Your Evolutionary Question

When the Celestine Prophecy, a spiritual novel by James Redfield, came out in 1993, it was widely read by spiritual types.  I however somehow did not read it till 2006.  I loved the various spiritual insights and truths he shared in the form of prophecies that the main characters were finding from thousands of year's old scrolls.  But the most fascinating part for me was his encounter with a priest, Father Sanchez who teaches him about the 6th insight, and in so doing also helps him to identify his evolutionary question.  For most people who have read this book when I mention the evolutionary question this has gone right by them and they don't remember it at all.  For me it is the most important part of the book.   Perhaps this is because I am also a therapist and I'm so impressed with how it weaves family of origin material with our being able to understand our spiritual purpose in life.

I have written elsewhere on this blog about the idea of chosing our parents.  Redfield also works with this idea and in the encounter between the main character and Father Sanchez, the priest guides him at looking at the qualities of each his parents, their sort of motto in life or stance towards it, what he learned from each, and what was the unfinished business of their lives.  From this broad over view the Priest helps him notice that he has woven these bits from his parents together into a spiritual question that he has chosen this life time to pursue and to work with.  This is called one's "evolutionary question" (because when we pursue it we grow.)  In a handbook Redfield wrote to accompany the book he has a series of questions designed to also help people identify these influences which shaped their journey.  Interestingly in Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects there is one exercise entitled: My Choices in this Life Time which coming from a Buddhist perspective of reincarnation also posits that we have chosen the conditions of this life time and that we have chosen them to prepare us for the spiritual work that we are here to do.  I have in my practice developed a way to help people identify in two to three sessions what their evolutionary question is.

What a marvelous compass to have, to have a really big perspective on the events of our lives and the influences of our parents in shaping our spiritual purpose in life.   What an amazing thing to walk conscious knowing that you indeed have a spiritual purpose and to be able to cleave closely to it.  I have found that when one knows what it is, it is possible to ask on a daily or weekly or monthly basis where you are at with your question - to return to it a guiding force and a clarifier about the current experiences one is having and the decisions that you have before you.  What is your evolutionary question?

Counting our Blessings

I see with bemusement as I look back over my past 3 posts here that my "new idea" for this post echos the themes of the past 3.   Well sometimes we must look at things from many angles to get something.

In the work of Joanna Macy she starts with Gratitude and then goes into grief for the world, then seeing with new perspective and then into taking action. In a couple of previous posts I have written about the book: The Wisdom to Know the Difference, by Eileen Flanagan about using the Serenity prayer to try to discern whether something is a thing we can change or a thing we must accept as is.  And in last month's post I talked about the significant difference in happiness of when people "compare up"  vs when they "compare down".

Today I was reminded by a friend that when we live fighting the reality of the experience we are having, fighting the injustice of it, the way in which it is not what we wanted or dreamed of, that we make ourselves unhappy.  (Similar to comparing up, glass half empty or not having the wisdom to know what we cannot change and must accept.)   My friend reminded me of his own amazing discovery of how to actually be happy while literally in prison for decades.   It starts with gratitude, counting your blessings and being truly happy for what you do in fact have.   In the comparing up mode we discount our blessings seeing them as "normal" and "as it should be" - thus not of importance or value.

All this begs the question of what is in fact changeable.  It is possible to live as if everything we encounter just is, and we have no personal power and must just endeavor to be happy in an injust and immoral society.  I would argue that that way of living is as much a cop out as deciding to me miserable by fighting everything happening in our lives.   It would seem to me that when we can ground in gratitude and learn to be happy there is a slack from which we can see what step might be before us for justice and try to take that step.   If we can take actions for justice from a place of non attachment then we are either devastated or ego stroked by our outcomes.   We are just faithful.

Many years ago a friend wrote me around Thanksgiving time that she was playing the "Thanksgiving game" on a daily basis.   This was a woman who was in grave danger of loosing her eyesite entirely, but she was noticing what to be thankful for each day.   I notice another one of my Facebook Friends, a climate activist is posting something she is grateful for each day.  These are inspiring examples to me of people remembering to count their blessings.

Living into Impotence

I suspect this title will not excite people about reading this post and for men may even seem a bit ominous.  But I ask you to read on.

