Tag: presence

Dog Spelled Backward

Photograph © Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © Peggy Kornegger
Admittedly, I am a cat person. Even though I grew up with a dog companion (Pepper), whom I loved dearly, cats have been closest to me as an adult: Edward for 8 years and Lily for 22. Of course, animals of all kinds touch my heart, and this has become increasingly true as my own awareness has expanded to be able to perceive the intelligence and sensitivity of all living beings on our planet. In my garden, I have sweet and often funny exchanges with birds, bees, butterflies, squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks. A connection and communication beyond words frequently passes between us.

Since I am a gardener, I am outdoors a lot of the time in the spring, summer, and early fall. As I plant and take care of my flowers in the yard, I often see neighbors walking their dogs. All kinds of dogs: labs, Scotties, pit bulls, schnauzers, pugs, huskies, terriers. Some are intent on their “appointed rounds” through the neighborhood, sniffing every tree and bush and not that interested in the occasional human gardener. Others, however, are absolutely thrilled to encounter another human besides the one at the other end of their leash.

Two dogs in particular come to mind: a small white terrier named Honus and a large black lab named Maggie. One morning, as I was on my hands and knees pulling weeds in the front border, I heard a kind of whining panting sound immediately behind me. I turned, and there was Honus, straining to get to me, at the absolute end of his leash, as his person tried to keep him contained. He was still a bit of a puppy then, waggling all over, his eyes sparkling with excitement and the overriding desire to get close enough to greet me with licks and touches. Who could resist such intensely focused friendliness? I immediately fell in love with Honus. Every single time I’ve seen him after that initial encounter, he has behaved exactly the same: so excited to see me, this human crawling around on the ground at his level. He is always stretching to get to me before I hear him, turn around, and then reach out to pet and talk to him. It’s a huge gift that makes me happy all day.

Maggie is a much older dog—a large black lab with gray hairs around her mouth. When I first met her, she behaved exactly the same as Honus. As she and the man with her passed by the front yard where I was gardening, I said hello. Maggie turned to look at me, and as soon as my eyes met hers, she began to wag her tail with enthusiasm and excitement, reaching out to me eagerly. Once again, I just had to walk over and pet her. Her eyes were filled with such happiness and love. No other way to describe what I saw there. She emitted a completely uncomplicated and unconditionally loving presence. Something I’ve seen so many times in dogs—and cats, too. Something almost sacred in its purity and spirit. So is it a coincidence that dog spelled backward is god?

Well, let me tell you another story. In recent years, my spiritual practice has opened my eyes to seeing God in everything. Literally everything: human, animal, insect, tree, rock, chair, rug, computer, star, planet. In the midst of this awakening, I watched the world around me transform. Everything I looked at began to take on a special quality of living light. One afternoon, on my usual walk around my neighborhood, I encountered a woman with her pit bull. As I passed them, the dog and I looked into each other’s eyes. I stopped completely. There gazing at me through this pit bull’s eyes was God—life energy shining forth, joyful awareness, pure beingness. Tears filled my eyes. God recognizing God, no separation.

Photograph © Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © Peggy Kornegger

If we could only realize that our entire world is made up of this oneness. Life reflecting life. It is everywhere! God meets God on the street every single day. That innocent, curious, welcoming essence that dogs and cats often show us is within us as well. We had it as children; we just need to allow it to come to life again. Years ago, my father, in his aging wisdom, once said, “If only I could be more like a dog.” Meaning, more forgiving, more loving. He could see that our companion animals are living examples of unselfish sweetness and love. Time to pay attention. Time to see the God in Dog. And in ourselves.

 

Background Bliss

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
One of the most profound universal spiritual teachings is that we are divine at our core. The sacred soul self within us is made up of God’s essence, which is pure peace and love. When we are connected to that part of us, we feel a bliss that encompasses all of our life’s experiences, whether happy or sad, crisis or celebration. Bliss that is not ecstatic joy but instead a full embrace of the poignant beauty of life. Divine connection, once accessed, can never be lost or superseded. It is eternal, and it carries us through everything that we may face in our lives, including death. It is always in the background, like a soft comforting presence. Many years ago, I experienced my first taste of this kind of background bliss before I encountered that particular teaching. I lived its truth before I heard it articulated. This occurred at the deaths of each of my parents.

First, let me say that I am an only child who was always very close to my parents. I feared their future deaths for most of my life. I thought I would lose my mind when they died. The irony is that “losing your mind” is often the best thing that could happen. The spiritual quest I began several years prior to their deaths put me in touch with something beyond my mind. The dissolution of a solely mental framework in favor of a greater awareness was exactly what helped me through the experience of their deaths.

