Connected and Committed

some little clue to the meaning of the universe

The physical beauty of the Keshiri was difficult to resist  but Vestara knew she would not be one of those who succumbed to it. She was utterly devoted to the Force, to her studies, to practicing and training and honing her skills until her body quivered with weariness, until she was drenched in sweat, until she crawled into bed and slept the dreamless sleep of the exhausted.

And now this Ship had come, and she did not care about anything else.

Again she felt the cold perusal, and shivered. Ahri's arms tightened about her, mistaking the gesture for physical chill.

You sensed me.

I-I did, she sent back through the Force.

She was being...examined. Appraised.

You seek to become a Sith Master. To harness the power of the dark side.

I...I...

Vestara straightened to her full tall height atop Tikk's back and deliberately banished her childish hesitancy. Never mind that she had never before beheld a spacefaring vessel--never even seen the diagrams and schematics that were purported to rest inside the forbidden hull of the crashed Omen. She was of the Tribe, the daughter of a Sith Saber. She was exceptionally strong in the Force and knew it.

And the Ship--Ship itself, not its pilot, she realized now it had no pilot, not yet--was testing her. She would not shrink before its probity.

I do . I shall. I am Vestara Khai, daughter of a proud heritage. I have what is necessary to command the dark side and bend it to my will. To use it for the good of the Tribe, and the People.

For the good of all Sith, Ship suggested.

She nodded automatically, though even as she did so she realized the vessel couldn't see her.

Except that it could. Or rather, she realized, it could sense her agreement in the Force. She felt it approve and then withdraw. Without the coldness of its presence in her mind, she somehow felt bereft, but she refrained from seeking it out again.

At that moment, as her gaze wandered from Ship to the throng of Sith crowding around it, in that sea of dark robes she saw a pale blond head turn in her direction. It was Lady Rhea, one of the members  of the Sith Circle of Lords, and her blue eyes were fixed upon Vestara. Even from this height, Vestara could see that Lady Rhea's eyes were narrowed, as if she was considering something.

Slowly, Vestara smiled.

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Omen  by Christie Golden, p. 45

~*~*~

'Actually," I told him reluctantly, "I have always agreed with the idea that we have a sin nature. I don't think it looks exactly like the fundamentalists say it does, 'cause I know so many people who do great things, but I do buy the idea we are flawed, that there is something in us that is broken. I think it is easier to do bad things than good things. And there is something in that basic fact, some little clue to the meaning of the universe."

..."Of course, but that really should tell us something about the human condition. We have to be taught to be good. It doesn't come completely natural. In my mind, that's a flaw in the human condition."

Blue Like Jazz, Don Miller

~*~*~

The great thing--no, one of the great things--about being able to look at life through the lens of possibility is the plethora of examples of how that might work that are available all around me, in every moment, that shine in the most unlikely places.

Even books about the dark side.

Even books about the flawed human condition.

What's fascinating about the dark side is that, for the dark side to be attractive at all, someone has to be in a lot of pain for relief to arrive from that sector of the universe. All its promise of power and domination only appeals to those who perceive themselves as powerless and dominated.

I'm guessing that things look good for Vestara to experience initiation into the fold in the story, something she desires and deserves to have. She can participate in the dark side and it doesn't have to affect me or what I desire. Where I'm at on the emotional scale most of the time, our worlds won't overlap or intertwine at all unless we choose to stick our noses in each other's business intellectually, or more importantly, energetically.

And actually I'm inspired by her dedication to go after what she wants. She doesn't hesitate. She rises to the occasion of opportunity like a fully realized female and allows herself to go toward who she's been  becoming.

There's much to admire here, more than what's available to the standard feminine action figure personas that populate the mainstream super hero shows my son watches.

And the notion that we have to be taught how to be good, well, I'm here to perform contaminated belief supply procedures on the layers of unexamined beliefs in that soft underbelly.

Generations of children have been conditioned to slowly but systematically reject who they really are in order to gain very conditional approval from those grown-ups who appear to have things figured out here on the planet.

The result is a huge spiritual backfire, this pounding square pegs to fit into round holes.