I am middle aged.  I have lived long enough to see that not everything we try for do we get.  I have lived long enough to also learn that you can warn people about dangers and snares that you know about personally, but they have to learn from their own experience.  I have lived long enough to learn that all set backs are not permanent, but neither are all victories.  I have experienced many loses in my life, starting very young, and I have learned that there are loses that cannot be recouped, out run or redone - they simply must be accepted.   Accepted not as a defeat, but as sand inside an oyster, and some as compost for the plants that are coming.

In the book: The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Difference and When to Let Go. by Eileen Flanagan she takes the serenity prayer and talks about how we come to terms with it.   She notes among other things that most of us are naturally pulled in one direction or the other with it.  I certainly recognized for myself that I am pulled to take courage and try to change things..even things like national policy.  But one of Eileen's points was that we do have to discern when we need to go the other direction which in my case means when to find serenity by accepting things as they are.  I don't recall if this is in her book but to believe that we can change anything is in fact a form of idolatry.  It is to believe that we have God like powers.

In a society racked with injustice, and in this country at this moment in history, this would seem an almost impossible task how to be at peace with the world as it is.  As a person who is actively working to stop climate change and who is surrounded by other climate change activists who often feel quite frantic about, as joked yesterday: "Repent the world is coming to an end" type feelings.  I have learned even with climate change to hold it in spirit.   I hold it with a spirit of curiosity, knowing that I do not know how things will turn out.  I have learned with great difficulty to practice non-attachment around the outcome.  Sometimes I cannot tell if it is simply a slick form or bargaining or denial.   But it seems like there is some peace from saying both in the face of hopeful signs and in the sign of terrible signs  "I don't know what will happen."

I was so pleased when Wen Stephenson's book: What we are Fighting for now is Each Other, came out.  I have not read the book yet.  I just love the title.   It summed up for me that I cannot be fighting for the outcome but I can always act for Love - the love of Life, the love of the planet and all those on it.  I can notice the spiritual practice of non-attachment to outcomes that Buddhism preaches.  The Truth is I don't know what will happen; none of us do.  As I write this the Lacy Dalton song is singing: "listen to the wind,  The only thing you can trust is change."  This also summarizes the form of detachment I am talking about.

As a therapist for 23 years now I have had ringside seats at many disasters.   Some that my clients were fighting as hard as they could.  Others that even as I gently tried to question or discourage they went towards like moth to the flame.   But there is nothing like being a therapist to teach you that you are not in charge of other people's lives, you are simply a witness.  Hopefully a loving and constructive or supportive witness, but a witness none the less.  This then becomes its own spiritual practice of learning to keep handing it back to God even as you pray for others.   and yes to keep breathing into your own impotence, to meet the limits of what you can do, or what you should do, to surrender again and still keep your heart open, feel the pain, release the pain, and then do it again.

Joanna Macy likes to ask the question: What have you allowed to break your heart?  To break your heart open?  This spiritual practice of living into impotence is not for the feint of heart, but it is a powerful spiritual practice.   It is is not the same, at all, as giving up or becoming hopeless or helpless. Because inside of this practice is really the turning towards the strength of God, and the wisdom of eternity.  Recently I have heard both Native people and a famous civil rights leader say: "We have been here before and we will be here again, we know who we are and we are not giving up".   There own familiarity with suffering gives them strength, endurance and resilience.  Impotence is about being without power but it is also about how you live into that.  Do you live into it as a loss, a humiliation, a defeat, or do you live into it with humility, serenity and hope?  Do you live into it alone, isolated on your own terms or do you live into it with Grace and Presence?

Where is God in Darkness?

I have written in other spaces about my concern that the incoming Trump administration represents the rise of fascism in the US.   This raises interesting spiritual questions about how we respond to destructive things happening around us, where is God in dark times and what does this mean about evil?

Has God abandoned us, or is punishing us by allowing this to happen?
If one holds to the view that God created us with free will then that means that those who are not listening to God are always free to stray from what God might intend for us and to do great destruction or evil.  That evil affects other people.  The price of freedom is a God who is omni-present, but not all powerful.

Where is God in this situation?
God is always present as a source of guidance, comfort, and strength.   It is even more important in crisis to turn to God.  God cannot however stop the suffering caused by others' application of their free will.  Buddhism does have much to say about how we manage suffering.

