Life as quality of Self-Perception: Pouring paint on one's essential nature

When I was a child I loved watching Casper the Friendly Ghost. Casper was real- but no one could see him for what he was- unless paint was poured over him. Then he became easy to see and describe and know. He was literally walking around as an invisible being most of the time and in every story it created a lot of misunderstanding.

Turns out we're like that. We don't easily perceive ourselves with out help. Many of us work hard over the course of a lifetime-- enlisting the help of many tools and teachers in order to see ourselves clearly so we can work with what is instead of what isn't.

What often becomes the neurotic obsession with self -analysis persists because to live in a state of confusion about our essential nature is painful. It creates messes from choices we make based on who we're trying to be and or who we want others to be for us. We're all delusional to the extent that we prioritize our organization of basic awareness around avoiding feelings and being attached to outcomes.

How would our lives be different if our seeing was clear?

Seeing our own nature clearly requires knowing the difference between what renders things invisible to us, and what throws a can of paint over them.

Let's say I asked you to as simply and accurately as possible identify the physical characteristics of your immediate surroundings. The only rule would be to avoid using adjectives that contain value judgments. In my case, I'm in my bedroom. It has four walls, an a- frame ceiling made of wood, a wooden floor, a white leather sofa against one wall, etc.

That's not a difficult thing to do. I just look around and name objects.

What's important to know is that this room is what it is and doesn't ever wish it were otherwise. Spending time in nature I can make the same observation. At a given moment I can acknowledge the basic landscape for what it is. If I'm standing in a park with tall trees or no trees or a stream or no stream these are things that are simply the truth of the physical features of where I'm standing. I can notice that the grass was wet this morning and now its dry. Nature is comforting precisely because its free from being conflicted about itself- because we aren't conflicted about it. Animals and very young children feel effortless to be with as they too are in a pure state of being that's easier for us to notice.

It would never occur to most of us to look at a sunset and feel rejected if it didn't show up for us with clouds that were a particular shade of pink. Nor would most of us try to insist that someone change their gender or their skin colour to make us happy. Clearly then we have the capacity to observe and be with what is. Remove the strain of judgement about things being something different and seeing clearly suddenly becomes possible-- once detached from self-worth, judgement, reactivity, need, desire, projection.

Seeing in this way is close to freedom and to love.

Yet if I asked you to see into your own essential nature- the core that makes you you- what makes that any less simple? More problematic?

"Ah" says the mind, "unlike the tree in the park which can only become what it is, I have made myself what I am, I have a story." Oh really? What if your investment in your story and my investment in mine makes it nearly impossible to see ourselves and others as they are in the here and now?

Question: Can you be in your own or another's quality of being with the same innocence with which you stand in a park full of living trees?

If you were able to do so, how might your enjoyment/peace with what is be enhanced?

Walk into someone's life today as if you were walking into a park. See if you can experience their simple essence as an expression of ever evolving qualities rather than fixed good or bad attributes. Practice letting them be. Let yourself be.

Or if that's a struggle walk away. Come back later- don't come back at all.

Whatever happens, know that if you stand in a park wishing it were an ocean- believing that if only it cared it would be an ocean, that it told you once it was an ocean and you felt wet back then.....that you are not seeing things as they are. As A Course in Miracles asks us to consider in one of its' workbook exercises: I see only the past.

Without seeing in the moment there is no acceptance of what is, without acceptance of what is there is no love.

Without love there is no seeing so there is suffering.

Learning to see is why we're here. Think about it. Isn't spiritual enlightenment referred to as awakening ?

Sleeping through life is when your eyes are closed. A good indication that you're asleep is that you see problems- you identify with being unhappy. Or, ironically you're ecstatic because the world is conforming to your picture for it. Also a sign of sleeping.

Pouring the paint of loving vigilance around seeing with new eyes each moment gets easier with practice.

It wastes no energy.

Still, We can't be too kind with ourselves and others when we behave out of stubborn adherence to blindness over and over again.

