Tag: connection

Gifts from God

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger
The people in our lives are gifts from God, not there by happenstance but by design. And not to be taken for granted or overlooked but instead continuously recognized and treasured. In my day-to-day life, my spiritual path repeatedly draws me inward to a profound divine connection. Within that experience, I feel as one with everything in the cosmos. I love those experiences. They teach me again and again why I am here on this planet. Yet, what I forget sometimes is that I am also here to connect with my fellow human beings, to be a part of their lives and have them be a part of mine. Meditation and inner journeys are extraordinary, but this Earth experience when shared at the deepest level with others is equally extraordinary. Without it, your heart can never crack open wide enough to let the divine in—or out.

A few Saturdays ago, I spent the day with two friends, a married couple whom I’ve known for over thirty years. In the morning, my partner Anne and I helped her mulch their garden with several other neighbors and friends, and in the afternoon we visited her husband at a rehab center in Boston, where he was recovering from chemo treatments for cancer. We hadn’t seen him for several months, and our visit was a surprise. The expression of welcoming joy on his face when we walked in was enough to bring tears to all of our eyes. After we hugged and then chatted a bit, we went to nearby Waterfront Park for an impromptu picnic. As we watched the boats and people come and go and basked in the spring sunshine, we told stories and shared experiences, past and present, that brought us all even closer together. Moments of laughter and tears that mean so much when old friends reunite, especially in the midst of life challenges like they have been facing.

And it was precisely that old friendship and those challenges that allowed us to drop everything nonessential from our conversations (and for them, from their lives). At times like these, we remember what is really important: to look in another human being’s eyes and say “I love you.” And we did. Nothing else matters. Nothing. So many times, we get caught up in our own lives and forget that essential truth, that key to all human relationships and to all of life: Love. Openly expressed and shared. We are here for such a relatively short time on this planet. Why waste a single moment in distraction or separation of any kind? We all feel joy, we all feel pain, our hearts encompass every possible human emotion. We are alike, we human souls in physical form—let’s not lose sight of our essential oneness.

When Anne and I came home, we felt we had been blessed with such a sacred experience in that unplanned day with our friends. The laundry undone, the emails unanswered—what did it matter? To-do lists are meant to be tossed aside in favor of spontaneous life moments that God presents us with every day. The people in your life are gifts from God. Their lives are precious, as is yours—don’t chose routine, or even meditation, when a human/divine soul stands before you ready to share their heart with you. That is why you were born, why I was born. Let us remember together the love that links our lives.

Stop Suffering

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger
So much of our personal suffering is self-imposed. We struggle against the way life is unfolding, trying to force certain outcomes. When we fail, we are miserable. Our minds replay our supposed failures over and over again, triggering memories of past “failures” so that finally we are drowning in an avalanche of suffering. We see ourselves as victims, barely able to carry on beneath the burden of unfulfilled dreams, of life’s unfairness. The promise of abundant possibilities and self-fulfillment seems to elude us again and again. What if we are only living out our mind’s perception of life—a self-constructed illusion that keeps us trapped in struggle and unhappiness? Our personality self, or ego, which is connected to the mind, engages in the world at the level of effort and trying. Our souls exist in connection to a Higher Self, or God. When we completely surrender to something greater than our own individual personality selves, we let go of suffering as a way of life.

I’ve been learning about the power of surrender for a number of years. The first level for me was to recognize that life is not about one-focus doing, it’s about being, out of which doing arises organically. When you surrender to something that is beyond the mind, beyond the will—whether you call it God/dess, universal consciousness, source energy, the name doesn’t matter—you step into the flow of life. I found that the more I let go of desired outcomes and objectives, the more I felt connected to that flow. Life unfolded perfectly without my even trying. Now, by “perfect” I don’t mean everything was necessarily what I wanted to experience. What was perfect was my letting go of it being perfect! At a deeper level, I accepted all of life’s experiences, not just the “good” ones, those my mind thought should happen. When I did that, I stopped suffering: on some level, everything was “good,” because it was part of a greater soul plan for my life.

Not everyone believes in soul plans. I do—perhaps because I’ve repeatedly experienced the power of that trajectory, that connection to God and soul purpose. Recently, I was working hard at learning a new kind of writing, one that I had never attempted before and knew nothing about: a play. The idea of doing it was exciting; the day-to-day reality was at times intimidating, overwhelming. I persisted because of my own internal commitment to do it, but I proceeded at the level of effort, of difficult daily mental work and figuring things out. There were moments of inspiration, but overall, I was not experiencing the flow that I have come to know in my writing when something beyond my personality self takes over and speaks through me. In spiritual writing, which has been my main focus in recent years, this connection comes easily for me. I am a conduit, and my own particular writing abilities are in service to that. In attempting something new, I felt none of this.

