So... why do I do this again? What is the practice of writing something that anyone can see? I was beginning to touch on what it was a few years ago; just a practice of showing yourself, in a way of bringing all your shadows into the light... Have I written about confession before? I'm sure of it. Confession, Repentance and Baptism. Confession: Seeing your habitual mind patterns, your interaction with yourself and the world.... Repentance: Taking steps to recognize and change any of those patterns you may not like, or that may be affecting you in a way that just doesn't serve you anymore.... and Baptism... renewal, when those conscious efforts become imbued in your being, just become a new part of who you are, naturally. A new pattern.
I definitely see the beauty in that process. If sin is an archery term, meaning to miss the mark, where are we aiming? The center... the center of our being... and what lies there? What is at the center? What am I trying to hit?
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Another Autobio for Class
WK9
November 9th, 2008
Accountability, Responsibility & Integrity: Now I Want To Play
Through this most interesting and investigative lens of looking at one’s life in the terms of “cause and effect,” I am instantly, somehow, drawn into the world of accountability, responsibility, and integrity; accountability being simply an empowerment of taking responsibility for one’s life, responsibility being simply an ability to respond to life’s dramas, and integrity being the ability to be true to yourself in a way that allows you to respond in a good way. When I look at the world and my life in these terms, my personal role in the shaping of my life becomes much more apparent, inviting me to both claim this life that I have been given and become more and more comfortable doing so through gentle acceptance of the past, hopeful enthusiasm about the future, and stillness of mind in the present moment. Yet, intuitively, I see life as much more mysterious than this heady and somewhat sterile idea of “cause and effect:” I believe that life spontaneously arises for each person by virtue of what they are, by what they have become, so that reality arises based on being rather than thinking. Thinking can have both positive and negative effects on being, yet it ultimately can become an endless game of fixing and gaining and striving, and there seems to be a much greater reality beyond the mind of thought where an actual experience of God is available, where each moment and each experience is perfect, spontaneous and new. In this realm, there is no cause and no effect, no winning or losing, no me and you, no world inside and world outside… because they are the one in the same. So in the realm of infinity, where there is just one, how can there be cause and effect?
And it’s interesting, because it’s this very idea that we start with when we are doing treatment: we start in the realm beyond cause and effect, and move down into creation and law. It makes me feel as if I am living in two worlds at once, and my intention is to be able to infuse the glimpses I’ve had with the world beyond cause and effect into the material world that I experience with my bodily senses and emotions.
Writing in this way, seeing this particular effect as my present state of being, I am reminded of a certain ritual that I used to take part in growing up. As an only child until the age of thirteen, I remember spending lots of time alone, entertaining myself with my own thoughts (and Nintendo). One of my favorite things to do was to stand in front of a mirror and just look at myself. Staring, slowing, barely remembering to breathe, I methodically recited and repeated, "That's me. I'm living right now . . . and that's me . . ." Slowly my world seemed to dilate, and it's really an ineffable feeling, but I can say that it felt good. I did this everywhere: in the bathroom, in the car, in dressing rooms, and in my mother's huge, carpet to ceiling 3-way mirror, which was especially fun because if I angled the outside mirrors just right, I could literally see myself from all sides. I'm not exactly sure what my motivation was, but I can remember the surreal sensations that arose as I looked at my reflection trying to understand that that thing in the mirror was me.
I honestly cannot confidently say that this thing called “me” has personally “caused” everything that has happened in my life to happen. I believe that we come to this earth with a myriad of lessons to learn that hopefully we can come to realize before we die. There’s a mysterious way in which events have taken place in my life, and at the height of what I feel to be my conscious evolution, I wasn’t “causing” anything, but I was rather completely open to the infinite synchronicity that is life, a sense of surrender that allowed me to feel as if every relation, every experience was by Divine appointment, not mine.
Yet I will continue my story in terms of accountability, responsibility and integrity. I was a confident and happy child, throughout all my years through elementary school. I was blessed with an extreme athleticism and this ability to excel at sports, and my confidence, my outlook on life as fun and safe gave me wonderful friends. My beingness was one of great joy for life and I thrived in the context of contest and games.
