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.

Get Cap, Wear Cape …….FLY!!!!

A myriad of emotions and plans run through my head. I am unsure of what is me and real and what is been programmed by my life, culture and beliefs. When preparing to start this venture. It seems that simple, "Get Cape, Wear Cap and FLY", but then my head gets in the way. Fear bubbles up around my ideas. telling me that perhaps there was no place for me here. I would stand amidst a throng of people completely unnoticed and unheard, or worse laughed at while I am opening my heart to the world. My head starts telling me about marketing, about market research, and price comparisons, but my heart sees into the souls of those who I have already had a chance to sit across the table from, listening to them bear their souls and ache for a soothing response. The memories of the smiles and hugs in offering some gentle healing through oils and a listening ear and I wonder, what of price comparisons. How much does my head need to drive this love, and if it drives at the wrong speed or intensity, will it completely shut down my heart? Then I remember a moment a long time ago when I walked into a room and there stood a man. Every part of my heart resonated with him and we could both feel it. There was not a moment of practicality in the room that night. I didn't ask for a list of his qualifications to hold my heart because I could tell he could. Since that night there have been logistical questions about school, careers, children, houses, and homes, life and death, but at the seat of this love rides a resonance that with each logistical question is an answer. There was and is a place that can be heard. It is deeper than the mind and higher than the emotions, it swells and speaks a language that is soft and rich and needs no ears to hear. Sometimes the hardest part is getting in tune………….. When my kids were studying the violin, their teacher showed me what happens when every string is in tune. When I play an A on the G string, the A string vibrates in resonance to the pitch it recognizes. The richness is compounded and the beauty of the instrument cannot fully be appreciated or heard unless each string is tuned to the next, until it rises and swells in completion of the melody it sings each in harmony and movement with each note. As I walked through life with my beloved, whose heart resonated with mine, sometimes the thing to do defied logic, I remember so many of those moments, some were door slamming, some were terrifying, some were heart breaking, but they each contributed to a melody sure and sweet providing healing and richness that I could only have dreamed about the first moment I saw his face. Each moment was as simple as "Get cape, Wear cape and Fly", except what is not shown in the picture is the fear, the not knowing, what it might look like if you fall. So we see people flying and we don't see their fear, the beliefs that have held them fast, the obstacles they have overcome, we only see the flight. To keep it simple, there is a resonance that you felt when you got the cape, when you put it on and that lead you to leap and fly. The fear will always be real, but to fly it is the voice and resonance of your heart that must be heard and heeded above that fearful message of the mind.

Teach your Mind to Listen………….

Teach you mind to listen…………….. I remember having this epiphany years ago about the importance of listening to my body. REcognizing that discomfort had a meaning and if I stopped to look closely at it I could extract the message of transformation from the experience. I was most proud of the great clarity and felt myself perhaps wiser than others who did not recognize the importance of looking at what was happening in their bodies. I took pride in understanding this from avery physical perspective, not realizing that I was leaving out some vital information. So, I spent years analyzing the reactions of food, medication and other such stimulus upon my body. I was very good at depriving myself of the things I perceived were toxic to my physicality. I got sicker, still proud of myself, not fully understanding the reasons for my demise. Life in all of its beauty and intensity handed my a package that left my spirit in turmoil and suddenly then I began to see there was a significant part of