About Knowing and My Heart…………..

I spent all of my life thinking about all the things that I knew, or thought that I knew. They impacted every choice that I made, every thought that came through my mind was directed by my "knowing". I took pride in what I knew and felt special that I knew things that others did not. From there I felt that my knowing gave me a special place in the world. Unconsciously, that place was above those that did not know, leaving me responsible for their knowing, as well as maintaining the life that one who knows lives. This unravelled for me little by little. There was such an immense pressure to perform, Holding so much, when others had so little. I fought inside and out to bring congruency and meaning to the outer actions, but wondered about the inner feelings of emptiness. The only hold on me was the knowing distributed by sources outside of myself and wanting so badly to be part of those who knew, and finding the knowing myself. The emotions were so deep, to compensate for the loss of knowing my own soul. I ached to be seen and ached to be know, but instead of the personal intimate peace that comes from hearing your own heart, I was left with the aching that comes when a person adopts what they surmise, or are told is so and then have all of the privileges of that externally given knowing. It is hard to pass up. Each person wants so deeply to belong and be part of a community, to have a place that belongs to them. That too, was fickle and determined by others. Were you able to outwardly personify the beliefs and hold others in such a way that they too felt the impressions and emotions of the system of thought? If so, you could be elevated in stature and position,or calling leaving you with a sense of belonging, and a sense of being valued, not for who you are/were, but for your ability to hold the space in the system. So, there was a drive to search the written words that told us what was inherent in the system to know. The nature of the knowing was based upon emotional responses in your searching, as well as the impressions of others upon the answers and external responses to the searching. It seemed as if the community was necessary to deliver the proper set of circumstances to experience and maintain a sense of "knowing". But if truth really does prevail, If God is truly greater the any other force in the universe, than should we not see his hand and truth above all else, alone or in a community? This is a difficult subject that many people have studied deeply and done much work on trying to understand the impact of communities on beliefs and the impact of leaving a community of belief. But, going back to knowing, I have experienced several sources of knowing and the most powerful of those is the experiences that truly combine all of the sources into one experience. But, the question is what can we really know? And how do we know it? To start with I always think of relationships, they seem to personify an archetypal experience that transfers to many other experiences, creating a type of knowing unique to seeing patterns. So, in relationships……If we are to develop a relationship with a person that we just met what might the criteria be for interest and safety as we invite another person into our soul. A few things come to mind, the first is trust. If I cannot open myself to you and fully disclose, neither can I receive you and there will be little purpose for the experience of being together. To develop trust, an ability to invite a person in and to receive another person the foundation is the ability to do that very thing with and for yourself. That sounds really easy, but can easily be manipulated away by cultural thinking. You think you need to act or operate in a certain way, due to the ideas around that action, not really by the real knowing of our soul on the course of action. So, if we think that we know, then we cannot hear what we do not know, leaving us in a feedback loop that we cannot break until we actually admit that we do not know and cannot know some things. So, why is this important? Knowing has three components, an emotional/spiritual component that is a resonant feeling of affirmation about the space we are holding and the direction we intend to move. The other part is experiential. The last is an intellect learning about the thing, experience, whatever it is we are trying to understand The experiential part is important to be able to translate the combination of our emotions/spirits and our reasoning. The experiential part is what breaks down the walls of belief that we set up predetermining what we think we know. It is through those experiences coupled with the resonant feelings and the learning that draw a complete picture of knowing. In talking about knowing, what I am really talking about is not "I know this fact." It is a overall impression of positiveness, hope, goodness, wholeness to ourselves and others, or conversely that there is a clear feeling of discord, loss of hope, fear, etc. This kind of knowing does not lead me to know what someone else is thinking on a factual basis or what a person in history may have intended in his actions, no what we are talking about is overall patterns and clarity about direction and resonance vs discord in your life and culture. So, when I say that I do not know, what I may mean is that I don't have the facts and I know that. And, I am ok with that, but what I do have is the underlying feelings and patterns that a certain course of action of thought process leaves me with. The important thing I have found in this is the real objectivity of what is there. I do not know, nor do I need to "know" to understand the patterns, not the facts, to see what life is behind the experience. Is it a life that has been built on honesty? Is it built on respect of persons? Does it hold one person above another, or are all of equal value and equally heard and cherished, in actions as well as word? Is there an inner representation of the outward action, or is there just fear permeating the inward, hoping that perhaps someday it will get better? Is there a sense of openness and allowance for each person's journey, or is there a specific way and order that if a person does not follow they do not have equal value or voice, and are perhaps reprimanded or shunned for their perspective? Is there a place for those who do not "know", that is sincere, honest and gentle, not contrived, the subject of gossip or assigned? Those are the things that I am looking for. Is the basis a sense or is there a sense of "it need it to be something specific" in order to be vindicated, or right. We can emotionally want to be somewhere and convince ourselves easily of what we see and what appears to us, but experience can bridge the gap left by emotion alone. How does that work? Over and over again we choose, we choose based on group think, sometimes, based on anger, sometimes based on fear, sometimes based on real desire and resonance , we swing around and around between all of those, and only through experience can we begin to interpret what the emotions around our actions mean. What this really means is that knowing is a process, not a one time event. So many times in life in our immaturity or the stage in our process that has a deep learning curve and we think we understand it all, only to move just a little further to find out that we really knew nothing that we thought we knew and find ourselves embarrassed at how we overlaid our beliefs upon others, not hearing, seeing or even knowing them at the same time as we were ardently declaring how much we knew and saw those same others. We had no idea of their feelings of aloneness, their feeling of despair and loneliness, as we sat vindicated in our belief, never hearing, never seeing, blind to ourselves and blind to others. And so to know, we must admit our ignorance and have a beautiful peace in all that we do not know. That is the real faith. For if God really does guide his children, then the honest admission of not knowing would garner the greatest support from a loving God. In relationships, it does, honesty is the key and foundation, not pretending that you are something you are not, being something on the outside, empty on the inside. We must honestly admit the fact that we are children in the learning of things of the heart, things of the spirit and finding also in finding an opening to your heart. This is the first step in finding the space and voice in your own heart. The first honest step of knowing is your heart……………..the real test of faith and vulnerability is being with your own heart.

