Earlier this week, I received an email from a childhood friend, now a resident of the Sunshine State, following his morning run. He told me about seeing an alligator, a starling, and a hawk. As I’ve mentioned before and will mention again, the Maya say that God, or, to use the Native American term, Great Spirit, talks to us all the time through nature. With the brilliant insight of a Mayan shaman, he readily received an inspiring message for his current life circumstances. He watched the starling reclaim his territory by noisily flutter near the hawk until the majestic bird flew away.
My friend was reminded that he, as a small businessman, can still hold his own against huge corporations who are both predatory and proud (hawk). Moreover, my friend saw how he can maintain his integrity by not swimming with the alligators, those bottom feeders in business, who become cutthroat and unethical in seeking to survive. Reading his email, I was reminded of his courage and tenacity in overcoming bigger opponents all through his life from athletics to business. But, beyond this message, there was another, related message for me to share with you relevant to remembering who we are truly are.
Since ancient times, the core elements of our human beingness have been depicted as three-fold. Plato described the soul as a charioteer holding the reins of two horses as his chariot moves midway between heaven and earth; on the one hand, a dark horse pulls the chariot downward toward earthly delights while a white one strives upward toward the heavenly realm of ideals. Saint Paul described our being as three-fold: “your whole being—spirit, soul, and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). And, Freud referred to the ego, the "I" at the center of our consciousness. On the one hand the ego is pressured by the id, that cauldron of body-based, instinctual desires; while on the other, the ego is compelled by the superego, the socially-conditioned conscience, filled with the morals, taboos, and ideals.
Now, here was my childhood friend presenting a richly symbolic and substantial shamanic depiction of the structure of our being as well as the choices we face that define who we are. It is an apt picture for the current shift we are being called to make. It is a shift in identity, in how we define ourselves. The pesky starling in us (ego) is faced with the choice of aligning with the massive instinctuality of the alligator or with the majestic spirituality of the hawk. In Egyptian mythology, the hawk was the symbol of the god Horus, and in the Native American spirituality, hawk is referred to as the “messenger of Great Spirit” (God).
To identify with the alligator, we risk being swallowed up in a life driven by the reptile brain. In contrast, the starling (ego) could identify with the hawk. Will we identify with the ego (body-based sense of self), the little self, the noisy, pesky starling, and drive away the majestic hawk, the higher self, the spirit, the transcendent portion of the soul? As mentioned in earlier postings, e.g., The Iguana & the Hawk, the Maya depict our highest potential as being feathered serpents, kukulcans. The lower in us is integrated into and guided by the higher.
Saint Paul called us to make our bodies a “living sacrifice” and thereby be “transformed” by the renewing of our minds so that we can then be filled and guided by the spirit of God (Romans 12:1-2). And, since God is love, that essentially means being guided by love. In the next posting, we will see what being guided by love meant to a psychiatrist encarcerated in a concentration camp.
• Today, reflect for a moment on the starling, the hawk, and the alligator as elements of all of us as human beings. Which one are you aligned with in life? Pay attention to the creatures crossing your path. And, remember they may take the form of something in our technological society such as the stylish jaguar making a turn at the traffic light.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Healing Early Heartbreak
Witnessing his or her parents in conflict breaks a child’s heart. But the tentacles of its effects reach far into the future of that child when he or she grows up. I saw this in my practice but it was brought home to me most poignantly when I recently revisited my memories of an icon of the 1960’s.
“Where Have You Gone Joe Namath?” I had just looked up at the magazine rack of the local coffee shop where I was enjoying an iced-coffee on a hot August day. There was the face of Joe Namath on the cover of Sports Illustrated. After all these years, there was the famous football star and notorious playboy: Broadway Joe.
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the football stadium at night, the cover photo forever freezes this moment in time. Wearing his white New York Jets’ jersey, Joe stands before us with dark, tousled hair and piercing blue eyes. He is the quarterback: the quintessential hero of our youth. Loved by all the girls. Envied by all the guys. Tall. Dark. And, despite his protruding proboscis, he is handsome in a rugged, unorthodox way. Just as Clark Gable, the early king of Hollywood had elephant ears that were dwarfed by his charm, so Namath’s nose is nullified by his magical presence.
The article was an excerpt from a biography of Broadway Joe entitled Namath written by Mark Kriegel. I found Kriegel’s comments very insightful. Kriegel suggested that he had more than broken bones: Joe had his heart broken early in life.
Kriegel described how Joe was open about all his physical injuries. “He’d talk about the broken bones. But never the broken heart,, the original wound.” Namath revealed to Kriegel one of his earliest and most vivid memories: “I can remember as a three- or four-year-old, to this day, hearing them [his mother and father] downstairs, talking or arguing about something? I was upstairs and I came to the top of the steps and I was crying because I was scared.”
Very astutely, Kriegel speculates on Joe’s personal emotional history: “Perhaps the fear was in his bones, something from his own father’s boyhood lodged in the marrow, the knowledge that separation is inevitable. Families fracture. You can get left behind.”
When Joe was in seventh grade his father left. Kriegel quoted one of Joe’s closest friends Jack (Hoot Owl) Hicks. Regarding the day Namath’s father left, Hicks said: “He [Joe] told me that was the saddest day of his life.”
As I read this, I could see the childhood origin of Broadway Joe’s highly publicized womanizing. I could also see the unconscious fear underlying his not marrying until he was forty. The child whose heart is broken may grow up to be a heartbreaker. Afraid of being abandoned, he or she abandons first. Such was the case with Robert until he came to therapy and finally confronted the pain of his personal emotional history.
Robert began, “After the breakup of my most recent relationship, I had a thought that I felt uncomfortable admitting. I imagined saying to all the women I had loved and left: ‘I’m glad I broke your heart the way mine was broken.’ Robert continued, "I was confused because I was not talking about any female I had loved as an adult or adolescent breaking my heart.” Robert didn’t realize it but he was talking about some distant childhood experience that was hidden in the hazy fog of memory. He was talking about something from his early life.
Robert then related how upset he was at dropping off his little boy, Chip. Chip was now seven years old. Chip was from Robert’s first marriage. Since leaving when Chip was a year old, Robert had gone through the next three marriages in less than six years. Robert described how hard it was every time he dropped off Chip and drove away. Dropping him off after this past weekend, Robert told me he just pulled over to the side of the road and sobbed.
I encouraged him to return in his memory to that moment and to picture the empty passenger seat where Chip had been sitting before Robert dropped him off. He began: “I hate it that I have to be apart from you. And that’s because I’d love it if we could be together. I hate it that I left you and your mother. And that’s because I’d have loved it if I would have stayed.” Robert was filled with regret.
Sensing Robert was identifying with Chip’s feelings of being left, I asked him to imagine himself in Chip’s place. I asked him to use the shift your focus and energy and look through techniques and speak as if he were Chip. Imagining himself in Chip’s place and speaking to himself as Chip’s father, Robert said: “I hate it that you left and I don’t get to see you as other kids get to see their dad. And that’s because I’d love it if you lived with Mommy and me. I hate it that I have to leave you at the end of our weekends together. And that’s because I love you and miss you so much.”
While he was feeling the words that he was saying as Chip, I asked Robert to imagine his little seven-year-old self sitting in the passenger seat of his car. Now repeat what you said as Chip only now do it as yourself speaking to your father. Robert’s eyes filled with tears. His father had left when he was three years old and he never saw him again. Leaving Chip after weekend visits was stirring up his early feelings of being abandoned by his father.
Similar to Joe Namath’s memory at the top of the stairs, Robert remembered witnessing his parents arguing. He remembered how terrified he felt. On the one hand, it broke Robert’s heart as it does so many children to see the two people they love and adore unable to handle the stress of conflict. On the other hand, it broke Robert’s heart that his father left. As so often happens, victim grows up to become victimizer.
• Today: Do you have a memory of your parents arguing? How did you feel? Visualize both your parents sitting in two separate empty chairs. Give voice to what the child you once were felt and would have loved instead. Write a letter to your parents expressing how it made you feel to see them fight. Be sure to express what you would have loved them to do instead of arguing. [Portions of above taken from Love Conquers Stress www.drsrj.com].
“Where Have You Gone Joe Namath?” I had just looked up at the magazine rack of the local coffee shop where I was enjoying an iced-coffee on a hot August day. There was the face of Joe Namath on the cover of Sports Illustrated. After all these years, there was the famous football star and notorious playboy: Broadway Joe.
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the football stadium at night, the cover photo forever freezes this moment in time. Wearing his white New York Jets’ jersey, Joe stands before us with dark, tousled hair and piercing blue eyes. He is the quarterback: the quintessential hero of our youth. Loved by all the girls. Envied by all the guys. Tall. Dark. And, despite his protruding proboscis, he is handsome in a rugged, unorthodox way. Just as Clark Gable, the early king of Hollywood had elephant ears that were dwarfed by his charm, so Namath’s nose is nullified by his magical presence.
The article was an excerpt from a biography of Broadway Joe entitled Namath written by Mark Kriegel. I found Kriegel’s comments very insightful. Kriegel suggested that he had more than broken bones: Joe had his heart broken early in life.
Kriegel described how Joe was open about all his physical injuries. “He’d talk about the broken bones. But never the broken heart,, the original wound.” Namath revealed to Kriegel one of his earliest and most vivid memories: “I can remember as a three- or four-year-old, to this day, hearing them [his mother and father] downstairs, talking or arguing about something? I was upstairs and I came to the top of the steps and I was crying because I was scared.”
Very astutely, Kriegel speculates on Joe’s personal emotional history: “Perhaps the fear was in his bones, something from his own father’s boyhood lodged in the marrow, the knowledge that separation is inevitable. Families fracture. You can get left behind.”
When Joe was in seventh grade his father left. Kriegel quoted one of Joe’s closest friends Jack (Hoot Owl) Hicks. Regarding the day Namath’s father left, Hicks said: “He [Joe] told me that was the saddest day of his life.”
As I read this, I could see the childhood origin of Broadway Joe’s highly publicized womanizing. I could also see the unconscious fear underlying his not marrying until he was forty. The child whose heart is broken may grow up to be a heartbreaker. Afraid of being abandoned, he or she abandons first. Such was the case with Robert until he came to therapy and finally confronted the pain of his personal emotional history.
Robert began, “After the breakup of my most recent relationship, I had a thought that I felt uncomfortable admitting. I imagined saying to all the women I had loved and left: ‘I’m glad I broke your heart the way mine was broken.’ Robert continued, "I was confused because I was not talking about any female I had loved as an adult or adolescent breaking my heart.” Robert didn’t realize it but he was talking about some distant childhood experience that was hidden in the hazy fog of memory. He was talking about something from his early life.
Robert then related how upset he was at dropping off his little boy, Chip. Chip was now seven years old. Chip was from Robert’s first marriage. Since leaving when Chip was a year old, Robert had gone through the next three marriages in less than six years. Robert described how hard it was every time he dropped off Chip and drove away. Dropping him off after this past weekend, Robert told me he just pulled over to the side of the road and sobbed.
I encouraged him to return in his memory to that moment and to picture the empty passenger seat where Chip had been sitting before Robert dropped him off. He began: “I hate it that I have to be apart from you. And that’s because I’d love it if we could be together. I hate it that I left you and your mother. And that’s because I’d have loved it if I would have stayed.” Robert was filled with regret.
