Archive for January, 2010
Willingness
Each of the nine colors in the Life Artist Palette (see the color legend below) is a context for living a fully expressed life. As you acquire the capacity to utilize these contexts, you awaken your Whole IQ—your Spirit, Heart, Mind and Body intelligences.
Willingness is one of the primary colors (along with Courage and Curiosity) of becoming a Life Artist.
Willingness is associated with Spirit intelligence. It supports you to shift the energy patterns that govern your life choices. If you find yourself stuck around a circumstance in your life; feeling consumed by a thought or emotion; or experiencing a high amount of anxiety, your energy is most likely trapped and compressed by tension.
In this state, you are caught in a reactive lifecycle, spinning in conflict around how to figure something out. We often believe the solution to this type of conflict lives in our Minds, and yet the truth is that the solution always starts with the Willingness to discover the energy that most inspires us, or that’s simply true in the moment.
When we become aware of the energy we most want to occupy, our awareness turns toward being creative rather than reactive. Through Willingness we give ourselves an energetic fuel that moves us back into relationship with our true desires.
Take a moment to notice where you might be energetically conflicted and use Willingness to bring yourself back into energetic alignment. It may be a Willingness to relax, or Willingness to feel a strong emotion. Notice what happens in your Spirit when you are willing to be true to yourself and what you want to create in your life.
LIFE ARTIST PALETTE LEGEND
Responsibility for Basic Human Rights
Too often we accept systems in place of human beings and common sense. Because I include an invoice in the body of an email instead of attaching it, Pearson International ignores the bill and misses paying me on time. Though almost every rational person on earth would agree that healthcare should be available and affordable for every citizen, we allow ourselves to be sidetracked by noise and misrepresentation. The Supreme Court jumps on the partisan bandwagon and reverses a law that restricted corporations from spending limitless amounts for or against candidates.
Winston Churchill said, after the battle at El Alamein,
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Our democracy may be at the end of its beginning, and what appears to be taking its place looks all too familiar from a historical perspective. More and more power is concentrated in the hands of the sheltered few. Politicians serve these select few, and despite what they say, have no sense of urgency in representing you and your concerns.
The system is disabled and will not fix itself. The only way human rights can make a sane stand is to embrace the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. Citizens must create the conditions they desire. Until people take to the streets—literally—and shut this system down, little or no progress will be made. If you doubt this, read history. What is happening to you now has happened to others before. You can change what’s coming, or you can be swept away by it.
The challenge is to balance spiritual practice with civic action. The spiritual practitioner’s civic impotence is a myth. By acting in civil defense of basic human rights—healthcare, meaningful work, education, opportunity to make a decent wage—you are operating from a persevering, grounded spiritual practice. Loving-kindness can be fierce, and that’s what’s called for now.
I Shout Their Names
I’m at an age where those I’ve known
for years are dying. Some go quick, like
snow on a warm day. Some more slowly;
as if every week is a tide that takes them
farther and farther away.
To lose someone you know is to be
seized by an invisible hand that pulls
a clump of earth from your heart.
Only after months is it possible to
realize—there is more room to feel.
Now I see your faces in the knots of
trees and chase leaves because I some-
how think they hold things you
meant to say. Now I cry at garlic
bread because you loved its smell.
Perhaps this is your gift to us:
to take up space so far in that
when you go, you empty us out.
And in our grief, we look for you
everywhere till against our will
we rediscover the world.
Sunday Snapshot: Stillness
Living in the world in the aftermath of a major catastrophe is a reminder that our time on this planet is precious and fleeting. Times like these are like the pauses after a deep exhale before the breath comes back in.
Paying attention to the breath puts us in immediate connection with our body. Similarly, an exhale from the Earth—in the form of a natural disaster—puts us in immediate connection with the world we live in. Whether we marvel at its power or get angry at what’s been lost, or feel it’s just the way things are, we are awakened to our powerlessness. To the fact that each of us does indeed have a limited number of inhalations and exhalations.
I’m a person who struggles with meditation. My life moves as fast as the next person’s, and I rarely prioritize something I know I want: the cultivation of stillness. Instead I take for granted those infinitesimally small pauses that happen before I inhale again. But from time to time I get my fix, reminding me again how grounding pausing can be. This week I happened to stay in savasana at the end yoga rather than rush out of the room like I often do. I happened to have been left on the table by my acupuncturist longer than I would have wanted, ultimately allowing me to surrender myself to my to-do list. I happened to have particularly paid attention to the physical sensation of my body collapsing into bed after a couple of particularly grueling days.
I’m envious of people who are naturally inclined toward stillness. Those who take time to notice the inhales and the exhales, the natural rhythms of life. I mostly strive to creates those moments when I remember, or occasionally, in weeks like these, I remember that this stillness is always there, always accessible in the chaos of the everyday.
This week I’ve felt the stillness in the snow-draped trees of South Lake Tahoe that seemed as if they should break under such weight; in the pure joy that graced the face of my good friend’s one-and-a-half-year-old when she met my eyes right before darting at break-neck speed out of the room, shrieking in delight; in the silent bliss of morning, ten minutes before the alarm clock forces me out of bed, listening to my lover’s even breathing; in the awesome pause that follows a torrential burst of rain whose power is both thrilling and threatening.
What is your relationship with stillness?
Where do you find it or create it?
How does it show up for you?
What Day Will Come?
As we witness the devastation in Haiti and political backlash in Massachusetts that makes meaningful health care reform ever more remote, I’ve been watching my landlady, Jeanne Krafft, fill our big house with medical supplies.
