my therapy session for my claustrophobia.

Here is Some Helpful Advice 😉

 

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YOU ARE HERE!

2 Dec

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Gosh.  I know right where I am.

A few days pass.  In between grading poetry anthologies, I take a little journey into reading the blogs out there that I have never seen.  Along this journey, I run across Awakeandfindingpurpose.wordpress.com and there I find another path walker sharing nakedly and beautifully.  This find then leads to some more bread crumbs along the way to Theawakeneddreamer.com…Wowza.  I am ready to hear this voice and experience stepping into her “telling” right now.

Rocking on my heels…ready to stop, and drop it all, no fear, just “come on fellas, show a girl the launching pad?”  Ah hahahahahaha.  Cue Alicia Silverstone Clueless voice, “As if….”

The empty mind times feel as nourishing as a bowl full of steamed spinach, a pure glass of water after a walk by the marsh.  Then the busy mind times feel like consuming cheeze doodles and dr. pepper.  Ugh.

So much has fallen away that I am full of longing for the rest to fall away.  I have had a shift; now I “know” the Eckhart Tolle park bench moment is coming.  Of course it is.  Everything to this point has led me along, and Everything will always continue to do so.  “She” let go of the grass reeds on the bank of the raging river a while ago.

I used to sneak away when my girls were young to go to a Thich Nhat Hanh Meditation Group in the basement of a Modern Baptist Church in Charlotte for one-half hour of sitting and one-half hour of walking meditation, followed by an awkward discussion of thoughts jumbled with ideology jumbled with all manner of open and closed, seeing and blind.  And I remember saying out loud, “Gosh, I just realized in the past few weeks that over 98% of what I think about is unnecessary.”  And a woman gave me and look, and said, “Really.  That’s messed up.  What do you think about?”  Indeed 🙂 What do we all think about?  But I was so new to the path, I thought I had said something so obviously stupid and wrong.

Most MIND is pretty close to that percentage…I stop and listen to mind chatter throughout the day.  What is it going on about?  At best, most of it is unnecessary, noisy blabbering, at worst painful confusion.

Paradoxically,  I don’t have to do anything about it.  I don’t have to sit on it, stuff it down.

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I just look at it.

It is going away… Soon, perhaps today it will fall away entirely; how beautiful!

“silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.”

― Rumi

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Paradox

20 Nov

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Paradox

Where we reside, the lessons come through opposites. I have a friend (DK) who has shown me that where paradox resides, you can be sure the divine is shining through. The divine is urging us on toward growth!

In writing a bit in this blog, I find myself face to face once again with the opposites within me. Even if no one reads this, and the format is just a way of reflecting me back to me, I question the impulse! Why share these thoughts? Is it ego? Why put these ponderings out in any sort of public way?

Now for the flip: connecting cannot take place without some sort of impulse. The past few years, the universe has richly rewarded me for stepping out of comfortable spots when the impulse to share strikes – my only contacts with awakening friends have come about by some movement, some acting on the impulse to share. My yin hunkers down and isolates to know herself, my yang seeks the company of like minded friends. My sun: My moon.

When our brains are forced to wrap around seemingly opposite ideas, and hold them all as true, we are thrown into cognitive dissonance.  We, human animals, do not like cognitive dissonance.  Cog Dis (so familiar to me now that the concept has this nickname) feels uncomfortable. In our discomfort, we have a choice to make. We can crack the outer shell of what we “think” we know and GROW. Or we can hide and revert back into old easy patterns – pretending we never heard the information that made our head hurt.  Then often we shoot the uncomfortable thought full of  hatred, fear and spew. Think Matrix movie moment…


There is lots of Cog Dis to be had, these days. On some level, we all know…the latest news stories…the lie repeated so often it becomes fact; so many broken systems surround us everyday. Peak Oil was one of the first such paradoxes that cracked my shell at one point – many shells ago. Our world on the verge of collapse in so many areas, one needn’t travel far to find the angst-ridden discord of opposites pulling.

Today I ask myself, what is asking to be looked at right now, full on? In what area am I choosing the steak?

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Video

Mary Oliver – Wild Geese

20 Nov

Feeling the soft animal body today, loving what I love – Mary Oliver for one.

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For the Moment, Put it All Down

19 Nov

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I have a YouTube Guru. Five minutes of listening to Mooji and I remember; I can let it all go.  Nothing is lost when I put my identity down; everything I am is still there, but now nothing is blocking the flow of all that is available to me (to all of us) in the moment. If an improv scene has a prayer of weaving into a magical unfoldment, the players have set their identities down and opened to the moment. Who I am, or my thoughts of who I am, can be set down as easily as a suitcase.  When we are on the train of life, we don’t have to carry the suitcase of identity on our heads. Set it down; it’s on the train too!

 

This teaching starts with a RELATIONSHIP question, but morphs into the clearest and most joyful teaching I’ve encountered for “Putting it All Down.”

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Yes, and…!

19 Nov

Improvisors use the phrase, “Yes, and…” to answer and begin a scene.  But really, everything can be about “Yes, anding” if we allow that.   Doesn’t life get interesting when we answer whatever may come with a “Yes, and…”?  This simple phrase is actually quite familiar through other words.  Lots of phrase contain the idea of saying “Yes” to life: “Go with the flow”, “Effortless action,” “I don’t mind,” “Show up, and see what happens…”

Saying YES to life, without resistance, no matter how messy, no matter how seemingly painful or humiliating, seems the only choice to me, anymore!

I am 46.  I took my first “Improv” class almost two years ago, and soon after, I found myself stripped and naked of all I had known for a long while.  Soon after that first class finished, I left my marriage of 19 years. I gathered my teenage girls, my possessions, and started out on a new life – a venture into the unknown.  Improv didn’t make me change me life directly, but it sure as hell helped me get the confidence to sit still, to listen, to see, to shake off the sleepy dust of roles and expectations. When I was present enough to show up, I realized my husband had already left, though he was not able to convey this except by not showing up, literally. Waking up and seeing takes courage sometimes, but now I know that showing up is the only option for me.

But this is just a story, any story really. Anyone in a body has one. And the same way improv, on a stage as a form of comedy or acting, lets us tell stories, experience identities, act out utter insanity; being in a body does all this as well.  Life is one constant scene.   We may forget this, attaching to the bodies we have, to the stories we think we are.  When we plug into believing we are our roles,  life has very high stakes for these “PERSONS.” Just as easily, I can shift my life, as the improvisor does from scene to scene, with a “yes, and…” and a listening ear – making life become play…life as improv!

There are so many avenues to explore; this is just one…I’m going to show up here and see what happens.

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