Sensing Robert was identifying with Chip’s feelings of being left, I asked him to imagine himself in Chip’s place. I asked him to use the shift your focus and energy and look through techniques and speak as if he were Chip. Imagining himself in Chip’s place and speaking to himself as Chip’s father, Robert said: “I hate it that you left and I don’t get to see you as other kids get to see their dad. And that’s because I’d love it if you lived with Mommy and me. I hate it that I have to leave you at the end of our weekends together. And that’s because I love you and miss you so much.”
While he was feeling the words that he was saying as Chip, I asked Robert to imagine his little seven-year-old self sitting in the passenger seat of his car. Now repeat what you said as Chip only now do it as yourself speaking to your father. Robert’s eyes filled with tears. His father had left when he was three years old and he never saw him again. Leaving Chip after weekend visits was stirring up his early feelings of being abandoned by his father.
Similar to Joe Namath’s memory at the top of the stairs, Robert remembered witnessing his parents arguing. He remembered how terrified he felt. On the one hand, it broke Robert’s heart as it does so many children to see the two people they love and adore unable to handle the stress of conflict. On the other hand, it broke Robert’s heart that his father left. As so often happens, victim grows up to become victimizer.
• Today: Do you have a memory of your parents arguing? How did you feel? Visualize both your parents sitting in two separate empty chairs. Give voice to what the child you once were felt and would have loved instead. Write a letter to your parents expressing how it made you feel to see them fight. Be sure to express what you would have loved them to do instead of arguing. [Portions of above taken from Love Conquers Stress www.drsrj.com].
Monday, April 26, 2010
From Contempt to Compassion
Last night’s episode of Desperate Housewives touched my heart. It brought up a topic I deal with in all of my books. The episode beautifully portrayed what I found in my practice when I worked with adults who had grown up to commit crimes that hurt others. When I set aside the tendency to judge and condemn or feel contempt for the hurtful surface behavior, I was able to help these people feel and release the buried pain driving them. This episode beautifully portrayed how an innocent little boy can grow up to become a “monster”—a serial killer. In the next posting,
Wow! That network television is bringing up an opportunity for viewers to awaken their hearts is itself heartwarming. It is an example of what the Maya mean when they say that 2012 is about the awakening of humanity's heart after a 5000-year period of darkness.
One of the most heinous examples of how a monster can be created is the story of Adolph Hitler. In The Truth Will Set You Free, Alice Miller presents the key elements of Hitler’s early life that led to his hatred and contempt for the Jewish people. Hitler’s paternal grandmother left her village in Austria to work as a live-in housekeeper for a Jewish merchant and his son when she was in her late teens. She got pregnant and moved back home. For fourteen years, the Jewish merchant sent child-support payments to her.
Adolph Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, grew up hating the fact that he was half-Jewish especially since the climate of the times in Austria and Germany was anti-semitic. Adolph became the target of his father's virulent hatred. Regarding the extent of Adolph's suffering, Miller's research revealed that Adolph's sister reported remembering Adolph being relentlessly and brutally beaten, mocked, humiliated, and tormented every day of his childhood.
A good German son honors his father and so Adolph repressed his rage at his father and idealized him as abused children often do. Hitler shifted his rage at his father onto the Jewish people. His relentless rage was insatiable: no amount of suffering on the part of innocent victims could ever appease his rage. Only confronting the true source of his rage and expressing it to that source could heal Hitler’s hurt. This means that Hitler would have had to express the repressed rage and hurt to the father within his memory.
We need to embrace the hurt child in us instead of holding the weak helpless child within us in contempt. This truth was brought home to me a few years ago when I saw a display on pearls at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. I learned that pearls are usually made from an invading parasite and not so much from the proverbial grain of sand. This was very interesting. In 8 Steps to Love, I had written about adult relationships fraught with childhood dependency patterns as being parasitic relationships. The message was more precise than I had imagined.
Up until this new discovery, I saw the message of the pearl as revealing that we can take the irritation of stress and use it to create the pearl of a richer, fuller, more rewarding life. Now I was discovering that the story of the pearl was revealing a deeper emotional truth.
The oyster wraps the parasite in layers of soft tissue and over time a pearl is created. Similarly, if we are to find the priceless pearl of the peace that resides in our true self, our innermost heart, we must embrace the repressed dependency longings of the hurt child in us in layers of love. We need to feel in order to heal the hurt child’s hope of finally finding someone in adulthood who can love him or her the way he or she longed to be loved.
The time when we needed the parental love that would have helped us develop a healthy self-love and self-esteem is long gone. It is not in the arms of another that we heal our wounded self-esteem, it is in our own arms. We must mourn the death of the hope of finally finding an all-loving parent in our love partner.
As the oyster contains the parasite that becomes a pearl so we must contain our tendency to form parasitic adult relationships. We can then transform the child’s immature and one-sided love into the ripened fruit of the ability to give and receive mature love.
• Today, if a feeling of contempt and a desire to hurt someone come up, then you need to stop yourself from acting on the urge. Take some slow, deep breaths. Think cool as you breathe in and calm as you breathe out. Go to a place to be alone and explore the desire to hurt the person whether it is physically, emotionally or both. There is a good chance that you are unconsciously reversing roles with the person you want to hurt. That is to say, you are exchanging the role of being a victim for the role of being a victimizer. Imagine what it would feel like to be the person hearing your words of criticism. Now initiate the inner quest and ask yourself: “When have I felt that way? Who was it that spoke to me that way? And when? How old was I?” Let’s say you see your father or mother. Now stand up to them and forcefully exclaim what upset you. For example, if your parent(s) were impatient, you might say something like the following: “I hated it when you were impatient with me and called me stupid. And that’s because I would have loved it if you had patiently explained what I was doing wrong and showed me how to do it right.”
Wow! That network television is bringing up an opportunity for viewers to awaken their hearts is itself heartwarming. It is an example of what the Maya mean when they say that 2012 is about the awakening of humanity's heart after a 5000-year period of darkness.
One of the most heinous examples of how a monster can be created is the story of Adolph Hitler. In The Truth Will Set You Free, Alice Miller presents the key elements of Hitler’s early life that led to his hatred and contempt for the Jewish people. Hitler’s paternal grandmother left her village in Austria to work as a live-in housekeeper for a Jewish merchant and his son when she was in her late teens. She got pregnant and moved back home. For fourteen years, the Jewish merchant sent child-support payments to her.
Adolph Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, grew up hating the fact that he was half-Jewish especially since the climate of the times in Austria and Germany was anti-semitic. Adolph became the target of his father's virulent hatred. Regarding the extent of Adolph's suffering, Miller's research revealed that Adolph's sister reported remembering Adolph being relentlessly and brutally beaten, mocked, humiliated, and tormented every day of his childhood.
A good German son honors his father and so Adolph repressed his rage at his father and idealized him as abused children often do. Hitler shifted his rage at his father onto the Jewish people. His relentless rage was insatiable: no amount of suffering on the part of innocent victims could ever appease his rage. Only confronting the true source of his rage and expressing it to that source could heal Hitler’s hurt. This means that Hitler would have had to express the repressed rage and hurt to the father within his memory.
We need to embrace the hurt child in us instead of holding the weak helpless child within us in contempt. This truth was brought home to me a few years ago when I saw a display on pearls at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. I learned that pearls are usually made from an invading parasite and not so much from the proverbial grain of sand. This was very interesting. In 8 Steps to Love, I had written about adult relationships fraught with childhood dependency patterns as being parasitic relationships. The message was more precise than I had imagined.
Up until this new discovery, I saw the message of the pearl as revealing that we can take the irritation of stress and use it to create the pearl of a richer, fuller, more rewarding life. Now I was discovering that the story of the pearl was revealing a deeper emotional truth.
The oyster wraps the parasite in layers of soft tissue and over time a pearl is created. Similarly, if we are to find the priceless pearl of the peace that resides in our true self, our innermost heart, we must embrace the repressed dependency longings of the hurt child in us in layers of love. We need to feel in order to heal the hurt child’s hope of finally finding someone in adulthood who can love him or her the way he or she longed to be loved.
The time when we needed the parental love that would have helped us develop a healthy self-love and self-esteem is long gone. It is not in the arms of another that we heal our wounded self-esteem, it is in our own arms. We must mourn the death of the hope of finally finding an all-loving parent in our love partner.
As the oyster contains the parasite that becomes a pearl so we must contain our tendency to form parasitic adult relationships. We can then transform the child’s immature and one-sided love into the ripened fruit of the ability to give and receive mature love.
• Today, if a feeling of contempt and a desire to hurt someone come up, then you need to stop yourself from acting on the urge. Take some slow, deep breaths. Think cool as you breathe in and calm as you breathe out. Go to a place to be alone and explore the desire to hurt the person whether it is physically, emotionally or both. There is a good chance that you are unconsciously reversing roles with the person you want to hurt. That is to say, you are exchanging the role of being a victim for the role of being a victimizer. Imagine what it would feel like to be the person hearing your words of criticism. Now initiate the inner quest and ask yourself: “When have I felt that way? Who was it that spoke to me that way? And when? How old was I?” Let’s say you see your father or mother. Now stand up to them and forcefully exclaim what upset you. For example, if your parent(s) were impatient, you might say something like the following: “I hated it when you were impatient with me and called me stupid. And that’s because I would have loved it if you had patiently explained what I was doing wrong and showed me how to do it right.”
Friday, April 23, 2010
The "E" in Emotion
The letter "E" in the word emotion can be said to represent energy which sets us in motion to take some kind of action. To understand emotions, we need to realize that all of our negative emotions stem from love. The enduring energy of love animates us and all of life.
All our emotions, then, have value. They tell us something about what is important to us and set us in motion toward some kind of action. When stress begins, we feel the pain or discomfort of some negative emotional state. Our emotional state includes an evaluation of ourselves, the situation and an evaluation of our ability to handle the situation. Our negative emotions are danger signals. They tell us we believe that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to someone or something we love. They move us to some version of fight-or-flight.
Love is the central and primary positive emotion from which all others stem. It tells us something or someone is important to us. Love, then, tells us directly what gives us joy, what we enjoy and care about, what is important to us. Love moves us to take care of, or, to simply care for whom or what we love.
Fear tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something, or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as powerless and incapable in relation to the situation. Fear moves us to run away, to take flight.
Anger tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as having some power and ability to do something in relation to the situation. Anger moves us to be aggressive and fight.
Sadness tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as defeated, powerless and hopeless in relation to the situation. Sadness moves us to tears and then acceptance of whatever we have, or think we have lost.
Since our stress today is not so much a physical threat, but is primarily emotional and mental, it is important to understand the logic of emotions. I found this very helpful to the men who consulted me. This was especially helpful to the men who were either dragged in for marital therapy by their wives, or had been sent in by their wives to see me as an ultimatum: “Either go to therapy or I’m leaving.”'
Hopefully, by taking a look at the logic behind our feelings, we will be encouraged as men to recognize just what these emotions are that women want us to share. Perhaps, we can then break free and by embracing the logic of emotions, become more comfortable being expressive.
