What would self-respect do right now?
What would self-respect say right now? When the pattern has historically been to get mired in shame, blame, or guilt, instead try someting new: - Allow the energy to move in the body. No stories, just watch the energy move. - When it has subsided in intensity, but is still active, inquire within the body what self-respect would do right now. - Do, say, follow those instructions. Let it be over. Move on.
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1. Our truth is holy. Our deepest truth is the holiest thing about us (because it is the closest thing to God). (John the Evangelizer)
2. Truth is felt within the body. The mind is the realm of culture, of man-made judgements like right/wrong, good/bad. The body is the realm of the true/untrue, it is where the truth is known. Because the truth is the holiest thing about us, that which houses the truth - the body - is holy. 3. When we are connected to our truth, when it is flowing through us, we feel the deepest peace imaginable. This is when our bodies become churches - holy spaces where the divine and the material meet. Amen. So much of our communication as a culture is for the purpose of releasing pain. Judging, gossiping, analyzing, predicting, venting. explaining, rationalizing. All for these happen for the sole purpose of releasing pain, or of being seen, of being understood, of seeking to make ourselves feel better, of restoring internal equilibrium. (All of these are impulses of the unhealed pain.)
On the healing path, we learn that no one is entitled to our attention. No one. Not my child, my spouse, my siblings, my parents, my boss, my employee, my friends, my neighbors. If someone is not in a peaceful state of mind the communication is an extension of, a release of, a perpetuation of, a recycling of, their internal pain. (Or mine, when I am the one doing it.) This is why we feel barfed on. There is another way. The greatest gift we can give another is to not be available for their pain, because that forces them to look at it, to see it, to take responsibility for it...and perhaps even to heal it. Instead of being available to receive it (even when that only takes the form of listening), we can trust them to handle it, and make ourselves unavailable. We can disengage, silently honor their pain, honor their path, and trust them to handle it. (And, when this happens to us, we can honor our pain, honor our path, and trust ourselves to handle it.) We can clean our own pain, and the underlying wound that gave it a home in the first place, it changes everything about how we perceive the behavior of another. It takes discipline to practice this, until it doesn't. Until the cost of exchanging pain with another becomes too much to bear, and we choose to instead take complete responsibility for our pain, and only our pain. (There's plenty, trust me.) And, this slows the roll of life considerably. It may take a day to have a conversation, but when (if!) it happens it is clean. If this resonates, here is an opportunity: 1. External practice: "I am no longer available to receive the pain of another." Until it has been cleaned by the owner, cleaned of the internal wound that allowed the pain to find a home in the first place, it is not yet a conversation that is ready to be had. Simply honor their path, and be unavailable. "My energy is cycling, and I am feeling stirred. This is not yet a conversation that is ready to be had." 2. External practice: Accept the invitation to witness, to honor, another's pain, provided they do not speak. Silently witness another witnessing their pain. 3. Internal practice: When and where I give my attention to another, when it is not consistent with my deepest truth, is a place where I am out of integrity with myself. Where I am trading the peace of another for my own. Looking at why I would do so, shows me where I am not yet free. We learned to do this, and we can unlearn it. The Peace Power Path is one way to heal the learned/acquired energy of going against our wholeness. 4. Internal practice: When the energy and pain are cycling, and the coping techniques are activated, choose to take complete responsibility for my pain. The Peace Power Path is one way of doing so. The places that hurt inside are places where I have abandoned myself, overridden my truth, acted from a place of loyalty instead of love, outsourced my well-being to the care of another, etc. ***Nature never does this.***. It is only when we are deeply responsible for our own well-being and tending to our own truth that we are sustainable and bring our best forward into humanity. Otherwise we are the Keystone Cops on the inside, scrambling around to get our needs met externally, when they can only ever truly be met internally.
We are taught from the youngest of ages to outsource our well-being to others. And it’s corollary, that we have the power and ability to harm another. Neither are true, these are the ways of man, not nature. In nature, the healthiest ecosystems are comprised of the healthiest individuals. A tree would never look to an owl to validate it. A flower seeks no approval to bloom. A bird in spring will never suppress it’s mating call. Not every culture does this, those that are integrated most closely with nature, indigenous populations, do not. These are the ways of man, the cult of culture, and make us controllable. We dance to an external fiddle, with no actual fiddler at the helm. Furiously rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, with no awareness that we are in dangerous waters. Myopic, and looking for others to give to us what we are unwilling to give to ourselves. Until we see it. Until it hurts too much to continue. Until we have outsourced our well-being to the bloody end, and found it completely empty, void of true power. Facing this pain and choosing another way takes courage. It is an internal act of revolution to forgo and release the ways of the culture, with its sticky, heavy, ingrained energy of loyalty, and instead turn inward, and choose love. To be uncontrollable; simply holy and human in our truth. But this is the path of freedom. And it is our birthright. Amen. How lifeless it feels to know things, when there is so much available to not know. Wonder, curiosity, trust, wisdom, imagination, passion, conversation, the Divine, the soul, our unique life pulse, surrender, humility, listening, spontaneity, depth, truth, spark, love, magic, exploration, surprise, delight, wildness, instinct, flow, poetry, creation, friction, new life, and growth can only happen in the not knowing. It is so alive...so fertile.
And so, today and all days, here’s to a life ceaselessly, shamelessly, joyfully, floodingly overflowing it’s banks in the Spring of not knowing. And, like a circle, may we unknow the known within ourselves, first and foremost, until it’s all new again. (And...when the - culturally conditioned - fear takes over, the desire for certainty, control, or an agenda, grips, remember this is true, also. Maybe not right away, maybe for another time, but always just on the other side.) At
Some point Your relationship With God Will Become like this: Next time you meet Him in the forest Or on a crowded city street There won't be anymore "Leaving." This is, God will climb into Your pocket. You will simply just take Yourself Along! ~Daniel Ladinsky interpretation, Poems by Hafiz When we hold a grudge, we seek to control another.
What we seek to control is simply a pointer, a place, where we do not yet trust ourselves (or another, it's the same thing). Where we hold hardness, not softness. I didn't actually hurt you, I showed you where you hold pain, a lack of wholeness. And vice versa. You didn't actually hurt me, you showed me where I hold pain, a lack of wholeness. Clean yourself and your pain, and I will do the same, and then we'll talk. (Except we probably won't need to, because we no longer take the actions of the other personally.) One way to clean oneself is the Peace Power Path. Namaste. "Because if there is a God — and I want my words to be exact — if God is a reality, if God’s attributes are infinite knowledge, infinite power, and omnipresence, then there is nothing outside of God. Period."
~ Daniel Ladinsky, The Sun Magazine article (https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/454/something-missing-in-my-heart) Photo credit: https://www.whoistbone.com/marfa If the truth of another upsets us, it is because we seek to control them. It is a place we are entangled, which simply means we are not whole, where we are not yet free. And, any place we do not see and honor the equality, sovereignty, truth, and dignity of another, we do not yet see and honor it in ourselves. The opportunity is to catch the response, see the true root cause, and choose to take complete responsibility for the place where *we* are not yet whole. To choose to grow up, and claim freedom.
Namaste, y’all. Blessings for the road. |
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