My mother died at the age of 81. She had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital in Illinois. I received a call in Boston in the middle of the night and flew there the next day. I spent five days sitting by her hospital bed, slowly coming to terms with the fact that she wouldn’t recover. Because my father was 86, I also needed to look out for his physical and emotional needs, convincing him to go home to rest at night. The nurses, knowing I was an only child, were exceedingly kind. Two of them stayed with me by her bedside at the very end. My mother passed away as I held her hand, telling her I loved her. Her final goodbye was a spiked heartbeat on the monitor when I said her name—then she was gone. I was alone but surrounded by love—from the nurses, my friends, my parents’ friends. Long-distance calls kept coming to the house in support of me and my dad, who was devastated without her. My partner flew to Illinois to help us both. I was grieving but somehow okay because of everyone’s kindness. Something greater was being shared: my mother’s love had merged with God’s love, and I could feel it within and all around me.

My father died nine years later. During that time, I flew back and forth to the Midwest, caring for him long-distance. Once again, I received a late-night call: he had been taken to the hospital with pneumonia. It took me two days to reach him because I was at a retreat center in western Massachusetts. He managed to stay alive until I could get there, which was the greatest gift he ever gave me. He recognized me through his oxygen mask, and we exchanged “I love you’s” as I sat holding his hand. Within five hours of my arrival, he took his last breath and passed peacefully away. In that moment, I could feel my mother’s presence, my father’s presence, and also a greater Presence that encompassed us all. It manifested itself in the loving-kindness of everyone I encountered. The waitress in the hotel restaurant sat and told me about her own father’s passing; the shuttle driver gave me a “remembrance angel.” Close friends and family called to express sympathy and love. And as my plane back to Boston lifted into the skies, I looked down and saw a rainbow corona encircling the plane’s shadow on the clouds below. I was so clearly not alone.

When my parents died, I felt great loss, but I did not feel lost…or crazy. I actually felt blessed to have been present as each of them passed. It felt like a sacred gift of love, from them and from God. I was given the chance to see through the veil and to understand that death is transition not finality. To experience at a very deep level the magnificent ways in which spirit fills our lives and surrounds us all with love in every single moment. I knew firsthand what it was like to feel grief right alongside gratitude. My heart, opened by sorrow, knew the bliss of divine connection, of presence within absence. When we think we are most alone, we are actually part of something so much greater.

A Lifetime Longing

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
In a recent teaching, Panache Desai talked about how so many of us have unconsciously yearned to know God or the truth of existence all our lives. We didn’t always have words for it, but at our core was a deep-seated longing to understand the universe, to feel a connection to something beyond our own separate selves. In our individual aloneness, we reach out for contact, for meaning, even in our early years. I certainly did, although I did not recognize it as a desire to know God. My reaching or yearning took the form of fear. Fear of eternity, of an infinite universe. It scared me so much that I was unable to sleep at night, and my mother would sit at my bedside to comfort me.

I was not raised within any particular religion, so God was just an idea to me. A possibility, my parents said, a question that each person must answer for themselves. I suppose, in their own way, they were referring to what Native Americans have called the “Great Mystery.” Nothing I could relate to at 6 years old. What I was seeking was relief from the terror I felt whenever I thought about the universe going on and on forever. God’s existence had no relevance to that, at least in my own mind at the time. As I saw it, eternal life (heaven) and eternal death (the void) were both eternity and thus equally frightening. I lived for years and years with that fear embedded in my consciousness. Many times, I thought it would drive me crazy.

It wasn’t until I met Panache and began to work with him that the fears I had carried all my life began to gradually transform. Through him, and later on my own, I experienced infinity as divine presence, or God. It filled me with the most profound peace imaginable—absolutely no fear. I felt at one with everything everywhere, beyond time and space, and my consciousness shifted completely. It was then that I began to realize that this was what I had yearned for my entire life, this immersion in oneness and unconditional love that is God. I had always longed, as William Blake wrote, to “hold Infinity in the palm of [my] hand” and know it as pure love, not fear at all. And here it was at last—God’s loving gift of presence within my own heart and soul. In truth, that sacred connection had always been there. It is who I am, who we all are.

Sometimes you wait your whole life for a key experience that changes everything in all directions—past, present, future. Often you can only reach that experience after having lived your way to it. Ultimately, that is why we came to this Earth: to experience our separateness and find our way home again; to recognize that separation is only an illusion within that greater oneness which encompasses all of existence. That is the human journey, during which we can feel so lost and alone at times, but looking back, we see nothing but grace and love. In that moment of realization, of conscious awareness of our oneness with everything, we step into ananda, or bliss. We know in our deepest heart that all of life is a blessing and that we ourselves are a part of that blessing because we are part of the infinite presence of God.