On the other hand, I encountered women whose husbands were upset that their wives were distant and had trouble expressing their feelings. These women seemed to be more identified with their male side. These women also found the logic of emotions helpful.
• Today, practice recognizing your negative feelings are telling you something improtant about what you value and love. When anger (irritation, resentment), fear (anxiety, worry), sadness (grief, feeling down) arise, just do the inner quest with a question: "What is my anger, fear, sadness or depression telling me about what I love?"
All our emotions, then, have value. They tell us something about what is important to us and set us in motion toward some kind of action. When stress begins, we feel the pain or discomfort of some negative emotional state. Our emotional state includes an evaluation of ourselves, the situation and an evaluation of our ability to handle the situation. Our negative emotions are danger signals. They tell us we believe that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to someone or something we love. They move us to some version of fight-or-flight.
Love is the central and primary positive emotion from which all others stem. It tells us something or someone is important to us. Love, then, tells us directly what gives us joy, what we enjoy and care about, what is important to us. Love moves us to take care of, or, to simply care for whom or what we love.
Fear tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something, or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as powerless and incapable in relation to the situation. Fear moves us to run away, to take flight.
Anger tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as having some power and ability to do something in relation to the situation. Anger moves us to be aggressive and fight.
Sadness tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as defeated, powerless and hopeless in relation to the situation. Sadness moves us to tears and then acceptance of whatever we have, or think we have lost.
Since our stress today is not so much a physical threat, but is primarily emotional and mental, it is important to understand the logic of emotions. I found this very helpful to the men who consulted me. This was especially helpful to the men who were either dragged in for marital therapy by their wives, or had been sent in by their wives to see me as an ultimatum: “Either go to therapy or I’m leaving.”'
Hopefully, by taking a look at the logic behind our feelings, we will be encouraged as men to recognize just what these emotions are that women want us to share. Perhaps, we can then break free and by embracing the logic of emotions, become more comfortable being expressive.
On the other hand, I encountered women whose husbands were upset that their wives were distant and had trouble expressing their feelings. These women seemed to be more identified with their male side. These women also found the logic of emotions helpful.
• Today, practice recognizing your negative feelings are telling you something improtant about what you value and love. When anger (irritation, resentment), fear (anxiety, worry), sadness (grief, feeling down) arise, just do the inner quest with a question: "What is my anger, fear, sadness or depression telling me about what I love?"
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Our Thoughts Really Matter
Our Thoughts Matter Because They Impact Matter: The Radical Implications of “We Are All One”
One cold, gray Sunday in March, two years after my trip to Tikal, I was to give a talk to the Philadelphia chapter of The Holistic Nurses Association. My talk was on how to use stress to heal ourselves. While I was driving in my car on my way to the meeting, I turned on the radio to hear Jackie Wilson singing, “Your love is taking me higher, higher than I’ve ever been taken before!” This song was followed by the group called Soul Survivor, singing the words, “I’m going to take an expressway to your heart.” These songs seemed to be messages to me from God as the Divine Beloved. I felt I was being guided regarding my talk.
That morning of the talk my car battery was dead and I had to get it recharged. I had come to associate the car battery with the heart. For just as our car is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by the battery, so our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by our innermost heart, the core of our being. It is this spark that makes our physical heart beat.
I took the battery being dead as a sign that I needed to emphasize the connection between love and stress. I thought it meant that I needed to emphasize that to truly master stress we need to access the peaceful power of love in our heart as the core of who we are. For a moment, I had a sense of how each one of us looking out of our eyes is the center of his or her universe. And yet I am part of your inner world of meaning and you are part of my inner world of meaning. I began to see how for each one of us everything that happens out there in the outer world is part of our inner world. And all that happens is to help us evolve spiritually.
As I sat with don Serillo after being in Tulum, I was introduced to the idea that we are evolving. He stressed that we were on our way to a major shift to a higher more loving and peaceful state of consciousness and perspective. In bringing about this change, don Serillo emphasized “Let not one of us be left behind.” It is our responsibility to help each other. And since we are all one, helping another is helping ourselves and vice versa. It is a matter of enlightened self-interest.
As we realize that all of us are part of a collective consciousness, we need to start taking responsibility for our thoughts. For example, so often I hear people complain about the government. They express contempt for the red tape and for taxes. The Department of Motor Vehicles and the people who work there are often the brunt of the jokes of many comedians. All these thoughts become more significant if we consider the idea that we are all one.
Right before going on MSNBC to discuss the issue of teenage runaways, I watched a news segment on Timothy McVeigh. He was awaiting his sentencing for blowing up a government building in Oklahoma City and killing so many innocent people.
Considering that we are all one can make us see the importance of facing and releasing the negative feelings we harbor in our heart. Could Timothy McVeigh be one of those impulse-ridden people who act out our collective disdain for and anger at the government? Sure he has his own emotional dynamics and agenda. But think of it, we know that there is truth to the psychoanalytic observation that children tend to express what their parents repress.
An anthropology professor told me of two instances of how his four-year-old son picked up on his hidden negative feelings. The professor and his wife and son were staying in an inn in a small village in Mexico. One day the professor was walking with his son along the street when the professor spotted a man walking his dog in the distance. Thinking he was successfully hiding his fear, the professor started to show his son the flowers on the side of the street. In just seconds, the little boy looked up and said, “Daddy, why are you afraid of the dog?”
On another occasion the little boy picked up on the professor’s hidden irritation about the housekeeper of the inn. After returning to the inn from his field study for the day, the professor was surprised by what his wife had to say about their little boy. She told him that the little boy had gone up to the housekeeper and asked, “Why doesn’t my daddy like you?”
• Today, consider the ethical implications that our thoughts matter, i.e., they impact matter in terms of the material world of people, places, and things. Just as children express what parents hold back, so immature impulse-ridden people may act out the collective feelings being held in the privacy of the minds of the rest of us. If, as the Maya and quantum physics claim, we are indeed all one and connected in some way in our consciousness, then, is it not our responsibility to monitor our negative thoughts and feelings? We can do our part not to contribute to the collective hate of one race or culture against another race or culture. Thoughts driven by strong feeling have a way of becoming manifested in concrete material reality. How we think and feel eventually become action. Our thoughts are like pebbles tossed into a pond causing ripples that travel across the face of the still waters. [Some of the above comes from A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
One cold, gray Sunday in March, two years after my trip to Tikal, I was to give a talk to the Philadelphia chapter of The Holistic Nurses Association. My talk was on how to use stress to heal ourselves. While I was driving in my car on my way to the meeting, I turned on the radio to hear Jackie Wilson singing, “Your love is taking me higher, higher than I’ve ever been taken before!” This song was followed by the group called Soul Survivor, singing the words, “I’m going to take an expressway to your heart.” These songs seemed to be messages to me from God as the Divine Beloved. I felt I was being guided regarding my talk.
That morning of the talk my car battery was dead and I had to get it recharged. I had come to associate the car battery with the heart. For just as our car is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by the battery, so our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by our innermost heart, the core of our being. It is this spark that makes our physical heart beat.
I took the battery being dead as a sign that I needed to emphasize the connection between love and stress. I thought it meant that I needed to emphasize that to truly master stress we need to access the peaceful power of love in our heart as the core of who we are. For a moment, I had a sense of how each one of us looking out of our eyes is the center of his or her universe. And yet I am part of your inner world of meaning and you are part of my inner world of meaning. I began to see how for each one of us everything that happens out there in the outer world is part of our inner world. And all that happens is to help us evolve spiritually.
As I sat with don Serillo after being in Tulum, I was introduced to the idea that we are evolving. He stressed that we were on our way to a major shift to a higher more loving and peaceful state of consciousness and perspective. In bringing about this change, don Serillo emphasized “Let not one of us be left behind.” It is our responsibility to help each other. And since we are all one, helping another is helping ourselves and vice versa. It is a matter of enlightened self-interest.
As we realize that all of us are part of a collective consciousness, we need to start taking responsibility for our thoughts. For example, so often I hear people complain about the government. They express contempt for the red tape and for taxes. The Department of Motor Vehicles and the people who work there are often the brunt of the jokes of many comedians. All these thoughts become more significant if we consider the idea that we are all one.
Right before going on MSNBC to discuss the issue of teenage runaways, I watched a news segment on Timothy McVeigh. He was awaiting his sentencing for blowing up a government building in Oklahoma City and killing so many innocent people.
Considering that we are all one can make us see the importance of facing and releasing the negative feelings we harbor in our heart. Could Timothy McVeigh be one of those impulse-ridden people who act out our collective disdain for and anger at the government? Sure he has his own emotional dynamics and agenda. But think of it, we know that there is truth to the psychoanalytic observation that children tend to express what their parents repress.
An anthropology professor told me of two instances of how his four-year-old son picked up on his hidden negative feelings. The professor and his wife and son were staying in an inn in a small village in Mexico. One day the professor was walking with his son along the street when the professor spotted a man walking his dog in the distance. Thinking he was successfully hiding his fear, the professor started to show his son the flowers on the side of the street. In just seconds, the little boy looked up and said, “Daddy, why are you afraid of the dog?”
On another occasion the little boy picked up on the professor’s hidden irritation about the housekeeper of the inn. After returning to the inn from his field study for the day, the professor was surprised by what his wife had to say about their little boy. She told him that the little boy had gone up to the housekeeper and asked, “Why doesn’t my daddy like you?”
• Today, consider the ethical implications that our thoughts matter, i.e., they impact matter in terms of the material world of people, places, and things. Just as children express what parents hold back, so immature impulse-ridden people may act out the collective feelings being held in the privacy of the minds of the rest of us. If, as the Maya and quantum physics claim, we are indeed all one and connected in some way in our consciousness, then, is it not our responsibility to monitor our negative thoughts and feelings? We can do our part not to contribute to the collective hate of one race or culture against another race or culture. Thoughts driven by strong feeling have a way of becoming manifested in concrete material reality. How we think and feel eventually become action. Our thoughts are like pebbles tossed into a pond causing ripples that travel across the face of the still waters. [Some of the above comes from A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
Monday, April 19, 2010
"You Are Everything . . ."
The Problem and the Solution: “It’s All About Me”
One particular teaching of the Maya that I heard again and again from different shamans was “We are all one.” God is in everything and so we are all one in God. It was a few years after I had been to the land of the Maya that this teaching came back to me in an interesting way. I was at a little café where I was talking with a friend of mine, another Reiki Master.
We discussed the spiritual understanding that we are all one and not disconnected as it appears. And we also talked about how God’s energy is in everything. We finished our talk and went to our cars. I turned on my car radio as I drove out of the parking lot and onto the street. The very first words I heard were from a song by the Stylistics, a group from the 1970s. The words I heard captured the essence of what we had discussed: “You are everything and everything is you.” It was the refrain of the song and it was repeated four times.
In the weeks to follow, this happened three more times at the precise moment that I turned on my car radio and once in the post office. I was mailing my book, 8 Steps to Love to a radio show host so she could read it before I was to be a guest on her show. Out of nowhere, I heard the Stylistics singing: “You are everything and everything is you.” It seemed that the Divine was making sure that I got the message loud and clear: we are all interconnected.