the equation that I had been missing. As I began to try and unravel the message from my spirit, I began to recognize there was a synergetic link between my spirits responses and my body's responses. Many of the things that I had determined to hold and withhold from myself physically were not the cause of the pain, nor of the relief. My pride was gone, left in its wake was the clear understanding that I had no idea of how to listen to anyone, least of all myself. I had built walls of faulty beliefs and all listening and hearing was filtered through lies in my own mind. But, I had no idea what was real, except what I had convinced myself was. How was I to know the real from the pretenses? The listening started with both the beliefs, and with my emotions. First I had to grieve, but I also had to learn. I had no idea what I was grieving for, the obvious had opened the flood gates to experiences and a lostness that I would never had acknowledged without the initiating factors. I cried so many tears I thought there was nothing left, this opened the way for, fear, for regret and then for anger. The learning was an interesting process, for what I needed to learn came as water in a drought. I could not get enough, when in my grief and sadness I could do nothing else, I saturated myself with the filling waters of the knowledge I had been seeking. Concurrently, as the level of consciousness in my mind was being raised, the grief began to ebb from my soul, giving way to other emotions that I had kept locked tightly under the lid of control and beliefs. The patterns of self deception began to give way to a desire, to know, know of life, know of myself, know of the goodness I had been aching for- but most of all for honesty. How deeply I wanted to question when there was one, to stop when I felt I couldn't move any further and ask for what i needed when I had a need. All of these I had deprived myself of, in the construct of my beliefs about who I was and what I could ask for or even want. At the core of the questions being asked and the answers being received was and is the question of what is mine? What can I hold? When do I need help with and what does that help look like? The essence of what each soul is must be understood to be able to teach any mind to listen. The essence of each soul being filled with a unique confluence of desire and contribution to the world. A special place, where you bring the questions and seek the answers that have never been asked in quite the same way under quite the same circumstances, creating a completely unique combination of need and contribution to the world. Finding who you need, it is a question of the heart and the experience. Perhaps the need is to urge you to love and believe in yourself like you never have, perhaps the impetus is a damaging relationship, perhaps a loss or heartache. Finding what you need , well is kind of the same. We learn to hear because things hurt, not because what we hope for lines up. It cannot line up if we have faulty beliefs in the way of our reception of our desires, or if perhaps what we think we want is actually formed from the constructs of a culture that is defining us, into a slow death. Then what we need takes us closer to death, so that we might seek more deeply for life. The answers to the teaching, and the listening come from a place, that defies logic.It holds us so completely without any outward manifestation of truth, that regardless of the response of others, that this deep knowing is felt through every part of our being. We become one and alive in our knowing. Lest this sounds too simple, there is still the noise of the fear, the sadness, regret and anger all happening at the same time, which we must see, and hear and gracefully honor and understand. Without reaching into those places, our mind cannot hear the desire. Without proper processing of the rage, the pleasure and desire are unfelt and confusion holds us and spins us around and around, through and in and out of the emotions again and again until we hold ourselves gracefully respecting our own pain and rage. So, teaching our minds to listen opens ourself up to every possibility, until we are willing to assume we may be out of tune with truth, we can never recognize the resonance of truth that the body and spirit without bias are speaking…………………..

