On Being

We are physical beings who inhabit a body that experiences the world through sensation and perception. We are emotional beings who cry, laugh, love, and feel anger. We are thoughtful/mental beings who learn, grow, have interests, think, and create. We are Spirit beings who carry within us the Divine spark of the Eternal.

All four dimensions of our being require and deserve our attention and our intention. Balancing them all in their needs for our Wholeness can be a struggle. Being thrown off balance in one dimension will affect other dimensions. Perhaps it would be wise to take a moment and reflect on what we are doing to nourish each dimension.

Physical. Perhaps the easiest to neglect, we begin to eat for convenience rather than for nourishment, we eat for emotion, we eat for social reasons, we eat unhealthy foods because we are in a rush. We find a myriad of creative excuses not to exercise. Funny how we don’t have time to exercise but we have time for everything else we cram into our day. Some of us don’t get enough rest and sacrifice sleep to our busy lives. Our body is a holy temple that houses the other three dimensions of our being. It deserves our attention and our intention.

Emotional. How are we addressing our emotional needs in our lives? Some are carrying around past hurts and allowing them to poison the present and sabotage the future. Some are involved in relationships with others that are unhealthy and even abusive. Some are harboring bitterness, hatred and intolerance for others in their hearts that is toxic not only to them but in what they are putting out as energy to the world around them. Are we surrounding ourselves with people and experiences that nourish our emotions and grow seeds of love and peace and contentment in our hearts? How are we caring for and nurturing our hearts every day? Our hearts deserve our attention and our intention.

Mental. Throughout our lifetime, we have an opportunity for continual learning, developing, growing, deepening, and expanding. Our minds are a beautiful complex creation capable of reaching the stars (literally). How many of us have become lazy and complacent about continual reaching, challenges, and new learning experiences? Maintaining interest in learning and growing is healthy exercise for our mind, and research shows it can even ward off many forms of age-related deterioration. Our minds deserve our attention and intention.

Spiritual. Each of us realizes that a personal reconciliation with spiritual truth is inevitable. Whatever that means for any given individual, it is something each of us contemplates. This dimension of Being ties the other three together regardless of the belief system. Whether it is prayer, formal religion, nature, creativity, meditation, connecting in Spirit deserves our attention and intention.

Balance in everything.

On Time

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecc. 3:1

Time. A concept that fascinates, intrigues, and captures our attention. We watch movies and television shows about time travel. We spend time, make time, waste time, kill time, keep time, blow time, schedule time, are on time, and short of time. When we are young we can’t wait to be older, and time seemingly stands still. When we grow older we wish we were young again, and we want time to slow down. We have days when time drags and days when time flies. We have activities that cause us to lose all sense of passage of time when we are fully engaged in the flow of the Spirit.

If you have ever had surgery you know what it is like to be put under anesthesia, only to be awakened and feel as if only a minute has gone by when actually hours have elapsed. We go to bed at night and sleep eight hours and feel like the night is so short and the day is so long. Ever sit down for a five-minute nap and wake up an hour later wondering where the time went? Days when we are doing something unpleasant feel very long, and days where we are enjoying ourselves feel very short.

I wonder if our fascination with time is related to our wish to control it. After all, from the time we are born we are on a countdown toward the day when our life will end. This would seem to set us up for a certain sense of urgency with respect to time, a clock inside of us set for the number of days we will live in this life.

Interesting that we think of time as something that occurs outside of ourselves. We wear watches and check clocks and structure our lives accordingly. We watch the sun cycle and know what time it is based on its position in the sky. Consider though how time is something very internal, carried within our being as an internal clock. Programmed inside all living things is a circadian rhythm, roughly a 24-hour cycle which is internal to the life form. Although exterior factors such as sunlight can have an influence on this cycle, it is mostly considered an internal program, largely independent of anything external. We have adapted our internal clock to a forced schedule to meet demands, and we discover the dramatic effects of throwing off our internal clock when we travel to different time zones and suffer from “jet lag”.

Time feels more precious as we grow older, each minute meaning more, and with more at stake with every passing second. We look forward and we look back, a sort of time travel. It would be nice to be able to always live in the moment and savor each second as it comes. Our minds seem to be endlessly busy transporting us to a different time. It makes me wonder how much of now we are actually experiencing.

Interdependency

We place a high value on independence, self reliance, sucking up the hard times in stoic strength, and powering through. Just get over it, and get over it on your own. We like that. Independence is equated with strength. After all, it is weak to ask for help through times of struggle, and depend on support when it is needed, right?

