Spirituality and the Inner Self

I believe that each person's spiritual life is his or her own business, and that we each need to develop a connection with the world around us in whatever way works best for us. Here are some musings on the spiritual life to consider.

Blog Posts:
Disaster Relief
Giving Thanks for a New Decade
The Blender Effect
Whose Worldview Have You Got?
Nature's Music
Living in Layers
Universe on the Wall

Disaster Relief
The earthquake in Haiti started me thinking about how we co-create our reality.

Back up a few days, and picture this: Shortly after the earthquake, thousands of people are watching TV when news of the earthquake comes through. There are a few dreadful pictures, and everyone watching thinks, “Oh, how horrible!” And it is. The horror is beyond imagining. But the energy they’re sending is fear, darkness, anxiety, which creates a small earthquake aftershock.

Within an hour, a million people have seen the story on the internet, all thinking, “Oh, how horrible!” Billions of fearful thought-atoms are now being focused every minute on poor Haiti and the people who are living the horror. And the earth responds to that huge influx of co-creative thought-energy: there are several more aftershocks.

By that evening, billions of people are sending frightful and anxious thought-atoms to Haiti, and the situation grows worse and worse.

It's difficult to accept that all of us are co-creating our own reality, in every moment. But that's only because we were never taught that that's how life works. Quantum physicists have proven that observation and thought-energy changes outcome. How would an event like this be different if, instead of sending thoughts of fear and anxiety and pity, from the moment we heard about a disaster, we began sending prayers for peace, comfort, and healing?

It’s absolutely natural to react to a major disaster with fear, sadness, and anxiety, but if we spend hours or days tuning into the news media and watching the ever-growing horror unfold, unless we focus on sending thoughts of compassion and healing, we are contributing to its growth in every moment we think about it.

If we create our own reality, we are creating the situation as we focus on it. As conscious beings who desire to help others and heal our planet, it would behoove us to consciously send thoughts of peace and healing as often as we can for as long as we can when a major disaster occurs.

The side benefit is that it gives our compassion muscle a workout, and helps us feel more peaceful, too.

Giving Thanks for a New Decade
I’m really glad the first decade of this century is coming to an end.

For one thing, we began 2000 with the tremendous fear that moving into the millennium would create havoc with computer date systems – some even predicted the end of the world as we know it. Then we faced the horror of September 11, 2001, which changed the way many of us viewed the world: from generally safe to pretty dangerous.

And for me, the next seven years were spent acting as caregiver for my parents as they succumbed to the difficulties of aging and became more and more infirm, until they passed away in 2005 and 2008. I spent 2009 focusing on regaining my health, which had declined frighteningly as a result of prolonged caregiver stress.

In the last few days, I have felt a powerful urge to clean my space. I’m not a messy person, but with so much to attend to in my attempts to keep life together, cleaning is often the first thing to fall by the wayside. But as I followed this instinct and started cleaning, I discovered that it was my psyche’s way of clearing away all the old fear and pain and anguish, like cleaning out an old, cluttered closet to make room for the new.

I’m always amazed at how the actions we take in the physical world often have a psychic component to them as well.

We have much to look forward to in this new decade. I wish everyone a happy and healthy New Year, and a New Decade filled with light and renewal!

The Blender Effect
This week, I feel like I’m living in a blender. Everything is whirling and twirling in a messy goo of missed appointments, half-baked emotions, unexpressed desires, and fretful annoyances. I bend uneasily under the heavy weight of my calendar, stumbling only half-effectively from one task to the next, while the clock continues tsk-ing out its count of the seconds I no longer have available to get too many things done.

The creatures on my to-do list are whining with dismay at having been left alone too long, each one moaning louder in my mind when I attend to another, in the hopes that it will become the next accomplishment.

And the accomplishments slide under my feet like a muddy, uneven treadmill, sometimes so fast that I don’t even notice; and while the accomplishment treadmill chugs tiredly onward beneath my feet, the guilt-for-not-getting-enough-done movie plays over and over in my head, following the endless dog-eared loop that circles around the head of nearly every average American citizen.

The world is tilting, and I feel as if everything is about to slide off – all that I think I know about myself and life is sliding sideways into a huge confusing jumble of mistakes and missteps and misunderstandings, pushed over the edge by the scorekeeping judge of my general ability to cope with life who lives in my head and always knows where my most tender vulnerabilities lie. I look at the smoldering, sodden heap of what I thought I knew, and the sigh that starts in my brain glides slowly and steadily all the way down to my toes.

Perhaps spirituality is not always about reaching for the clouds or finding inner peace. Sometimes it’s about scrabbling down into the dark earth of life, coping with the Blender Effect without resistance, and knowing that everything will still turn out okay in the end.

Whose Worldview Have You Got?
Is the way you see the world the way it really is?

As we grow up, we buy into the collective reality because we don’t know that things can be any other way. We base our view of the world on what our parents and others around us teach us to believe. But that view can only control our reality until we work on changing our perspective.

Imagine how two people with different worldviews would experience an unexpected gift coming into their lives. If one of them is used to unexpected gifts being wonderful things, that person will take it in stride, and enjoy and appreciate it. But perhaps the other person grew up with a worldview where gifts only come with strings attached or some kind of “payment” later on. For that person, the gift will create anxiety and the fear of being subject to another’s agenda or of being expected to repay the gift somehow.

