Category Archives: peace

Why is “normal” actually “harmful”?

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We can be like Cinderella’s step sisters or like a middle weight boxer trying to “fit in” to the category we wish to enter. We think, “I want to be a princess so I will cram my foot into these shoes.” We think, ” I must shed weight no matter what the physical cost to be able to compete.”

Social Signalling is out of our control. Our neurons are set up to synk with the behavior of people we observe around us. It is a left over survival pattern. Back in time, we observed others and if Kruk did not follow the ways of those around him and just decided the red berries looked delicious, he would end up curled on the ground poisoned dead. It was a matter of the discontinuance of Kruk and of his DNA.

In the world entranced by the manichaen doctrine the soul of a wicked one was like someone carrying the plague. Wiki tells us Manichaeism taught that life in this world is unbearably painful and radically evil. In Manichaeism inner illumination reveals that the soul, which shares in the nature of God, has fallen into the evil world of matter and must be saved by the means of spirit or intelligence. Consequently, in a society where survival depended on being connected to a village, shunning and exile were used as a passive death sentence.

No food would be given, no shelter, no warmth either physical or emotional. If a member of a social group broke the law of the normal, they were possessed by the devil and were left to die.

Even more contemporarily, various groups use exclusion as a way of controlling desired behavior.

The result is that we have in our DNA the memory of complying with what is considered normal. It is one of the reasons that social signalling controls our choices.

And so we, when trapped in a crowded theatre and fire breaks out, follow the crowd even if it leads to death. And so when we have evidence that certain behaviors shorten our lives and sabotage our health, it is worth it for us. At least we are not alone.

The only way we can pull ourselves out of this hypnotic state of automatically following the mores and choices of members of our social group is to become “the watcher.” We can teach ourselves to sit back as if we are in a drawing class and really concentrate on what we are seeing. We see the lines, the shapes, the patterns, the presentation of behaviors. We take time to consider each action.

The questions to ask ourselves are: “Does this serve the greater good? Does this action, this decision make me healthier, stronger, a better version of myself?”

It is like the mindfulness walk of a Buddhist sanga. Step, step, stop. And as one foot touches another the mind connects to the ground. The mind focuses in on the now. The mind can ask, “Where are you going?” “Are you in balance?”

who could you be?

We are in a time when “normal” no longer is of service to our own lives; to the culture surrounding us; to the earth.

It is time to see who you were meant to be. It is time to grow into a deeply connected self. But not connected to others mindlessly following. We start to wonder who we could be…. if only…..

Time is a myth

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I find I have slipped from one sense of time to another from month to month and from year to year in the last three years of chaotic awakening.

. As I have healed, as I have become a grown-ass woman and no longer a wounded adolescent, my relationships have changed.

In the climate of nowness, I am telling people, “I don’t do time.” What I mean by that is I have released the necessity of validating myself by the pulse of the beat between a desire or an event or the arrival of an Amazon package and that swack of the wish arrow into the bull’s eye. If I ” achieve” something quickly am I a more valuable person than if it takes me years?

I can feel that old addiction to adrenaline if I focus on time.

Alone with self

“Hurry up, hurry up or you will miss the train, the boat, the plane, the appointment, the opportunity. All will dissolve and fade.”

When these thoughts appear, I feel the flood of adrenalin surge as it rushes through my veins and my Fitbit will even report back to me my heart rate has gone up.

What if all of this projection about validation, about deserving, about achieving is created by my own thought energy?

And so I set out like a sandel-footed acolyte creating the no-path path with each step.

“Who am I now?” I ask myself. Then I drop the question into the void and turn away my narcissistic gaze.

Life is so much more peaceful without gripping like a starving child at the hand of time. Life is so much more peaceful without scanning the face of a person I meet to see if he or she loves me enough. Life is so much more peaceful when I don’t quiver in fear when I get a bill or pay my taxes.

At first, the feeling is of the life of a ghost creature. Who am I if I am not anxious, worried, fearful, and focused on achieving to prove I deserve to live?

Then nothingness appears. Then the sense of blankness appears. There is no avatar for transitioning.

receive the now

I spent years breathing through the storm of thoughts that showed up to lecture me, to urge me to audition to be me.

It is called faith. I had faith that eventually the release of time, and of identify and of chasing the rabbit like a greyhound on a track would be the correct behavior. What will happen without those defining neuroses?

Slowly things begin to appear in my life. I slept more deeply. I am no longer startled by abrupt sounds. I did not have flashes of trauma going through an intersection when I drive. I began to feel smooth and soft. The hard shell of defensiveness, the brittle layer of intellectual processing, the constant comparison of myself to another to see which one of us was the most something or another… just stopped.

I am most aware of my journey when I wake up. I call it surfacing. I float up from my dreams and my body becomes reborn as a casing, a home, a nurturing organism. I feel my bed under me and am grateful for its comfort and support. I extend the waking up process as long as I can. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So I have given up time with the understanding that I am the creator of the time I live. And it stretches on and on like a desert of colored sand. I can go in any direction I desire. Now is perfect.

