Show Up, Be Open

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
At times we approach our lives with reluctance, dragging our feet. Attached to the past, apprehensive about the future, we are not fully present to what is happening now. Fear or regret keep us trapped in a repetitive pattern of non-acceptance and non-alignment with the events of life. From the outside, we may look like we’re here, but in truth we are absent. We’ve closed the door to possibility and locked it tightly, believing we are protecting ourselves from disappointment or disaster. However, in shutting down, we lose connection to the threads that tie everything together so perfectly in life’s tapestry. We feel lost and alone. Is it possible to get our bearings and experience connection once again? Absolutely.

In my own life, I find more and more that if I’m willing to be open to whatever is unfolding, that openness transforms my experience in completely unexpected ways. There is a magic that occurs when you just show up in life moment to moment without an agenda, a to-do list, or any preconceptions. In the stillness of Nature, this is easy, but recently I experienced it in one of the most crowded, noisy places imaginable: New York City.

My partner, Anne, and I were celebrating our 35th anniversary, and we had matinee tickets for Dear Evan Hansen. In the back of our heads, however, we also wanted to see Hamilton, even though tickets are hard to get and extremely expensive. We wondered what would happen if we went by the theater to see if anything was available for that night’s show. So we did. There were, of course, no seats, but they told us we could stand in the cancellations line in case something opened up. We decided to come back at 5 after our matinee.

Dear Evan Hansen was amazing and deeply moving, and we left tearfully uplifted, in a daze of emotion. The Hamilton theater was right around the corner, and the cancellations line already had several people in it. We joined them. No expectations, just for the adventure of seeing what would unfold. We spent the next three hours having a great time talking with other people in line from all over the world. The suspense grew as curtain time drew closer.

Then at 10 minutes before 8, someone from the box office came and said to us, “Follow me.” Within 5 minutes, we had tickets (not scalped and thus less expensive) and were ushered to seventh-row-center orchestra seats!! We were so thrilled we were speechless, and we watched the show (one of the best theater experiences ever) practically levitating with excitement. What an incredible anniversary gift!

I feel certain we would have been just fine if no seats had become available since we already were in such an appreciative happy mood. Perhaps it was just that state of being that opened the doors of possibility to even more joy and abundance. The key, it seems, is to appreciate every moment no matter what occurs. The greater wisdom is to be open to all experiences, not just the “good” ones. To realize that all of life is a blessing, even the perceived challenges. We can live our lives like this all the time, trusting, welcoming it all. We don’t have to wait for a “perfect” day or event. Every day, every moment, is perfect for opening your heart and feeling a connection to the magical energy of life flowing through you.

 

What’s in a Name?

Photograph © 2015 Peggy Kornegger
My aversion to the word God began in childhood because of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who regularly showed up at our door to convert us to Christianity. My father used to try to argue them out of their stance that only they knew who or what God is. They, of course, saw my dad as one of the lost who needed to be saved. This was my first experience with proselytizing. As adults, my parents had moved away from their Christian roots to a more “free-thinking” approach to religion. They felt that humans can never really “know” if God exists; it is a personal belief. So I was raised entirely outside of traditional religion. My parents took me to a Unitarian church once, but I wasn’t really interested. They always allowed me my own choices with regard to religious beliefs or practices.

So I had no spiritual framework other than Nature and my parents’ unconditional love, which I eventually recognized as God in its purest form. I remained suspicious of the rigidity of religion, as well as its patriarchal structure, for many years. The word God to me exemplified all of that. It wasn’t until I read Mary Daly’s book Beyond God the Father in my 20s that I began to open to a spirituality beyond religion. Mary asked her readers to imagine God as a verb not a noun—an active verb, neither male nor female. That fascinated me and enabled me to break through to infinite possibilities around the idea of God. The words Source, Divine, Goddess, Great Mystery, Universal Consciousness, Spirit all held meaning for me. I liked having many names for God, which is really unnamed energy anyway. It’s humans who want to name it.

As I began to follow my own spiritual path, I found that everything held a beauty of its own in the human quest to find and understand God. Even traditional religions, before they became distorted by human attempts to concretize and contain spirit, held many eternal truths at their core. I came to my own open-ended spirituality and no longer cringed at the word God. It’s just a word after all. Now I embrace God as the sacred living energy in all things and all beings, even those Jehovah’s Witnesses who believed that their God was the only one. They too are playing a role on the Earth at this time in the greater evolution from separation and “rightness” to oneness and non-judgment.