The reason most of us have difficulty manifesting the reality we choose is not that we’re not good at it. The problem is that we haven’t cleared away the old beliefs we were taught. We operate under our parents’ worldview as adults, constantly recreating the old reality on a subconscious level, even if we don’t like it. And if we grew up in a dysfunctional family, our views of reality can be really skewed.

Until we consciously change our perspective by digging into the beliefs that we were taught and discarding those that don’t align with our current value system, life won’t change much. We may work and work in an attempt to create a different reality, but we can’t create something new when all the old roadblocks are still standing in the way.

If you’re not happy with your life, and want to work on changing your perspective, Alice Miller’s book For Your Own Good is a good place to start.

Nature's Music
I think that crickets created jazz. One night in late summer a few years ago, I was sitting on the back porch enjoying the sunset, and I started listening to the rhythm of the crickets. Two of them were talking back and forth across the street, “ZZZ zzz zzz.” Pause. “zzz ZZZ zzz.” Pause. As I listened, I noticed that they would continue in a certain rhythm of threes or fours for awhile, but then one would skip a beat, and the other would immediately moderate his or her rhythm. Once in awhile, everything would get off track and they’d be zzz-zing at the same time, or one would shut up to let the other initiate a new rhythm. (As an amateur musician, I notice these things).

I imagine some mild-mannered old musician down in New Orleans a hundred years ago, sitting and listening to the rhythm of the crickets, and using it as a beat for his new song. They really have a sense of rhythm! And when one drops out altogether, whether to feed or mate or just rest for awhile (or whatever else crickets do), the other keeps the beat going just in case the first wants to jam some more.

What’s really amazing is when three or more of them get going at once – the options for rhythm and beat counterpoint are much more open, and when one puts a little extra beat into the mix, the other two each come up with their own new response, and they’re off on a completely different riff.

Which brings me to the subject of ears: did you know that crickets have ears on their legs? I suppose that means that their response time between hearing another cricket and making their own sound is pretty fast. And I always want to know the purpose of things. Why were crickets created? Sure, they eat bugs, but maybe their intended purpose was to create jazz so that humans could copy and build on it, and sit in lounges with a glass of wine, enjoying the gift of the crickets.

Nature is truly amazing. I hope you get a chance to listen to the cricket jazz this summer.

Living in Layers
This morning, I woke early at the insistence of my cat, and lay in bed listening to the pulse of the rain coming lighter, then heavier, as the birds who were waking with the sun provided a background of sweet harmony.

I was struck by the fact that as a child I learned to focus on the world in a very linear fashion: looking at and thinking about one thing at a time, going in a single direction, accomplishing one task before I started another. This early morning experience was quite different. I was experiencing layers of life rather than a single line of it – the rain and the birds and the breeze coming in the window and the experience of my skin against the soft sheets were all interwoven with the environment I live in, my thoughts and hopes and dreams and sensations of possibility, all shifting and moving and weaving in a tremendous expression of life force energy. The trees were moving outside the window, the flowers in the garden reaching for the light and soaking in the water to nourish themselves, the breeze taking branches in one direction, then another, while somewhere in the community other people were waking up or walking dogs, and other places across the country the skies were clear. And the experience of who I am and who I have been and who I hope to be threads through it all...

Life is such a different experience when we open up to the layers of what's happening around us. I think this must be how animals experience life – the smells intermingled with what they sense all around them in every direction, with a constant check of wind and weather and possible predators or prey. The bonus for living in layers is that it leaves much less room for monkey mind, for our focus to get caught on a single thought that won't leave us alone or batter us about the laundry list of things yet to be done. Living in layers allows a more organic experience of body-mind-spirit without the domination of the mind pushing us to go in particular directions. It's a nice rest for the soul.

Universe on the Wall
One of my favorite things to do when I need to relax and connect with All That Is is to watch the patterns that the sun shining through leaves makes on the wall. The branches outside the window dance if there’s a slight breeze, and on the wall, the leaves turn into a three-dimensional kaleidoscope of fluttering shadows, prompting a feeling of endless time and space, infinity right there on the wall. Some of the branches are still, and some are wafting in the breeze; some are clearly outlined, and some are fuzzy, depending on their placement; and all of them together create a flowing painting full of the wonder of nature’s design. It's like watching a fire in the fireplace. If I focus on the show for awhile, I begin to feel as if I’m right there with Cosmic Intelligence, as if it’s showing me its inner workings as it grows the trees and feeds the leaves, moving and shifting and changing and recreating the world around its center.

After years of watching this natural display, it only takes a few minutes now for me to shift into a very meditative state. My body knows that it’s time to slow down and unite with the very fabric of life, and my mind quickly empties of daily concerns and worries. I often use this time to work on manifesting what I want in my life. It’s as if by spiraling into the shadows, witnessing the energy behind the energy that creates the Universe, I can more easily send my own energy into fulfilling my desires, whether for myself or for the good of all. The Universe on the Wall always puts me into a good space, and the rest of the day goes well.

Finding your own way to connect with Source is an important part of living a comfortable and peaceful life. You might want to check out the Universe on the Wall when you get a chance.