The Voice of Pain……….

On New Year's Day we took our nine year old daughter ice skating. She was excited. I wasn't. I didn't really want to go. See, I had been feeling very sad for a long time. I couldn't seems to piece much of anything together with a real truth, just a lot of emotions. There was anger, lots of it, sadness and just a feeling of being overwhelmed with not being able to make any sense of all of the feelings for so long. I would hear one feeling and be so sure of what it was saying. I would respond and realize that I was swirling just as much in all of the emotions as I was before. I couldn't seem to find my way out. I wanted to take action, make choices that would leave me feeling "Yah, that is what I wanted to say and that is just what I wanted to do!!", but I would look at what I was telling myself and I realized I was stuck, stuck in some beliefs that were leaving me feeling like there was no way out. Damned if I did, damned if I didn't and I couldn't see anything but those two options. So, there I was, I just wanted to lay down and stop, stop trying, stop feeling, stop wanting, stop grieving, just stop, but instead we went skating. I think it is funny how much we don't about karma, not sure if that is the right word, but why things happen that happen. I wonder if something is beckoning that we just need some help to understand. Well, that day, something was beckoning me. I am not a great skater, but I don't usually fall, unless I am being reckless and I can see that coming a mile a way. This day I was not being reckless and I did not see this coming. Out of the blue, I completely lost my balance, one of those great wipe outs, feet out from under you and as hard as you can fall on your back. There I was, laying on the ice, thinking that really hurt, reliving the slow motion of trying to catch myself with my right hand outstretched in an awkward twist and then coming down in it. I felt somewhat shocked, my skate in my lower leg, my wrist throbbing and generally the wind knocked out of me. Whhhheeww, I laid on the cold ice catching my breath. That was it, no more chances the skates were coming off. In my family we call it boot skating, when you are too chicken to skate with real skates, so that was my plan. I didn't really make it back on the ice. I was shaking, in shock and not really feeling any pain for about an hour, when my wrist started to swell. I figured it was probably broken, turned out not to be, but badly sprained. Either way there was lots of swelling, lots of pain and complete impairment of my ability to use my right hand. I am right handed. The irony was not lost on me. I have been studying and trying to understand what my state of mind means and where it might be leading me too. Throughout my life pain has been a call that caused me to stop and listen. For some reason when I am in pain, I can no longer listen to the competing voices of my intellect trying to break down, analyze and come up with the most efficient and effective solution to the problem at hand. I spend far too much time without listening trying to hear and pain helps my shut out all the noise of my own head. I makes me shut up and finally hear the gut and core of my being and what it is telling me and has known all along, but I was too busy spinning things around and around and trying to create what would be the most perfect solution that would never go wrong. I was looking for results, needing results and living for results. I was afraid to get it wrong, afraid, I would be a failure, afraid that I really wouldn't be enough, and worst of all afraid to be honest about being afraid. It is what I believed and maybe if I tried hard enough, maybe just maybe if I analyzed it deeper and looked harder I could finally make the choice that would tell me that this time I was enough. This time the message was different. IT was that both ways were wrong, staying and running. If I stayed I had learned to stay without being heard or being present. I stayed and sacrificed who I was for others, if I left I hadn't sacrificed myself, but I had nothing. I was alone. In my pain I saw another option, one I had never seen before, what if I stayed, and called what worked for me, what if I set some boundaries about what I could do or be? What if I as a person had a voice about my own experience? No wonder the feelings, no wonder the sadness the anger, driven by a belief of my lack of self I had no ability to see what a circumstance might look and feel like with my voice holding what it needed and what It was ready for. Powerful idea, and as I stepped I realized that my pain had helped me to break down the barriers and finally be able to see there was more than what I could have perceived in my belief driven intellect. Right at the core of my being, I knew that I needed to be present and not run away and I knew that I needed to speak, popular or not what I had to say, Without the constant analyzing voices. My acupuncturist told me that her perception of what my body was telling her was a yin deficiency, a deficiency of the female receptive principle. I couldn't receive myself, I couldn't trust my intuition and it was challenging my physically. When I sat in her office and listened I realized, a culminating experience of study, experience and pain, what was really in this place. I finally could see past my own intellectual swirling, my excess of yang and the masculine principles trying to drive my life, but losing ground every so effectively, until this moment. I heard the other part and knew that in order to heal, both physically, emotionally and spiritually I had to turn and listen, listen to the sound of crying muscles, disconnected joints and a broken heart. They brought the sound of change. They knew what my mind could not grasp, when I started to listen, my pain finally told me the truth my heart had been whispering and I knew that I could finally find my way home. My compass, pain.