As I began to understand and feel what this “me” was, I began to exert this sense of me into the world and with this sense of a separate self, I began to make decisions on the basis of trying to protect and feed this me. Here was a fundamental shift in my consciousness, that is, it was the beginning of my first sense of self-consciousness and acting from that place. This began a pattern that I am continuing to work with today. And it’s an incredibly interesting dance, as if this self-consciousness has grown and evolved throughout my whole life, and it is still here with me now. The question becomes, “Do I dance with it? Or resist it?”
My first two years of High School were incredibly challenging in this way. I transitioned to a new high school in both my freshman and sophomore years. Because of that, my self-consciousness was very high, and my self-esteem not so high. Both years, I started off with good friends and a fun life. But towards the end of both years, the group of friends that I had created decided that they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. I was excluded from my group of friends and felt more alone than ever. Looking back at it now, it seems that I helped to create these situations by not fully believing in myself. If the world is a mirror, my world at the time seemed to reflect my fears of isolation. Yet I didn’t fully realize that I could change it at the time, I didn’t fully take accountability for what had happened and thus easily took on the victim role. Thus, I had no ability to respond and no chance to find integrity in my thoughts, actions and attitudes.
Yet at the end of my sophomore year, right after I had been excluded from my peer group and my date to the sophomore dance had decided to go with someone else, the girl that I had had a crush on for the entire year entered my life. And we fell in love. Looking at my life through the lens of cause and effect, I cannot fully explain how this wonderful person came into my life; it was seemingly out of nowhere. Logically, there must have been a part of me beyond my normal waking consciousness that still believed in connection and love, because this is what this person showed me again.
My remaining days in high school were an extremely bright time for the most part. My confidence in myself and life grew, and my soccer skills peaked again connecting me with my body. I still felt loneliness when it came to the world of the opposite sex, yet I was so extremely supported by friends and family that my consciousness grew and grew and my beingness allowed many beautiful circumstances to come into my life. I responded to life in a way that matched my intuitive feelings about the Universe: Life is good. Life is God.
My college years were all about experimentation and expansion. I spent a lot of time studying religious texts and my mind soared in the heights of being able to study what my heart has always yearned to learn. It was here that I learned about the conscious nature of reality, of being completely connected to the world in which you live. This allowed me to travel to India and study and practice meditation. In this context, I was more myself than ever, and I touched on an intelligence that is completely beyond one’s own mind, and I found a love of life itself, the entire process of living and dying and suffering and celebrating. And in this state, I again attracted the next love of my life.
Yet this was to be my next critical lesson as I began to confine the love of the Universe into the boundaries of a single individual. And as this entanglement ensued within my mind and being, the relationship fell apart. I forgot that the source of my happiness, the very ability to attract this love in my life was wholly based on the fact that I was in a state of love. And this basic confusion, of the source of love, took me down into a spiral of depression that I am still recovering from to this day. This was almost three years ago.
Depression has allowed me to dig up and sift through what my beliefs are about myself and the world. In the trenches of depression, I have questioned and quested, and ultimately have learned to surrender to the entire process of life itself. When you are in a state of confusion so much so that you truly don’t know what to create, it seems, you are really close to God. In this process of surrender, for me, it’s not so much about what I want to create, but rather, how I can serve. I gave up trying to be happy and instead just opened up my arms and heart as a vessel for something that could live through and as my life.
These days, I realize that I am a creator, but in this spiritual realm, I feel that we are co-creators, vessels, changing the world by virtue of what we are. The more I try to protect and serve the self, the more I feel a sense of struggle. The more I open up and accept and embrace the circumstances before me, the more I can create. I want to serve humanity and serve my soul, by going through life in a way that just appreciates the whole infinite process of life.
These days, I still battle with self-doubt, and use the tools of meditation and prayer to open me up, to do things my mind doesn’t think I can do. To take an approach of simple non-attachment, not being attached to a particular outcome, allows me the freedom to be. Life, to me, is meant to be a mystery. A life planned out, then sought out, even spiritually, doesn’t seem to bring real happiness… there is always this sense of mystery pulling us. This I feel deeply, and a connection into the nature of God arises with this sense, for God is not some sort of clock-maker, but an infinite being playing out its life through its myriad of forms living its life through our lives, through our hearts and minds, through our struggles and despairs, and our ecstasies and joys. I am more aware now of when I am resisting and when I am opening, and it’s not exactly easy to open up all the time. Yet, practice helps, and more practice helps more still. I have a teacher who has shared with me one of her mantras: “Fall in love with life in every moment.” And this is how I hope to create, through this act of loving surrender, through a releasing of self-consciousness, self-protection, self-gain, and self-loathing, and into a world where there is nothing to really do, except carry out this love through every inch of my being. It is in this way that I take accountability for my life, and respond to life’s situations that aligns with opening up and loving the entire process of life, and thus creating integrity with not only my thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, but the entire Universe itself.
