Tag: being

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.

Rewriting the Lyrics of Our Lives

Songwriters sometimes rewrite their lyrics to expand or change perspective. Today, we are all called to rewrite how we see ourselves and our lives in the 21st century, to be more truthful, more inclusive, more expansive, more heart-centered. Not only in the U.S. but everywhere in the world. We think we belong to countries, to nationalities, to races, to religions, to belief systems. In truth, we are none of those. We are immigrants on this planet, traveling here from somewhere in the cosmos to sing our human songs. We think we have identities as we move from place to place. Those identities arrive at birth and depart at death. What is left is a soul, traveling light. In a rewrite of the lyrics of our lives, the words will fall way and there will be nothing but that light.

The longer I live, the less I hang onto. Even the language I use to describe my own feelings and thoughts flows through me but doesn’t really stick. It is spirit speaking in the mother tongue of my soul, and I am just a vessel through which it pours. Each of us is. We are souls passing through. We speak and listen, but it is our hearts that discover the deepest wisdom, in silence, in love. Human/soul connection beyond lifetimes.

When those we love pass from this dimension to another, life can take on a limitless, ethereal quality. Memories are both close and distant, bright and dim. Everything merges into one somehow. I miss my parents and friends who have died, but they are also with me. Life on Earth is what we shared, but there is something larger than those lives that holds us together in ways that are outside of language or description. Infinite consciousness.

In recent years, I find myself floating in the intangible: something as fleetingly beautiful as a morning sky or a summer’s sunset. And it is not just one thing. It is everything. I walk but really I am carried. Music carries me. Birdsong carries me. Poetry carries me. Love carries me. I speak but I am speechless. The lyrics of my life rewrite themselves without any effort on my part. They are both vivid and neutral. They shift with the changes in light and sound and being.

In the end, it is grace that carries us. We are part of something we can only sense but not fully articulate. Early in life, we are immersed in the wonders of living. Death is distant. Then it comes closer, perhaps touches us in a sudden unexpected way. It is then that we begin to see a wider view. The lyrics we have written to describe our lives no longer entirely fit. We realize that at the deepest level, all of us, no matter our background, race, or beliefs, share a common destiny and are woven from common threads. The tapestry of life on Earth enfolds us in its wondrous complexity. When we finally see that fully, “lyrics” fall away, and there is nothing left but the grace of being and interbeing.


Writing as Release

I have expressed myself through writing since I was a teenager. I always kept a journal, and after college I began to publish articles and poetry in feminist and political publications. Later my writing became more focused on spiritual exploration. In 2012 I began an ongoing online blog in which I write about a variety of subjects, mostly framed within my own life experiences. I write both to give voice to my inner thoughts and feelings and to connect with others. Only recently have I begun to see my writing as a way of processing all that I am living through day to day and year to year. It helps me to resolve my feelings and to see a bigger picture.

In multiple situations and events, such as moving state to state or the passing of friends/family, I have written my way to peace of mind in the midst of uncertainty or sadness. In the last 12+ years, I have felt the presence of spirit within the words that come through me to be written. It is not my mind that chooses what to say but my soul. It is guiding me to align with an inner peace that always exists within; it is showing me wisdom beyond anything I could discover with mental efforting. When I let go completely, the sentences flow from somewhere outside my physical form. In that letting go, I experience my life flowing in the same way.

More and more now, I see that the realm of infinite consciousness is the source of all I am and all I express as a human being. Soul presence embodied on planet Earth within what we have named time and space. Sounds nebulous perhaps but my experience of “something greater” in my life becomes more vivid and all-encompassing with each passing year. Especially when I sit down to write. Often it is the ups and downs of daily life that move me to sit at the computer and allow that greater something to speak through me. Ultimately that is exactly what brings me comfort and release. At the deepest level it is spiritual connection, or God awareness.

Not everyone thinks of life in terms of a God or Source energy. To some, belief in divine intelligence is a human invention and arises from our own fears and inability to accept uncertainty. Perhaps. Yet throughout millennia, sages and explorers of consciousness have come to profound wisdom about the nature of life/death and eternity within a spiritual framework. Actually, at this level, words and explanations become unimportant. What is discovered/experienced is entirely outside the realm of language and interpretation. What my/your soul experiences is nonverbal.

So then how does writing come into it? For me, as I write, something within me translates the nonverbal experience of God and infinity into human language. It is not literal but an approximation, meant to evoke the feeling of soul connection, of heart-centered awareness. A living metaphor perhaps, just as a poem or piece of music brings to life some ineffable something within us. Not to put too grandiose a spin on it, but this is the closest I can come to describing what writing is to me. It is a sacred activity. It brings me home to my own soul and the soul of all things. It releases what I have held separate and makes it one with all beings and Being itself.

Timeless Slow Motion

The experience of calendar- and clock-oriented time has seemed to fade and often dissolve completely over the past two to three years of radical changes in the world. I find that many people I know comment on how they often have no idea what day or month it is until they stop and think about it. Life has given us the opportunity to live the ancient wisdom of present-moment awareness in which time does not exist. Now is timeless. There is only Presence. It may be hard to get used to at first, but gradually there is a letting go into a greater sense of being alive, one that is not constrained by human parameters or mental constructions that explain the world. Being alive and being aware of life is all there is.