In truth, we are all God’s witnesses in this world, every one of us a precious being with the ability to recognize divinity everywhere, inside us and outside us. In the deepest sense, there is no inside or outside, only seamless infinite love that connects us all. That is God, beyond words, beyond definitions. You can’t explain, argue about, or understand God with the mind. You can only experience that blessed spirit, that love, as it flows through you and from you into the world.

Shakespeare wrote: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” It doesn’t matter whether you give God a name or definition or even if you believe God exists. The sweetness of that sacred presence is at the heart of your existence as a soul on this planet. And it continues beyond earthly life into infinity. Nameless or named, the universal consciousness that we call God or Goddess is an integral part of our lives. And s/he doesn’t care what term we use. When I let go of my past perceptions of the word God, I came to see that loving divine connection in every single aspect of my life.

Peace Is Everywhere

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
Beneath the noisy thoughts in your head, there is peace. Underneath the emotional upset, there is peace. Behind every human action and reaction, there is an unwavering core of peace. It may be hard to perceive at times, but if you take a deep breath and allow everything to just be as it is, you are immediately brought to the peace that always lives within. I have learned the truth of this over time and through experience. That one breath changes everything, and I am centered in absolute stillness and peace, no matter what else is going on around me.

The world we experience every day is full of excitement and drama, all of it compelling. We are here on Earth to immerse ourselves in those diverse experiences and emerge on the other side with new awareness and wisdom. We may not know it consciously, but our souls are guiding us on our earthly journey. It is a journey through the polarities and extremes of life back to the center of all creation, which is infinite peace and oneness, which is God. To know peace in the midst of every experience—chaos or celebration—is to live in alignment with divine Source energy. It is why we are here (and where we came from), all of us in our uniquely diverse lives: to come back home to peace and radiate it out from the core of our being. More and more, we are coming into conscious realization of this extraordinary process and the transformative power it holds.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, antiwar activists used to chant “Peace Now” and “Give Peace a Chance.” (I was there; I remember.) John Lennon wrote: “War is over, if you want it. War is over now.” Beneath the slogans and lyrics was a truth that we have gradually come to see in the years since then: peace is present now, within each of us, and we can live it individually and collectively when we breathe it into the world with conscious awareness. It’s not about forcing anything to happen. It’s about allowing the peace of the universe to fully emerge from our souls and guide our daily lives, moment to moment.

That may sound “woo woo” and weird, but it’s actually grounded in the here and now. When you take a deep breath (which is spirit infusing human form) in the present moment, you align with the silent power of a “peace that surpasses all understanding” and are centered in the ground of all being. It can shift everything in a nanosecond. Within that living breathing inner peace, there is only love, compassion, and connection. Connection to God; connection to our fellow beings on the planet. When we pause and become fully aware of our breathing and the stillness at our core, struggle, judgment, and the need to build walls against everything and everyone falls away, dissolves. War, within and without, is over in that moment of completely conscious loving awareness.

This is where we are now on the planet, moving toward fully embodying that truth, that destiny. I feel it more and more powerfully every day in my own life and in the lives of people around me. But don’t take my word for it. As you move through your day and life starts to “get to you,” pause and take a deep breath, feel the sweet stillness at your center. Gradually you will begin to realize that peace is everywhere; it lives inside each and every one of us.

Bliss and Bangs on the Head

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Sometimes life is a joyful dance, and sometimes it just hurts, like a really bad headache. When things get difficult, you may feel that you are being punished for failing some invisible test of your character. Or, dramatically, that you are Sisyphus pushing a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down again. This is the human view, thinking we are in complete control of our lives and have made a mistake when things aren’t going well. In truth, we are not in single-handed control, and there are no mistakes. Everything that occurs in your life has been envisioned by God and your soul to bring you to greater awareness of the absolute perfection of every moment.

As we progress on the spiritual path, we gradually learn that sacred Source energy is present in every single experience. It’s in the goose bumps and tears of blissful connection to something greater as well as in the sudden harsh twist of fate that stops you in your tracks and diverts you to a new destination. It’s the hard stuff as well as the celestial celebration. It’s all divinely orchestrated Grace, designed to move you ever closer to complete alignment with your soul. It opens you to seeing that God/dess is present in absolutely every situation and scenario, in every person and event.