What does God require of us?
The Bible answers this question of what God requires of us saying:
"To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."  Micah 6:8
I think those spiritual theologies that say we are co-creators of the world we live in and the lives we walk in, also suggest that we are to embrace the highest truth we know and live it.   I think in a time where hatred rises up and causes the scapegoating and targeting of some people that means saying no to that.  I think in a time where violence rises up it means acting with non-violence.  I think in a time where the earth is pillaged, polluted and destroyed it means aligning our life style with an honoring and protecting of the earth (as currently modeled by Native people at Standing Rock).  In a time where there is an increasing assault on free speech, on free press, and on civil liberties it means standing up for those and protecting supporting those others who also speak out.   In a time where vote suppression and gerrymandering threaten our very democracy it means standing up to fight for democracy.   And all of these things mean turning to God for the courage to act for justice.  In short, in a universe where people can do destructive or evil things, we are called upon to speak truth, take action and to hold up the Light of Love.   To remain silent or passive is to passively allow the evil.

Is there no Light in this Darkness?
Neale Donald Walsh has written quite a bit about how it is only the dark that allows us to know the Light.   That the Light longs to be known by us.   Perhaps another way of saying this is that we sometime must struggle in order to learn; contrast is one of the ways by which we learn.  If one believe in reincarnation then we have come to earth in incarnations intended to maximize our learning, and the encounter with darkness or evil is not a detour or a mistake, it is an opportunity for learning, and opportunity to bring forth light.  We are not called to do this alone, it is what community, especially spiritual community is for.

Why is this happening when I don't want it to?
While we may co-create our own personal reality, it is also the case that as a collective humanity, or a society we also create certain shared realities through our shared consciousness. There are lessons we are trying to learn as a collective.  It is worth asking: How could it serve the learning of the American people to grapple with the person of Donald Trump and the type of leadership he is bringing?  It is easy to point fingers of blame at figures in history like Hitler or Trump who are the apparent center of so much darkness, but that really gets all the rest of us off the hook.   We must look at the fear that is always the fertile ground for fascism.   We must examine where we have stood in relationship to fear? We must do the spiritual work of looking at the anger, the pull for easy answers, for power, the arrogance, etc that live within us and are mirrored by Trump, rather than simply demonize him.

How do we respond to this spirituality?
Responding to an already negative situation with more anger, violence or fear only magnifies the negative energy.  Going numb or in denial also does not serve the Light.  Joanna Macy tells the story of the Tibetan Shambala prophecy.   The Tibetan's believe that there comes a time of great darkness and chaos when the world as we know it is completely threatened.   At that time many souls come to earth for one purpose: to fight for our world as Shambala warriors.   They are not intended to fight with normal weapons of violence, but rather with spiritual weapons of wisdom and compassion.   Wisdom brings great clarity and vision, but clarity alone does not bring the passion for action.   Compassion brings great love which can move people to action, but action alone is not productive without clarity or focus.   So they must use wisdom and compassion together to fight for our world.  I believe that this is a time when we all must become Shambala warriors.

Is their an opportunity is this experience?
When lived spiritually all experience contain an opportunity.  Chaos, danger, conflict, destruction.... all of these things carry in them the seeds of change and the possibilities for transformation.   If Hillary Clinton had been elected, most good liberals would have continued to focus little on the situation, even as our planet is threatened by the crisis of climate change, even as racism was literally killing Black people in the streets daily.  When evil becomes as blatant and undeniable as it now is, there is a moral imperative put before us all.  The addition of the Trump administration to the Climate crisis demands we quite literally transform the current power structure or we will die.  So it is time for each of us to reach down to the foundations of our spiritual traditions and see what God calls us to do.

Sitting with the World's Suffering

"I'm sorry I just have to rant", she said.   And then she went on for some minutes about the death penalty and about our droan policy, and about ISIS and how we condemned them for killing while the US engaged in both kinds of killing.  "It is hypocrisy!", she ended.    Then she asked me how one sits with this sort of horrible thing, and what is wrong with humans that they act so ignorantly?  I have been known to have my own such rants, so I was sympathetic to her anger and turmoil.  But the question she asked me was far more important.

I have come to this belief through a variety of interlocking and reinforcing teachings and could not even recount exactly how, I can only say what I believe, but I think it is probably worth sharing.