November 9th, 2008
Accountability, Responsibility & Integrity: Now I Want To Play
Through this most interesting and investigative lens of looking at one’s life in the terms of “cause and effect,” I am instantly, somehow, drawn into the world of accountability, responsibility, and integrity; accountability being simply an empowerment of taking responsibility for one’s life, responsibility being simply an ability to respond to life’s dramas, and integrity being the ability to be true to yourself in a way that allows you to respond in a good way. When I look at the world and my life in these terms, my personal role in the shaping of my life becomes much more apparent, inviting me to both claim this life that I have been given and become more and more comfortable doing so through gentle acceptance of the past, hopeful enthusiasm about the future, and stillness of mind in the present moment. Yet, intuitively, I see life as much more mysterious than this heady and somewhat sterile idea of “cause and effect:” I believe that life spontaneously arises for each person by virtue of what they are, by what they have become, so that reality arises based on being rather than thinking. Thinking can have both positive and negative effects on being, yet it ultimately can become an endless game of fixing and gaining and striving, and there seems to be a much greater reality beyond the mind of thought where an actual experience of God is available, where each moment and each experience is perfect, spontaneous and new. In this realm, there is no cause and no effect, no winning or losing, no me and you, no world inside and world outside… because they are the one in the same. So in the realm of infinity, where there is just one, how can there be cause and effect?
And it’s interesting, because it’s this very idea that we start with when we are doing treatment: we start in the realm beyond cause and effect, and move down into creation and law. It makes me feel as if I am living in two worlds at once, and my intention is to be able to infuse the glimpses I’ve had with the world beyond cause and effect into the material world that I experience with my bodily senses and emotions.
Writing in this way, seeing this particular effect as my present state of being, I am reminded of a certain ritual that I used to take part in growing up. As an only child until the age of thirteen, I remember spending lots of time alone, entertaining myself with my own thoughts (and Nintendo). One of my favorite things to do was to stand in front of a mirror and just look at myself. Staring, slowing, barely remembering to breathe, I methodically recited and repeated, "That's me. I'm living right now . . . and that's me . . ." Slowly my world seemed to dilate, and it's really an ineffable feeling, but I can say that it felt good. I did this everywhere: in the bathroom, in the car, in dressing rooms, and in my mother's huge, carpet to ceiling 3-way mirror, which was especially fun because if I angled the outside mirrors just right, I could literally see myself from all sides. I'm not exactly sure what my motivation was, but I can remember the surreal sensations that arose as I looked at my reflection trying to understand that that thing in the mirror was me.
I honestly cannot confidently say that this thing called “me” has personally “caused” everything that has happened in my life to happen. I believe that we come to this earth with a myriad of lessons to learn that hopefully we can come to realize before we die. There’s a mysterious way in which events have taken place in my life, and at the height of what I feel to be my conscious evolution, I wasn’t “causing” anything, but I was rather completely open to the infinite synchronicity that is life, a sense of surrender that allowed me to feel as if every relation, every experience was by Divine appointment, not mine.
Yet I will continue my story in terms of accountability, responsibility and integrity. I was a confident and happy child, throughout all my years through elementary school. I was blessed with an extreme athleticism and this ability to excel at sports, and my confidence, my outlook on life as fun and safe gave me wonderful friends. My beingness was one of great joy for life and I thrived in the context of contest and games.
As I began to understand and feel what this “me” was, I began to exert this sense of me into the world and with this sense of a separate self, I began to make decisions on the basis of trying to protect and feed this me. Here was a fundamental shift in my consciousness, that is, it was the beginning of my first sense of self-consciousness and acting from that place. This began a pattern that I am continuing to work with today. And it’s an incredibly interesting dance, as if this self-consciousness has grown and evolved throughout my whole life, and it is still here with me now. The question becomes, “Do I dance with it? Or resist it?”