To Trust

To stand as an individual and to hold something unique, yourself is amazing and beautiful. There is nothing or no one that holds any more authority than you do on your needs, experiences dreams, hopes and future. To stand where you have stood is sacred and has never been duplicated in this life by anyone. So it holds true that you are the personal authority on you. Now, as my own personal authority I have learned that there is a lot I do not know and many more things that even if I know them I do not fully understand their applicability in my life. There are others who have gone before that have experienced similar and have insight that may give perspective to my story. But even at that, it still comes down to me. So how do we hold something that has never been held previously in the history of this world?………successfully? What is the foundation that we can trust? Since our experiences not only reflect an outer experience, but also an inner life response to those outer experiences the answer to that question cannot be either an inner action nor an outer action only, but reflect an experience that creates both an inner and an outer representation. Without both we are not whole, nor has our voice really been heard. What are we going to trust to find that ? I want to share some of my experiences around trust to illustrate my thoughts on how I have come to understand this. This is my experience and is uniquely personal, as are my conclusions to those experiences . In my growing up, the culture, both family and church that I experienced did what any organization, or family ought to for young children, they taught about external actions. Hoping that with that knowledge, I would also experience an internal experience that would ground me for life. Young children do need to be taught, they operate on an internal feeling mode without being able to put what they want to do together with an understanding of consequence, delayed gratification, or work as opposed to play. So, it is important to teach things to children that will guide their lives towards being able to achieve their potential, educationally, emotionally, socially and intellectually. As children grow it becomes important for them to use their growing intellectual, physical, spiritual and emotional capacities, much like an musician studying an instrument, as they move over and over again in the same manner they begin to discover what it looks like, feels like and sounds like to master their study. Much the same way a child needs to fall down, make mistakes and experience failure to fully understand the way to success. IT is through their own feeling, their way through these experiences that they become more competent to do it alone. Now here is where the challenge lies. There is a moment in time when it is necessary to step away and change your relationship with the child to friend or mentor, whom they may seek out when they need to. This is where things went awry. In a culture where you as an individual are never trusted, no matter what responsibility you are given there is someone there telling you how to "get it right", because the outer result, and authority is the most important. Appearance trumps everything in this culture. We talk about the internal, with assumption that if you get the outside right the inside will be a given, but when there is a challenge it is the outside we are looking at. And over and over again, little by little the inside trust of oneself, one's inner needs, desires and knowing are eroded. For there is always an outer source for the answer, and even if we use the "feeling", it is not yours, but belongs to God, or a higher power that knows better than you. I have watched the fear over and over again. Sometimes it is easier to see in others than myself. Mostly because seeing it in myself is so painful. I recognize what I am seeing because of my own experience. I hear the fear of not being sure if you got right what Heavenly FAther was telling you, or the other one God told me to do something the I really don't want to do, but I will submit, as though God cares nothing for those desires he put in your heart. Then we get into denying yourself of "all ungodliness", but culturally that has turned into everything that you might want or feel. Someone else for sure knows better than you. because we talk about how the "natural man is an enemy to God". The problem then becomes that anything you want or feel becomes the enemy and you have very succinctly and subtly learned to never trust yourself. From side to side reeling to and fro in fear we struggle to find answers because if they are internal, someone else had to have given it to you. Why did God put desires in our hearts? Why did he make some to love flowers and colors and others to love the science of the sky or earth? So that he could take us all down and put us all into the same mold, wearing our pastels and khakis??? Trust comes from trusting ourselves. Like being a musician comes from practicing. I spent my life being told how my roles should look my clothing, my marriage, my children (, remember the talk "Women Who know"). Inside the sadness built up, until I was lost. I loved my children, my marriage felt marginal and I for sure had nothing to look forward to as a person. The opportunities to choose were around: when I would go visiting teaching, clean my house and do service. I ached to study, to work, but not like I was told that I could. My children didn't want to fit the mold, maybe I had purposely taught them they didn't have to. Life started to unravel from every perspective and there was not one place that I could get right. Many I just didn't have the strength to do anymore. I was so tired, so unengaged in my own life. The last straw happened for me when our daughter's temple marriage ended in divorce. I know that happens, but the circumstances around this happening were betrayal, appearances, abuse,and broken trust and it felt so familiar that I could not wrap my mind around the grief and why it hurt so much. I watched her suffer and suffered with her and finally understood this was all about trust. In order to choose what is best for your growth and potential, your hopes dreams and goals, you need to choose it. You can't choose it with someone in the background, holding more cards than you do. It has to be your desire, your heart your life I realized through this experience and some others that I won't share here that, here I stood having no idea what I could do. I was waiting for the voice of permission by the culture that what I desired fit into the roles, the ideology that someone else had determined for me and that I had trusted, with my whole heart. Not only had I trusted them, but my worth was built upon fitting into the culture. It was clear that I was good enough when……………… and the list is very long, not only is it long, but it never ends. There is an allotted time for grief, if you need one, but if you are not done and need something outside of that, the disapproval was keenly felt. I have personally been pained by hearing a leader criticize those who asked for a release when they felt they could no longer serve. No essence of trusting their soul, but a solid wall of " the man who knows it all" The crowning blow came when I found out the lies that permeated through that culture, they had been told in veiled truths hidden from plain view. And then I felt betrayed, like my daughter. I had trusted that what someone said they were is what they were. I recognized that lies cannot stand upon lies and that truth is built upon a foundation of truth Trusting has to start with truth. Learning to trust myself after all of these years of delegating it to an someone else is challenging. IT requires me to think and feel and discern my own soul. I have to build upon truth. Truth is built upon love, life and light. How can I know, how can I trust myself? Truth is the answer. I am practicing trusting myself and guardedly trusting others. I have days where I feel so afraid, like I am free falling. I am learning a new instrument. I am learning how to listen and to play with with my heart, and my desires. I have moments when I feel so free, like a child, all the parameters of fear gone. And others where I wish to fall into someone holding all of this, but I don't really want that. Learning to trust is new. It has created delightful resonance in my marriage. So amazing to trust like this, the fear gone, the judgement gone, just delight in each other. And with myself, I am amazed at who I actually am. So many things I didn't know, they were all hidden in fear and despair and have now been given new life. So, this is what trust feels like. I am still new at this and am cautious and guarded, like I am playing a little haltingly on my newly acquired instrument, but delighted by the sounds and gratefully looking forward to the potential of the beautiful music to be made.