We come with free will and not all of us are tuning into God and making choices that are aligned with the highest truth available.  But it is almost like souls also follow developmental stages - young souls learning about scarcity, violence, addiction, appropriate and inappropriate uses of power, etc. Perhaps slightly wiser souls learning about cooperation, giving, receiving, closeness, etc.  and eventually the Bodhisattva souls who have come back just to help others.  What this means to me is that within a particular life time people may be born into wars, or gang violence, or addiction, or political dramas as part of the lesson they are working on in this life time.   Some people maybe come famous actors in larger historic struggles whether they come as Rosa Parks or as George Zimmerman.  They are both working on their own personal lessons about (in this case) race or violence/non-violence - but they are also helping these themes be held up to societal awareness and learning.  They are helping our whole society learn about these themes.

Have you ever noticed how certain issues/themes show up repeatedly in your life, others not at all? How certain issues capture your attention completely and others do not engage you?  That is probably not an accident.   I for example have absolutely no interest in addictive substances.   While not wanting to hang out with addicts I also have great compassion for the suffering that they engage, and the struggle to be free of it.  It simply feels like something I have dealt with at some other time.  It is not a concern for me in this life time.

On the societal level I have even heard some argue that the likes of Adolph Hitler, took on lifetimes of suffering in order to offer us a most perfect symbol of hatred, violence and abuse of power - that in a twisted backwards way that was an offering to our collective learning. That by seeing the dark and the ugly we can better see the light and the beauty.  I do not know if I would go that far, but it certainly suggests that the project of collective learning is not straightforward.

So unlike the person above, I do not feel that people who are engaging in violence or hatred, or abuse of power are ignorant.  I simply feel they are human souls struggling with the lessons they have come to this life time to learn.  Granted I may not like their behavior, and in my turn I may rant about it. But when I am in a centered place, when I sit on the banks of the River of God, as I spoke about last month, I simply see the teeming masses of humanity struggling for resources, for love, for connection and for growth.  From that deeply centered place I see that we are all the same.  I may not be a murder, or an addict or an adulterer in this lifetime, but I know I have been in some other lifetime.  I also see that even in a current lifetime of such actions is a person who wants love, who bleeds, who hurts, who yearns.  These are other ways we are the same.

The hard part has been to sit with the pain of the world.  I have known people who have committed murder and rape and I have known people who have had family members murdered or been raped themselves.  I have known people who have lost family members in war (well even people whose last life time was to die in war) and I have known soldiers.  Their suffering has been equally real to me. It stopped looking as simple as the victims and the perpetrators.

One of the greatest gifts of the little Buddhism that I have learned is to learn how to breathe it through - breath the suffering through.   A practice I first learned from Joanna Macy, who is a Buddhist and and environmentalist.  In this practice you see the suffer you breathe it in, passing it through your heart with compassion and you imagine it leaving a whole in your heart and your chest and returning to the world.

A friend of mine recently talked about "spiritual bubble wrap".   She was talking about the ways in which we insulate ourselves against the suffering of the world.  How we turn away from stories like the next mass shooting where innocent people have been gunned down for simply being somewhere. We go numb.  We do not want to feel. Before learning breathing through I would deliberately turn my attention away from certain stories, certain kinds of suffering which felt like too much or "not my issue".   I still do this sometimes.  

But one day after a week of Joanna's workshop I had the radio on and the story came on about the sentencing of the police officers who during hurricane Katrina shot several black people on the bridge in New Orleans.   I started to turn away from the story, to put on the spiritual bubble wrap, but then I remembered to do the breathing through.  When I could do that I could notice the sadness of the racism so thick in our society that the police walk in fear of Black people, I could feel pain for the Black people who had already lost their homes and now would loose their lives or limbs because of racism, I could feel the sadness for the people of New Orleans effected by the climate change we have collectively brought.  and I could breathe it through.  Somehow it was less painful when held in compassion rather than sealed out with bubble wrap.

Buddhists have a loving kindness meditation.  It starts with sending love and compassion to yourself, then to your family or loved ones, then to a friend, then to an acquaintance, and then to a stranger and then to someone you are angry or upset with, and finally to the whole world.  This for me is simply another way to sit on the banks of the River of God, another way to breath it through.  Somehow remembering that we are all just struggling to grow into our better selves, our greater soul, the collective consciousness, really helps me be with the suffering that is this world.

Living as part of LIfe Itself

Recently I have been reading the book "Tomorrow's God" by Neale Donald Walsh.  In this book he both says we will (need to) move into a new spiritual renaissance if we are to save the planet and that it will include a new understanding of God which he calls Tomorrow's God.  He says we will (or suggests we should) stop using the word God (or Allah, or any similar words) because of the huge amount of misunderstandings and baggage we have attached to that word.  Instead he suggests we use the word LIFE.

