A New Beginning!

I haven't written anything on my blog or posted anything here for a while. Following is a post taken from my blog written on Wednesday, 18 August 2010. Katherine thank you for your lovely comments. As you have requested, I post this here with love, on this very special day, 10.10.10, which is the start of New Beginnings for the whole planet.


I have been on a private journey, practising what I have been preaching more or less and finding bits of myself I left behind, or was too scared to look at.

I have read some more, practised some more, forgiven some more and let go some more. Am I whole?

I was always whole, this is the most important lesson I have learnt; that the true essence of who we are; is and always was and will be whole and perfect.

I have re-membered that to become whole we need to separate in order to come back together.

We live in a world of separateness, or the illusion that we are separate, but in actual fact we are all ONE; as the body is made of many parts, they are not of much use by them selves, even though they are important in their own right, they are made to work together as ONE.

I have reflected more on the Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle, and read some other inspirational books on the law of attraction, and the conclusion I have come to, is that all wisdom is true.

Truth IS, it is always the same. There are many routes to it but Truth does not move, it waits patiently for you to accept this fact.

I can read something and see the truth in parts of it, I can dismiss other parts, but what is important the truth is there to be seen, whether we can see it or not.

When I have seen it, I know it to be real (true) for my heart sings. I feel some resonance, as if my heart is tuned into the same frequency.

There have been times when I have read something that does not resonate with me. Does this mean it is not true, or is it that I cannot see the truth. Truth is there, you have reached insight when you are able to see through the words. For behind it all is truth, waiting patiently to be reached.

I have also been re-learning, about who I really am. I have found the truth, again through words, as this is my medium of enlightenment. To others it may be something else.

I have come to see that I am not really just my body, my name, my culture, my religion, my sex, my marital status etc. I am part of the Divine. I am more Divine than all the rest of these parts.

I have also come to see that when I am in alignment with this bigger part of who I am, my life works. There still are similar situations, problems and issues, but the difference is that I am not been washed up by the waves. I can ride the waves and still be at peace.

How???

- By waking up each day from the starting point of wholeness and not lack.
- By looking at all the possible things that can go right today, than hold on to all that went wrong yesterday, and think more of the same today.
- By honoring my feelings, feeling the power they evoke inside me, trusting that I will not be engulfed by them, and breathing, whilst they gently subside.
- By understanding that at the end of an unhappy moment/event there is an opportunity for a happy outcome.

The above can be explained as follows:

If everything in this life is made up of opposites then the opposite of sadness is happiness. There is a variation of both these feelings/situations as there is variation in the hues of colour.

So on a scale of happiness/sadness it could look as below:

(Sadness)Pain->anger->frustration->surrender->forgivenes->PEACE(happiness)

As you walk on the the path towards happiness, you can experience sadness and along the path there is pain, anger, frustration and all the rest that can make us unhappy. The important thing to remember is that at the other end if you continue there is peace, which is happiness.

Surrender is not giving in to the situation or circumstance, it is an acceptance, a letting go of, and this gives you the opportunity to forgive, which is to fully release the past, leaving just peace.

Along this journey of life, we will be taking steps forward and then seemingly fall backward into pain. We can choose to stay at any point, we can bring in surrender at any point, we can forgive at any point. We don't have to ignore the hurt and frustration, just accept it, this helps for the biggest transformation.

Life offers many opportunities to find peace in all situations. It may seem a pointless venture since there is this situation of duality/opposites going on. But each time you forgive, you have put yourself on a higher level of understanding and consciousness.

You now have more awareness and more power of your actions. From this new awareness, you can reach peace quicker, as you are embodying more peace. You are being more of who you really are. You are aligned to the Divine, and the Divine is LOVE!!!

With an awareness that you are essentially made up of love, the more connected you feel to this part of you, the more peace you will see all around you.

So, here are my lessons, for now. I hope through these words you are able to see the truth. I hope you can see your own light shining through!

'A man should look for what is and not what he thinks should be'
Albert Einstein

Water and Forgiveness

The Loy Krathong song begins, “In the twelfth month on the full moon…”
By the Western calendar, the festival actually takes place in November, but by the Thai lunar calendar it’s the twelfth month. Not only are the months counted differently, but here in the village it’s actually 2542, since the original Year of the Buddha occurred 500 years before the first Year of Our Lord. I feel as if I’m a time traveler who has been transported 500 years into the future.
Loy Krathong is the second-most important celebration on the Thai calendar, and this presumably means the village will go all out. But when the celebration begins, I’m surprised at the dignity and restraint of the celebration. Unlike the prolonged and frenzied partying of the Songkran holiday, this harvest festival chiefly involves launching floating candles across the water to carry our sins away. No Las Vegas-like stage shows, no throbbing outdoor movies, no wobbly carnival rides.
Instead, after dark, we carry our modest krathongs (floats made of banana leaves and bearing flowers, candles and incense sticks) down to the village reservoir. The vast, placid reservoir is already fringed with flickering krathongs, which are bobbing near the shores from which villagers have launched them. It’s a windless night, so not many of the village’s sins have floated out into the middle, except where villagers are splashing and making waves to send them on their way.