As someone who has gone through times of physical crisis where complete dependency on another was required of me without choice, I learned a few things about dependency and surrendering to it. Total dependency on another human being for every physical need is a humbling experience. But there is an opportunity in these broken moments to embrace the need, to allow someone into our brokeness with us and give and receive a sacred Love in this holy encounter of connection. Love in its purest form…Love that is caring, Love that is concern, Love that is compassion, Love that is kindness, Love that is comfort, Love that is practical, Love that looks past the ugliness and pain, Love that is patient, Love that is … Divine.

The flow of this Love is not only one way, solely received by the dependent one as a gift from the caregiver. Dependency is a gift given to the person receiving it in trust from another person in need. As the caregiver who is entrusted with this sacred gift, she/he receives Love that is trusting, Love that is giving, Love that is grateful, Love that is appreciative, Love that is … Divine.

In everyday life we do not often encounter dramatic examples of dependency. But what about the ways we could reach out in dependency when we are in need and we don’t because we are afraid of being perceived as weak? How many holy moments of healing and connection in Love are sacrificed by our desire to appear strong, capable and independent in all things? Sharing our burdens makes us stronger, not weaker. Where I lack, you fill, and vice versa. Thank God that you are strong where I am not, and thank God that I can ask for your help when I need it. I honor you by trusting you with my need. And I hope that you will trust me with yours. It is through our sharing and our willingness to serve in both the role of provider and receiver that we grow in our strength, humble ourselves, see the holiness in one another, share deeply of our humanity, and view one another through the eyes of Compassion, Kindness, and…..Love.

_____________________________
For my mom

Thoughts about Thoughts

Ever wonder where a thought comes from? Physiologically, thoughts are a complex chemical process based on brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, which are made from amino acids. Their complex interaction is what shifts our moods and changes our mind. Neurotransmitters allow brain cells to network and communicate.

I’m having thoughts about thoughts.

Ever have an experience where for no reason whatsoever someone will pop into your mind and you contact them only to find out how much they needed you in that moment? Ever find that a thought you have leads to a word you speak and guides you into a moment, an encounter or experience that ends up creating meaning for you that was totally unexpected, and may even be life altering? How about thinking a thought that is totally irrelevant to anything at that moment but you receive clarity later when other events occur that give you understanding?

Are we to assume thoughts are random, spontaneous, and merely a coincidence where the precise mix of neurtransmitters has led us to call a friend at the right time?

So if we assume something else, something innate and akin to intuition, what is the source of those thoughts? Are they our thoughts? Are they God’s thoughts? Are they thoughts occurring on a level of consciousness that we are not aware of? And how much control do we have over our thoughts? If a thought is a chemical reaction, then what drives the thought in the first place?

Some people spend a lifetime practicing mind clearing, to remove thoughts that are considered distracting or obtrusive and may bring undesired moods or effects. Which comes first, the emotion or the thought?

So how do you change or eliminate a thought? Particularly when it is a thought that is also tied to emotion, therefore increasing the power of the thought. Meditation, prayer, discipline, intention, mindfulness, awareness?

What are your thoughts about thoughts?

Dying Well

It has always seemed to me as I looked around at my peers that I have gone through a lot more loss through death in my life than most of them did. And it also seems to me that an extraordinary number of my peers have died at such early ages, starting with a friend at the age of 9 who died of bone cancer. The trend continued through teenage and young adulthood years with losses due to various diseases that one does not often associate with the young.

What does it mean to die well? In the second half of the fifteenth century, it was decided to attempt a definition of what it meant to die well. Human beings “learned” how to die. It was thought that if Ars Bene Moriendi, or the “art of dying right”, was learned at a young age, there would be no reason to fear death because everyone would know exactly what steps would occur and what would happen at the hour of his/her death. A manual of sorts for dying right. Given that the Black Death had been taking lives in huge numbers, there simply were not sufficient numbers of priests left alive to attend to the dying. So, Ars Moriendi was an attempt by the church to put together a manual on how to die well on your own. A do-it-yourself guide to dying well. There was a long version and a short version, complete with illustrations made on woodcuts. The long version consisted of six chapters. Basically, the idea was that a dying man would be subject to five temptations that may jeopardize his eternal reward, and so instructions were provided regarding these five temptations and how to avoid them. Instructions were also provided on the seven questions to ask the dying person, and the consolation available to him through Christ’s love. Further instructions were outlined regarding how family members in attendance of another’s death should act at the death bed during the dying period, and prayers that should be recited. Everyone knew their role, including the dying person.