Notice how this does shift some misunderstandings.  I for one think the ideas that God as vengeful, punishing, jealous or only blessing the US are distorted understanding of the Divine Being.  So in his schema of substituting the word Life you get:

A punishing God = A punishing Life.   Well that sort of clears up that Life does not punish us.  Sometimes other people do, but that is based upon their will, beliefs, or values.  They were not directed by the Life force to punish anyone.

A vengeful God = a vengeful Life.  Again there is no evidence of Life creating vengeance.  Some animals eat others but it is not vengeance.  Some people are vengeful to other people but again out of their emotions, or beliefs.  But the Life force does not make them vengeful.  In fact it is easier to notice that when a group acts vengefully towards another that the life force does not direct them to do so....they may call on beliefs to explain their actions, especially religious beliefs or as Walsh would say "the Old God".

A jealous God = a jealous Life.  Now it starts to seem rather absurd doesn't it?  How can life be jealous?

God Bless America = Life Bless America.  Well Life does bless America, and every other country too. While certainly some have far less material goods or sometimes less useful natural resources, none are without laughter, kindness, creativity, etc....in other words the blessings of life.

And then there is the other side of this:
A Loving God = A Loving Life.  Yes indeed as we look around we see all kinds of evidence of Life providing love, and love coming through all aspects of life and in fact creating life.

God the Creator = Life the Creator.  Well that one is fairly obvious huh?

God as my refuge = Life as my refuge.  Here I notice that if I use the word Life it helps me to notice how I should be approaching life.  Rather than trying to run to God as a refuge against life!

God the Provider = Life the Provider.  Certainly life provides many things, but what we want?  In the old way of turning to God and praying for things to be provided we were always like helpless children and what we wanted may or may not be provided.  (Some religions claiming that only if you were virtuous or hard working did God provide.)  But life seems to provide in no predictable pattern....or does it provide what our intentions are?  What we co-create in alignment with life's energy?

This also syncs up very well with what both Walsh and Wayne Dyer (and countless others) say about manifesting.   Dyer refers to The Universe (instead of God) and both talk about the Universe or Life as being neutral about what is created or provided.  Ask for sorrow or anger and that can be provided.  Ask for Love and joy and that can be provided.   We need therefore to be conscious about what we ask for and where we put our attention because what we dwell upon Dyer says is what we manifest.  Think endlessly "Oh I have so many bills to pay" and sure enough more bills will show up.  Think endlessly "Oh my life is blessed" and sure enough more blessings will show up.  So I would like to put my attention on the goodness of life and the love that is abundant in life.  I think if I put my attention on love and goodness I'm liking to live Life more deeply, more consciously.

When we pray to God this often evokes a sense of receiving or being denied, of a "power over" or a parent or "the Santa Claus God" who I have written about in a previous blog.  It is also to get mad at God for what we decide God has done. If we call this energy Life, it is I think still possible to pray to it, but it does sort of change the interaction.  There is wonder, awe, gratitude and joy, and there is the attempt to perceive the Life Energy and to align with it.  But any appealing to it...well you just have to go more into that co-creation or aligning the life energy with the bigger life energy.  From my point of view that keeps me more true to how I want to pray anyway.

Joanna Macy talks about how in systems theory you have living parts that make up bigger living parts.  So for example we have cells that make up organs (also parts of our life) which make up our live bodies and then our bodies join with other bodies to make up living communities, etc.   She points out that these parts at each level cooperate to make the larger level function.  But something much more profound is able to happen when any level has self-reflection upon itself as a separate living being and ALSO part of a living being.  So if I engage in being consciously aware (mindfulness) of being a part of Life/God this is different than living as part of Life with no awareness of anything beyond my own self.  It centers us into life itself.

Hope in My Soul

Hope is a very central issue to me. I was almost named Hope when I was born.  I was born out of the reconciliation of my parent’s separation, and my father wanted to name me Hope.  My mother vetoed this name.  Two years later when my sister was born his hope had died into a stubborn faith that they would continue, and so he wanted to name her Faith.  My mother vetoed this name, and she was named Fay.  Was his hope sucessful?  My parents were married till my mother died, for 11 more years after he reached for the name Hope.  But they were kept together by her dying and would have separated if she had not become ill.

I hoped my mother would live during the two and half years she lay dying.  Hope was disappointed when she died.  Thus also began my career of hoping for impossible things and yet needing hope to survive that which is awful.