Ellen, a woman who works at a facility for assisting cancer patients, was telling me a funny story. Her boss was complaining and in her complaints she was sounding very self-centered. She was good-natured and so the staff put on her desk a sign that read, “It’s all about me!” As I heard this story, I thought to myself this is the problem of our narcissistic self-centeredness and it is the solution if we extend the definition of who this me is when we say “It’s all about me.”
When we consider that we are all one then we extend the boundaries of me to include the world. We can do this by changing the song words of the Stylistics, “You are everything and everything is you” to the following:
“I AM everything and everything is me!”
When you go to the coffee shop, the man or woman taking your order is you. As you drive along in your car, the other drivers are you even the driver who cuts you off. Consider this during the course of your day. As you look at anything, people, trees, animals, road, sidewalks, sky, clouds, sun and so forth, you can think to yourself, “It is all me!”
For in the depth of our heart, we discover that indeed we are all one. This being the case, we can begin to identify with all of humanity. If we extend our sense of me, we realize that we are the waiter at the restaurant. We are the taxi driver. We are the barking dog in our neighborhood. We are the screaming baby in the movie theater. As we see a plane overhead, we are the pilot and the passengers on that plane. We are also the blue sky and the clouds.
• Today, extend your sense of yourself. Consider how we are the world and the world is us. Me is extended beyond a cherished separate self-image to include all of life. Laboratory experiments done by quantum physicists have demonstrated that everything is "entangled" at the suatomic level of the all-pervaisve quantum field. Walt Whitman intuited this. He attempted to extend his sense of himself in his Song of Myself found in his famous volume, Leaves of Grass.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me
As good belongs to you.
One particular teaching of the Maya that I heard again and again from different shamans was “We are all one.” God is in everything and so we are all one in God. It was a few years after I had been to the land of the Maya that this teaching came back to me in an interesting way. I was at a little café where I was talking with a friend of mine, another Reiki Master.
We discussed the spiritual understanding that we are all one and not disconnected as it appears. And we also talked about how God’s energy is in everything. We finished our talk and went to our cars. I turned on my car radio as I drove out of the parking lot and onto the street. The very first words I heard were from a song by the Stylistics, a group from the 1970s. The words I heard captured the essence of what we had discussed: “You are everything and everything is you.” It was the refrain of the song and it was repeated four times.
In the weeks to follow, this happened three more times at the precise moment that I turned on my car radio and once in the post office. I was mailing my book, 8 Steps to Love to a radio show host so she could read it before I was to be a guest on her show. Out of nowhere, I heard the Stylistics singing: “You are everything and everything is you.” It seemed that the Divine was making sure that I got the message loud and clear: we are all interconnected.
Ellen, a woman who works at a facility for assisting cancer patients, was telling me a funny story. Her boss was complaining and in her complaints she was sounding very self-centered. She was good-natured and so the staff put on her desk a sign that read, “It’s all about me!” As I heard this story, I thought to myself this is the problem of our narcissistic self-centeredness and it is the solution if we extend the definition of who this me is when we say “It’s all about me.”
When we consider that we are all one then we extend the boundaries of me to include the world. We can do this by changing the song words of the Stylistics, “You are everything and everything is you” to the following:
“I AM everything and everything is me!”
When you go to the coffee shop, the man or woman taking your order is you. As you drive along in your car, the other drivers are you even the driver who cuts you off. Consider this during the course of your day. As you look at anything, people, trees, animals, road, sidewalks, sky, clouds, sun and so forth, you can think to yourself, “It is all me!”
For in the depth of our heart, we discover that indeed we are all one. This being the case, we can begin to identify with all of humanity. If we extend our sense of me, we realize that we are the waiter at the restaurant. We are the taxi driver. We are the barking dog in our neighborhood. We are the screaming baby in the movie theater. As we see a plane overhead, we are the pilot and the passengers on that plane. We are also the blue sky and the clouds.
• Today, extend your sense of yourself. Consider how we are the world and the world is us. Me is extended beyond a cherished separate self-image to include all of life. Laboratory experiments done by quantum physicists have demonstrated that everything is "entangled" at the suatomic level of the all-pervaisve quantum field. Walt Whitman intuited this. He attempted to extend his sense of himself in his Song of Myself found in his famous volume, Leaves of Grass.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me
As good belongs to you.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Meaning of Life: Not in Scrolls
"Jacob had a dream: a ladder was there, standing on the ground with its top reaching to heaven; and there were angels of God going up it and coming down. And Yahweh was there standing over him" (Genesis 28:12).
The fourteenth century Dominican priest and mystic, Meister Eckhart, emphasized that the kingdom of God is not apart from us but is within us and all around us. In Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox reveals how Eckhart does not separate God from His creation. Really feeling the presence of the Divine in nature became a daily experience for me during my time in Tikal. As I sat with the Mayan shamans and walked through the jungle near Tikal, I found my heart awakening to the Divine in everything.
For centuries, Jacob’s ladder has been a major symbol for Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart reveals that the true essence of the ladder is not as a way to leave Earth and literally ascend to God. To him, it is about how when we awaken our consciousness to the spiritual dimension of life, we realize God is always with us and around us. Matthew Fox points out that Eckhart calls us to be like Jacob and wake up in joyful celebration.
"Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Truly Yahweh is in this place and I never knew it!’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven!"’ (Genesis 28:16-17)
Jacob’s Ladder can be seen as an ancient bridge between the apparent opposites of heaven and earth. Jacob sees angels both ascending and descending. All we need to do is to wake up like Jacob and see through the eyes of love that the Divine is in the ordinary. The sacred is in the profane. Our journey is one of becoming whole in an inner marriage of body and spirit, of head and heart. It is a journey of becoming practical mystics.
The image of Jacob’s ladder ties in with the Mayan idea that within our heart we are all connected to both heaven and earth. Jacob’s ladder had angels ascending to heaven and descending to earth. It appears that there is a continuous flow of angels. It seems to be a telling image of how there is a continuous energy flow of love, angels, to help us work the magic necessary to make our world a more peaceful and loving place as the Maya urge us to do.
The ladder in Jacob’s dream can be seen to remind us that there are higher and lower levels of consciousness. The angelic energy of love descends to us and returns to heaven. This is a metaphor for the idea that there are levels of consciousness beyond our ordinary state of consciousness. Like a radio tower broadcasting different bandwidths and frequencies for different stations, the rungs of the ladder of consciousness take us into other levels of reality. When we have our radio tuned to 106.1 FM, we do not hear 96.5 FM or 1290 AM. And yet these stations and countless others still exist even when we are not tuned into them. Thousands of stations are broadcasting simultaneously.
The ancient wisdom of the Kabbalah and modern physics concur that reality is made up of ten levels or dimensions. In our metaphor of Jacob’s ladder, we could say there are ten rungs but this is beyond the scope of this book. Nine of the dimensions are said to be beyond space and time: the coordinates of our physical world. These nine cannot be accessed by ordinary consciousness.
Like Eckhart, the Maya believe that awakening to the spiritual dimension of life involves the recognition that God is not separate from His creation. Instead, God infuses everything with His Spirit. God is talking to us through nature. Right after I finished writing this about Meister Eckhart and the Maya, I took a short break and turned on the television. The end of the movie Stigmata was on. A priest was reading aloud from the lost Gospel of Saint Thomas that we are told in a postscript was found in the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels in Egypt in 1945. The passage is right in line with what I was writing. God is not separate from nature but is hidden within nature. Christ is quoted as saying:
"The kingdom of God is within you and all around you
and not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of
wood and I am there. Lift a stone and you will find me."
Now compare the similarity of the following words Gerardo shared with us during one of our meetings with him.
"The angel of life, the meaning of life, is not written in
the scrolls. The living word of the living God is found
in stone, in the rocks, and trees, and within yourself."
• Today, pay attention to the meaningful coincidences in your life. For example, moments after my friend Bill's father died, Bill turned on the car radio to hear the words of a song that summed up his father's approach to life: "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." A year later, on the anniversary of his father's death, Bill thought of how he had not heard that song all year. Right then, walking into the kitchen, Bill heard "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." The dialogue with the Divine, the living God, continues even as I write this blog posting. I will keep sharing this part of the journey as it appears. However, I will not be able to share all of the times the messages come as it happens often. I will have to pick and choose the messages that seem most relevant. After all, as the Maya tell us: God talks to us all the time.
The fourteenth century Dominican priest and mystic, Meister Eckhart, emphasized that the kingdom of God is not apart from us but is within us and all around us. In Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox reveals how Eckhart does not separate God from His creation. Really feeling the presence of the Divine in nature became a daily experience for me during my time in Tikal. As I sat with the Mayan shamans and walked through the jungle near Tikal, I found my heart awakening to the Divine in everything.
For centuries, Jacob’s ladder has been a major symbol for Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart reveals that the true essence of the ladder is not as a way to leave Earth and literally ascend to God. To him, it is about how when we awaken our consciousness to the spiritual dimension of life, we realize God is always with us and around us. Matthew Fox points out that Eckhart calls us to be like Jacob and wake up in joyful celebration.
"Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Truly Yahweh is in this place and I never knew it!’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven!"’ (Genesis 28:16-17)
Jacob’s Ladder can be seen as an ancient bridge between the apparent opposites of heaven and earth. Jacob sees angels both ascending and descending. All we need to do is to wake up like Jacob and see through the eyes of love that the Divine is in the ordinary. The sacred is in the profane. Our journey is one of becoming whole in an inner marriage of body and spirit, of head and heart. It is a journey of becoming practical mystics.
The image of Jacob’s ladder ties in with the Mayan idea that within our heart we are all connected to both heaven and earth. Jacob’s ladder had angels ascending to heaven and descending to earth. It appears that there is a continuous flow of angels. It seems to be a telling image of how there is a continuous energy flow of love, angels, to help us work the magic necessary to make our world a more peaceful and loving place as the Maya urge us to do.
The ladder in Jacob’s dream can be seen to remind us that there are higher and lower levels of consciousness. The angelic energy of love descends to us and returns to heaven. This is a metaphor for the idea that there are levels of consciousness beyond our ordinary state of consciousness. Like a radio tower broadcasting different bandwidths and frequencies for different stations, the rungs of the ladder of consciousness take us into other levels of reality. When we have our radio tuned to 106.1 FM, we do not hear 96.5 FM or 1290 AM. And yet these stations and countless others still exist even when we are not tuned into them. Thousands of stations are broadcasting simultaneously.
The ancient wisdom of the Kabbalah and modern physics concur that reality is made up of ten levels or dimensions. In our metaphor of Jacob’s ladder, we could say there are ten rungs but this is beyond the scope of this book. Nine of the dimensions are said to be beyond space and time: the coordinates of our physical world. These nine cannot be accessed by ordinary consciousness.
Like Eckhart, the Maya believe that awakening to the spiritual dimension of life involves the recognition that God is not separate from His creation. Instead, God infuses everything with His Spirit. God is talking to us through nature. Right after I finished writing this about Meister Eckhart and the Maya, I took a short break and turned on the television. The end of the movie Stigmata was on. A priest was reading aloud from the lost Gospel of Saint Thomas that we are told in a postscript was found in the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels in Egypt in 1945. The passage is right in line with what I was writing. God is not separate from nature but is hidden within nature. Christ is quoted as saying:
"The kingdom of God is within you and all around you
and not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of
wood and I am there. Lift a stone and you will find me."
