Tag: connection

Celebrating Solitude

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
Even though I’ve been in a couple for 35 years, I love being alone. It’s been a part of my life since childhood. I grew up as an only child on five acres in rural Illinois, where I spent a good portion of my childhood playing outdoors alone (or with my dog) and sitting in trees reading. I don’t ever remember feeling lonely. My parents and I were close, so I was with them a lot too, and I had school friends who came to visit, but at the core of my life was time spent in solitude. It became the peaceful center from which I lived outward into the world. As an adult, I always relied on time alone to come back to myself, away from jobs and social situations. Don’t get me wrong—I loved my friends, but there was a certain point at which I had to step away and be alone. It was like breathing to me.

I have so many memories that involve finding joy in being by myself. One of the most vivid was when I worked for a senator as a student intern in Washington, DC, in college. One lunch hour I wandered around outside the Capitol Building alone and then sat in the sun in a quiet spot where no one else was walking. I can remember having a sudden flash of absolute exhilaration when the thought crossed my mind, “No one else on Earth knows where I am right now.” There was something incredibly exciting about that to a 19-year-old living in a new city, trying out grown-up life on her own. I’ve never forgotten that feeling—of being an alive, independent, free spirit in the world.

When I took up bird-watching many years later, I felt a similar thrill being alone in nature: a magical aura that surrounded a sudden encounter with a migrating bird in a bush or tree. If I were absolutely still and silent, the birds came closer and continued with their bird lives as if I weren’t there. It was a precious gift. There were even times when a wood thrush or warbler would land in a branch close to me and sing its heart out. Some kind of special connection occurred then—a living awareness that passed between us. I treasured those moments. It was perhaps my first conscious experience of the spirit of life that is in all beings.

After I embarked on a spiritual path in my 30s, time spent alone in meditation or contemplation became central to my journey. I found it absolutely key to have those daily periods of solitude in order to connect with my own soul and with God. In solitary silence, “stillness speaks,” as Eckhart Tolle has written. Divine connection is an inner experience that comes only when we set aside all external distractions and open our hearts and souls to something greater, beyond the material world.

These quiet moments are extremely precious to me. They are at the core of my life as a human/spirit on this Earth. Ultimately, too, they bring me closer to those around me. I am fortunate in having a life partner who understands and supports my wish to have alone time. She too needs time to herself. When we come together from our separate solitudes, our connection is even deeper and more loving.

Words are often unnecessary with friends and family who share this kind of connection. Something beyond verbal language is passing between us. We recognize and celebrate one another’s souls when we are together and carry our heart connection with us when we are apart. This is life on Earth at its most expansive and wonderful. To me, time spent alone is an essential part of being human, of being conscious spirit in physical form, which is why we incarnated at this particular time on this particular planet. The world is full of so many distractions. It is only in stepping aside and looking inward that we find the true nature of who we are in this extraordinary universe. Every day I say a prayer of gratitude for the solitude that is a sanctuary of peace in my life.

 

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.

That’s Wonderful

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger
When I told a good friend recently that I had lost my connection to God and could feel nothing during meditation, he responded, “That’s wonderful.” A month or so later, when I told him that the house where my partner and I rent our apartment was for sale and we would probably have to move, he again said, “That’s wonderful.” In both instances, he was expressing the wider perspective that something greater often arises out of a seeming loss. That turned out to be absolutely true. In the first case, the emptiness I felt opened me to an even deeper and more expansive divine connection; I had to be swept clean in order to receive it. In the second case, that For Sale sign was indeed a “sign” that it was time for Anne and me to move, which is now becoming an exciting exploration of possibilities.

My friend’s responses were a perfect reminder and reflection of my own evolving consciousness as I more continuously see “wonderful” myself in all of life’s day-to-day events and changes. To be able to look beyond the present circumstances at the full spectrum of life’s experiences and possibilities can be a tremendous comfort. For nothing is good or bad except in our judgment of it. The things we deem to be “bad” may turn out to hold within them the biggest blessings of our lives. Ultimately, everything that occurs is for our soul’s evolution and expansion into light, and indeed, that it is incredibly wonderful. Gradually, we learn to accept “what is” and allow the process of life to unfold without judging or categorizing; to celebrate all aspects of life as “wonderful” because from the vantage point of the soul, they are.

There is an old Chinese parable about a farmer whose life gains and losses over the years were viewed by his neighbors as good or bad luck. His own reaction was always noncommittal. Each time, the “bad” ultimately held the “good” inside of it. His son’s broken leg from a fall spared him from being taken away to fight in the emperor’s war. The wisdom in this teaching story is that judging current circumstances is essentially useless because everything is always changing, and nothing is just one thing. I have come to see this as a universal truth as I live my life and gain greater awareness about the interconnectedness of everything.

When we focus on the present moment, and practice coming back to it in meditation, we are no longer at the mercy of mental meanderings into the past or future. In the “now,” experiencing the inner peace of our heart and soul, all is well, and nothing is good or bad. We connect with the God within and see our lives with conscious awareness of the infinite expanse of beingness. This perspective allows us to let go of the need to predict or conclude, to anticipate or fear. Instead we just surrender to the divine trajectory of our own lives; our hearts are open, and we trust that whatever happens is for our greater growth and soul evolution.

For me, this has repeatedly proven to be the most expansive and wise way to live my daily life. That didn’t happen overnight; it’s an ongoing practice, and there is sometimes a mental delay of several minutes (or longer) before I re-center my consciousness in the moment. The breath is my touchstone, because you can’t breathe in the future or the past, only in the now. So when I take a deep breath and then let go completely, suddenly everything is indeed wonder-full, and I see life as the miracle, blessing, and adventure that it truly is.