Separate and Distinct

One of the doctrines that we are proudest of in the church has been the doctrine of the Godhead containing three separate and distinct beings. We pride ourselves on creating something that soothes the intellect's need to understand from a material level God. But, I started wondering about that. I have studied, permaculture, organic gardening, aromatherapy, homeopathy, the philosophy of Romantic science and more. The thing that fascinated me about it all was the connections. Everything is connected. I was so delighted to learn about mycorrhizal fungi, the fungi that connects roots of plants into systems of immune support, that we cannot see and have little understanding of from a surface perspective. When we look at patterns, fractal patterns and how things are created in patterns that are like archetypes connected by virtue of patterning, the whole world is connected through a giant archetypal pattern. Then there is quantum physics and the waves. I don't know all that much, about this, this this is my summary of what would take me a lot more time and study to really understand. Everything is connected by way of energy and how the energy responds depends upon the type of energy that is connects with it, so a like energy builds and dissonant energy breaks something down, really indicating connections everywhere at every level that we cannot even begin to understand on a material level. But if we stop for a minute and are present with ourself, we can feel it. We feel it in a place above our intellectual mind and there is no way to "prove" this on a material level, but it is something we just "know" . When we meet a person that you have a feeling that you knew before, where does that come from. It speaks to energy, the energy they bring and when it meets with yours it builds. Hmmm it feels kind of beautiful and simple when you are looking for something. Now back to separate and distinct, here in lies the problem. The connection of our souls and our energy is totally disregarded in this space. God becomes something outside of us, whose influence we cannot bring in except through our outer action, completely removing our inner heart from the equation. Now, when I say that I mean that the heart is not the source of the connection to the outer, an outer source is the connection to the action. To try and make sense we say words, like " An outer manifestation of an inward commitment". But how is the inner fully manifested? Only by a certain set of parameters that look a little like a successful business executive: driven, hardworking , goal oriented, appearance, numbers and results focused. Go through the actions required for a person to connect to this separate and distinct God. We pray, we read, we serve, we visit, we keep commandments, we go to the temple and the list could go on. A list driven and determined by an external source and a lot of fear. One of the things that I wondered is why the Bible talks about three in one when it talks about the Godhead. One of the other things I have been studying has been the translation issues with the Bible. I have looked at how we take the English version of the Bible, written in the 1500's and completely overlay our understanding of English to the translation that was done hundreds of years ago. Now anyone who has read Shaekespeare, Chaucer, Austen, and I could go on know that the English language was much different, much more complex than it is now. Words have changed meanings and the literality of things has also changed. Now, take that a step further and look at the meaning of some of the passages that we assume we know the meaning of, in Greek or Aramaic, or Hebrew. As I have studied the beginning of the Old Testment in Hebrew, it has blown my mind. What we are assuming is literal, Adam, Eve, man woman, Garden etc, could not possibly be literal when we look at the Hebrew work, especially when we add in an understanding of the consciousness of the people writing this book and their way of communicating through stories. They spoke in parables, or myths. What we are assuming as literal is not likely literal. So, back to the Godhead as three in one, What were they really saying? From what very little that I know of this subject, it seems to me that we must go back to connections, patterns that makes sense to this intuitive place in us. Everything is connected and in patterns and impacts everything else without reservation, no matter how much we will it to be otherwise. So, God, Jesus and the holy spirit, their connection has to be in us. Three in one in our soul, their influence whether that be through quantum energies that we do not understand, or something else, there is that intuitive place in me that knows that when I open to my own soul, my own heart to the world, to desire, to a spiritual space that cannot be explained with words, I find God, all of him, not outside, but inside. I was taught that I must perform in order to have God's grace. In order to be truly connected to my family there is a place I must go, a physical place and physical things that I must do or the connection is lost. It has bred fear and shame in me my whole life. Fear of losing what I love the most. That fear drove me to try and control them the way I was controlled. "Please, jump through these hoops or we won't be enough to be connected forever" What I discovered when I stepped a way from the fear and frantic driving, results , and the appearance focused nature of the church is the beautiful place of connection, one that is just waiting for me to see it. It is this quiet place, where I need not try to convince another of my knowing, so they too can be connected, but a personal place of deep resonant understanding that is quiet. For me many things have changed, prayer for example has become quiet, when I am so busy trying to be heard and get my point across, make sure I am asking for the right things, and the right people and the right experiences, my mind gets caught up in the "rightness" of it all and I become separate from the very source of the power that I am seeking. Prayer has become hearing, hearing the resonant energy in my heart. The list can go on…………….. What I have really learned is that God, Jesus and his spirit are in me, just like my kids have complete access to both my husband's and my DNA and with that they become complete, they are three in one. It is kind of beautiful. They never have to look to find that part of me that they want or need and it becomes an amazing beautiful discovery of me through them. What I have given to them is beautiful and unique. They will each in combination of what they have with their own unique desires and perceptions become someone so totally different, but I can see me in them, like I can see my parents in me. So, in the beginning in Hebrew the Name for God had the meaning of a being discovering himself. Now I understand why. I discover him and he discovers himself through my quiet understanding of who I am, my desires, my heart, the places and people and calling that is resonant only to me in this perfectly unique way. I never want to be separate and distinct again. I want to be connected by every particle of energy and of light and every force that God has created that we do not understand. I am OK with knowing that there are many things that I do not understand. But I know God is in me and I know that He is love and that love does guide us to all truth, all light, all connection, for now and forever. I love being able to let my fear go with this beautiful understanding, the importance of my heart to really understanding love and connection to God, to the world and to everything here. We do know, all of the truth of God and the whole universe is in potentiality within us, our learning is to listen and to hear. The voice is our own heart.