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Why I’m Vegan
Category: nature
Love – the mirror
The shadow part of our unconscious has a talent and desire to cause trouble for us. So it becomes of paramount important to find a way to prevent the meddlesome troublemaking of our shadow sides.
I have lived most of my life believing that love is always positive, that love only speaks the kindest truth… that love sees with the heart. And I still believe this but as a new way of discerning kindness has been shown to me. It has become very clear to me that a very effective way to see ourselves is to use love, friendship or intimacy as a mirror and allow the love to open us more fully to ourselves and also to see the places we may not see clearly ourselves. Only in a trusted connection of friendship and real love can this function in the highest way.
There is a necessity to be able to face all of ourselves, the light and the dark to continue growing and expanding in higher consciousness. Our shadow side is sneaky, when we look there, our shadow diappears! It can only be seen by looking behind and those who have the best view are often outside ourselves. Our friends and family can help us to become the people we want to be with loving feedback and observation.
This is tricky turf, though. In many relationships and families most of us have witnessed this process being subverted through criticism and verbal abuse. The eyes of love do not see in a judgmental way. Love is patient, love is kind… love especially is kind.
Cultivating relationships and intimacies with others can help us see where we are on the path – “as within, so without”. What kinds of friends do you have? How are they reflecting your shadow side back to you? Awareness is the first big step towards change and healing.
There is another sneaky way the human mind can cloud the mirror, and it is fairly common and very hard to detect from the inside. It is called “projection” where we imagine others to be making us our victims when we are also enacting the behavior we judge in others. By listening to our own judgements of others we can learn to perceive ourselves more clearly, clean our mirrors and heal the ways we judge ourselves and project that outward into the world.
Our shadows want to be seen, to be acknowledged and respected. When that doesn’t happen there are some interesting ways the shadow demands attention. For one there can be a tendency for those with troubled feelings to find someone to whom they can “confess” their darker thoughts and tendencies. It is a cry for help, and a cry for loving attention. The shadow part of our unconscious has a talent and desire to cause trouble for us. So it becomes of paramount important to find a way to prevent the meddlesome troublemaking of our shadow sides. This really is BIG work. Therapists are one powerful avenue towards self -love, and it is important to feel support and respect in that relationship. Close friends can also help us, as can intimate partners. The enmeshment of intimacy does seem to cloud things though and it may not be best to depend on your partner for this support. Sometimes it works to engage in “co-counseling” with a friend where you share time, each giving and receiving emotional support and loving feedback.
I love to contemplate the story of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion – Kwan Yin. She is so filled with love and compassion that she actually rides a dragon to her destination. I understand this to be the illustration of the truth that only love, more love and more compassion can fully integrate the powerful, fiery, potentially destructive parts of our psyche into balance to serve the highest good.
How have you tamed your dragons today? Let’s talk!
Disappointment and stress
They stroll through life, hand in hand – disappointment and stress, stress and disappointment. Unmet expectations lead to misery, unfulfilled ambitions cause pain. This isn’t a given, it is a habitual pattern of humanity – one that can cause us to sit up and beg for change. It certainly causes a lot of uncomfortable feelings and outcomes. I can accept that uncomfortable feelings are the harbingers of growth, loud messengers from our inner selves that there is some part that needs attention. Our inner lives are a deep well!
Disappointment is the uncomfortable result of unmet expectations and unfulfilled attachments. It can be extremely painful and clearly has the power to cause enormous suffering, especially when the disappointment is connected to an important relationship or outcome. Disappointment can cause resentment, and its regular companion – anger. It’s easy to say that least some of the time things don’t turn out the way we want them to, and understanding a more compassionate way to meet this occurrence is one of the compelling reasons to engage in a life of inner growth and inquiry.
Acceptance is the flip side of disappointment. Continued acceptance is dependent on a sturdy foundation of open hearted, non-judgmental self love. It is a destination that isn’t found in travel magazines, or anywhere but within. As usual, recognition is the first big step towards releasing the uncomfortable mind traps that are the creators of a suffering. The greater the expectation the greater the disappointment when it is not met. Is it possible to live a life without expectations, hopes and dreams? I have experienced travel as a good training ground for shifting harmful expectation since the only way to be comfortable while traveling is to release expectation and confront the present moment. And facing this challenge necessarily brings a heaping glory of insight and clarity.