We'll open our eyes as we do- its all we have, all we are.

On the edge

I wanna know:

Who we are now.

If you share my thirst for being real and not habitual.

I wanna know if friendship, laughter and deep intimacy are still somewhere on the menu and the sex that goes along but doesn’t come without

Whether we still have sufficient guts, love, or compassion to tell the truths that came so easily once, but that now could send it all tumbling like a house of cards

Knowing that whether or not we survive the listening,

The only certainty is that wounds don’t heal in the silence we retreat to for safety.

I wanna know

What lives underneath the layers of “us”

what it might feel like to be celebrating what we now diplomatically ignore

about the different needs and desires where your heart protect its’ own secret reasons and so does mine.

I wanna know

what would make either of us ecstatically happy and whether we still share a vision for making that happen

I wanna know where in us individually lies the seed of self-redemption which if nurtured would grow us into joyful expressions of life renewed and to hell with partners and parents dutifully resigned.

I wanna know my heart’s desire- know your's- know if our marriage serves or hinders

yes or no or both.

Know if what gets us through the times when I’m sure its over can still be rightfully be called courage?

Or if we're hanging on how come?

I wanna know if we still love us

Not because we once said we always would-

But because we choose to do so now.

Mother of the Bride and other unlikely rites of passage

I've understood for a long time that that one hidden gift of being close to my children includes revisiting my own developmental stages as they and I live through theirs.

At the moment in preparing to share in the festivities of my daughter's imminent wedding, I was awakened by a question for myself this morning; "what am I wedded to in this life?".

I have ideals, values, beliefs, needs, habits. But this is about something deeper- something asking me to look at what I'm living for through examining how I'm living.

Rather than look at routines, relationships or possessions- an interesting variation is to look at one's life as being wedded in any given moment to qualities of being. I love this idea because it shows us in a much more dynamic, fluid state of flux- but can also allow for the recognition of qualities we may have embodied over years or perhaps even lifetimes.

Standing one rain and wind swept July afternoon on the isle of Iona, the deepest essential qualitative nature of my being came through like the peeled notes of the abbey bell tones across the silence of the road I was on. Without judgement, I observed that openness-receptivity-love-and a visceral experience of eternal oneness were all qualities I was being after 4 days alone on this island and in relative silence.

These qualities not surprisingly were exactly conducive to finding myself completely awake and present to the many gifts in the moment.

The peace I felt emotionally was like bathing in a warm ocean. Sweet, blissful joy.

Later that day however, I listened deeply again- and this time I could feel myself in resonance with the qualities of longing, need, and uncertainty with respect to a relationship I was pondering. Not surprisingly my experience was one of unease and preoccupation with wanting to fix something. Then came the useful question "what are the antidotes to these qualities which I'm allowing to rob my being of its natural peace?

Almost at once I could feel that acceptance, gratitude, and trust would bring me home again.

I want to be clear here that this wasn't an exercise in aiming to be virtuous or good. Virtues can connote a kind of moral high ground where one is attempting to emulate a desirable attitude. Qualities are accessed by a subtle tuning in process as in calling on the energy of a living attribute to take up residence within us as us. This simple process of asking permission for a qualitative shift requires only willingness. There is no external manipulation of outside elements. It works because it releases resistance by first allowing it and then asking for balance to be restored.

So, as it happens, for the last few days I've been wedded to the qualities of abandonment- woundedness, and despair, for reasons I won't go into.

Rather than spiritually berating myself for being "weak" or for letting my ego's small separate voice reign supreme, I sat in meditation and at first simply allowed myself to feel the fullness of each quality. I especially noticed how deeply invested my emotions were in keeping me there. Slowly, I started to breathe into what I heard would help-- the qualities self-love, forgiveness, and detachment-- calling on each one as you would a trusted friend.

