Category: mantra

Grief and Guilt

Leana LovejoyLeave a comment

“Every feeling fully felt leads to Love” — Grace of Mt. Shasta

I lost my Mother last week, which as everyone knows is a huge transition, and even though I know it was her time, I still feel grief arising, in waves that sometimes build and sometimes ebb quietly away.  Occasionally the grief has a quality of extreme pain, other times it is soft and warm.  I can still hear my Mom’s voice, speaking my name and wonder how long that will last.  I saved her final voice message to me on my computer, but alas that computer died and with it – the message… letting go is the message, while remembering to give thanks for her long life, and for the time we had to mend our fences and open our hearts to each other.

What is the pain of grief?  My experience is that when grief is allowed, invited, even welcomed that it is a portal to exaltation, to the rainbow realm, the living grace of this world.  I have experienced this and so speak from there.  But why then is grief sometimes so crippling and painful?  The difference, I believe, is guilt.  When guilt sneakily attaches itself to grief, huge pain erupts.  Thoughts such as   “If only I had….” or “why didn’t I…” begin to surface and with them comes enormous pain.

I once read a really interesting book – Power vs. Force and the statement made in that book is that our feelings have vibrations.  Guilt and shame, say the author, are the lowest vibration.  Lower vibrations (below love) are uncomfortable and make us sick, they bring “dis-ease”.  That means that feelings of guilt are necessarily unhealthy for us and our close ones.  How do we let them go?  Ahhhhh, this is the big work!

I love the word “awareness” and perhaps I overuse it these days – but it does seem that awareness is the first step towards change.  After all it is impossible to make a conscious change from an unconscious place.  That seems obvious but is truly worth consideration, since taking the first big step of awareness often brings pain.  In order to face our uncomfortable habits, thought patterns and neuroses takes courage.  Heaps of courage.  I for one have a hard time pricking my finger for a little blood sample, why should I want to poke at the demons of my unconscious wounding?  Well, awakening the sleeping demons means we will need to tussle with them but let’s for one moment feel confident that we have tools to overcome the challenges of our inner lives.  I know we do!  You got this!  Let’s do it!

Ok so the guilt has been brought to the surface.  What is the way to shift and change unconscious patterns?  It is remarkably similar to the way we change our bodies – it takes repetition.  But unlike building physical strength with emotional re-programming it takes repetition with emotion.  Finding the old thoughts and judgements that have created the guilt with us is a huge step, and the painful emotions that are stirred by those thoughts can shift in an instant with new more supportive thoughts.  Feeling deeply into the new thoughts creates a new way to respond and the old patterns can drop away, recycle, compost and reappear as grace.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it again – this is no easy task.  I have noticed that when I need to face something uncomfortable in myself that all the little things undone around the house immediately becoming compelling – the vacuum cleaner beckons, the deep cleaning of the closet must happen – on and on the procrastination continues.  It takes huge devotion to make space to sit and contemplate.  Right now, in the middle of the Shelter at Home I hope that you have found the time and space for your inner life.  The world right now is a huge metaphor for what is needed in our inner lives…just be with yourself.   Begin Within… Again…

 

The Jewel in the Virus

Leana Lovejoy1 Comment

A very well known Tibetan mantra is” Om mani padme hum” which translates roughly to “the jewel within the lotus” and is a message to let the “mud” of life feed and nurture the beautiful sacred flower – the lotus.  There are many ways to translate this mantra, but I am uplifted by this interpretation.  Scholars, beware I’m not here to debate, and am not clinging to my perspective either, I may well be getting this wrong. Still, on the path of higher truth, being wrong is also good – it leads to humility, which circles right back to the meaning of the mantra.

A couple of weeks ago I was sick in bed for 3 full weeks.  One day I was up, the next, flat as a pancake burning with fever. Interestingly it’s quite big news right now as the media is using the latest viral infection as a huge fear tactic (everyone has heard of the Corona virus by now, I’m sure).  I decided to consider this a time to purge, physically and emotionally from the pressures of the last year.  It was a year of big challenges, lots of loss and transformation, most of it seemingly unwanted.  Ahhhh, surrender, accept, let go…. I know all the words, I’ve said them many times, but wow I was in the big shredder and coping was sometimes out of my range.  (there’s the humility!)

Just as some of the bigger issues in my life were working out and things were resolving better than I hoped — it hit, the waves of nausea, a high fever and complete fatigue.  I was grounded.  The timing was so perfect, I could acknowledge that, I had no pressing projects or even engagements on my calendar so I just coped.  I took my temperature a lot, and watched the fever just linger and linger. I let shows just run on Netflix, which gave me some comfort and a bit of false companionship.  Nobody wanted to visit, friends and neighbors dropped supplies on the porch, and who could blame them, I didn’t want to pass this along.  Still, more than a little bit of self-pity crept in.  I remembered my two year illness of 2002 and worked to keep myself from falling into despair.

Then, as it started easing up I felt some new lightness.  I noticed that old joint pains were gone which felt fantastic, and imagined that I was letting go of  old emotions and ideas that had lingered in my body for too long.  That felt good, I know how to meditate, I know how to be with my feelings, or so I told myself. As the healing screeched to a standstill I groggily recognized the opportunity to witness some inner dialog that I just don’t want to have anymore, which is the main purpose of a vision quest.  It’s a conscious decision to stand still and take a good look around in our often neglected inner landscape.  It is so easy to be distracted from ourselves, there is always something apparently more compelling to do besides roto-rooter our emotional and spiritual bodies.  My being wasn’t having that.  Once again there were no distractions possible.  I didn’t have the energy to even read a book.  What is the message?  Standing still calls for a lot of things including listening to the “small, still voice within”.   I generally experience this as a loud voice but apparently there has always been more, beneath and beyond the title pages.  This is where I reached.

Wallowing in self pity doesn’t do much for the spirit, or indeed the body’s immune system.  Healthy mind, healthy body, right?  Having the body rendered useless does send a message of surrender, and seems to force negative emotions to the surface to be recognized, processed and ultimately accepted.  Loved?  Appreciated?  This is the holy grail, and PhD of spiritual work. As this flu experience has subsided and my life has returned to a semblance of its “normal” routines I want to hold on to the precious jewels in the lotus of the illness.  Being in the middle of it is painfully challenging even staying positive and grateful, and sending love to my shadow it was all I could do to just get through the day.  Nighttime was worse since sleep was almost impossible until I propped myself and slept in a more upright position.  This virus wasn’t going to let go until I learned what I needed to learn.

I’ve been known to say “no mud, no lotus” from time to time.  The darkness is a rich place, so my latest mission is to enjoy it, or at the very least to drop some of my resistance to it.  To be really clear, that doesn’t relieve us of the commitment to honor our body and build our immune systems to stay healthy, so my higher self says…. healthy mud makes for a bigger lotus!  Be well, stay grateful and drink your green juice…. I love you!