The power of Christ in our lives……………...

Where and How does the real power of Christ enter our lives? That is the question. So, My heart always told me that to get to real truth I needed Christ, a power above myself and one that could beneath me to lift me up. But the real question was how. There are many man made ideas, first of who God is and second of what he expects of us. When you look at the Hebrew name for Jehovah, JHWHY, which means I AM that I Am, or Being becoming, or a being discovering himself. I thought about that and it crossed my mind that we are a little like that a being discovering himself. I wondered how He is discovering himself and then it crossed my mind that perhaps it is through us. See, if I need Christ to fully be who it is that I have the potential to be, His power or a portion of him is and becomes alive in me to lift me above the instinctual wanderings of being human and the rational demands of the intellectual mind. He meets us in those places and brings our desires above the elements that would make us nothing more than animals. The power of love is his lifting power and through the Holy spirit we are brought to knowledge of truth, a recognition of truth that allows those instincts to rise through love and understanding of their generating power in our life. Without Christ those instincts would leave us no better than the animals. The channeling power of his knowledge and love lift us into a place of distinct generation of something more out of what would just be something less. It moves us into a spiritual realm, and brings light and life to our action. The same holds true with the intellectual rationalization that characterizes our humanity. Our ego nature wants to control, rationalize and moralize. Keeping constant control over our being, holding tightly to the external expression. This is a polar expression of external control, vs external lack of control. Neither side linking us up with Christ, or has an internal representation. Either way we are not using the forces of life for our internal growth. See, Christ came to fulfill the law of Moses, the law of obligations and parameters and brought a new law, an law that invited us to open our heart, love him and those who belonged also in the sphere of our influence. So, love was the primary methodology to achieving the power of Christ over our minds. So, here we sit and I look at how Christianity has a powerful set of methods and external rules to drive our action and those who cannot drive the external rules, say "To hell with all of this and let everything hang out" TO really put it in perspective, neither side is any healthier, any closer to Christ. The Bible as we know it and claim to understand as we read it over and over again, we fail to realize that the version of the Bible we are reading was not originally written in English and the English that it was written in is not the language that we know. If you look very closely at the original language of the Bible it is interesting to note that Biblical HEbrew is not a word for word translation. Each letter in HEbrew has a representative meaning and then put together with other letters has an even larger representation, that is not literal, but provides an understanding that is very expansive and is more than a material event, but looks deeply into the archetypes that are represented in the process of describing, for example the creation, Adam, heaven and earth. It is so much deeper than we assume in our unidimensional language. And we study this in our ignorance and are so proud of what we think we know and then we try to in our pride impose our intellectual understanding, that we call spiritual on others. The funny thing is our discussions of faith really have nothing to do with faith, because the objects of our faith are man made, including the character of God and our understanding of his work. So, we are trusting all of our faith in what a man told us, not really in the complete relationship of Christ's love and truth in your heart alone raising you above the obstacles. This process of understanding truth has no man come between us and God, no man as interpreter, no man as the diviner, or how could He discover himself through us? In mirroring another and not allowing Him through our individual uniqueness to rise allowing a distinct and totally personal representation of Him through us we cannot represent Him, or our own unique being that he has made possible. Christ is in each of us, we don't have to look somewhere to find him. We don't have some set of rules that make us more approachable. We have things that lift us closer to him and things that cause us to feel the distance from who he is in us. He is so close and has never left us and will always save us from our intellect, our ego and our instincts to bring them all to a greater power and purpose in him.