The storm still rages outside, but inside my day is different now. Being wedded at my core to all things that bring healing and promote new growth means becoming symbolically engaged over and over to going with cycles of change. Where there's resistance there's pain. Where deliberate surrender is, is where the breath takes us- not to a place of passivity, but rather to where there is freedom.

Rainy Day Musings

Blog as confessional. "Bless me Blog for I have sinned, it has been a long time since my last post". "Oh, and when I do post I'm not sure I'm really saying the whole truth about my life--assuming anyone but me gives a shite"?

I imagined sitting in the dark sandalwood smelling booth with the little wire mesh screen window and waited. No response. No " That'll be 3 Hail Mary's and 4 squat lunges" or not even " Say 5 Our Fathers and then perform fellatio as if you really mean it"

Yet clearly my own blog hasn't noticed my absence.

Rather, alone in the pretend confessional booth that lives inside every writer's conscience there was only silence. I'm supposing this is a good sign, a sign that if there's as yet no readership for my blog to disappoint, then I'm absolved from needing forgiveness. Truth be told if I thought anyone was actually going to read this, I probably wouldn't have included the gratuitous line about fellatio-- which was after all a nod to my good friend Kavida who only writes about sex in her blog all the time and has a readership of over 2000.

Right now there's a very soggy hammock suspended outside my window. Although I like it very much it sees relatively little use over the few months of the year when Middle Earth dries out. Still, it hangs in stripey green pleasantness on my front veranda and waits for company, existing solely to cradle the would be soul in need of a gentle rocking. It has mildew spots from having been left out too late into the rainy season last year and now it hangs before me yet again as waterlogged as a cardboard boat in a river.

The season when it might have held respite for the odd afternoon daydreamer has passed. Now no one wants the job of taking the hapless drowning victim down from between it's two crucifixion posts, especially when there's no good place in the garage for it to dry. More mildew is likely. Sad, drippy state of affairs.

I'm sure you've sussed where this is going. It's like too Jungian to miss mmkay? I AM THE WET HAMMOCK TODAY. I hang around Auckland where I don't really want to be hoping that some day maybe I'll be able to create a well used niche where women will know about, need and want what I have to offer and I'll generate some consistent income. I hang out in my marriage hoping my husband will notice I'm alive and will say "Darling, let's make a point of cherishing our time together". Lastly, I'm hanging out in my lovely house because mindlessly running errands, shopping, trying to fill up the day with busyness just isn't happening. Neither is listening to spiritual pod casts, calling someone to distract me from myself , or going upstairs to make myself useful in the kitchen.

I want to sit with this. Just sit. The temporary fixes, the notion of being rescued from myself- these are not what I want. I want peace. Contentment. Freedom from inner restlessness.

I can't buy what I need and no one can give it to me. What is required at a certain stage of development for lasting happiness is that a life based on imperatives born of identification with the ego mind be consciously replaced by a single minded desire to know Spirit. This is far, far from denial of one's humanity. It is the ultimate adventure to the final frontier- except that there's no travel website and nothing outside yourself that gets you a ticket in.

So you sit. And you sit some more. And you're vigilant- and you carry out day to day tasks with mindfulness, dropping the weight of judgement little by little like a diver dropping lead weights. Up, slowly up through layers of silt and murkiness until a glimmer of light means that home is vibrationally nearer. That the perfection of each moment is experienced as a natural continuum. That the monkey mind has become the lotus unfolding. I'm now back. Did you come too?

Chop wood and carry water or don't. Waking up is everything and no thing.

Phew. That's better. Now what was I gonna "do"? Oh yeah, write my blog.

The Un-necessary act of looking for work

And now for today's overstated understatement: Examining one's conscious mind for thoughts based on the ego's belief system isn't easy. It is however, a task that others will gladly help you with.

How I love my ego's favorite songs always reliably on in the background, drowning out attempts to hear them for what they are until I'm whipped up in a frenzy higher than a latte froth!