 

You Are Unique

Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger

There is no other being on this Earth, in this universe, who is just like you. You are entirely unique. Not only in your physical features—your face, hair color, and body shape—but also in your cells, your genes. No part of you is replicated anywhere in the cosmos. Think of that for a moment. Nowhere is there a duplicate of your specific body, mind, and spirit. Just like a snowflake, you are distinctly different from every other person on this planet. If you didn’t exist, your essence would be missing from the fabric of the created world.

Pause. Take that in. To be you is such a gift, an honor really. You came into this life for a reason. You were created to be the essence of who you are in your soul. The overlay of personality traits that you have developed to exist in a world that doesn’t always embrace your uniqueness is just that: a surface layer of coping mechanisms, of past history. Those things do not define you. At the deepest level, within your heart and soul, you are pure light expressing as loving presence in this world. You are a love song, a sonnet, an improvised dance, a spark of fire, here to ignite the collective consciousness of all humanity through the sheer power of your beingness. Each of us is that.

Sounds like a big responsibility, doesn’t it? Actually it’s so much more than that. It’s an entry point to the playground of possibility that is life on Earth. We who have incarnated at this time are here to live out the furthest reaches of expanded awareness and creative expression that human beings can embody. We are doing it together, each of us in our own lives but connected through an invisible network of human/divine energy that makes our planet, too, unique. Earth is a planet of polarities, true, but it is also a place where we can come into harmony and balance in the midst of everything as we create lives based in oneness, love, and ongoing transformation.

How do we do that? Well, it’s a little different for every one of us. For me, it means writing my soul self into the world: sharing my experiences, insights, and visions and expressing my vulnerability and my humanness. It also means being completely present to those who cross my path each day (people, animals, birds, everything). To love and appreciate it all. To make every step, every breath, a prayer or an offering to life. And to continue to be open to the expansion of who I am and who I can become in my lifetime. We are each here to live our unique gifts into the world and constantly stretch ourselves into more. And to remember it is a shared journey, always.

So, every morning, look in the mirror and smile at that beautiful unique reflection before you. There is not another like it anywhere, and you are here to show us all that special something that makes you you. Celebrate your unrepeatability! Express your soul self in the world, and soon you will be surrounded by others doing the same. In multi-part harmony, we will fill the planet with music and song.

 

 

The Pause

Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger
Life can occasionally hand you a time-out whether you asked for it or not. It could take the form of a health challenge, a job loss, a missed connection, or a misunderstanding. You are zooming along nonstop when suddenly an impenetrable wall appears right in front of you. Bam! Stopped in your tracks. Sidelined. No way over, around, or through. You have to come to a halt, take a deep breath, and wait. The pause.

In our speedy multi-tasking world, we aren’t encouraged to see the importance of allowing for that pause. The usual message, from childhood on, is “pursue your goals, full speed ahead, and don’t let anything deter you.” Until we are forced to slow down and reevaluate, we don’t understand the key role of timing in our lives. However, if we look around at the natural world we are part of, timing is the basis of everything. Winter waits patiently for spring and the reappearance of green leaves and flowers. Animals and birds, as well as humans, wait weeks or months for the birth of their babies. Patience and timing are at the very core of life on Earth. To push against that is to cause ourselves unnecessary suffering.

As I faced an uncertain medical diagnosis recently, I repeatedly found myself in the position of waiting—for test results, for the next appointment, for a clearer diagnosis, etc. After the most recent doctor’s visit, I am still in that position. In fact, that seems to be part of the diagnosis: to wait and see if it stays the same, gets better, or gets worse. Status quo means all is well, for the moment. Such is life, really. It’s all a guide for living with awareness. The wisest approach is to live in the “wellness” of the moment. No one can predict what will occur next. So we “wait and see.”

What if we could realize that waiting is not stuckness but beingness? Each moment holds everything within it. If we rush past it, we lose all those precious seconds of everything. To be stopped by circumstance is a gift, a blessing. It allows us to look around and really see the world around us and within us. For our own mental, emotional, and spiritual health, we need time and space to just breathe and be. Out of that flexible state of presence, our next best version of ourselves emerges without effort or pushing. And it will only emerge in its own divine timing. Soul time. Not human clock time.

As I look at the waiting of the past couple of months, I see with more clarity how much was going on within that waiting. A greater wisdom, surrender, and dissolving of effort was arising in me. An integration of experience and emotions. We have to allow ourselves the pause that engenders awareness about what we are encountering in our lives. So let yourself be stopped, let yourself pause. Each day, everything is unfolding just perfectly, with impeccable timing….

“A delay isn’t a denial; it’s an opportunity to evolve.”—Panache Desai