My first two years of High School were incredibly challenging in this way. I transitioned to a new high school in both my freshman and sophomore years. Because of that, my self-consciousness was very high, and my self-esteem not so high. Both years, I started off with good friends and a fun life. But towards the end of both years, the group of friends that I had created decided that they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. I was excluded from my group of friends and felt more alone than ever. Looking back at it now, it seems that I helped to create these situations by not fully believing in myself. If the world is a mirror, my world at the time seemed to reflect my fears of isolation. Yet I didn’t fully realize that I could change it at the time, I didn’t fully take accountability for what had happened and thus easily took on the victim role. Thus, I had no ability to respond and no chance to find integrity in my thoughts, actions and attitudes.
Yet at the end of my sophomore year, right after I had been excluded from my peer group and my date to the sophomore dance had decided to go with someone else, the girl that I had had a crush on for the entire year entered my life. And we fell in love. Looking at my life through the lens of cause and effect, I cannot fully explain how this wonderful person came into my life; it was seemingly out of nowhere. Logically, there must have been a part of me beyond my normal waking consciousness that still believed in connection and love, because this is what this person showed me again.
My remaining days in high school were an extremely bright time for the most part. My confidence in myself and life grew, and my soccer skills peaked again connecting me with my body. I still felt loneliness when it came to the world of the opposite sex, yet I was so extremely supported by friends and family that my consciousness grew and grew and my beingness allowed many beautiful circumstances to come into my life. I responded to life in a way that matched my intuitive feelings about the Universe: Life is good. Life is God.
My college years were all about experimentation and expansion. I spent a lot of time studying religious texts and my mind soared in the heights of being able to study what my heart has always yearned to learn. It was here that I learned about the conscious nature of reality, of being completely connected to the world in which you live. This allowed me to travel to India and study and practice meditation. In this context, I was more myself than ever, and I touched on an intelligence that is completely beyond one’s own mind, and I found a love of life itself, the entire process of living and dying and suffering and celebrating. And in this state, I again attracted the next love of my life.
Yet this was to be my next critical lesson as I began to confine the love of the Universe into the boundaries of a single individual. And as this entanglement ensued within my mind and being, the relationship fell apart. I forgot that the source of my happiness, the very ability to attract this love in my life was wholly based on the fact that I was in a state of love. And this basic confusion, of the source of love, took me down into a spiral of depression that I am still recovering from to this day. This was almost three years ago.
Depression has allowed me to dig up and sift through what my beliefs are about myself and the world. In the trenches of depression, I have questioned and quested, and ultimately have learned to surrender to the entire process of life itself. When you are in a state of confusion so much so that you truly don’t know what to create, it seems, you are really close to God. In this process of surrender, for me, it’s not so much about what I want to create, but rather, how I can serve. I gave up trying to be happy and instead just opened up my arms and heart as a vessel for something that could live through and as my life.
These days, I realize that I am a creator, but in this spiritual realm, I feel that we are co-creators, vessels, changing the world by virtue of what we are. The more I try to protect and serve the self, the more I feel a sense of struggle. The more I open up and accept and embrace the circumstances before me, the more I can create. I want to serve humanity and serve my soul, by going through life in a way that just appreciates the whole infinite process of life.
These days, I still battle with self-doubt, and use the tools of meditation and prayer to open me up, to do things my mind doesn’t think I can do. To take an approach of simple non-attachment, not being attached to a particular outcome, allows me the freedom to be. Life, to me, is meant to be a mystery. A life planned out, then sought out, even spiritually, doesn’t seem to bring real happiness… there is always this sense of mystery pulling us. This I feel deeply, and a connection into the nature of God arises with this sense, for God is not some sort of clock-maker, but an infinite being playing out its life through its myriad of forms living its life through our lives, through our hearts and minds, through our struggles and despairs, and our ecstasies and joys. I am more aware now of when I am resisting and when I am opening, and it’s not exactly easy to open up all the time. Yet, practice helps, and more practice helps more still. I have a teacher who has shared with me one of her mantras: “Fall in love with life in every moment.” And this is how I hope to create, through this act of loving surrender, through a releasing of self-consciousness, self-protection, self-gain, and self-loathing, and into a world where there is nothing to really do, except carry out this love through every inch of my being. It is in this way that I take accountability for my life, and respond to life’s situations that aligns with opening up and loving the entire process of life, and thus creating integrity with not only my thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, but the entire Universe itself.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Seattle
Ah, Seattle. This interesting meld of masculine and feminine energies. Held by the water that comes from all around... like being in a womb again... and challenged by the mountains, to go out and fulfill your potential.
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