Now compare the similarity of the following words Gerardo shared with us during one of our meetings with him.
"The angel of life, the meaning of life, is not written in
the scrolls. The living word of the living God is found
in stone, in the rocks, and trees, and within yourself."
• Today, pay attention to the meaningful coincidences in your life. For example, moments after my friend Bill's father died, Bill turned on the car radio to hear the words of a song that summed up his father's approach to life: "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." A year later, on the anniversary of his father's death, Bill thought of how he had not heard that song all year. Right then, walking into the kitchen, Bill heard "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." The dialogue with the Divine, the living God, continues even as I write this blog posting. I will keep sharing this part of the journey as it appears. However, I will not be able to share all of the times the messages come as it happens often. I will have to pick and choose the messages that seem most relevant. After all, as the Maya tell us: God talks to us all the time.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
After O'Reilly: The Unexpected
After an appearance on Fox News Network’s nationally televised The O’Reilly Factor, I had an experience that was right out of the movie The Sixth Sense. It was only a few hours after my appearance when I was watching television in my bedroom. The room was well-lighted. During a commercial, I nodded out for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, I saw a striking woman, a brunette, wearing a black suit. She appeared to be in her thirties.
This elegant woman’s beauty was a cross between Gloria Vanderbilt and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She was seated in the chair at the foot of my bed staring directly into my eyes. I had a thought that she was the spirit of Ann who was a woman in her forties who had died a year earlier. Ann was Gretchen’s friend of twenty years. Gretchen, who was also in her forties, had called me the night before I was to go on The O’Reilly Factor. However, I was puzzled because somewhere I had gotten the impression that Ann was a blonde and not a brunette.
Gretchen was consulting me for help with her continuing pain over the loss of her dear friend Ann. As I looked into the eyes of this brunette in black, I said, “Ann?” With that, I felt the sensation of energy come through the back door to my heart and fill me from head to toe. At the same time, the woman atomized before my eyes the way perfume becomes tiny droplets when sprayed into the air. I say atomized because it was as if her spirit had coalesced into a mass of some kind of misty molecules or atoms.
Immediately after this apparition atomized, I called Gretchen and asked her what Ann looked like. I told Gretchen, “I think I may have had a visitation from Ann’s spirit.” Gretchen said she would e-mail me a picture of Ann.
When I received my e-mail and looked at her picture, I saw it was as I suspected. Ann was blonde. I wrote Gretchen an e-mail to tell her that it was not Ann. I went to e-mail Gretchen but the e-mail would not go through. I tried four times. Then I thought that maybe the visiting spirit was Gretchen’s mother. I added this thought to my e-mail. It went right through. Gretchen called me and confirmed that the description of the woman in black sounded like her mother. Shortly after her mother’s death, Gretchen told me she was visited by the spirit of her mother.
The interesting thing to me was the clinical significance of this vision of Gretchen’s mother. Her appearance gave me insight into what was complicating Gretchen’s bereavement. Gretchen was losing her mother all over again with the death of Ann. For Gretchen, the wound of losing her mother had been ripped open again by Ann’s death.
The other thing I noticed was that Gretchen’s loss of Ann was complicated by what could be termed the ugly ducking syndrome. Just like the ugly duckling in the children’s story, Gretchen did not appreciate her inner and understated outer beauty. From my vision of her mother, I could see that Gretchen grew up in the shadow of a very beautiful mother. Ann stepped in and filled her mother’s shoes as she was flamboyant and charismatic.
Again, Gretchen was overshadowed. Ann was outgoing and popular. Having compared herself first to her mother and then to her friend, Gretchen had never developed a strong sense of self-worth apart from her mother and her friend. This insight helped me help her begin to deal with the loss of her mother and friend as more than the loss of two very important people both of whom she had loved deeply. She experienced the loss of her mother and friend as a loss of the external source of her self-worth.
For Gretchen, feeling good about herself was tied up with Ann’s charismatic qualities. With Ann as her friend, she could borrow a sense of worth—worth by her association with an attractive and dynamic friend.
Gretchen’s situation reveals how time, distance, and even death do not interfere with our being connected to each other. As I mentioned in 8 Steps to Love, I have felt the palpable loving energy of people’s deceased loved ones bringing comforting messages of love during Reiki healing sessions. I would get a small snapshot of the person’s departed loved one. But with Gretchen, the appearance of her mother from beyond the grave was much more dramatic. Her deceased mother appeared to me to be as real as any fully alive full-bodied flesh-and-blood person.
It is interesting to note that just a few hours before this paranormal experience, I had been on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss Dr. Phil McGraw who had made his weekly appearance on Oprah. I was to critique Dr. Phil’s work with individuals and couples. My role was to draw on my clinical experience in my work as a psychologist.
Here I was engaged in trying to help Gretchen only a few hours after my appearance on national television. Then it hit me, my approach could be described as Dr. Phil meets John Edwards. On his show called Crossing Over, John Edwards helps audience members with their grief by communicating with their departed loved ones. I was attempting to use my clinical skills to help Gretchen with her grief only I was blessed with the added benefit of having seen the spirit of her deceased mother. This paranormal event helped me apply my clinical insights.
• Today, consider how love and concern do not die. In this case, a mother returned nearly two decades after she had died to help her daughter through me. Reflect on what this story tells us about who all of us really are in the core of our being? About our true essence?
This elegant woman’s beauty was a cross between Gloria Vanderbilt and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She was seated in the chair at the foot of my bed staring directly into my eyes. I had a thought that she was the spirit of Ann who was a woman in her forties who had died a year earlier. Ann was Gretchen’s friend of twenty years. Gretchen, who was also in her forties, had called me the night before I was to go on The O’Reilly Factor. However, I was puzzled because somewhere I had gotten the impression that Ann was a blonde and not a brunette.
Gretchen was consulting me for help with her continuing pain over the loss of her dear friend Ann. As I looked into the eyes of this brunette in black, I said, “Ann?” With that, I felt the sensation of energy come through the back door to my heart and fill me from head to toe. At the same time, the woman atomized before my eyes the way perfume becomes tiny droplets when sprayed into the air. I say atomized because it was as if her spirit had coalesced into a mass of some kind of misty molecules or atoms.
Immediately after this apparition atomized, I called Gretchen and asked her what Ann looked like. I told Gretchen, “I think I may have had a visitation from Ann’s spirit.” Gretchen said she would e-mail me a picture of Ann.
When I received my e-mail and looked at her picture, I saw it was as I suspected. Ann was blonde. I wrote Gretchen an e-mail to tell her that it was not Ann. I went to e-mail Gretchen but the e-mail would not go through. I tried four times. Then I thought that maybe the visiting spirit was Gretchen’s mother. I added this thought to my e-mail. It went right through. Gretchen called me and confirmed that the description of the woman in black sounded like her mother. Shortly after her mother’s death, Gretchen told me she was visited by the spirit of her mother.
The interesting thing to me was the clinical significance of this vision of Gretchen’s mother. Her appearance gave me insight into what was complicating Gretchen’s bereavement. Gretchen was losing her mother all over again with the death of Ann. For Gretchen, the wound of losing her mother had been ripped open again by Ann’s death.
The other thing I noticed was that Gretchen’s loss of Ann was complicated by what could be termed the ugly ducking syndrome. Just like the ugly duckling in the children’s story, Gretchen did not appreciate her inner and understated outer beauty. From my vision of her mother, I could see that Gretchen grew up in the shadow of a very beautiful mother. Ann stepped in and filled her mother’s shoes as she was flamboyant and charismatic.
Again, Gretchen was overshadowed. Ann was outgoing and popular. Having compared herself first to her mother and then to her friend, Gretchen had never developed a strong sense of self-worth apart from her mother and her friend. This insight helped me help her begin to deal with the loss of her mother and friend as more than the loss of two very important people both of whom she had loved deeply. She experienced the loss of her mother and friend as a loss of the external source of her self-worth.
For Gretchen, feeling good about herself was tied up with Ann’s charismatic qualities. With Ann as her friend, she could borrow a sense of worth—worth by her association with an attractive and dynamic friend.
Gretchen’s situation reveals how time, distance, and even death do not interfere with our being connected to each other. As I mentioned in 8 Steps to Love, I have felt the palpable loving energy of people’s deceased loved ones bringing comforting messages of love during Reiki healing sessions. I would get a small snapshot of the person’s departed loved one. But with Gretchen, the appearance of her mother from beyond the grave was much more dramatic. Her deceased mother appeared to me to be as real as any fully alive full-bodied flesh-and-blood person.
It is interesting to note that just a few hours before this paranormal experience, I had been on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss Dr. Phil McGraw who had made his weekly appearance on Oprah. I was to critique Dr. Phil’s work with individuals and couples. My role was to draw on my clinical experience in my work as a psychologist.
Here I was engaged in trying to help Gretchen only a few hours after my appearance on national television. Then it hit me, my approach could be described as Dr. Phil meets John Edwards. On his show called Crossing Over, John Edwards helps audience members with their grief by communicating with their departed loved ones. I was attempting to use my clinical skills to help Gretchen with her grief only I was blessed with the added benefit of having seen the spirit of her deceased mother. This paranormal event helped me apply my clinical insights.
• Today, consider how love and concern do not die. In this case, a mother returned nearly two decades after she had died to help her daughter through me. Reflect on what this story tells us about who all of us really are in the core of our being? About our true essence?
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Simpsons & The Soul
When I was coming back from a weekend trip in Maine, I discovered my car starting to slow down mysteriously even though I had a full tank of gas. The battery went dead and the car died. I was surprised because I always thought that once a car was running, the battery would keep recharging.
The mechanic told me that the problem was with the alternator, the electric generator that keeps circulating the electrical energy that charges the battery. It was then that I realized that the most essential part of the car is something that is basically invisible to us, namely, the continuously circulating energy from the alternator. This energy charges the battery so it can ignite the engine and keep it alive. Without this continuously flowing energy, the car dies and cannot be driven.
Later, after I returned home, I happened to watch The Simpsons, a television comedy with cartoon characters that pokes fun at American family life. In this episode, Bart Simpson, the school age son, who is always getting into trouble, sells his soul for five dollars to his friend Millhouse. Bart finds himself unable to enjoy life. Things that made him laugh, no longer have any impact on him. He loses his energy and power. For example, when Bart goes to the local convenience store, the automatic doors don’t register his presence and so, don’t open for him. Finally, some other boys come by and let Bart in. Once inside, he can’t even make the glass door to the freezer by the check-out counter steam up by blowing on it as the other boys had done. The other boys laugh at him, calling him, “no breath.”
These two events fit the criteria of synchronicity, which, as was mentioned in the last chapter, refers to meaningful coincidences. It is a scientific way of describing the lessons that we can learn from life or that life may teach us. From a traditional religious perspective, it is a sign from God. In the psychology of dreams, a car often symbolizes our body, that is, it is the vehicle which carries our consciousness, our spirit and soul through life.