For me at that time the Emily Dickerson poem was truth:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all

I then launched a lifetime of activism.  As a favorite quote of mine says: “An idealist is someone who is homesick for a land they have never been.”  Certainly activists always struggle for things that are not yet: justice, peace, community.  To struggle for these things which are not yet, one has to have hope.

Somehow I have been the champion of lost causes.  I worked for years as a volunteer in prisons, work which touched my soul and was deep and meaningful…and when I would go to fundraise for it I would see how clearly our society judged prisoners “hopeless”.  I tried to stop nuclear weapons which amassed more quickly than demonstrators.  And now in my most challenging of impossible causes I’m fighting climate change.  So I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the significance of hope.

Recently, I went to hear Meg Wheatly, a Buddhist, talk on being a warrior for our time.  For me the most significant part of the talk was when she talked about hope.  She started to say something about the “ambush of hope” and how people’s disappointed hope can make them give up on what they are trying to do.  She said: “The space between hope and fear is inseparable.”  I have heard people who are without hope sort of bash hope, say it is just a form of trickery, a fool’s gold…something to be avoided.  I really cannot stand that message, it seems so dark and so fatalistic.  I was concerned that that was where she was going.   I have usefully heard people say the opposite of love is fear…but it was interesting to think that hope and fear are inseparable.  Because yes, I had to admit that when I have hope there is always a niggling fear somewhere that I will be wrong, be foolish or be disappointed.   And when I have fear there is also a little niggling hope that it will be ok and everything will turn out well.

Then Meg said she’d heard the joke: “expectation is pre-meditated disappointment.”  I laughed in recognition of how often my expectations have brought me disappointment.

I have written in my Jan blog on Gratitude and Expectations: “I have been thinking about how expectations, like goals and dreams are generally a good thing and help us aim for things and collectively move forward in life.  And yet I am aware of how we can become so attached to a dream, or a goal as to have the expectation that life will be a certain way and experience great disappointment or frustration when it is not that way”. 

It all comes into clearer focus for me that goals, visions and dreams are a good thing that help us move forward, but that expectations do lead to disappointment.  Certainly the relationship between disappointment and fear is clear…and now leads to the issue of hope.  Then someone said: “I think an aspiration is hope without expectation.”  Whether one agrees with that term it does begin to distinguish a way of hoping that is unattached.

Another person said: “Hope is being willing to face the pain of disappointment”.  Which I think speaks to the idea that we realize there are no guarantees for the things we hope for, and we do it anyway.

Meg then introduced these two quotes.

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”  Vaclav Havel President of Czechoslovia  1989-92

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
― Thomas Merton

These two quotes are important to me because of the work on “Active Hope” that I have done with Joanna Macy.  Joanna has been for decades, starting with our responses to the nuclear arms race been inviting Americans to look at our grief and despair about the world.  She says in her Work that Reconnects that we must start with gratitude for what is and then experience our grief so we are not dragged down by it and can then see with new eyes and be freed to act.  The part of this formula that did not resonate with me at first was gratitude.  It was hard for me to notice what to be grateful for when I was so worried!   However, my work with Joanna has been very profound.

I recall at a workshop where I felt deeply sunk in a sense of despair over the threat of the dying of the oceans that I felt no hope.  Joanna’s assistant Anne spoke and said that she did not think we would survive but that she was sustained by “resting in the arms of all of you, in the love of you.”  I realized as I reflected upon this that I did not know if we will survive but that if the worst scenarios were to play out that I would still want in the descent of humanity for us to treat each other with as much respect as possible, without violence, to try to be fair with each other, to face our challenges cooperatively and with love. I realized that it meant I would make the same choices that I would make while fighting for our survival if I thought we would not survive.  I realized that I needed not to “concentrate on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself” as Merton says.  Or as Meg Wheatly said: “It becomes “What is”.  A place of gratitude.  Gratitude for what we still have.”

After my experience in Joanna’s workshop my “hope” changed.  It was not desperate, it was actually much deeper.  There was a calm I felt even in the face of much worse news.  There was the perseverance to just keep forging forward.  And strangely the gratitude showed up.  I felt like some people with chronic illnesses report feeling…just grateful for all the small things.  Grateful for what we still have, for as long as we have it.  Grateful to rest in the love of community.