Floating our boats of sin away is actually only one of several explanations I’ve heard about this festival. I’ve also been told that the festival involves giving thanks for the rains that irrigate the paddy fields. And in a combination of those two strains—expressing gratitude for the rains and asking forgiveness for sins--I’ve heard we are specifically asking pardon from the water gods for polluting the water. That’s a tad ironic, since the festival involves littering the waters with dozens of krathongs, some of which have come to include Styrofoam.
Still, it’s undeniably a lovely sight when the rivers and lakes of Thailand become oceans of flowers and fire this one night of the year. Perhaps the most spectacular celebration takes place in the ancient city of Sukothai, but the nearby Mekong River becomes a stream of candlelight as well.
But for this festival, the village has plenty of water and floating beauty. And of all the different explanations I’ve been given for Loy Krathong, it’s the asking-for-forgiveness explanation that I like the best. For me, this makes the ritual of Loy Krathong something like a sacrament, a visible expression of God conferring invisible grace. Or, as one definition says, “a rite in which God is uniquely active.” Amen to that. So I silently ask Jesus to forgive my sins before launching my krathong. My Buddhist friend, Maliwan, is crouched beside me, and she pauses before launching her krathong as well. “Now,” she murmurs, “we pray.” She bows her head. Our candles burn with remorse, our incense sticks send up a fragrant plea for forgiveness. Our sins set sail softly, sadly, but when our sin and regret stall a few feet from shore, we smack energetically at the water, sending the floats outward on concentric ripples of water. All my students are milling around, exchanging greetings and smiles. The whole village is out, and the feeling of a fresh start is in the air. It’s a beautiful sight, as dozens of candles flicker on the dark water.
Later, three of us from the village straddle a single motorcycle and ride to Ban Dung, where a krathong contest is being judged. Here is the lavish celebration I have grown to expect in Thailand. These krathongs are not modest—they are huge and elaborate, constructed of hundreds of tightly woven banana leaves, sculpted into royal birds and royal palaces and bedecked with festive lights.
But not only are the floating beauties of the water being judged—local beauties of the human variety are also competing for a crown. Beauty contests are another feature of Loy Krathong, and one young woman after another parades across the stage. As she crosses, pauses, and twirls, each woman’s measurements are pronounced over the loudspeakers to fervent applause.
Also posted on Strange Islands

Presence and Contemplation

Place your attention here and now with me in this moment. Begin to focus your attention first on your breathing and slow your breathing down. You may want to take a couple of deep, cleansing breaths and then begin to slow your breathing down. As you focus on your breathing and on slowing it down, feel your entire body relax.

Feel the facial muscles relax, unfurrow your brow, relax your mouth and jaw, relax your neck. Allow the feeling of relaxation flow through your entire body as you continue to focus on slowing down your breathing. Allow any tension in the body to simply melt away, feel the tension melt away as you slow down your breathing.

Focus on slowing down your thoughts as you continue to feel yourself relax, allow your thoughts to become gentle thoughts. Allow tenderness and gentleness to enter as you allow any harsh and stressful thoughts to simply pass by. Allow the stream of activity in your brain, the chatter to slow down, to pass away, as you feel a gentle tenderness fill you.

Allow all thoughts to pass away, even hurtful thoughts or thoughts of anger, just allow them to pass by and dissolve away. You can allow all thoughts, even if they are stressful or disturbing to simply pass by as mental activity, nothing important to hold onto, it is just the brain performing a function, just as the heart performs the function of pumping blood through your body.

Allow the peace and calm that fills you as you continue to relax and allow random thoughts to simply pass away encourage forgiveness. Allow any and all thoughts that can be replaced with forgiveness to pass away and allow forgiveness to fill that space.

A quote from Lord Edwary Hyde Clarendon for you to contemplate:

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It affects nothing it touches and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed. 

I run a regular series every Friday offering presence and contemplation at my blog The Evolving Spirit

    

He says, she says

By kbxmas

When my son was a toddler he rarely talked. For about six months a speech therapist came to our house once a week and tried to draw out his words. Eventually he started to speak but still, he remained a boy of action and few words. Until this past year, that is. It's as if he discovered the joy of articulation overnight and now assaults us with non-stop verbal artillery. Take this salvo, thrown at me as I was pulling into the Target parking lot the other day:

“I just burped without making a sound. I wish my bones were superglued together. Mommy, when I opened my juice it 'sploded. In you van. Are you mad? I smell french fries.”