That's what is broken in us, once we buy into the idea that we need fixing.

And no one who claims to has much of anything figured out here on the planet that I can see. We keep making silent agreements to continue supporting ideas that don't work, en masse.

That little clue to the meaning of the universe?

Hello.

I knew it wasn't only me

Still, I knew, because of my own feelings, there was something wrong with me, and I knew it wasn't only me. I knew it was everybody. It was like a bacteria or a cancer or a trance. It wasn't on the skin; it was in the soul. It showed itself in loneliness, lust, anger, jealousy, and depression. It had people screwed up bad everywhere you went--at the store, at home, at church; it was ugly and deep. Lots of singers on the radio were singing about it, and cops had jobs because of it. It was as if we were broken, I thought, as if we were never supposed to feel these sticky emotions. It was as if we were cracked, couldn't love right, couldn't feel good things for very long without screwing it all up. We were like gasoline engines running on diesel.I was just a kid so I couldn't put words to it, but every kid feels it...From a very early age our souls are taught there is a comfort, and a discomfort in the world, a good and a bad if you will, a lovely and a frightening. There seemed to me to be too much frightening, and I didn't know why it existed.

~from Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

Indeed.

Our souls are taught these dark places.

Or rather, our minds are conditioned to believe that these dark places are truths worthy of being attended to, deserving of investment of our time and energy.

Our souls, however, never buy into this crap.

They do not buy into the "truth" of dark places.

They merely continue to hold vigil for other truths becoming more self-evident as time goes by and we get tired of maintaining this charade that's been handed down to us.

This weekend, if you are going to be around people from your past who helped validate those dark places, try something new. When the thoughts you learned to practice and turn into your beliefs start churning around in the ruts of your neuropathways, try this new thought instead:

"It's not my truth in this moment, anymore."

Because it's not.

Give it a try.

It's exactly how the dark "truths" got a foothold in your mind in the first place.

Pick another truth to focus on.

The one your soul knows.

happy happy joy joy

I'll have what she's having

I've been thinking about knowing what it is that we want, and the scene in When Harry Met Sally where she orders her food the way she prefers it popped into my head. If you don't remember it because you only remember THAT restaurant scene from the movie, here's a recap (THAT scene is for another post altogether):

I'm sure that I joined the rest of the audience and judged Sally for her eccentric tastes and even the audacity for speaking them out loud way back in 1989.

Now I see things a little differently.

I get it that it's OK--no, it's more than ok, it's necessary--for her, and everyone else to A) have those preferences, B) voice those preferences, and C) be unconcerned what others' might think about those preferences.

Unconcerned as in, everybody has their own preferences. As in, all of us attempting to fit in and be like everyone else doesn't work, hasn't worked, isn't ever going to work. As in, we can't not have our preferences, and when we pretend that they aren't important, we suffer.

Our bodies develop diseases that reflect what it is we are stuffing down inside.

We don't sleep well.

Our relationships are hollow containers for so much mask-wearing, when authenticity could be the order of the day.

We spend time wondering "What if?", and torture ourselves with the inaccurate assumption that we'll never be able to have what we want.

All because we are such good little automatons who learned putting our concerns for what others think before allowing ourselves to be who we really are, from all the sources that spew that uni-message every day.

We learn to cater to the selfishness of others.

Isn't that fascinating? We buy into and minimize the risk of acquiring that abhorrent label "selfish" by living lives that allow others to feel better about their selfish preferences.

The irony of it all is that those folks we are trying to please, they did the same thing.

They did something at some point because of what someone else thought they should do.

They made a choice that made their heart thrash around in its rib cage with resignation and resentment, and it's been beating there on auto pilot ever since.

Those preferences of ours, they are our lifelines. They are the universe's ticket to being around a while longer. They are what will make us happy.

And until we decide that being happy is a state not relegated to retirement, or when the kids are gone, or that nebulous "someday", those preferences stand in the wings, just waiting for us to enliven them with our enthusiasm and our clarity.

They're accommodating like that.