But life isn’t always happening in special situations and it is the everyday, the ordinary where many of the usual mind traps find fertile ground and take root. It’s time to learn how to celebrate all the everyday wonders with joy, with a fresh perspective and with a relaxed mind and open heart. Ahhhh it sounds so easy! And yet, at this time in history as we are in “lockdown”, where free movement around the world isn’t possible, what is another way to gain insight from our feelings? It’s possible that there is more disappointment and stress now than before the lockdown. We have been forcibly pressed to re-consider many things that were once taken for granted in life and re-orient as quickly as possible.
These times have generated a profound sense of stress for many. Stress is a direct result of the fear of disappointment. Stress is a foreshadowing of the emotional pain of disappointment, in fact it is a share of the disappointment already being felt. What is the antidote for this? Once again it points directly to relaxation, acceptance and bringing the complete self into the present moment. None of us can foretell the future – one of the reasons so many keep trying is that future-telling or “forecasting” cannot be verified, and there is a kind of relief in hearing what may be happening before it happens… but truly there is no way to accurately foretell the future. Just watch what happens when reassurance promises a good outcome. The mind relaxes, the emotional body relaxes and just assuming a good outcome changes the present moment into something less stressful. There you have it! Once again, recognizing the mind as the generator of emotion turns us within to put more energy and effort into teaching our mind what we want it to know. Deep breathing is so effective because it redirects our attention back to our body, to its momentary movements.
Here’s another quick and effective practice some years ago: to come more fully into the present moment, try to be aware of all 5 senses at the same time… just try…
Let me know how it goes!
Cultivate kindness
Taming an unruly mind is not unlike training an unruly dog. Patience, persistence, determination, intention and love are all included. It’s most effective to leave behind the all-too-human propensity towards self-criticism, which doesn’t contribute anything valuable to the process of gaining mastery over our minds. The instructions have been available for eons – the ancients (think Buddha and Padmasambhava) codified a system for inner peace that has proven to be challenging to us modern humans.
In this universe of polarities, right and wrong, good and bad, up and down mour surface situations continue to change dramatically sometimes from one day to the next. Technological “advances” seem to have had the opposite effect on the human spirit. Addicted to “devices” many people do not seem to be aware of the world around them, bringing it all down to a tiny screen on a tiny electronic box, called a “Smart Phone”. Those nuggets of magnetism are miraculous, no doubt, and become more so every day. How is this possible? The human mind is also miraculous, unrelentingly imagining then creating improvements, modifications and changes to the way things function.
The down side of all this activity is the need for a busy mind. It has come to be called ADD, attention deficit disorder, which is replicating mightily these days – and is perhaps the siren song of our civilization. It seems that most of us have forgotten how to sit quietly and contemplate. Here is the challenge! There is a lot of evidence that a wealth of material possessions does not bring happiness or deep peace. In fact, clearing clutter has become a best selling idea, only made possible by the overabundance of non-essential items that tend to collect when we have expendable income. Clearing our homes of excess things doesn’t necessary clear our minds, but interestingly the processes can be parallel in their unfolding. What this means to me is – clearing mental clutter is a process of examining thoughts and choosing whether to turn the volume up or down on them. Recycle, compost or just donate to the landfill, but get rid of unhelpful thoughts!
It’s a good start to simply ask yourself these basic questions: is this thought helpful and supportive, is it relevant and useful, and does it make me feel good? The best test of a thought is how our body responds when we think it. We all know what it feels like to have the white hot heat of anger, or some other uncomfortable feeling grab us and wrestle us to the symbolic mat. In our discomfort it is easy to lash out – causing harm to those we love. It is a sign of maturity and the wondrous benefit of effective inner work to be able to choose wisely under emotional duress. It’s a work in progress for sure, it’s certainly more desirable to my mind than remaining are willing mired in old ways of conflict and abuse.
Taking a stand in our lives to shift our relations and learn to truly love is, in my belief, the one true path in life. Other things matter little in comparison, and the I’m sure that at the end of our lives what really matters is how much love we shared. There was a bumper sticker going around “he who dies with the most toys wins”. Nothing, to my mind could be farther from the truth. Choose love, dear ones.
Grief and Guilt
“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…
Exiting the Chrysalis
I have spent countless hours observing caterpillars, chrysalis and butterflies. I have witnessed the challenge, the risk and the glory of metamorphosis. Each transition is difficult – when the caterpillar hatches it is fine food for birds, lizards and other critters. As they grow into adulthood, the caterpillar needs to find a safe place to cocoon. This is not an easy search for such a small being, and there are many hazards on the way. Once again, they can be eaten by birds, or other creatures, crushed by man or animal or run out of time in their quest.
