Author: spiritflower

Writer, author, lightworker

Worry and Its Antidotes

Our minds often seem to be looking for something to worry about: “Who will be elected?” “Why is that person coughing?” “What’s that noise?” If we go online, we are continually bombarded with potential fears: a new COVID variant, rising costs, droughts, floods, shootings…. These stories feed right into the part of our brain that is a problem-solver. A useful attribute, but if the brain can’t find a solution to a problem, it gets diverted to the worry channel. The “What if” station, which seems to become particularly active at night when we are tired. Worries about yourself, your loved ones, and the whole world can take over your life if you let them. So don’t let them…..

What’s the antidote? you ask. Well, I find that there are many, and I have to remember to be open to them all. Remembering is key. In fact, that’s the number 1 step: Recognizing that you are caught in worrying. That puts a brake on and allows you to step sideways into another frame of mind (and heart). I say “heart” because often it’s the heart’s perspective that unlocks the closed door to the room where you are trapped with your worries running wild.

The heart is an optimist. It sees flowers when you might see poison ivy. It sees love when you are caught in fear or anger. How to connect to the heart? Take a walk outside in a park or anywhere else where you can see trees, hear birds, look up at the sky. Nature is a major heart connector. I take daily walks to keep myself centered in a positive frame of mind, to live from my heart and not from mental fears. If something difficult does arise, my heart’s spirit guides me through.

Friends and family can also be antidotes. Anyone close to you who is a good listener and can help you realize that your worries are not necessarily destined to materialize. In fact, most of the time they don’t. Mark Twain had a great saying, which I used to keep posted above my desk: “I have known a great many troubles in my life, most of which never happened.” Perfect description of how our minds make our worries seem real, when they aren’t. They are passing thoughts, which may or may not take form. Why waste time (and your life) focusing on them?

I’ve learned over the years (and keep learning) to find ways to divert my mind when it goes into worry overdrive. Music and poetry* help. Walking helps. Nature helps. Meditation** and yoga. A favorite sitcom rerun on TV. Eating healthy food I love (e.g., cherries, grapes, avocados). The kindness of those close to me who listen and reassure me with simple words like “Yes, I understand.” (My partner is very good at this.) There are countless ways to find positivity in your daily life and open your heart in the process. Because when your heart is open and really connected to life’s wonders and beauty, worries fade to the background and may disappear entirely.

And if they return tomorrow in different guises, you and I always have effective antidotes at hand. As the wise tell us, “Love is stronger than fear.” I’ve found that to be true, again and again.
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*This song always lifts my heart: “I Am Light” by India.Arie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2E3dBtTtBw. And Mary Oliver’s poem “I Worried” is the perfect antidote: https://www.mindfulnessassociation.net/words-of-wonder/i-worried-mary-oliver/.
**Every morning I listen to Panache Desai’s free online meditation Call to Calm: https://www.panachedesai.com/.

From the Heart

In her recent DNC speech, Michelle Obama urged listeners not to complain but rather to “do something!” Yes, and to that I would add “Be in your heart as you do.” Because being is as important as doing in this world, maybe more so. How you go about “doing” infuses your life energy into what you do. If you complain or criticize, you may negate all that you do. If you are optimistic and hopeful, you amplify your doing with positive energy and inspire everyone around you. The power of open-hearted human connection.

Another word for life energy is soul, who you are at your core. Your soul doesn’t have opinions; it is pure peace, pure love. That energy can break through walls. As Amanda Gorman wrote in her poem “This Sacred Scene”: “While we all love freedom, it is love that frees us all….empathy emancipates.” The loving compassion in your words and actions frees the love in the hearts of those you encounter on your life’s path. One seemingly small expression of love can have a huge effect. For example, Tim Walz’s teenage son Gus, who tearfully said “ I love you, Dad! That’s my dad!” from the audience as Walz accepted the Vice Presidential nomination at the DNC. Gus’s image on video opened hearts around the globe when it went viral on social media.