They know that they make so much sense for you. They know that you choosing to follow the trail of your bliss would mean only good things. They're hanging out with the people and circumstances and events waiting in the wings with them based on those preferences, just itching to be put in the rotation.

They wait for us to come out and play.

Sally, I celebrate what you're having.

Mukhtar the bus driver had a birthday

In Denmark, Mukhtar the bus driver had a birthday. He worked that day. His regular passengers had an idea:

contamination of the belief supply

Our disrespected environment, our edumacation lockstep delivery system, our political stagnation process, our empty religious practices, our fake food product industry, our lack-focused marketing mindset--all of the worst of these aspects of our culture stay in place because of a contamination of the belief supply. We stay asleep collectively under the silent agreements we make when we continue to buy into the power these mirages of civilization have over us.

It's not true.

Start telling a different story that begins gathering new textures of thoughts to you that eventually shift your beliefs over time about what is possible.

That's how it's done.

bliss and a ton of crap

This personal transformation business is fascinating stuff.

Popular culture tends to characterize the process with images of sublime serenity and blissful contemplation.

Anyone who actually engages the process however knows that before, during and after that blissful state arrives, there is a ton of crap to continuously dismantle and unlearn.

Some of that skewed perspective we attribute to ourselves initially came from others, and then we constructed more elaborate endless-loop thinking on top of that fine start.

Reorienting to what is actually true about who we are is much like the painstaking scraping layers of paint from the side of a building or the surface of a piece of furniture.

It's hard work, to the extent to which we buy into it needing to be that way, but makes for a much more hospitable foundation on which to apply the new colors and textures we consciously want.

It means learning new behavior and taking responsibility for it, which humans tend not to do gracefully or willingly, generally putting it off until circumstances are such that we see we have no other choice.

It means no longer being able to stop the blame buck anywhere else but right here for what is showing up in our lives over and over again.

It means sitting with really uncomfortable stuff and realizing that we aren't going to die because of it.

This personal transformation business is fascinating stuff.

Vibrational marketing

Vibrational marketing ala Abraham.

bacon, bacon, bacon

lizard brain, required high and collapse

When the lizard brain kicks in and the resistance slows you down, the only correct response is to push back again and again and again with one failure after another. Sooner or later, the lizard will get bored and give up.

~Seth Godin

Phase Three You've gone through two of the three phases of excitement and now it pays off. You hit pay dirt. Phase Three is where you lay out a plan and roll up your sleeves -- without the high, without the crash, but with the clarity and steady energy that makes things happen.

You won't have that energy unless you collapsed when you were supposed to.

-Barbara Sher

~*~*~

What I absolutely adore about the universe is that there are enough techniques and practices that get invented and floated around over the centuries that can apply to wherever you are in your spiritual/self-help evolution. Someone else has been there before and has scattered the bread crumb wisdom you can glean from their experience.

Seth, I love you to death, I really do, but when you describe pushing back with failure as "the only correct response" to make things happen, I agree to a point, but something is missing.

Same for you, Barb. Your work has made a huge difference in my life as well, but a high automatically followed by a collapse as required meandering to bringing ideas to life? There's something missing there too.

What I've come to count on in my process of emerging from merely permission existing to full out permission living is that there are always rogue, errant and woefully inaccurate beliefs underlying my inability to shift my thinking, which is what keeps doubts and fears in place and new ideas from being allowed their due quicker than they usually get access at Chez Today.

I would surmise that Seth has supreme unshakable confidence in his ideas and in his ability to navigate the world with them successfully, hence his technique works for him. He processed and discarded the pesky beliefs early in the game that might have kept him caught up in the permission existing that he so eloquently bashes and tweaks and prods every day. The education, publishing and marketing worlds are rampant with those beliefs, and we need his shining light of other-options-are-available.

Barbara engages resistance with everything she has, and her techniques embody the powerful tools that humor and accepting what is can be. But the repertoire of effective mechanisms to move away from existing and into living is much broader than to simply wait out the resistance that will definitely come up because the beliefs that trigger them haven't been examined and approved with a #5 sticker.