When the caterpillar finds a suitable place (or unsuitable, time will tell, a Monarch caterpillar once made its chrysalis on a hinge and almost made it until an unwitting guest closed the door… sadly…) I digress – It attaches to the wall. It needs to hold on in order to let go. That always tickles me to say, paradoxes are my thing! Then comes the intense part as the caterpillar’s body seems to dissolve. Sometimes they just don’t make it through this process, it can’t be easy. If they do make it then they become another kind of being. A being stopped in time. Some of them have little faces, others look like dangly jade earrings but all of them are specialized and precise. For in some period of time, from a couple of weeks to a couple of years, the butterfly will emerge.
The monarch butterfly emerging is a miracle of nature I’m overawed to have witnessed many times. As the jade green chrysalis approaches hatching time, the skin begins to become transparent and the butterfly inside is seen as a kind of origami puzzle. When it breaks out of the cocoon it is a fragile being. It takes time to dry off its wings and is very vulnerable for even a gust of wind can knock it to the ground and its wings will deform. They can’t take off yet so are at the mercy of any nearby bird. And yet, many of them flutter happily (I project) into the sunlight. Butterflies can’t fly in cold weather so they are always beacons of springtime.
Once they are aloft they have two activities to fulfill. They sip nectar and aid in pollination as a side effect. They make love and procreate. I once watched a monarch butterfly couple do their coupling for almost an hour. When it was complete, he (I imagine, perhaps wrongly) lifted her up and flew her up to a branch where they rested for a while. It’s a short life, but valuable for sure.
Why am I rambling about this right now? We’re quarantined to be safe from the corona virus, we’re watching our world come to a standstill. We are cocooned. It is a challenge perhaps the biggest challenge of our short lives. Life, as we imagined it was, has ceased to be. We have let go, collectively and individually. We have let go of activity for the most part. We’re not allowed to gather or recreate together. It’s very strange. It seems unnatural. For those of us who have meditated and vision quested it is not difficult but most people have spent their lives avoiding being alone and quiet and listening to their inner voice.
What’s next? I imagine us, like the butterfly, emerging slowly from this cocoon. Taking it one tiny step at a time, into the sunlight. Everything has shifted and I hope that we can collectively make more loving choices as we recreate our systems to better serve humanity and our ecosystem. There are some important things each of us can do to contribute and “be the change”. We can get comfortable with ourselves, honest and true and be clear on what we stand for. I stand for love, for caring, for holding each other up with nobody left behind. I think a basic universal income and guaranteed housing would be a fantastic place to start. All the money spent on the war machine can be turned to providing that and health care, education and funding for the arts. Animal agriculture should be ended and hemp and cannabis farms allowed to prosper and provide.
The sky is the limit! What kind of world do you want to live in? Keep marinating in your cocoon and we can discover that together….I love you!
Kindness and Judgement
I know this: I can gently pet a kitten, smell a rose and embrace a favorite person with warmth in my heart. It feels so good, a gentle purr, a sweet fragrance and that special something that communicates love between friends who hug – and yet – on a daily basis is there more to understanding what passes as kindness?
Ordinary kindnesses – epitomized by the young person helping an elder cross the street, or carrying a heavy bag for a tottering shopper, are encouraged in a universal attitude of understanding. And yet, how can our kindnesses extend into every nook and cranny, every moment, every breath? What is holding us back from letting the sweetness inside be expressed?
Sometimes a kindness requires a deeper vulnerability- a reaching in to a dusty heartspace, a symbolic inner cave of old toys, cherished but unused. Imagine pulling them out, dusting them off and putting them to work to create a better day, a better connection and higher love. What happens when I am a deliberate creator of kindness? A new brightness comes, a sweeter joy erupts together with more laughter.
I am surrounded by animal companions – they delight at a glance and explode into playfulness with the least provocation. How can I emulate this – embody this – exult into this primal joy more and more often? Is it adulthood that holds me back or a concept of maturity? Is laughter often inappropriate? I aim to always remember to see life as a playground, rather than an industrial assembly line of productivity and accomplishment.
A recent visitor showed extreme disapproval at my lifestyle. Too many dogs, they said, too many books, bad feng shui. My joy was temporarily dampened. Am I getting it wrong about how to live and be myself? Humpf! I retrieved my eco-spray bottle of “Grouch-Be-Gone” and applied it liberally to all the surfaces in my sanctuary. As the mood lightened I remembered that I love to play – to dance and to sing. In tune or out, music is my delight, my happiness a true love. Cultivating inner joy and playfulness will definitely bubble over and expand out into the world as kindness, contagious positivity and happiness…oh yes and I really love my dogs, my books and my eccentric furniture. Having the confidence to make the choices my true heart is calling for, each day in each moment, large or small, has had the extraordinary effect of transforming my life into a living altar to joy and love.