The meaningful coincidence led me to the following observation:
A car is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of electrical energy generated by the alternator. This continuous flow of energy is what charges the battery, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine and keeps it alive. And, like a car, our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of the enduring energy of love generated by the core of our being–our heart, spirit and soul. This continuous flow of the enduring energy of love is what charges the battery of our physical heart, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine of our body and keeps it alive. [Excerpted from 8 Steps to Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you notice cars, think of how all that is visible (metal frame, nuts and bolts, glossy paint, rubber tires, cushy seats, and fancy dashboard) is worthless without the invisible spark and current provided by the battery. Consider how the invisible essence in you cannot be found by a surgeon cutting into your brain or heart. And, remember that it is this invisible essence or "ghost in the machine" (as it is called in philosophical circles) that determines whether what we see and touch is real or whether it is an hallucination. Ask yourself, "What does this say about my true identity? About who I really am?"
The mechanic told me that the problem was with the alternator, the electric generator that keeps circulating the electrical energy that charges the battery. It was then that I realized that the most essential part of the car is something that is basically invisible to us, namely, the continuously circulating energy from the alternator. This energy charges the battery so it can ignite the engine and keep it alive. Without this continuously flowing energy, the car dies and cannot be driven.
Later, after I returned home, I happened to watch The Simpsons, a television comedy with cartoon characters that pokes fun at American family life. In this episode, Bart Simpson, the school age son, who is always getting into trouble, sells his soul for five dollars to his friend Millhouse. Bart finds himself unable to enjoy life. Things that made him laugh, no longer have any impact on him. He loses his energy and power. For example, when Bart goes to the local convenience store, the automatic doors don’t register his presence and so, don’t open for him. Finally, some other boys come by and let Bart in. Once inside, he can’t even make the glass door to the freezer by the check-out counter steam up by blowing on it as the other boys had done. The other boys laugh at him, calling him, “no breath.”
These two events fit the criteria of synchronicity, which, as was mentioned in the last chapter, refers to meaningful coincidences. It is a scientific way of describing the lessons that we can learn from life or that life may teach us. From a traditional religious perspective, it is a sign from God. In the psychology of dreams, a car often symbolizes our body, that is, it is the vehicle which carries our consciousness, our spirit and soul through life.
The meaningful coincidence led me to the following observation:
A car is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of electrical energy generated by the alternator. This continuous flow of energy is what charges the battery, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine and keeps it alive. And, like a car, our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of the enduring energy of love generated by the core of our being–our heart, spirit and soul. This continuous flow of the enduring energy of love is what charges the battery of our physical heart, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine of our body and keeps it alive. [Excerpted from 8 Steps to Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you notice cars, think of how all that is visible (metal frame, nuts and bolts, glossy paint, rubber tires, cushy seats, and fancy dashboard) is worthless without the invisible spark and current provided by the battery. Consider how the invisible essence in you cannot be found by a surgeon cutting into your brain or heart. And, remember that it is this invisible essence or "ghost in the machine" (as it is called in philosophical circles) that determines whether what we see and touch is real or whether it is an hallucination. Ask yourself, "What does this say about my true identity? About who I really am?"
Friday, April 9, 2010
I Am Free!
"I am free! I am free! He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me!"
—Sandor Boytar, M.D.
The red October sun disappeared behind the trees as Gizella gazed out of the window; her teary eyes focused on the beauty of autumn. She momentarily looked away from the couch where her husband, Sandor, lay dying. The array of autumn colors: gold, orange, and red seemed to match the mixture of bittersweet feelings Gizella felt during her husband’s final hours. She was sad as she remembered the good times, and yet, she did not want him to suffer anymore from the ravages of bone cancer.
During Sandor’s final hours, Anna, his stepdaughter, sat by his side sending him Reiki healing energy to ease his pain. He didn’t believe in energy healing but he allowed Anna to lay her hands lightly on the painful areas of his body. Anna got the impression that Sandor was accepting the Reiki with the attitude: “If it makes her feel better to do something for me, why not let her.” He passed away in peace as Anna kept sending him Reiki until his last breath.
Suddenly, Gizella’s peaceful yet painful reflections were interrupted by a swirling energy of golden-speckled light encircling her just seconds after Sandor took his last breath. Within her mind, Gizella heard Sandor’s voice. She felt his energy direct her attention to his lifeless body lying on the couch. He then cried out: “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me!” She was stunned. Here was his soul proclaiming its freedom. Sandor’s next words were, “I love you and I’m sorry I was not able to show you how much I loved you!” Like so many men, Sandor had found it difficult to express the deep love in his heart.
Gizella felt the energy of her husband’s liberated soul encircle her and she heard the words of his soul in her mind. To whom was Sandor referring when he said to his lovely Gizella, “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me?” He was referring to his body-mind that had prevented him from believing in the spiritual reality of his soul. In the months before he died, Sandor had often told Gizella, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” All his life, he had refused to believe in the soul.
Dr. Boytar was an otherwise sturdy and physically fit eighty-year-old medical doctor. His physique reminded me of the ageless and forever-fit Jack LaLane. A man of courage, he managed to escape from communist-occupied Hungary in the 1950’s. When I sat with him six months earlier, I silently wondered what, if anything, were the underlying emotional issues related to the bone cancer. As I talked with this distinguished and learned medical doctor, I thought to myself what is eating you to the bone? His very next comment was that: “If Gizella and I had remained in Hungary, I would never have been able to be with her.” Sandor and Gizella met in America years after they left Hungary.
In Hungarian society, Sandor believed his beautiful wife would have been out of his reach. Thrown together by circumstances in America, they had found each other. Strangers in a new land. They had a common bond through their roots in Hungary and both were in the medical field. I could see that he couldn’t believe that she loved him. He seemed to think that she stayed married to him only for convenience and the comfort of a common heritage. Sandor was wrong as Gizella did indeed love him very much.
During his life, Sandor denied the reality of the spiritual dimension of life. His paradigm as a man of science did not allow him to believe in his own soul. The soul is not quantifiable and cannot be seen by cutting someone open with surgery. He believed in the organs of the body and in the chemical processes regulating our health and determining our life and death.
So Sandor’s proclamation after his death is not simply the reaffirmation of cherished beliefs held while he was alive. These were not the words that Gizella would ever have expected to hear. Moreover, Gizella was not one to have spiritual experiences.
Gizella felt Sandor’s presence for two days following his death. On the evening of the second day, Gizella felt Sandor’s energy begin to leave and then she saw him ascending toward the top of the cathedral ceiling of their home. She heard him say, “I have to go. Know that I love you!”
Gizella asked, “Where are you going?” Sandor replied, “I am going to the place where you wait before you are sent to where you are supposed to go next.” In the book entitled, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives, Dr. Newton calls the place Sandor was first going to, “the staging area” or “the orientation area.” It is where the soul first goes after death before going where it needs to go for its next phase of learning and evolution.
Sandor had never read any books about spirituality or the after-death experience. Yet, here was the soul of a dyed-in-the-wool scientific materialist ascending and telling his wife that he was heading for the staging area. Throughout his entire career as a medical doctor, he vehemently maintained, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” [More on the above can be found in A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you go through your day, ask yourself, "Do I really believe that who I am, my essence, the I who is looking through my eyes at the world, is the product of chemicals and firing neurons?" Consider that, as Dr. Boytar discovered, consciousness or awareness is primary and matter (your body and the material world) is secodary. This is part of what the Maya predicted. It is part of the great shift in understanding ourselves and our world that is taking place as we approach 2012. For more about the power of our consciousness see February 2010 blog entry entitled One Candle Shining.
—Sandor Boytar, M.D.
The red October sun disappeared behind the trees as Gizella gazed out of the window; her teary eyes focused on the beauty of autumn. She momentarily looked away from the couch where her husband, Sandor, lay dying. The array of autumn colors: gold, orange, and red seemed to match the mixture of bittersweet feelings Gizella felt during her husband’s final hours. She was sad as she remembered the good times, and yet, she did not want him to suffer anymore from the ravages of bone cancer.
During Sandor’s final hours, Anna, his stepdaughter, sat by his side sending him Reiki healing energy to ease his pain. He didn’t believe in energy healing but he allowed Anna to lay her hands lightly on the painful areas of his body. Anna got the impression that Sandor was accepting the Reiki with the attitude: “If it makes her feel better to do something for me, why not let her.” He passed away in peace as Anna kept sending him Reiki until his last breath.
Suddenly, Gizella’s peaceful yet painful reflections were interrupted by a swirling energy of golden-speckled light encircling her just seconds after Sandor took his last breath. Within her mind, Gizella heard Sandor’s voice. She felt his energy direct her attention to his lifeless body lying on the couch. He then cried out: “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me!” She was stunned. Here was his soul proclaiming its freedom. Sandor’s next words were, “I love you and I’m sorry I was not able to show you how much I loved you!” Like so many men, Sandor had found it difficult to express the deep love in his heart.
Gizella felt the energy of her husband’s liberated soul encircle her and she heard the words of his soul in her mind. To whom was Sandor referring when he said to his lovely Gizella, “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me?” He was referring to his body-mind that had prevented him from believing in the spiritual reality of his soul. In the months before he died, Sandor had often told Gizella, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” All his life, he had refused to believe in the soul.
Dr. Boytar was an otherwise sturdy and physically fit eighty-year-old medical doctor. His physique reminded me of the ageless and forever-fit Jack LaLane. A man of courage, he managed to escape from communist-occupied Hungary in the 1950’s. When I sat with him six months earlier, I silently wondered what, if anything, were the underlying emotional issues related to the bone cancer. As I talked with this distinguished and learned medical doctor, I thought to myself what is eating you to the bone? His very next comment was that: “If Gizella and I had remained in Hungary, I would never have been able to be with her.” Sandor and Gizella met in America years after they left Hungary.
In Hungarian society, Sandor believed his beautiful wife would have been out of his reach. Thrown together by circumstances in America, they had found each other. Strangers in a new land. They had a common bond through their roots in Hungary and both were in the medical field. I could see that he couldn’t believe that she loved him. He seemed to think that she stayed married to him only for convenience and the comfort of a common heritage. Sandor was wrong as Gizella did indeed love him very much.
During his life, Sandor denied the reality of the spiritual dimension of life. His paradigm as a man of science did not allow him to believe in his own soul. The soul is not quantifiable and cannot be seen by cutting someone open with surgery. He believed in the organs of the body and in the chemical processes regulating our health and determining our life and death.
So Sandor’s proclamation after his death is not simply the reaffirmation of cherished beliefs held while he was alive. These were not the words that Gizella would ever have expected to hear. Moreover, Gizella was not one to have spiritual experiences.
Gizella felt Sandor’s presence for two days following his death. On the evening of the second day, Gizella felt Sandor’s energy begin to leave and then she saw him ascending toward the top of the cathedral ceiling of their home. She heard him say, “I have to go. Know that I love you!”
Gizella asked, “Where are you going?” Sandor replied, “I am going to the place where you wait before you are sent to where you are supposed to go next.” In the book entitled, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives, Dr. Newton calls the place Sandor was first going to, “the staging area” or “the orientation area.” It is where the soul first goes after death before going where it needs to go for its next phase of learning and evolution.