In 2018 I moved from Massachusetts to Florida; in 2020 I moved back. Within that span of time, a pandemic brought the world to a standstill. Busy-ness of all kinds subsided. My own life became mainly morning meditation, yoga, writing, and daily walks on a nature trail outside my door. Most other things fell away. In 2021­–2022, as I lived through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, even my past identity began to dissolve. I let go completely into appreciating each second of my life. Today, as people try to get back their pre-pandemic lives and return to “normal” activities, I find myself reluctant to become “busy” again. My entire being wants to move in slow motion and be fully present with a minimum of activities, such as writing or walking in Nature. I am most at peace then.

There is no time in Nature. When I walk quietly among the trees, listening to the call of the wood thrush or cardinal, I do not count the minutes and keep track of how much time has passed. I am fully in the moment and nothing else exists. The color of the sky and the movement of the clouds engage my heart and soul. I frequently stop and just stare at the beauty around me. A flower, butterfly, or bee is a tiny miracle; if I walk swiftly, I miss them entirely. “Slow” is a gift; “timeless” is a gift. I am grateful for all that happened in my life that brought me to this space of just plain “being.”

Major events, whether personal (like cancer) or global (like COVID), shatter reality and give us the opportunity to see the world and ourselves with fresh eyes and no past frameworks. If we remain in this open space without refilling it with previous mindsets that keep us spinning in place, then limitless possibilities open up all around us. The most powerful of which is just to see the world each morning with clear vision and no preconceptions.

Allow the present to move you; don’t try to control it or force it along a particular mental path. When you accept each moment as it arises, your soul can guide you in living a life that peacefully flows and flowers, even in the midst of illness or extreme changes in the external world. Indeed, maybe this is why crisis comes to humans—to teach them fluidity and gratitude. Perhaps our souls chose these particular lifetimes on Planet Earth to help humanity evolve into full conscious awareness of timeless presence and connection to something greater in the universe. Slow down, smile, and watch time disappear.

Shedding

In the second week after my first chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer, I began to lose my hair. Like a white angora cat, I shed hairs everywhere: on my clothing, in the shower drain, on my chair, in my hairbrush. Sometimes they drifted down onto my shoulders like cherry blossoms in the springtime; other times they clumped like small snowdrifts on my pillow. All of it strangely fascinating to me, as if they were bits of my identity falling away, freeing me even further at a soul level.

That may seem an odd way to view it; yet the process feels symbolic of a larger shedding that occurs as I clear out the clutter of a lifetime of identities. To be human is to move through many experiences and identities. I used to gather identities like flowers in a basket (flower child, activist, feminist, lesbian, writer, editor, spiritual seeker), feeling glad that I was eclectic and not tied to any one self-identification. I felt freer that way. As the years went by and my spiritual practice expanded, I began to realize that freedom is a much more expansive designation when viewed from the soul’s perspective.

The soul is pure being. It has no identity in the way we think of that term. The soul comes into physical form to experience life as a human and to evolve and expand its beingness. It has no attachment to any one identification we may claim as we pass through our lives. When we begin to drop attachments to particular identities, the soul moves to the forefront of our experience. We begin to experience being in an entirely new way. And we see more clearly, and intensely, the world we are passing through here on Earth.

I first experienced this “dropping” of identity when years ago (2005), I was invited to travel to Guatemala with Maya elders Mercedes and Gerardo to participate in ceremonies at sacred sites there. I was both honored and excited because the Mayan cosmology held great meaning for me. However, the “gateway” I had to pass through was the fact that women traditionally wear long dresses at every ceremony. As a lesbian feminist, I had not worn a dress in 30 years; consequently I found my attachment to that particular identity being challenged. In my heart, I knew there was no way that I would ever turn down such a precious invitation from the elders. So that meant opening to a different way of being in the world. At the time, I experienced this as a complete falling away of who I had been before and going to Guatemala “naked” at the soul level. I honored the Maya tradition by wearing a beautiful long skirt, and in the process, I stepped into magical interdimensional experiences at the sacred ceremonies, beyond language and definitely beyond identity.

As I continued on my soul journey over the years, I found that the more I dropped identification with any identity at all, the more I experienced a beingness without beginning or end …. and the more I knew God, or Spirit, in a way I never had before. Ultimately, I came to understand that the final realization is that all identity is an illusion. Our identities are merely the costumes, or disguises, that we put on for this human ride; when we take them off, all that remains is Spirit.

So this is where I am now. Yet another identity falling away with the hair on my head. Perhaps one of the last identifications and attachments: to my physical form and what I look like. Once again, soul-naked before the universe. One definition of the word bald is “undisguised” or “unveiled.” The process of life often removes our protective veils and disguises if we don’t do it ourselves. Either way, it is liberation for the soul. I can feel that. To live my life as pure spirit, unfiltered and free. It is our collective human destiny to shed identity and shine the light of soul presence in this world.