His words are like buckshot, tiny pellets of minutiae scattered to the wind. He'll throw a hundred words at me and maybe six or eight will stick.
My 7-year-old daughter on the other hand, chooses her words thoughtfully. Hers is the silver bullet tucked with care in her pocket, withheld until absolutely necessary, never wasted. They have the power to melt hearts and wound them.

Tonight she was harping on about something that was unfair so I sent her upstairs for a cooling off period, which only served to further stir her ire and as she made her way down the hall to her room she yelled the following at me: “I hate you and I will never apologize! And if I do apologize I won't mean it!”

While I should have been wounded by this, I've been hated by her enough times to know that it only lasts the duration of her time out and besides, I was too tickled by her addendum to be hurt. As predicted, once she was allowed back downstairs we made fast with a hug and a game of trash, in which she beat me soundly. Fortunately, both my children are fluent in the language of forgivemess, as are all children, in their wisdom.

I'm a bit apprehensive, however, for her teenage years, when her tongue may grow sharper and her cooling off period longer. At least I'll have my son to talk at me while I'm waiting her out. Unless, of course, they go changing on my again, as kids are wont to do.

Also posted on Wanderlust

no brakes, no seatbelts, and no anaesthetic

Sometimes life brings us drastic change -- disease, war, natural disasters, things that are larger than ourselves which we cannot control -- and sometimes we walk into it, or stumble into it. We've all heard the convenient little tidbit of "New Age" philosophy that states, "You create your own reality". There's certainly a level on which our perceptions shape the narrative we tell ourselves and others about our experience. It is also not far wrong to say that our perceptions are shaped by the choices that we make from moment to moment.

However, there's a dangerous "blame the victim" sort of slant implied by this bit of folk wisdom. We've all taken the stance of the victim from time to time, and certainly there is a responsible way for any adult to step out of victimization into empowerment -- I may have not caused the earthquake that destroyed my house (at least not directly or consciously), but I am in charge of rebuilding it. And if we burned the house down by getting drunk and falling asleep while smoking, well, we can't exactly blame the liquor store. But I feel a little uneasy about over-simplified statements of "Karma" (a complex philosophical framework that is mostly misunderstood by Westerners) or "drawing experiences to oneself", when considering things like child abuse, racism both institutional and social, famine, inter-generational poverty, and genocide. Even when faced with unintended consequences of one's own actions, to minimize the suffering experienced by saying the person "brought it on themselves" isn't exactly the sort of compassion I'm comfortable displaying in public.

In reality, or so I believe, we all brought everything on ourselves by being born; but we didn't deserve any of it, even the good things. However, for me to hold onto blame for someone who I believe has wronged me is just another way to hold on to suffering. In my experience, keeping score regarding what I perceive as harm done to me by others doesn't result in some sort of cosmic actuarial reckoning at the end of the day or even at the end of life. My fear, and I have good reason to fear this, is that there is no great cosmic reckoning of any kind, ever, other than in an unimaginably gradual process of random movements in the universe. Instead, the only reckoning I will experience is the one I bring about by the immoderate and reckless act of forgiveness.

We often see small children forgiving and sharing with others in a manner which seems angelic and pure to us; but it's really only a matter of the degree to which they feel the pain of their experience in any given moment. You and I haven't changed much since we were children. Sure, we'll share and forgive and include and all that great stuff -- when it's comfortable and convenient. Everybody likes to be perceived as a "nice person". It's when giving and forgiving hurts that it truly has any meaning. Anybody can throw crumbs to the birds; it takes a different sort of person to see a bird fly into a closed window and go check if it's injured. I think a good many of us have an "I gave at the office" approach to those who come to us with hands outstretched, reduced to a level of desperation in which they are incapable of feeling any shame for begging. But we need to help, however much we may resist it. It's like we have two voices in our heads -- or rather, one in our head and one in our heart. The one in our head says, "You'll be taken advantage of," and the one in our heart only knows how to say "I love you".

The secret to all this is that forgiving is easy, or at least it is past the first step. It is impossible to forgive anyone else if we can't forgive ourselves -- that is where it must begin. "I chose this" cannot be a self-condemnation; rather, it's an acceptance that we are not that special in our suffering. Miraculously enough, I have discovered that once I drag myself over that first terrible hurdle, everything afterward is a cakewalk. If I can fully and completely forgive myself for my mistakes, laziness, cowardice, even moments of cruelty, I have everything I need to forgive others. In forgiving myself I don't let myself off the hook; to the contrary, it's claiming a whole other level of responsibility for my actions. Once I've set aside luxuriating in the self-pitying voice that says "I suck!", I am confronted by the task of making ordinary human amends for my ordinary human misdeeds. You aren't a f?!?-up; you f?!?ed up. Get clear on the difference between those two statements, and you can get clear with anyone about anything.