Sandor had never read any books about spirituality or the after-death experience. Yet, here was the soul of a dyed-in-the-wool scientific materialist ascending and telling his wife that he was heading for the staging area. Throughout his entire career as a medical doctor, he vehemently maintained, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” [More on the above can be found in A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you go through your day, ask yourself, "Do I really believe that who I am, my essence, the I who is looking through my eyes at the world, is the product of chemicals and firing neurons?" Consider that, as Dr. Boytar discovered, consciousness or awareness is primary and matter (your body and the material world) is secodary. This is part of what the Maya predicted. It is part of the great shift in understanding ourselves and our world that is taking place as we approach 2012. For more about the power of our consciousness see February 2010 blog entry entitled One Candle Shining.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Hearts Weep & Spirits Smile
I just learned that my dear friend Joe lost his daughter Nicole to cancer on Easter Sunday. Last fall, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, he lost Cynthia, Nicole’s sister, to cancer. Both were in their late thirties with families and children of their own. How unbearable it must be to be the parent of two inwardly and outwardly beautiful young women cut down in their prime by cancer.
However, Joe’s awareness of the spiritual dimension of life has helped him with his heart-ripping grief. An hour after Nicole died, Joe and other family members were startled by what they saw; Nicole had a smile on her lips. It was not there the moment of her death and did not appear until the funeral director arrived. It was as if her spirit were communicating through her body. “I love you all and I’m glad to be released.” Nicole and Cynthia had suffered hard and long. Both endured the pain of the cancer intensified by all the surgeries, radiation, and painful side effects of the chemotherapy. (In the next posting, I’ll share my experience with a medical doctor that illustrates how the deceased communicate joy at being released, especially when it is from a body wracked with pain.)
“Was there a symbolic message about death here? Thanksgiving? Easter?” I wondered if an aspect of the legacies of these remarkable young women is to teach us all how gratitude, the essence of Thanksgiving, and joy, the essence of Easter, can also be experienced at the loss of a loved one. Then, as so often happens in the daily dialogue with the Divine, I received an answer to my question. “Yes, they can,” I thought as the following passages from 8 Steps to Love came to mind.
Grief, Gratitude & Joy
On a cold and gray autumn afternoon, I was walking in the graveyard of an old country church. The air was especially chilly as the church stood only a few miles from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The winds coming off the Chesapeake bay cut right through my overcoat. Suddenly, I was struck by the following words inscribed on a gravestone.
All that’s bright must fade
All that’s fair, decay
All we loved was made
To bloom and pass away.
[And yet, "our love is here to stay."]
Thank you for those inspiring lyrics, Mr. Gershwin.]
At first, the message seemed depressing, like the coldness and grayness of the day. Then, it was like a ray of sunshine, shooting through those gray clouds as I saw the comfort and significance in these words. When we come to accept the truth of these words then we discover our capacity to love freely. It hit me that there is a primary and a secondary source of human suffering. I now knew what one of my mentors meant when he said, “According to Freud, in order to be emotionally healthy, we must replace neurotic suffering with real suffering.” I thought to myself:
We suffer because we love. This is unavoidable. We suffer
more because we deny the reality of love. This is avoidable.
Repression and denial of the reality of our love and of our essential identity as the enduring energy of love cause us more pain. The emptiness we initially feel when a loved one is lost stems from our holding back our love out of a wish to avoid the pain of our loss. Our restraint is based on a denial and repression of our essence, of that which makes life worth living, namely, our capacity to love.
To ease our suffering, we need to come to terms with how the bodies or the concrete material forms of the people, pets, places and things we love in our lives eventually “fade, decay or bloom and pass away.” Then we can learn to love who or what is in our life while it is in our life with an attitude of gratitude. Rather than grabbing on tightly and possessively to what we love as though our life and internal security, peace of mind and well-being depended on it, we learn to love freely. We joyfully recognize the transitory nature of concrete material reality. As William Blake wrote:
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise…
We transcend the primary source of our suffering when we realize that the important thing, that which lasts, is the process of loving. In remembering that the essence of our heart, the treasure of love in our heart, is the capacity to care and love, we remain in touch with our inner fullness. It is having the courage to love, knowing full well the concrete form will inevitably be lost to us. Hence, we can learn to love freely, without grasping or clinging for dear life to that which we love. We transcend our suffering as we discover the joy of loving freely.
The secondary source of our suffering comes from the fact that our body depends on the external world, on air, food and water to survive. Our spirit, however, can transcend the physical circumstances we find ourselves in as prisoners of war survivors and near-death experience survivors have done. It is when we identify with our body only, that the loss of our loved one leads to aching emptiness. We long for the physical presence of our loved one in order to feel our own fullness again. However, when we identify with our spirit, the treasure of love that we are, we feel a fullness. In reliving our love for our lost loved one, we can forever feel and bring back the joy we felt before we lost our loved one. We can transform our suffering into joy.
Therefore, even though the losses we experience in life may cause us great suffering, it is through the losses that we discover we are not simply our bodies.
• Today, remember, "The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble (or, is it the other way around? Rockies tumble? Oh, well, it works either way.) They're only made of clay. But, our love is here to stay." Now, consider the following Sufi saying. It succinctly describes the joy that comes from loving freely despite the heartache and gnawing pain of loss:
When the heart weeps for what it has lost,
the spirit laughs [smiles, in Nicole's case] for what it has found.
However, Joe’s awareness of the spiritual dimension of life has helped him with his heart-ripping grief. An hour after Nicole died, Joe and other family members were startled by what they saw; Nicole had a smile on her lips. It was not there the moment of her death and did not appear until the funeral director arrived. It was as if her spirit were communicating through her body. “I love you all and I’m glad to be released.” Nicole and Cynthia had suffered hard and long. Both endured the pain of the cancer intensified by all the surgeries, radiation, and painful side effects of the chemotherapy. (In the next posting, I’ll share my experience with a medical doctor that illustrates how the deceased communicate joy at being released, especially when it is from a body wracked with pain.)
“Was there a symbolic message about death here? Thanksgiving? Easter?” I wondered if an aspect of the legacies of these remarkable young women is to teach us all how gratitude, the essence of Thanksgiving, and joy, the essence of Easter, can also be experienced at the loss of a loved one. Then, as so often happens in the daily dialogue with the Divine, I received an answer to my question. “Yes, they can,” I thought as the following passages from 8 Steps to Love came to mind.
Grief, Gratitude & Joy
On a cold and gray autumn afternoon, I was walking in the graveyard of an old country church. The air was especially chilly as the church stood only a few miles from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The winds coming off the Chesapeake bay cut right through my overcoat. Suddenly, I was struck by the following words inscribed on a gravestone.
All that’s bright must fade
All that’s fair, decay
All we loved was made
To bloom and pass away.
[And yet, "our love is here to stay."]
Thank you for those inspiring lyrics, Mr. Gershwin.]
At first, the message seemed depressing, like the coldness and grayness of the day. Then, it was like a ray of sunshine, shooting through those gray clouds as I saw the comfort and significance in these words. When we come to accept the truth of these words then we discover our capacity to love freely. It hit me that there is a primary and a secondary source of human suffering. I now knew what one of my mentors meant when he said, “According to Freud, in order to be emotionally healthy, we must replace neurotic suffering with real suffering.” I thought to myself:
We suffer because we love. This is unavoidable. We suffer
more because we deny the reality of love. This is avoidable.
Repression and denial of the reality of our love and of our essential identity as the enduring energy of love cause us more pain. The emptiness we initially feel when a loved one is lost stems from our holding back our love out of a wish to avoid the pain of our loss. Our restraint is based on a denial and repression of our essence, of that which makes life worth living, namely, our capacity to love.
To ease our suffering, we need to come to terms with how the bodies or the concrete material forms of the people, pets, places and things we love in our lives eventually “fade, decay or bloom and pass away.” Then we can learn to love who or what is in our life while it is in our life with an attitude of gratitude. Rather than grabbing on tightly and possessively to what we love as though our life and internal security, peace of mind and well-being depended on it, we learn to love freely. We joyfully recognize the transitory nature of concrete material reality. As William Blake wrote:
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise…
We transcend the primary source of our suffering when we realize that the important thing, that which lasts, is the process of loving. In remembering that the essence of our heart, the treasure of love in our heart, is the capacity to care and love, we remain in touch with our inner fullness. It is having the courage to love, knowing full well the concrete form will inevitably be lost to us. Hence, we can learn to love freely, without grasping or clinging for dear life to that which we love. We transcend our suffering as we discover the joy of loving freely.
The secondary source of our suffering comes from the fact that our body depends on the external world, on air, food and water to survive. Our spirit, however, can transcend the physical circumstances we find ourselves in as prisoners of war survivors and near-death experience survivors have done. It is when we identify with our body only, that the loss of our loved one leads to aching emptiness. We long for the physical presence of our loved one in order to feel our own fullness again. However, when we identify with our spirit, the treasure of love that we are, we feel a fullness. In reliving our love for our lost loved one, we can forever feel and bring back the joy we felt before we lost our loved one. We can transform our suffering into joy.
Therefore, even though the losses we experience in life may cause us great suffering, it is through the losses that we discover we are not simply our bodies.
• Today, remember, "The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble (or, is it the other way around? Rockies tumble? Oh, well, it works either way.) They're only made of clay. But, our love is here to stay." Now, consider the following Sufi saying. It succinctly describes the joy that comes from loving freely despite the heartache and gnawing pain of loss:
When the heart weeps for what it has lost,
the spirit laughs [smiles, in Nicole's case] for what it has found.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Inner-Freedom Fire Ceremony
The air was chilly at 5:15 A.M. To the left of the chruch coutyard, just above the roof of the stone chruch, I could see the moon shining brightly in the darkness of the predawn sky. In an instant, I heard the crackling of dry sticks and branches in a large barrel. The priest had lit the fire for the beginning of an ancient ceremony, dating back to those first century Christians. Small white candles were handed out to each of us in the congregation. Standing in a crescent shape by the blazing fire, we watched the priest light the large, white Christ Candle. Eventually, the fire was spread to the single candle held by each and every one of us. First, two of us received the flame directly from the Christ Candle. They both turned to light another’s cnadle who in turn lit the candle of someone else until all of our candles were lit. The ceremony corresponded to the vow we all shared later in the service: “to seek and serve the Christ in others.” Alice Howell’s comment came to mind, “There is one flame but many candles” (see blog entry entited One Flame . . . Many Candles).
What else was God, the Divine Beloved, revealing to me that was a refinement of what I experinced in the sacred fire ceremonies of the Maya? The fire ceremony of Easter morning reminded me that we have within us all a small flame of the all-consuming and, paradoxically, all-embracing, fire of God’s love. I say paradoxically because I find myself remembering the Burning Bush scene with Moses (Charlton Heston) in the Cecil B. DeMille classic The Ten Commandments. Rather than consume the bush by buring it to a crisp, the fire of God simply contained (embraced) the bush. The Christ Candle is a symbol of how the fire of God’s love was exemplified in the life of Christ. His great love, compassion, and capacity to forgive was both all-consuming and all-embracing, by being extended to the discarded and rejected of society—the lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors (April 15th is getting closer), and beggars.