When we opt in to permission (ours) living, we choose not to be limited by beliefs that no longer serve us. We say yes to living and loving and playing and working in the manner that is right for us, criteria that have nothing to do with meeting anyone else's approval.

This is not anarchy. This is not blatant disregard of other people's feelings.

This is maintaining healthy boundaries, something this culture does a pretty good job of ignoring in its knowledge transmission to its populace through education, religion and other institutionalized thinking.

The folks who require us to get their approval don't know what healthy boundaries are because of this conditioning, and operate from the totally selfish perspective that they might accuse us of should we dare to live the way that makes sense to us.

And round and round it goes.

Resistance thrives on that churning, have you noticed?

Lizard brain too. Fight or flight kicks in, and away we go.

Boredom and collapse might indeed be what the doctor ordered: boredom with belief transmission that serves a select few, and the subsequent collapse of that belief system upon recognition of it by everyone else.

While that revolution takes place and builds momentum, we can be discovering our tribes, supporting our linchpins, and humoring at our resistance.

Like Seth and Barb said.

But get that #5 sticker from yourself.

Happiness ain't all it's cracked up to be

Happiness ain't all it's cracked up to be.

What an outrageous headline.

What a ludicrous set of conclusions, based on a set of equally ludicrous assumptions.

Just as statistics can be manipulated to extol any particular viewpoint, so can study variables and entrenched thinking skew results.

I first realized this when the virtues of adhering to a Mediterranean diet were first spread around the globe. The health benefits the researchers were able to measure in their subjects led them to believe that the food they ate and the alcohol they ingested were the responsible factors.

What the researchers failed to include in their findings--because they weren't looking for them--were the cultural factors that contribute considerably more to one's overall health and well-being in these locales than just the food or the kind or amount of spirits one imbibes.

Granted, they insist on eating real food and understand the merit of that philosophy more than we do. And their wines are grown and processed with love, an elixir that has no match.

But there's more to it than that. And because I lived in Italy for three years, I was fortunate enough to become privy to some of the cultural wisdom a few locals shared with me about how life could be lived in ways I'd never encountered before in my native particular slice of the West.

So when I read this headline in some search results to discover where the phrase "all it's cracked up to be" came from, I had to shake my head.

Research bias and ignorance.

How they apply the term "selfishness" and interpret their subjects' behaviors sounds so civilized, so definitive.

But their results are inaccurate at best, flawed and uninformed at worst.

Devotees of Abraham will understand what I mean.

Starting out with a set of false premises will lead you to false conclusions.

 

I think I'll stop now

I have a day job in the education industry, one of the few sanctioned cultural experiences of an energy cycle with distinct endings and beginnings, where an indigenous slow-down occurs and effort expenditures fall back for just a bit at certain times of year.

Like this one.

The feeling is reminisceint of a very good vacation, in which relaxation was the point and not more do-ing. Where relationships were enhanced and amplified, and one returns to the "real" world refreshed and ready to recommence with the adrenal gland draining.

It usually happens on the last day of classes, when fleeting appreciation glides on the air and the pressure is off to confine captive minds.

I want to capture this feeling and put it in a two-gallon mayonnaise jar and give it to everyone with a reminder to open it and breathe it in as often as possible.

Native peoples have remembered how to do this, how to pause, how to reflect, how to honor, how to lay fallow, how to connect, how to appreciate and live what is of value.

Slow food.

Slow living.

It's raining cats and dogs this morning, one of nature's ways of requiring that we slow down.

The mood is sublime and quiet as I type.

I think I'll stop now.

my god, she found it

Depression is not only a result of inner punishment we inflict on ourselves for daring to think of inner freedom. It is also the result of despair, born of the inner knowledge of disloyalty to self, and waste of one's self and one's real assets over a lifetime of capitulation to inner tyranny. Fortunately as I shall explain when I discuss compassion, if the battle is engaged and sustained, spontaneity often wins out, because the great proclivity of most human beings is toward healthy growth, in the service of taking ourselves, our needs, our assets and our real hopes and desires seriously.

Unfortunately, this is often not evident because we suffer from the pressures of an impossible cultural value system of which both we and our parents are victims.