Ask any therapist, philosopher or good observer of the human condition what people struggle with and it all boils down to the same thing. (Here's where I try to simplify what you already know or don't give a shit about). We live caught in a cycle of illusion and projection; walking Panavision cameras whose director has an insatiable craving for more, better, different, and above all for our movie version to be regarded as the RIGHT interpretation of reality!

The good news is you aren't alone in being reluctant to leave the illusion pool. What woman doesn't love a good soak? Repeatedly? My girlfriends and I could easily live for swimming upstream through the maya of relationships legitimately wanting to be loved enough right up to the point where that new love lets us down again. "Oh no, not worthy of me and I didn't see it- Darnit" ! I have been a serial fault finder of men, employers with rules of any kind, and definitely any country I live in for more than 2 years.

Seek, seek, seek- the thrill of discovery followed by the pain of self-deception. Turns out the men I know weren't all liars trying to disappoint and hurt me. This is what the Course in Miracles refers to as the promise of "special love" whose only possible destiny is to become the fodder of special hate.

Yet to give up the revolving door and climb out of an open window instead...est-ce possible?

Thank God my life and yours are in Divine hands. While I'm busy feeling morally and spiritually superior to my husband, family, friends and acquaintances who are in turn busy feeling superior to me, we may sadly miss each other's light. The light goes on shining in the dark until the hold of the shadow self gradually lifts like mist from a river bank.

If we didn't wait til death-- if we woke up in the dream? Ah, but if others in our life don't wake with us says the ego, how unfair, lonely and misunderstood would that be? Wouldn't one be even more alone?

Well I suspect that reaching a place of sustained awakenedness means that the question ceases to have merit. Imagine the bliss that could come from genuinely not needing or wanting for their own sake. For the end of seeking.

As a child I loved the story of the Yellow Brick road to OZ. Funny about that platitude at the end that "there's no place like home". What brought Dorothy back was her desire to wake up in the dream, to discover that she'd always had the power to be home.

Paradoxically, the trip she thought she made was the only way to find out she'd never left.

Much maligned monthlies not for marinating in....

Gentlemen I give you this bit of advice: reduce a sauce, your waist line, or your power bill before you ever, ever reduce the sum total of a good woman's thoughts down to her hormones. I don't care if you know for a fact that she's straddling a mattress, bloated and riddled with cramps, and that her breasts are clearly two vertically suspended Hindenburgs. In your effort to appear all knowing or empathic, you reveal yourself to be another card carrying fascist pig.

What allows me to say so with such precise insight? Call it the same instinct that tells me you might want to happily eviscerate a woman who whenever you expressed something she didn't like simply observed "This is really about your fear of erectile dysfunction, isn't it Hon?" No amount of penis envy would excuse that kind of self-serving presumptuous remark on a woman's part now would it? Of course not.

Yes, we menstruate. Yes, it amplifies what's already there. No we don't appreciate reminders subtle or otherwise that both these things are true. It's about as useful as pointing out to an alcoholic that they behave differently while drinking. Notice that it almost never changes a drunk's behaviour when you do that. Likewise, the t-shirt I saw in the mall pretty much sums up how most women view their period: The one time of the month when I can really be myself.

20-25 days a month we soothe, we listen, we anticipate, come man cold or anima attack. We don't earn your wages but we do take your shit and try to turn it into fertilizer.

So what can you do that would be helpful? Think NASA and give your woman some space. I mean real space. No you don't need to build a menstrual yurt or disappear for the weekend--though Goddess knows I'd pay my husband to take an occasional sojourn through Arctic tundra and leave his map at home.

But then I'd miss him. I appreciate it enormously when I am PMS'd off my face and instead of rubbing my nose in blood, he simply takes me in his arms for a soft, sensual cuddle that includes a prolonged stroke of my lumbar region.

If I'm over-sensitive or bitchy, let him consider the countless ways I prop up his manly ego and walk over egg shells so as not to bruise his pride or provoke his temper. Let him be the change he would see in me and model the self-restraint.....just once. It wouldn't even have to be once a month.