I have encountered this lesson again and again when my thinking mind jumps in with a judgment about what is occurring instead of accepting it all as part of my soul’s evolution. Gradually I am learning to trust that there is always a hidden blessing in what seems like a difficult challenge or painful experience. The times when I cry with frustration or hurt are as sacred as the times when I cry with joy at feeling God’s presence. Nothing on my life’s path is meant to torture me, only to expand my awareness of the divine connection that exists all the time within me.

So I continue. Each day is a new opportunity to see with my soul’s eyes and live in full awareness of that unbroken connection. That is why we are here on Earth—to experience it all and know it is all God. And to know ourselves as God as well. There is nothing that is not that infinite cosmic consciousness that we have named God or Goddess, or perhaps more appropriately the “Great Mystery.” We try to understand and explain with logic why things are happening the way they are, but that really leads us nowhere, except to pushing another rock uphill. If I let go completely and trust that it’s all unfolding just as it’s meant to, stress and expectation fall away, and I am at peace in the center of my life.

Peace of mind is what lies waiting for us when we surrender thinking to just being, allowing everything and everyone to just be as well. Peace on earth begins with peace of mind, and peace of mind comes from deep awareness at the soul level. This is where we are all headed. If you or I sometimes forget, that is fine too because really we can’t fail. We are evolving and expanding into complete fulfillment of our destiny as conscious spirit in physical form. Actually, it already exists within us. Take a deep, fully conscious breath, and you are there—now.

 

Losing Heart and Having Heart in Troubled Times

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger

When you “lose heart,” you become discouraged and lose hope. When you “have heart,” you keep your faith and trust in spite of the odds. We are living at a time in which both of these options present themselves. The shadow side of our collective consciousness in the United States is coming to the fore, and we are seeing people fiercely hanging on to privileges and prejudices as if their lives depended on it. In truth, it is their identities, their egos, that depend on belief systems based in hierarchy and entitlement.

The 1% believe they have earned their place at the top of the heap and that those they have stepped on and profited from in order to get there are losers and leeches. Minorities and immigrants are targeted as threats to an elitist, white-male status quo. The exact opposite of the values of democracy and equal rights that this country is supposedly founded on. Of course, those founders were also white, male, and many were slaveholders, so the underside of American “freedom” has always existed.

When the rest of us look at this scenario, our hearts are tested. Will we lose hope or will we keep our faith that the imbalances will eventually right themselves? To paraphrase (and update) Thomas Paine: these are the times that try human souls. Can generosity, compassion, and loving-kindness eventually prevail in a society like ours where the accumulation and hoarding of monetary wealth and material possessions, as well as the oppression of entire segments of the population, is so widespread? Classism and racism overlay our so-called democratic society, to say nothing of sexism.

Everyone’s consciousness is affected by this skewed worldview. Many with more don’t want to give up what they have in order to assist others who have less. The media promotes consumerism and the lifestyles of the rich and famous, as if these were behaviors to aspire to. The artificially created “need” to buy and keep buying invades our daily lives. Unless we make a conscious decision not to participate. Unless we choose sharing over greed, caring over selfishness, simplicity instead of overconsumption. Unless we choose to live from our hearts and not our conditioning.

All the extremes and polarities are being displayed in full view of the world. The advent of  a belligerent, self-aggrandizing approach to life is pervasive. There is an increasingly harsh and ruthless holding on to privilege, often accompanied by hatred of all those who stand up for their rights as equal citizens. Yet, there is a hollowness to these defenders of entitlement. Their hearts seem to be empty, their minds filled with delusions of superiority based on money and power. Appearance is more important than truth. But there is only so long they can maintain that facade. Their extreme behavior is the death rattle of an outdated paradigm, doomed to disappear like the dinosaurs.

Hope for the future lies with those who are, everywhere on this planet, now awakening to a conscious awareness that sees unity and commonality, not separation and divisiveness. People whose lives are lived heartfully and soulfully in deep connection with their fellow beings. Generosity of spirit prevails. You don’t hear as much about these individuals, because the media tends to focus on disaster and destruction instead of imaginative and inspired alternatives to power and elitism. But they/we are out here, and we are not going away.

Even though at times the odds seem overwhelming, we mustn’t lose heart. In having heart, in living heart, we open the heart of the world to greater compassion and caring so that eventually everyone, every soul on this Earth, can step out of separation and live in oneness. A critical mass of love and kindness has the power to shift everything. You never know when even the most recalcitrant of dinosaurs will have a change of heart. In the long run, hate can never “trump” love.