A nurse in Marin County who serves on the board of a hospital that was damaged in the quake, Jeanne quickly decided that she needed to go to Haiti. She’s a woman who knows how to sum up and take decisive action. It’s been impressive seeing her enlist the aid of dozens of friends who have showed up with supplies, carrying cases, and a willingness to sit for hours unpacking and repacking to make a dozen large, heavy cases conform to the airline’s requirements.
I myself, a minor player in this adventure, was enlisted to come up with trauma shears, a formidably named tool I had to look up on Wikipedia before feeling capable of dickering with our local medical supplies outlet.
As Jeanne prepares to leave at midnight tomorrow, I wonder what day will find her there, or whether she will land in what looks very much like perpetual night we see on the televised reports. In a way, she is bringing some daylight with her, repeating the descent into that chaos already performed by angels who are now on the ground making due with inadequate supplies or nothing at all.
Nothing but faith and perseverance.
These words came to me as I read a poem my friend May Brosseau of Southern California sent me this morning.
the day will come
when night is done
truth will be told
of young and old
time to despair
or life so fair
heaven or hell
tolls the death knell
yet all I care
is that you share
your Life with me
one you made free
may you be pleased
your heart be seized
with one so small
who heard your call
and offered love
for offered Love
This intimate poem addressed to Mary’s God holds a grounded vision of the world, including its horrors, and yet also affirms life and love and belief.
That is what Jeanne and others like her are doing, too, and all of us on our paths. May we not lose site of love and light as we dive into darkness to do what’s right.
Sunday Snapshot: Haiti
Sunday Snapshots is the Three Intentions version of the Week in Review. This week, our national consciousness has turned toward the tragedy in Haiti. I want to share the following Quotation of the Week, which came from the the other Week in Review:
“A day felt like a year. You’re buried alive. You can’t scream. You wonder if anyone will ever come.”
—Ronald Jedna, who was rescued from the rubble of his apartment building after the earthquake in Haiti
There is no putting words to what’s going on in Haiti. The loss is unspeakable, the death toll incomprehensible. One glimmer of goodness is what’s seemed like an unprecedented number of calls to action. I’ve received emails, information, and updates from every corner. I even saw an ad on my online thesaurus with a link to help Haiti.
And so this week’s inaugural Week in Review is a simple call to keep the conversation going. If you haven’t donated yet, consider Partners In Health. Coincidentally, my book club’s pick last month was Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, an amazing story of Paul Farmer’s tireless work to help and heal the poor population in this long-suffering island nation.
Staying present to the suffering of others is a challenge, and yet it’s an opportunity for connection, too. In this mile-a-minute world where our attentions are pulled in a hundred different directions every day, global catastrophes such as this, as terrible as they are, are at least moments to stop. Slow down. Look at what’s happening and respond.
Your Spiritual Practice as Poetry
Long ago, when naturalist John Muir, the father of our national parks, was a hungry, active boy in Scotland, his aunt was given a parcel in the family garden. Rather than planting potatoes or turnips, she filled her allotted segment with lilies. One can imagine her fellow family elders regarding her work with astonishment, and her with the indulgence one reserves for the challenged and abnormal.
But young Muir adored his aunt’s lily garden. Destined to become the first chronicler of the gorgeous wild lilies of the Sierras in California, he had never seen anything as beautiful as those dazzling lilies in the family garden. He spent hours gazing at them, studying each plant until he knew them as well as one might know a dear friend.
Sustenance comes in at the mouth, but also through the other spiritual portals of the senses. All we need to do is slow down, listen, and observe. This poem by George Hitchcock that says it better:
Records
Another
Russian
has returned
after
2,000,000
miles
in orbit.
Today I sat
motionless
for
28
minutes
while a
butterfly
folded its
trembling
wings
and rested
on my knee.
A life is made up of countless moments just like this one, yet how many we miss! We miss them by scurrying to and fro, whipped by deadlines, pursuing money, prestige, and phantoms created by our compulsive conjuring. We miss them by straying far from the fountainhead as we’re swept away on a tide of frenzied, unfocused energy. We miss them by becoming deaf to the Word. We fall away so pointedly that we no longer hear the voices of elders—the mentors—whose responsibility is to keep alive and pass along the words we need to hear in order to be whole.
Outlasting the Storm
The island of self I return to
is washed of all edges, completely
smooth, as if all the loss and struggle
never happened. When a stranger asks
how I came to be here, I have no way
to light the stories of being saved from
myself into a fire that can warm us. No
way to paint the joy of being here across
the sky. I only know that no island is
separate below. Only an island in what
it shows the world. So lay with me in
the sand we’ve given up, that we might
drink what spills from the moon.
An Introduction to the Colors of the Life Artist Color Palette
In the Soul’s Dream journey I guide, you become a “traveler”—moving through the lands of Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body, and ending the adventure with an experience of harmony, divine connection, and balance between your inner and outer world.
Each traveler arrives at their Soul’s Dream by awakening their Whole IQ and intentionally transforming a belief, pattern, or role that holds them back in life. The transformative process happens through growing your facility with nine colors, which are contexts, in your life. The colors give you greater access to your Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences and the respective energy, feeling, thought, and forms that each intelligence governs.
The nine colors are willingness, courage, curiosity, inspiration, vulnerability, learning, dreaming, gratitude, and remembering. They comprise the Life Artist color palette and, as you gain the ability to utilize each color more fully, you awaken greater trust and faith in your capacity to create your life from the most vital expression of your true self.
In my next nine blogs I’ll focus on one color and how each one supports you to awaken your Whole IQ and become a Life Artist.
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