The solution came, of course, in letting go even more. My morning prayers of gratitude and surrender expanded to the point where I was only asking to be of service to God: “If this is what I’m here to do, please show me the way. I surrender to whatever my soul’s agenda is.” Last year, during a health crisis with my eyes, I had surrendered in much the same way, and everything opened up around me. This time I went even deeper, and once again I was lifted out of the entanglements of my own fears and efforting into connection and flow. I began to hear my characters’ voices in my head and transcribed their conversations into the play. I witnessed their lives unfolding, just as mine was. My mind became the tool of my soul and helped me actualize the creative flow I was experiencing. I stopped struggling.

And the miraculous byproduct of this new level of surrender was an even deeper relationship with God, the spirit within that is always with me. The vast loving energy of a universe that is eternally ready to support our soul’s evolution here on Earth. One morning, as I was praying at the end of yoga, on my knees in child’s pose, surrender went through my body like electricity, like a flood, leaving me shaking, with goosebumps all over and tears streaming down my face. The divine connection was so powerful that I felt an inner vibration for days afterward. Now, day to day, I feel even less attached to the outcome of anything, in writing or in life. I’m here to live my soul’s purpose, and I accept wherever that takes me. Suffering or struggle, if it arises, passes very quickly when I remember that one guiding principle.

 

Time Passing, Time Standing Still

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger

At times, it seems that our lives are moving so fast that we can’t catch our breath. At other times, it can seem that we are stuck, that time is standing still. Yet, past, present, future; birth, life, death; and time itself are all mental concepts, distinctions that we humans invent and superimpose on the world as we try to make sense of it. Beyond the mind’s created parameters is eternity. Occasionally, we touch it with fleeting awareness: In moments of great love or great loss, the mental boundaries fall away, and there is just presence without beginning or end. The deeper we live into life, the more we open to this perception.

Over the course of a lifetime, if we are lucky, there can be a gradual disengagement from the arbitrary cognitive constructs that seem to hold life together but actually keep us from seeing the infinite universe we are part of. William Blake writes of holding “Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour.” Poets and mystics help us step over the threshold of the world we perceive as real into a limitless open space of sheer beingness where time passing and time standing still become one.

One night last month, for no particular reason, I thought of my parents and the ages at which they had died: 81 and 94. It gave me pause. I don’t often think of my own age, and I usually perceive the future as open-ended. But, of course, we have no idea how long we have on this Earth. I could live to 100+. Or I could die tomorrow. Thinking of my parents’ deaths made mortality more “real” somehow. I asked myself: In the time left to me, how do I want to live?  A question I have usually answered in the living itself—embracing the full adventure, aware of each precious unrepeatable moment. The answer evolves as I evolve.

Last year, in the midst of a health crisis, I answered that question with a prayer in which I surrendered my separate human identity to something greater: to divine connection, in service to God/dess. That moment of surrender shifted everything for me and continues to, on a daily basis. When I thought of my parents last month, I surrendered again—to the unknown trajectory of my own life and death as a physical form here on Earth. The human ego, or personality self, struggles to survive at all costs, but our souls are eternal. When the personality surrenders to the soul’s greater wisdom, an inner alignment of human and divine takes place. We start to experience life as beautifully orchestrated, beyond time. We step into a flow of living energy that is limitless and multidimensional.

Only the soul sees this greater universal picture. In recent years, I’ve found that there are some experiences that cannot be described, that elude language entirely. They are encounters of the heart and soul that are primordial and timeless. Only in silence are they fully received. When we are present at a birth or a death, when we hold another close to our heart with love, when we experience God’s presence—these are times of wordless immersion in the mystery of life. Time ceases to exist. These are the truest moments of all, when we know that everything is unfolding exactly as it’s meant to. My life, your life, all of life, is of a piece, a miracle that defies description.

It’s All About Love, Always

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger

A few weeks ago, I watched the four-part series “When We Rise,” about the recent history of the LGBTQ community in the U.S. and the fight for our basic human rights, including marriage equality. At the end, I felt emotionally exhausted, like I had relived the last 39 years of my life. I lived in San Francisco in 1978 at the time of the California Briggs Initiative to ban gay/lesbian schoolteachers, thankfully defeated, and the shooting death of gay city supervisor Harvey Milk. In 1981, I moved back to Boston, right before the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, which would take the lives of thousands of gay men. Every year I took part in the AIDS Walk to raise money for those with AIDS, and I lost dear friends on both coasts to this terrible disease. In 1987 and 1993, I marched on Washington for LGBTQ rights and freedom, and each year there was a Pride March in Boston (in June, to coincide with the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York). Those were years of great sadness and loss, and yet the love in our hearts and the hope that together we could bring about change kept us going.