It may not be completely authentic to live life as a musical production – but some of it can be – in fact the more of life that is filled with song (and dance and play) the happier we can be. Remembering to skip and hop instead of plod is the work of my inner child. The distilled essence of playfulness is my aim – in each moment as much as possible.
Joy is contagious – !
If you want to heal it, you gotta feel it…
My inner voice said repeatedly: “Okay self – you got this, you’re good, you’re balanced and happy. You keep calm under stressful circumstances. Years of meditation, spiritual healing and “inner work” seemed to have done the trick and helped keep your emotional life stable and simple.”
Surprise!!! Life conspired to prove me wrong about this – as my comfortable, sweet and friendly world was recently turned upside down – without my permission, I might add. Not just in one way, in many ways simultaneously. I experienced shock. My inability to stay calm, respond rather than react and generally feel good was imperiled. I raved, I cried and squealed. I lost touch with my center and spiraled into places I haven’t visited for years. Some of them were new and exotic destinations, wholly unimagined. It has been a deep dive into the ocean of emotion. But I’m a snorkeler, I said to myself – you can do this. Just remember to keep breathing. Try to remember which way is up. Follow the bubbles.
I’ll confess I gained a lot of compassion and understanding for others during this unraveling. I also gained a powerful desire to understand in more compelling ways how to change my inner landscape to be what I genuinely want it to be. To respond in different ways means changing those pesky, troublesome unconscious thought patterns. If I’m making that sound easy, please forgive me, I’m sure it is not, it is one of the biggest challenges I have faced in my earth walk. How do we alter what is unconscious? Years of societal conditioning, childhood and adult wounding and ancestral patterns have been stored inside us, and are the unseen, often troublemaking programmers of our operating systems.
To correct the glitches in our subconscious minds, it calls to me to seek advice from on high. The Vedas – ancient Hindu wisdom scriptures say it this way – there are two paths, the wisdom path, and the devotion path. When they are brought together, our inner life is enriched, we are connected to all-that-is, and find our life on earth to be vastly improved and more meaningful. That is my interpretation, anyway. Bringing their esoteric teachings into modern life is our challenge. The “path of truth” has been paved over for centuries. Discernment, contemplation, courage – finding these inside myself is a step by step process. A wild ride!
Wisdom is always present. Some claim to hear a ‘small still inner voice’ that urges an even deeper listening. Sitting still, letting it be heard is so important and also presents a monumental challenge. Ironic, paradoxical and really hard – the wisdom side of things is always available to us. At this time in history, we have so many teachings that can appear at the flick of a finger. There’s no need to buy anything if you have internet access – the sages are all present there! Free Webinars abound if you will simply sacrifice your email address. And yet, it seems obvious that most of us would rather play a game or enjoy a meal than sincerely seek the wisdom of the universe.
Alongside wisdom appears devotion aka dedication. The subconscious mind blossoms and changes encouraged by repetition. Here’s where the two paths meet – the wisdom path is about re-training the conscious mind and the devotional path is about re-training the subconscious mind. There is another profound tidbit that has just appeared to me – it isn’t just about repetition. To truly reach the subconscious mind and guide it to behave differently it needs feelings – strong emotion. So it’s repetition with emotion is reputed to be the magic key. Absentmindedly repeating a prayer or affirmation doesn’t make much difference to our inner world, but add some powerful emotion there and Shazam – the inner self wakes up and pays attention!
Recognizing these simple truths is part of what can be called “awakening”. Living consciously means finding the nooks and crannies of our subconscious that are little rebels without a cause – and teaching them to behave in alignment with our higher self. It’s mind yoga – and as much as the physical side of yoga has swept the world and become mainstream – the yoga of the mind is likely more important especially to our emotional and spiritual well being who are walking hand in hand, or mind in body…
How does this all come together? Most of us know that to create a new habit takes some weeks of repetition. On my quest to understand healing and change I recently saw the results of a study that showed that when play is included, the mind learns more quickly. I would make a leap of faith and say that the unconscious mind may also learn more quickly from a playful attitude as indeed the happy people of this planet show us. Success seems to love joyful beings! Unhappiness, in general, is not the direction any of us truly want to go and finding our way through the darker times in life could be called “the quest”… or “enlightenment” since light is a lot more fun than dark, for most of us.