The combination of inner and outer pressures makes extrication from this vice extremely painful and difficult and requires considerable motivation.

...The struggle for a compassionate life includes nonjudgmental acceptance of all aspects of self, regardless of, and usually as a stand against, familiar and cultural value systems that are designed to obliterate pieces of ourselves. Unless we know and fight for our sacred right to be human, we invariably find that at least in some measure we live in a state of inner terror. Unfortunately, many of us have been terrorized for so long and so effectively that we no longer know what constitutes being human.

Compassion and Self-Hate: Am Alternative to Despair by Theodore Rubin

I found these quotes the other day in an old notebook from 2001.

It was one of the first references I had seen made by someone in a culturally sanctioned healing profession that described exactly what it felt like inside my body to be feeling what I was feeling, and why I was feeling that way, and what I could do about it, that made sense.

There's also a journal entry near this excerpt:

"So an ongoing plan to beat this bogus self-loathing and get on with why I am on this earth. I was talking to K. and couldn't quite articulate what keeps me from this. What came up was not giving myself permission which is a round about way of getting to the point. Anyway. Bombarding my psyche with affirmations I guess would be good to continue. Although that doesn't seem to have been very effective thus far. Why don't I think that I am worthy of good things? Is my upbringing devoid of approval so encompassing that I am unable to rise above it? It doesn't make any sense. I am capable, I have things to contribute to the world, so what's the hold up?

Don't know."

~*~*~

And another:

"Lots of old patterns reigniting, lots of learning, I hope. One, that I am ambivalent about wanting to be wanted or wanting to be loved; I'd prefer the latter but the former is so ingrained, it's amazing how automatic the reflexes are, immediate: "Why doesn't he want me?" and "Why aren't I good enough?" instead of "What kind of man is he," and "Would he be good for me?"

But I am learning. I have no idea what I'm replacing old patterns with, but I didn't know what I was doing when they were first created either...

This time I could step outside myself at times to catch a glimpse of what I was doing, what I was choosing to make happen. At one point I remember thinking, I am choosing to be this blissed out, why couldn't I choose that all the time, and not based on the opinion of someone else? What would that be like? What positions would I need to get off of? Or not? What negative energy zappers could I let go of?"

~*~*~

This version of me from nine years ago, I so appreciate her hanging in there and not giving up on figuring out the why and how to change what I was living in my head.

She made this amazing life that I'm living now, outside of my head, possible.

She kept looking for clues, for people, for techniques, for bodies of thought, for practices, for something that made sense of the inner tyranny, and the equally tenacious knowing that there was more to life than waking up in the clutches of it every day.

The knowing wouldn't allow her to give up.

And she found what she was looking for.

My god, she found it.

Peace of mind. Contentment. Knowing, on a cellular level.

The keys to that kingdom are different for everyone, but they all hang from the same ring.

Have you claimed yours yet?

permission living. yours. opt in.

Four years ago this week, I embarked upon a potentially pivotal phase of my life in a relationship that I thought at the time was the be-all and end-all of relationships.

Not so much.

The person that I was back then learned quite a bit from that experience and has moved on to morph through probably, I don't know, at least seven or eight personal transformations since then.

If I had stayed in that relationship, I would have been fully engaged in permission existing.

Other people's permission.

And merely existing. 

I opted out, because I knew that wasn't possible anymore, even back then.

Instead, I was heading for permission living.

Mine.

I opted in, finally.

I crossed that line in my head, the one that holds us back from being who we really are.

I said, "Yes," instead of "Maybe".

Epiphanies erupted.

Shackles fell away.

It was quite the revelation, really.

Scary, yes. Angst-ridden, yes. We humans love to torture ourselves with shift remorse as well as buyer's remorse.

This permission to be who we are, in our skins, that we dream about doing someday, we regain it in every moment, until it builds up to critical mass and becomes a platform from which to operate rather than the tenuous scaffolding it must start out as.

I celebrate my scaffolding and the angst, because it got me to the glorious knowing place I'm in right now.

No way around that process.

Opting out of permission existing.

Theirs.

And opting in to permission living.

Yours.

Click that button.