But you don’t have to be famous or in the public eye to touch the lives of friends and strangers alike in your life. Telling those close to you that you love them is the most precious gift you could give them, which they can then pass on. One smile and kind words to a bus driver or cashier can make their day and ripple through person after person as they share their uplifted spirits with others. Does that sound like a Disney film—too good to be real? Well, try living in that awareness for one day and see how it affects not only others’ feelings but your own. The proverb about the movement of a butterfly’s wings in China affecting weather in North America is not as far-fetched as you may think!

Whatever you feel called to do in your life—volunteering at a Food Bank or animal shelter; activism for human rights or environmental awareness; voting; recycling; donating food or funds; creating art, music, writing; helping a neighbor or family member—is a pathway to active being as well. True soul-to-soul connections. When you consciously live from the heart, you are creating waves of loving-kindness and generosity of spirit wherever you go. You are being and doing simultaneously, and your full human potential is shining out into the world—from your heart.

Experience or Interpretation?

Philosophers, historians, and scientists spend their lives interpreting the world around them. We grow up seeing our world through the filters they have created with their interpretations. Even the language we use to describe the world reflects their views. Yet these very interpretations change from decade to decade, century to century. If we pause and step away from the filters, we realize that these ever-shifting, but seemingly solid “truths” may be keeping us from the immediacy of a life experienced without filters, sometimes called “Presence.”

If you are fully present within each moment, aware of each breath, filters fall away, and the need for interpretation falls away too. Yes, language is useful to human beings for communicating and connecting with one another, but an even deeper inner connection happens in silence. The stillness of your soul “speaks” wordlessly in that silence. This must have been what poet William Blake experienced when he wrote of seeing “a world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in a moment.” The poetry of Presence shows us an infinite interwoven tapestry of light that fills the multiverse beyond imagination. Language falls short as the heart overflows with wonder and awe. The only adequate response is, once again, silence.

This is what I experience every time I walk alone in Nature. There is nothing between me and Presence. Any interpretations I still carry with me dissolve in the stillness. I feel one with all beings and with pure Being itself. I am Presence. In those moments, I am aware that there is nothing else. How to remain centered in that space as I go through my day? Not always easy. Old interpretation filters remain within me and bombard my consciousness from every direction. The key is to keep bringing myself back to the direct experience in front of me.

To take a deep breath and see rather than think about what I’m seeing. To not get lost in my mind and its meanderings. We have a choice in each moment to fully focus on the experience before us or to sidetrack into the thought process it engenders. Distraction happens, it’s human, but we can bring ourselves back to the present moment and the present experience by remembering. Conscious awareness.

Will human beings continue to interpret the world around them in order to understand it better? Probably. Yet at a certain point in our lives, as we live year after year with changing reality filters, we may come to see constant interpretation as somehow falling short of a full experience of life. Interpretation can be fun at times (some might call this blog an interpretation—ha!), but perhaps as a side trip, not the entire journey. Interpretation as one experience in a vast spectrum of experiences.

The key is to keep returning to the conscious Presence within us, which connects directly to the experience before us. To shine the light of awareness on any potential filters and allow words to drop away, if even for a few moments. How can words possibly describe the extraordinary magnificence of the universe we inhabit without getting in the way of our direct experience of it? Silently inhale the stillness and you become one with it all.

Sweet Peas and Dancing Trees

When you move from one place to another, the way in which you view your surroundings day to day changes. Depending on how far you move and how different one location is from another, your perceptional shift can be imperceptible or radical. But it always happens. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I used to move frequently for just this reason: it was like throwing everything up in the air and starting all over again. Whether across town or coast to coast, the world was a different place. Traveling has the same effect. All my senses come alive in new ways. I am consciously interrupting habit, and I love it.

My partner and I recently moved to a condo on the opposite side of Boston from where we had lived for years in various apartments. This was after a move to Florida for two years. It is wonderful to be back in Massachusetts, and this current move has introduced us to an entirely unfamiliar town, quite different from where we used to live. It took a number of months for me to open fully to the change. I really missed where we lived for so many years (which was very close to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, my favorite nature sanctuary). Now, however, gradually, the sense of newness is reawakening my full awareness in unexpected ways.

For instance, last week on my daily walk I discovered bright pink and white sweet peas growing wild in the area next to the woods across from our condo. It was such a delight because it reminded me of my childhood in the Illinois countryside, where sweet peas blanketed the fences with their beautiful blooms. I never knew they could grow wild in the fields like I am seeing here. These were covered with bees and butterflies, and I stood watching them for quite a while in deep appreciation.