One of the most miraculous and lovely ways to “practice” is to “play” music! It’s not an accident that making music is called play. When ambition is airlifted from the area – and music making is merry making, surely that is one of the higher emotional states available to us. Why do birds sing at sunrise? I surmise that they are delighted to welcome a new day – and also find their family and friends in the nearby shrubs and trees. Music also brings us together, unites us in a common energy field, which usually also feels really good. Just right, comfortable, and fully present.
To recap I am working to feel my emotions more deeply, to understand when I’m acting from unconscious wounds, to reprogram my subconscious with affirmation, repetition infused with emotion all the while in a state of joy and love. Let’s get started!
Heart medicine – a poem
letting the raw parts be heard
finding expression for the inexpressible
tears for words
words for tears, cried through my mind
The discomfort of some feelings
certain sizzlers like charcoals
yearning to burn
cannot be contained in this body
nor understood in this mind
or felt in this heart
where do they go
how can they be handled
how do I surrender to the flame
jumping jacks
Buddhist chants
Primal scream
or Lou Reed
temporary respite
cushion the blows
that rain upon my shattered soul
How did this happen to me?
What detours did I have to take
to reach my destination?
Where is the map?
wisdom knows
still, letting her lead is an
unaccustomed kind of sensation
like breaking in a pair of shoes
or traveling to a foreign land
at first, everything is different,
unfamiliar, uncomfortable
then, gradually a learning
a relaxation and trust emerges
the way is shown
Love and Devastation
When a love relationship turns to hate, or dislike or disharmony – what is that about? This is one of the most troubling, painful and challenging situations in life for me. I imagine it is the same for others. One of my spiritual mentors said it this way: “In order to love you must be willing to face the devastation”. A Buddhist friend and I were pondering this turn of events and he relates it to the idea that in the light there is also the dark, in happiness there is sorrow – it is the yin/yang truth of life. Absolute duality. In the emotional realm it makes sense that once again the idea of attachment and aversion is where the suffering lies. Attached to “good” feelings and afraid of “bad” feelings – there is also an unconscious awareness of the pain embedded in the pleasure. True freedom is acceptance, but that is not a Pollyanna-ish idea. Acceptance includes everything. Leave anything out and it is not acceptance.
These spiritual “basics” are bandied about frequently in my world. The basics don’t change but my relationship to them and understanding of them does continue to deepen and expand. Contemplation and experience, rinse and repeat. The cycle becomes a spiral…unwinding towards understanding, and then acceptance.
There was a time when I mourned my lover’s death while he was alive. Deeply entwined in a long term relationship I feared its ending – and sometimes felt I should leave before he left me or died. I imagine this is not an uncommon way to react to intimacy and love. If I push it away then i can save myself from the pain of loss. Well – that is a losing game! It is not win-win, it is lose-lose. Perhaps it is easier to avoid intimacy and love altogether, and so avoid the pain of loss. Pondering that it is easy to see that life then collapses into pain, loneliness and depression. There is no the easy way out.
So, what is the way out? My experience is this – the way out is through. Through the pain, through the difficult emotions, through the grief and through the loss. Remembering all those I have loved and lost, the grief remains but the love, wow, the love was so good. My life was so enriched by the loss, by the love and continues to be enriched with the memories. Happy, happy memories. Ironically it seems that happiness is easier to remember than pain. Is that true for you, too?
Emotions are tricky turf. Our coping mechanisms and addictions seem to be born from the desire and need to suppress what we are afraid to feel. The British culture was molded from the idea of “stiff upper lip” which is shorthand for “show no emotion”. What happens to feelings that want to be felt but aren’t? Where do they go? One theory is that they turn into themselves and cause disease (dis-ease, duh). I see the possibility here. The psychiatric diseases are clearly seen as suppressed emotion and energy.
How, then do we feel emotions? It takes so much courage to let the painful feelings be felt and pass through. The more deeply and completely they are felt, the more quickly they pass through, at least that’s true for me. I consider this process to be the sacred fire, as the allowing of intense emotion seems to burn something – and there is a purification that completes when a feeling is fully felt.
A wise person once said to me “Every feeling fully felt leads to love”. I have experienced the truth of this – the complete and utter bliss that lies on the other side of grief. The Tibetan Buddhists belief is that we have the possibility to attain a “rainbow body” – and the process of burning off all that is not true, all this is not love, leads to this illumined state. Bring it on!
Always Choose Love- Give Love Gardens 