While this seems a bit contrived and the original text of Ars Bene Moriendi is out of time and relevance to us today, this wider concept of dying well, or at least figuring out how to deal with death at all, seems to be something worth some attention. I’ve watched some chaos over the last several weeks that I have seen many times before, and it has convinced me yet again that some practical thought might be a good idea in this regard. We spend our time and money worshipping youth and going to great lengths to avoid aging as much as possible, we pour huge amounts of money into industries such as medicine and pharmaceuticals in order to delay dying and death as long as possible, and we do everything we can to ignore the presence of the elderly, abandoning them to an overburdened nursing home system that warehouses them where they are out of sight and out of mind, forgetting of course that we are all going to arrive at death’s door ourselves at some point. But we don’t like to see them and be reminded of how much closer to death they are than we are. We would rather live in our happy denial about the inevitability of our own mortality and hope that by totally ignoring it maybe we will escape it, or at least we won’t have to think about it until the day actually arrives.

What then IS dying well? And who defines what dying well means? And how exactly is living well related to the idea of dying well? What a sorowful thing it must be to lie on a death bed with bitter regrets and longing for things not accomplished, love not expressed, wisdom not shared, experiences not enjoyed, decisions not made. What a shame that instead of joyous release from a life lived in fulfillment, a person is simply tired of living. What a disgrace that so many die alone and lonely.

Is dying well only as simple as living well, making each day count, living each one as if it truly is the last, and being grateful for the time we are given? I’m not really sure. I just know from my experience volunteering in a critical care unit in a hospital and watching many different death scenarios play themselves out that I am sure it could have been done better. Too many people die alone, being cradled only by machines in sterile rooms with fluorescent lighting, lulled to final sleep by the sound of a monitor and IVs dripping into their bodies as they just drift off into eternity. Surely we can do dying better than that. Surely we have a responsibility to each other in our shared humanity to do better than that. It is not enough to leave it all to medical personnel to take care of it all for us.

Maybe an Ars Bene Moriendi for our modern day is exactly what we need.

Service

To serve is to fulfill purpose. We all have a life purpose, a reason for being, life’s work to complete in service. In service to our purpose and in achieving balance, it might be worth considering the following:

First, how are we serving the Divine connection every day? How are we connecting each day in spiritual life, and are we dedicating time each day for this? We tend to give our time to those things that are priorities in our lives, and if we were to perform a time audit on any given day in our life, perhaps it would be quite revealing. Our spiritual life requires attention and intention. The less time we devote and the more neglectful we become, the more disconnected and isolated we become.

Secondly, how are we serving ourselves? Sometimes a genuine look within is required to examine the ways we are serving, or not serving, our own needs. Those who tend to give of themselves must be careful to remember to also be open to receive. The bank account cannot solely show a record of withdrawals without any deposits or it will quickly become overdrawn. This weariness may lead to physical problems in health, emotional upset, mental anguish, and Spiritual depletion. On the flip side, those who have withdrawn into themselves, serving only themselves in their own personal goals and achievements will only discover discontent and disillusionment. The result we see is a striving for “more” in order to fill a void inside that simply cannot be filled with something “outside”. With a record of only deposits, and no withdrawals, the bank account becomes bloated and lethargic with no movement and no meaning.

Third, how are we serving others around us? Is service to others is in balance with other priorities? Service to others can take many forms, from a simple smile and inquiry into a stranger’s day to volunteering time, to connecting with friends and family in support and encouragement, to any number of things that present opportunities to us every single day that utilize our gifts and talents.

Finally, how are we serving on a global level? A significant portion of our life’s work has to do with how we are effecting change in the world we share for advancement and care and common good. We have a responsibility as citizens of this planet to be respectful of what has been entrusted to our care, both for ourselves and for those who follow us.

Moon Gazing

Creation

Each of us is a creator.

We are Loving expressions of the Creator, and we in turn create as expressions of our Spirit.

Like a prism, the pure white light of your Spirit is dispersed from you in a blazing glorious spectrum of vibrant color expressed through your creation.

We are co-creators, and through one another, we find our own creation.

Common Ground

What do an atheist and a theist have in common?

They both have faith.