Resurrection

We never lose anything we own with our soul. Likewise, it's never too late to lose an internalized distortion. The very long subtitle here might read: Lessons my Dad is teaching me twenty four years after his death.

This is about clarity. A huge moment of it, which came just on the tail end so to speak of making love with my husband. I know some use nicotine to focus their mind, for others maybe meditation is the catalyst of choice. For me this morning, a big piece of the puzzle lay waiting in the arms of the man I love. As partners often will, he's watched me struggle with myself for years over one particularly persistent pattern that dogs my being. You see, I don't often stick with people, places, or things. I've made choices that manifest in much being left unfinished. Big things sometimes, like marriages, jobs, projects, even parenting when I was younger. You get the picture. Nothing too remarkable here- except that before this morning a piece of connective tissue that had been missing as to "how come" would finally get connected.

I call these missing pieces loose threads, and they're potentially transformative when they poke out your sleeve end at just the right moment. I lay there contentedly in my bed, beginning to contemplate the day as is my habit, and the feeling came. The one that always comes. The one that judges me for being directionless, lazy, lacking in meaningful goals and is accompanied by intense inner restlessness and impatience. "I must be in the wrong place on the planet- that's it. It must be time to move somewhere new". Or, it used to be "I must be in the wrong relationship", or "I must not being trying as hard as other people who deserve to live self-fulfilled lives".

So goes the refrain. Day after day like some irritating bit of plant fiber stuck between my teeth. The difference is that today this thread this time had a new context. The context that has come from a moment on the Isle of Iona while walking completely on my own down a windy dirt road in cold light rainfall one early July morning. Suddenly I just was. Walking. Nothing added or taken away. I noticed it. No needs and no mental static or distractions. My soul alone animating my two feet, each unhurried step following the other. Non-linear, totally awake, and completely at peace. This was it, and it was self-evident. No more searching. I was Rumi's poem come to life- I was what I was looking for. Like an answered prayer on two legs, I spent the rest of the day in perfect alignment with all that ever had been or would be. A gentleness, born of pure love and effortless appreciation shone from every pore of my being and I knew my Self to be timeless and perfect.

"You'll lose this when you're back home" I reminded myself. It wouldn't matter. Surely. I had walked through a gateway and that had to mean a door would remain open if only by the tiniest of cracks. It had to mean that somehow, back home in a very quiet suburban life I could still find my way back as many times as required until living in a place of enlightenment was easy.

Well, it hasn't been easy. The resistance to letting go of the old messages and mental patterns has been huge. Instead of the static becoming quieter it's become maddeningly louder. If you're an advanced spiritual teacher or an inherently wise soul reading this, you're most likely smiling or nodding at the perfection of this kind of angst following on the heels of a profound revelation.

But what about my Dad? He's been gone for a long time, which any good psychologist will tell you doesn't matter. A message from him, spoken to my eight year old self had taken root in my consciousness and was thriving like the root ball of a weed. "God gave you a gifted mind and you're going to waste it--because you have no self-discipline". He was probably just frustrated at the time, maybe I'd dropped the ball at school and disappointed his ambitions for me. Dad's expectations were high and his opinion was who I was- was how I saw myself and what I cared about most-- namely, pleasing him. Earning his hard won approval was everything. I'd seen this before- had waded through my family of origin work-- but this time I saw it. Classic, obvious, simple. Juxtaposed against a back drop of a mother who loved me unconditionally and whose one request was that I finish high school; I have been a self in limbo if not at war between ambition and ambivalence for forty some odd years. How wonderfully silly.

My husband stopped and looked at me and smiled. "That was the key message" he said. I looked at him and got it. Got that I wake up each day in a place of wishing that just for today I could stop feeling as Jackson Browne sang " I guess they've got a lot to do before they can rest assured, their lives, are justified". I'd been praying to God that she would let me slide, because I wasn't about to. Until now maybe. For just today...the mind my Dad said would be wasted, because that was his fear, his way to love me--that same mind has forgiven us both.