 

 

 

Hallucinating Reality

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I wake up with my new Russian Blue cat pushed against my legs. Day after day of dense ponderous rain has been falling. All of us welcomed it. The numerous fires breaking out every summer have begun early. They began in April and seered right through to May. Just a week ago we were choked by the brown-gray sky and warned against the evil of outside.

The rain appeared like a blessing that comes from a genii. It was instant. It was within the parameters of what the seeker of a miracle had asked for. But, as always with hope and fate and dread there was that twist, the sting of literally getting what was wished for.

My new thrift store shoes priced in the world of heavy-edged commerce at over $100 were red and sparkling on my feet soaked to the gunnels by the pooling rainwater. As I determinedly made my way to “accomplish” the purchase of items on my list, I was stopped twice by other women who were also wearing Italian-brand shoes.  We stood facing one another showing off our shoes and delighting in our “tribe” of niche consumers.

As my hair became rivulets to channel the heavy rain, I thought about how much my life had been about a rhythm of collapse in the face of opposition and then arising to heroically push forward.

as above, so below
as within, so without

The failed hip, the fear of death lurking outside my door, constant pain. The angels of hope kept showing up to grab me under each armpit and stand me on my feet.

Just before the smoke appeared to threaten our lungs, Tod, my companion cat became anxious and twitchy. He could feel it coming. He was restless and unsettled. Jumping from one viewing place to another, he had all senses alert.

And once the rain came, both he and I relaxed into a deep, long sleep.

“When will my life begin for real,” my ego asks me. “When will I achieve my goals and stand strong and triumphant?”

And then I remind myself that after 78 years of life, I should know by now, it is not a single track run for a prize life.

The struggle is always in the physicality of existence. I torture myself with phrases like “When will you be what you want to be?” I lash myself with the whips of familial and societal expectations.

Nobody tells a five-year-old that simply rising to a challenge; simply loving and caring for the body; simply having a consistently compassionate reaction to others is achieving something. Nobody hangs a gold medal on the chest of an individual who resists the mass hallucination spun out spell-casting of reality.

It is like pushing through bars of a prison, this life.

And as I wake up with Tod, the cat laying on my left leg with his legs wrapped around my calf, I hear him purr.

And as I wake up still alive and held by my body with no pain, I know that pushing myself into satisfying some installed craving by my ancestors, my society has once again been avoided. I am focused on living peacefully. That is a life beyond the insanity of hallucinated chaos.

I watch my thoughts and my actions and I see how skilled I am becoming at dismissing the siren’s call asking me to run my life based on fear and phobia.

Yesterday, I thought, “You have been so closed down, you have forgotten to look at a flower.”

Today, I intend to spend time appreciating the miracle of a flower continuing to burst forth in beauty in the midst of cold, killer smoke and heavy beating rain. How heroic is the lilac, the daisy, the iris. We are like that. We are blossoming. We must congratulate ourselves.

 

Time and Intention are the enemy of Unexpected gifts.

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The day began hesitantly. First, the hot water run in the bathtub for the washing of hair and stretching of limbs was intended. The screen addiction’s blue light trance caught my mind. After going through the email and seeing possibilities; chaotic offers of peace; warnings that this class or video or lesson would become cannibalistic and eat itself out of existence any moment; the lost losers wailing in the valley of abandonment and those indecipherable messages from some long dead language from another planet I am by now too tired to try to decipher. I delete, delete, delete. Next, I must remove the dead bodies from the field and leave my trash as pristine as I found it.
I push back the cleaning, laundry and prep for new incoming guests in order to get into the tub before the thought of a hot bath had totally dissolved.
I wash my hair while listening to Jason Stephenson soothe affirmation towards me like a lover with his warm breath. “I am blossoming,” I repeat out loud as I soap up my head and dunk it beneath the water line. “I am at peace in the world,” I repeat as I smooth the conditioner through my increasingly longer locks. “I am supported by the universe,” I chant towards the bathroom ceiling as I douse my head with repeatedly used water.
After the ritual of cleansing, I go to the bed to breathe along with Wim Hoff. Almost immediately I feel prickles of energy along my flesh and inside my body. I feel like my cells are drinking tiny cappuccino cups of delicious caffeine liquid. I push against my capacity for breath and expand it more and more. I float in a sea of thoughts, plans, visions, voices, and intentions. All of the shards of half-seen things break off from their mooring and I watch them fly past me as I release them with my breath, through the ceiling into the field of what is.
After dressing, I dress the bed and address the new cat.
I walk out onto the lawn barefoot to feel the day all over me from foot to face. I say, “Hello birdies.” I always say, ” Hello birdies, ” when they sing. It seems only right.
The rituals of morning end up being the rituals of day because I have detached myself from time now. I justify it to my ego by reminding that cranky critic that I started my first job at 8. Now, 70 years later I chose to not be chained at the ankles by time. I am barefoot on the lawn. The birds sing. What will happen will happen.
Finally, I understand I do not need to have an opinion about everything that happens. Finally, I understand I do not need to have an opinion about every blade of grass, every leaf, and every passing being on my sidewalk.
This. This is now. My hair is washed, the room is ready for the next guest. I feel at home in myself.
May be an image of chess
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