The English language is said to be poor in that it has only one word for love.  It does not distinguish between the love of parents and children, from romantic love, or the love of a comrade or for the world in general.  The same could be said about the word hope.  There is this kind of hope that has expectations and the danger of much disappointment and there is this other kind of hope that has surrendered all expectations and that is just a steady direction and intention for Good – an almost instinct towards Light.

Choosing Our Parents

In my twenties I first read Illusions by Richard Bach.  In it he says: "Every problem has its gift" and other pieces of wisdom that suggest we are in charge of our own life experience, not passive victims to it.  I recall taking the worst event of my life and saying:  "Ok what is the gift of that?"  And strangely I could see it, and I could feel it shifting something that had lived in me as a sort of “victim oh poor me” story.  Something in this same exploration suggested to me that we in fact choose our parents.  About 7 years ago I finally read the Celestine Prophesy.   In this spiritual novel he also suggests that we choose our parents; and in fact he suggests we come to earth with a spiritual purpose and that the parents we choose provide certain lessons, for good or for bad, which help shape us for that spiritual purpose.  He calls this our “evolutionary question” and says we each have one.  He somewhat lays out a method for figuring it out (which I have further developed and have done with numerous friends.)  In the last few years in reading various books by Neale Donald Walsch and then most recently Inspiration by Wayne Dyer this idea has again been repeated that we choose our parents.  (This belief does fit best if you believe in reincarnation and karma.) 

In a previous post: God the Father/God the Mother, I talk about the idea that our concepts of God are often powerfully shaped by how we experience our "all powerful" parents during our childhoods.  These two ideas seem to go hand in glove: that we choose parents that provide a certain spiritual (or not) experience that then shapes our spirituality and the tools and concepts with which we pursue our spiritual task on earth.  This has powerful implications for both how we relate to our parents and our experiences with them, but also for those of us who are parents, how we parent.  Do you see your child as a soul that you have a sacred trust with?  Do you nurture not just their body, mind and emotions, but also their spiritual nature or their soul? 

What are the healing potentials with your parents (alive or dead) if you consider that you actually chose them?  For someone who was treated abusively or hatefully by a parent this may seem a fairly repugnant and nonsensical statement...at first glance.  But keep looking.  I think for example of a friend of mine who was beaten by his father during his childhood.   He says it taught him to question authority and to be strong and to be centered in his own internal sense of truth.  He has been an activist throughout his life and this has served him well.  I think of another person whose parents were not religious at all, but has a deep love of beauty, and how that prepared her to create art which has been a path to mysticism.

For myself, despite believing that we choose our parents, I have been mystified for decades trying to understand why I would choose a mother, a good mother, who would die during my childhood?  It has finally come to me in doing Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects, that I have learned how to be present to grief and loss unflinchingly and unwaveringly....and that in this time of so much loss on this planet, that those of us who fight for peace and for justice must be able to be present to the pain of the world.  As Joanna says:  "Be willing to have your heart be broken open to the pain of the world; it is what your heart was created for...to connect you to life." So I commend to you the question:  Why did I choose my parents?  How have they, for better or for worse, prepared me for my spiritual purpose in life?

When did you stop Singing?

Yesterday I was at a workshop lead by facilitators trained by Joanna Macy.  Joanna is a Buddhist, a psychologist, and a whole systems thinker.  Since the 80's responding to the Nuclear Crisis, Joanna has been looking at how the role of suppressed grief and denial play in our inability as a society to respond to the threats to life on earth. Originally she focused on the nuclear weapons threat, more recently she has looked at environmental threats, and the threat from climate change.  (see http://www.joannamacy.net/)

During the workshop the leader shared the following queries:
1)  When did you stop singing?
2)  When did you stop deeply listening and hearing with empathy what another says?
3) When did you stop telling stories?
4)  When did you stop coming to silence?
and to the above I would add:
5) When did you stop dancing?
6)  When did you stop laughing?

These queries to me speak to the deep zestful engagement with life.  It seems to me that in any one of these areas, where we stopped, it is time to understand and engage in healing.  I would love to have people post comments about what they realize about these queries.  For myself I see that after I left HS singing became very much more scarce, and that I need to figure out how to remember the words of songs so that I can sing them.  I realized as well that just two weeks ago this somehow came up with my husband whether we ever sang.  I think that when this sort of synchronicity of a subject coming before you in close proximity happens, this is one of the ways The Singer taps us on the shoulder to get our attention.  Ironically one of my favorite songs says  "how can I keep from singing?"  Time to start singing.