This past spring the cherry, crab apple, and red bud trees blooming here were also a surprise, as were the dozens of song sparrows and house finches singing all day from March on. Joined by cardinals, robins, Carolina wrens, gold finches, red-winged blackbirds, and catbirds, they have been a particularly powerful welcoming for me, as I was uncertain how many birds would be nearby. But the woods that surround the condo buildings are a natural habitat for them. Flocks of spring migrants have flown in, as well as birds that remain here all year. The entire area is alive with avian life.

The trees themselves are my latest source of inspiration and wonder. As the weather and winds change, the tall, intensely green oak, maple, beech, birch, and other trees reflect the shifts in air movement in quite dramatic ways. They dance! From our third-floor windows, I watch them quite literally dance with the wind, swaying synchronously like an Alvin Ailey or Martha Graham dance troupe. The music of the spheres seems to move them, and I feel a part of the greater movement of the universe as I watch their collective branch and leaf motion so perfectly in unison against the sky and clouds. Each time I gaze at them is a fresh look at life itself.

Every day now, my heart expands in gratitude for these gifts of Nature that surround me—and for the ability to see and hear them. As my habitual ways of perceiving fall away, the world opens up around me, and I remember that this can happen anywhere at any time. Moving does shake things up, but I can also keep my sensual acuity sharp by living each moment with wide-open awareness. Even walking in the same area in different seasons is a continually new experience. As I look out my window each morning at the ever-changing details of the natural world before me, I feel such joy—and my soul dances with the trees.

Heroes Among Us

When people think of heroes, they often picture those who risk their lives to save lives, such as first-responders. Indeed, these individuals are definitely courageous heroes. Yet, there are others in our communities who are also heroic and touch our lives in many different ways. For instance: teachers, who with dedication and purpose hold the door open to our education and growth as human beings. From teachers, we learn to think, to explore ideas, and to expand our minds to include all kinds of views of the world. One of the greatest gifts that teachers can give is support for being ourselves.

My grandmother, uncle, and aunt were teachers. My wife has been a teacher all her adult life, first teaching history to potential high school dropouts (using Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States), then graphic design to college students and adults, and eventually web design to people of all ages. One of her fondest memories is of a student who told her how kind she was and how much she had helped him learn. Often kindness and compassion are what we remember most about our teachers.

My fourth-grade teacher was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She treated her nine-year-old students with gentleness, humor, and respect for each of us as individuals. My favorite part of the day was a reading hour in which we could read the many varied books she had collected at the back of the room (or any we had brought ourselves). She honored our independent directions and choices in learning and in life. Not all teachers are encouraged to do this, however, especially now.

Today, many local and state laws are dictating what can and can’t be taught, as well as what books are available in libraries. The history of slavery, systemic racism, gender identity, and climate change are prohibited from mention in increasing numbers of educational institutions. The lists of “banned” books grow nationwide (classics such as The Diary of Anne Frank and The Color Purple). Belief systems constrict how we are “taught” and what we read. Teachers are currently facing a particularly heroic path in this country. And they persevere, in spite of the challenges.

I feel such gratitude for the teachers in my life, past and present, wherever I may encounter them. For not all teachers are in classrooms or education venues. In daily life, I learn from friends, as well as strangers, who speak and live their truth in the world. Wisdom can be passed on in so many ways: a shared poem or song; a calming insight; an expansive, inclusive idea. I learn from activists who speak out for freedom and justice (Bernice Johnson Reagon, Howard Zinn), as well as from spiritual teachers whose lives are centered in loving-kindness and peace (Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzberg). To live love by being love is deeply heroic and inspiring.

Sometimes people become heroes in the simple act of being themselves and in doing so teach others how essential freedom of expression is. The transgender community especially embodies this kind of heroism. When we listen openly to those who have been silenced or outcast, we learn to become more compassionate human beings. The courageous voices of everyday heroes who speak and act from their hearts and souls inspire us to do the same. Together we all step into living heroic lives committed to kindness, freedom, peace, and unconditional love.