In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same sex marriage, and the movement for marriage equality continued to gain momentum. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act), and in 2015, it ruled in favor of same sex marriage nationwide. My partner and I, who had been together for 31 years, married in 2014, with family and friends celebrating with us. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the national consciousness had shifted significantly toward love and inclusiveness over bigotry and hatred. We all had gotten so used to living with secrecy, fear, and the threat of violence that when acceptance appeared, it was almost shocking—extremely emotional and powerful for each of us. But it had not really been sudden; years of activism and private and public “coming out” had brought about the change. The rainbow lights shining across the country on national monuments, as well as the White House, reflected the magical new reality we were all experiencing.

However, today in 2017, a new administration, accompanied by a conservative backlash, is already beginning to whittle away at our hard-won gains, beginning with transgender rights. LGBTQ community members are currently the top target for acts of hatred in the Boston area. We are not done. Freedom, equality, and justice for all people are ideals that must be lived and upheld every single day. We do that by not giving up, by not allowing outrage or depression to overrule the universal compassion and kindness in our hearts. Intolerance still exists, but we are here to live our love, and we won’t stop. Not now, not ever. The music of our hearts and souls will carry us forward.

Photograph © Peggy Kornegger

I have changed in so many ways in the last 39 years, yet the core of me remains the same. I too am here to live love in the world. When I am meditating alone or in spiritual circles, when I am marching in demonstrations, when I am speaking my truth, I am centered in that love. A living prayer for love that includes friends and strangers alike around the world. Our hearts and souls link us together into one family. We are all connected, we very diverse humans on planet Earth, reaching out for freedom, equality, and the right to self-expression. In the deepest part of our being, we are not so different; we all want similar things in this life. Ultimately, it’s all about love. Always.

In Memoriam: Gilbert Baker, who in 1978 created the first rainbow flag in San Francisco, died last Friday, March 31, at the age of 65. That first hand-dyed and hand-stitched rainbow flag became the international symbol for LGBTQ pride and freedom.

The Deepest Peace

© 2016 Anne S. Katzeff / Artist
© 2016 Anne S. Katzeff / Artist

I have discovered that the more I want a situation or person to either change or stay the same, the more I suffer. Yet I have also found that there is a peaceful core within me that understands impermanence and nonattachment. These two Buddhist principles have helped me accept the transitory nature of life. When I am deep in meditation, experiencing profound inner peace, I see clearly the truth of impermanence (nothing, good or bad, ever stays the same) and how letting go of attachment to a particular outcome frees me from the mental/emotional habits of the personality self. At the soul level, all is well, unfolding perfectly for my own expansion and evolution.

Embracing impermanence and nonattachment has been a gradual process for me, over many years. They used to be just concepts that I thought sounded good but I couldn’t really connect to experientially. Lately, however, as my spiritual awareness has deepened, those two insights have risen to the forefront of my consciousness. I often repeat them to myself like mantras to access the peace within me, which they are an integral part of. This is the soul’s peace, which does not judge or have opinions; it just witnesses. And from the witness’s point of view, it does not matter if something or someone changes or not. It’s all part of a greater picture that I, as a human being, have a limited ability to see in its entirety. I just have to trust in my soul’s perception (and in God) and surrender to the power of a divine purpose in everything.

Surrender and trust have also been key to letting go within my own life. They, too, accompany the experience of inner peace that I am connecting to more and more. There is a reason why these principles have been around for thousands of years and have been at the core of the teachings of great spiritual masters. They bring us to a place of flow in our lives, accepting “what is” and aligning with the continuous fluctuations of human existence. This is a time on Earth when the voices and energetic imprints of the greatest teachers are becoming more available to everyone. Their wisdom and beingness within the collective consciousness are here to help us as we move into our own wisdom and life mastery.

Events in the world, and particularly within this country, are now making it essential for us to live in connection with our souls, accessing the deeper truths about life and living. In an environment in which people are being persecuted because of bigotry and prejudice, where is justice? How do we live with this? How do we love all of humanity when some are acting in destructive, hateful ways? This is the challenge of our times: to live in such a way that our own souls’ wisdom and light affect the collective consciousness in a positive way. If we believe that love is stronger than hate, and peace more powerful than fear, then we need to live that in every moment. For ourselves and for everyone who crosses our path. When we shift our own energy out of judgment and outrage, then everything begins to shift around us. The peaceful soul brings peace to the world. As I see it, this is how we are evolving as a people and as a planet within a huge constantly changing universe. May we all help each other find our way again and again to deep inner peace.