That was it! God, the Divine Beloved, was showing me somethig to share with you about how Christ forgave those who crucified Him. He asked His Father to forgive them in their ignorance of what they were doing. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24). Jesus appeals to His Father, the I AM THAT I AM to forgive them. He did not call out from the cross, “I forgive you.”
I wondered what this might mean for us as a model for how we can learn to forgive and find inner peace? Sure, it means we can simply pray and ask God to forgive those who hurt us. And, we can also ask God to help us forgive. To me, it also means that we can place the offending person, object, or situation into the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming and all-embracing love. It struck me that the fire of all the little desires fueling our emotions can be consumed by the fire of the greater desire for inner freedom and peace.
Visualizing the all-consuming aspect of the sacred fire was what I learned from the Mayan fire ceremony. We could place into the fire the stress of our inner life of desires and emotions, especially what Swami Rama called our “psychological trash” (see blog entry entitled Sacred Fire). But today’s ceremony revealed a way to deal with the stress that can arise from surface differences. We can seek to remember the one spirit (flame) of love hidden in the surface diversity of our various shapes and sizes of soul suits, our corporeal costumes as well as the surface differences in race, religion, culture, education, etc.
Moments after the service ended, my reflections on the sacred fire were interrupted. A woman I know, a self-taught biblical scholar, took me by the arm and led me to an icon hanging on the church wall. Excitedly, she told me, “On icons of Christ, you will see Greek words contained in the nimbus, the cloud-like halo. They translate as, ‘The One Who Is.’” I was receiving an answer to my thoughts in the daily dialogue with the Divine. I then thought, this “is” is something fundamental and universal that is beyond the boundaries and forms of any one relgious tradition. “Is” is in Christ (Chr-is-t), Krishna (Kr-is-hna), Vishnu (V-is-hnu), Isis (Is-is), St. Issa (Is-sa), the name given to Christ in India and Tibet, Ishtar (Is-htar), and, let's not forget Islam (Is-lam), though many angry Americans might like to since they mistakingly equate terrorism with this sacred tradition.
“Ah ha!” I thought. “The word ‘is’ contains a message.” Peace comes when we are still, cease striving, and rest in just being, not in doing, getting, or having. Rest is found in aligning with the awareness that I AM. It is the recognition that I simply exist beyond labels and conditions. By bringing our attention to this simple, unadorned truth, we find rest from our hectic schedules. Worn down by wearying days of doing, we find a brief respite in simply being one who “is” with no place to go and nothing or no thing to do in that moment. We enter the timeless of what we might call no-thing-ness. We get out from under all the “things” or “thingness” weighing us down. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, “ Emerson (Ralph Waldo, that is) once said over a century ago.
• Today, resolve to get back in the saddle by taking a moment to just BE, before you begin your day. Instead of starting your day by praying to God for certain blessings, conduct your very own inner-freedom fire ceremony. Take some slow, deep breaths and visualize a fire on an altar before God, your Divine Beloved. This fire is the sacred inner fire of your being, the flame of the one who simply “is” within you. This fire is the flame of the I AM consciousness within you that is not identified with anything but just being. Now, reflecting on the day ahead, place into this fire all your desires, hopes, dreams, plans, frustrations, fears, anxieties, joys, resentments, loves and hates, and son on. With each breath, imagine you are enflaming the fire with fresh oxygen until all that is left is the fire burning brightly. Feel the peace of being at one with God and the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming yet all-embracing love. Take a moment to repeat this during the day when you feel stressed and remember the one flame of the One Who Is resides in us all despite our surface differences.
What else was God, the Divine Beloved, revealing to me that was a refinement of what I experinced in the sacred fire ceremonies of the Maya? The fire ceremony of Easter morning reminded me that we have within us all a small flame of the all-consuming and, paradoxically, all-embracing, fire of God’s love. I say paradoxically because I find myself remembering the Burning Bush scene with Moses (Charlton Heston) in the Cecil B. DeMille classic The Ten Commandments. Rather than consume the bush by buring it to a crisp, the fire of God simply contained (embraced) the bush. The Christ Candle is a symbol of how the fire of God’s love was exemplified in the life of Christ. His great love, compassion, and capacity to forgive was both all-consuming and all-embracing, by being extended to the discarded and rejected of society—the lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors (April 15th is getting closer), and beggars.
That was it! God, the Divine Beloved, was showing me somethig to share with you about how Christ forgave those who crucified Him. He asked His Father to forgive them in their ignorance of what they were doing. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24). Jesus appeals to His Father, the I AM THAT I AM to forgive them. He did not call out from the cross, “I forgive you.”
I wondered what this might mean for us as a model for how we can learn to forgive and find inner peace? Sure, it means we can simply pray and ask God to forgive those who hurt us. And, we can also ask God to help us forgive. To me, it also means that we can place the offending person, object, or situation into the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming and all-embracing love. It struck me that the fire of all the little desires fueling our emotions can be consumed by the fire of the greater desire for inner freedom and peace.
Visualizing the all-consuming aspect of the sacred fire was what I learned from the Mayan fire ceremony. We could place into the fire the stress of our inner life of desires and emotions, especially what Swami Rama called our “psychological trash” (see blog entry entitled Sacred Fire). But today’s ceremony revealed a way to deal with the stress that can arise from surface differences. We can seek to remember the one spirit (flame) of love hidden in the surface diversity of our various shapes and sizes of soul suits, our corporeal costumes as well as the surface differences in race, religion, culture, education, etc.
Moments after the service ended, my reflections on the sacred fire were interrupted. A woman I know, a self-taught biblical scholar, took me by the arm and led me to an icon hanging on the church wall. Excitedly, she told me, “On icons of Christ, you will see Greek words contained in the nimbus, the cloud-like halo. They translate as, ‘The One Who Is.’” I was receiving an answer to my thoughts in the daily dialogue with the Divine. I then thought, this “is” is something fundamental and universal that is beyond the boundaries and forms of any one relgious tradition. “Is” is in Christ (Chr-is-t), Krishna (Kr-is-hna), Vishnu (V-is-hnu), Isis (Is-is), St. Issa (Is-sa), the name given to Christ in India and Tibet, Ishtar (Is-htar), and, let's not forget Islam (Is-lam), though many angry Americans might like to since they mistakingly equate terrorism with this sacred tradition.
“Ah ha!” I thought. “The word ‘is’ contains a message.” Peace comes when we are still, cease striving, and rest in just being, not in doing, getting, or having. Rest is found in aligning with the awareness that I AM. It is the recognition that I simply exist beyond labels and conditions. By bringing our attention to this simple, unadorned truth, we find rest from our hectic schedules. Worn down by wearying days of doing, we find a brief respite in simply being one who “is” with no place to go and nothing or no thing to do in that moment. We enter the timeless of what we might call no-thing-ness. We get out from under all the “things” or “thingness” weighing us down. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, “ Emerson (Ralph Waldo, that is) once said over a century ago.
• Today, resolve to get back in the saddle by taking a moment to just BE, before you begin your day. Instead of starting your day by praying to God for certain blessings, conduct your very own inner-freedom fire ceremony. Take some slow, deep breaths and visualize a fire on an altar before God, your Divine Beloved. This fire is the sacred inner fire of your being, the flame of the one who simply “is” within you. This fire is the flame of the I AM consciousness within you that is not identified with anything but just being. Now, reflecting on the day ahead, place into this fire all your desires, hopes, dreams, plans, frustrations, fears, anxieties, joys, resentments, loves and hates, and son on. With each breath, imagine you are enflaming the fire with fresh oxygen until all that is left is the fire burning brightly. Feel the peace of being at one with God and the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming yet all-embracing love. Take a moment to repeat this during the day when you feel stressed and remember the one flame of the One Who Is resides in us all despite our surface differences.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Forgiving Nero on Good Friday
Last Saturday night, I watched a film about the life of the Roman Emperor Nero, entitled Nero. I did so on the recommendation of a close friend, a gifted artist, who is well-versed in ancient Greek and Roman history. He prepared me for a film with a psychological slant on Nero. To my surprise, there was a spiritual message about forgiveness. Just moments earlier, on what was then the eve of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, I had been reflecting on forgiveness. This was the other synchronicity in the daily dialogue with the Divine (remember that, as the Mayans say, “God talks to us ALL the time”), I alluded to in the previous posting.
In the final scene, Acte, the love of Nero’s life, stands by the unlit funeral pyre where Nero’s body is lying. We hear Acte’s thoughts, “Nero had a dream of Rome, a dream of a better world.” Acte takes a flaming branch and lights the pile of sticks encasing Nero’s body. Referring to the fire that burned Rome during Nero‘s reign, we again hear her thoughts, “He [Nero] did not light the fire but the fire in his soul consumed him. Let us forgive him as we hope to be forgiven.”
What! Forgive Nero who fed all those innocent early Christians to the lions? But how can we? We can because we are all Nero. We are all consumed by the fire of desire to change the world everyday. It is as if we say to ourselves, “I need the world to be different before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my unreasonable boss to see I’m right and he’s wrong before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my wife or husband to agree with my point of view or I will remain disturbed and unhappy.”
Yes, the desire to improve conditions around us is fine but we can do so by taking a breath, relaxing, and doing so as we are strengthened by feeling good first. Then we are inspired to change the conditions around us as we breath freely with less tension. But we do so not because our peace of mind and well being depend on it.
The word spirit in many languages is equated with the breath. When Jesus died on the cross on that first Good Friday, he did so after he commend His Spirit into God’s hands. In little ways each day, we can choose to do the same by exhaling the tension we feel when we want to change the world. We can commend our spirit into the hands of the I AM That I AM awareness within us. It is the awareness that is not dependent on conditions: it is conditionless. What can I say about myself that is not subject to change while I draw breath on this planet? I AM. I exist. I AM this or that, a butcher or baker or candle stick maker is subject to change. Even my gender can be changed if I were to elect to have an operation.
Right now, allow yourself to feel the peace of choosing to cast the fire of the desire to change any conditions into the sacred fire of the all-consuming love of God Whose name is I AM THAT I AM. We can then tap into the peace of that consciousness within us when we become still and cease striving to change the world. Then we stop being consumed by the fire of our desire as Nero was. And, we can stop seeking revenge against those we feel wronged by as Nero did. According to the film, when his pregnant second wife died, Nero asked Saint Paul to raise her from the dead. But when Paul was unable to do so, he told Nero that it was not God’s will. Nero became enraged and thus began his slaughter of Christians.
When Jesus commended His Spirit into God’s hands, an earthquake shook the Earth. The thick curtain barring the way to the inner sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The barrier to intimacy with God was removed. Just as the 8.8 earthquake in Chile shook La Tierra Madre to Her core and shifted the coastline of South America, practicing forgiveness today as Christ did is capable of causing an inner earthquake that can shake each one of us to the core of our usual sense of ourselves. As long as we cling to a body-based sense of ourselves, centered in the reactive reptile brain, forgiveness makes little sense. Revenge makes more sense. “You hurt me verbally or physically, I’ll get you back.” But when we remember that who we are is spirit, and the essence of that spirit is both breath and love, we can aspire to forgive as Christ did those who crucified Him.
• Today, resolve to retain your inner freedom by not allowing anyone or anything rob you of your ability to feel good and be at peace. Reflect on how it is in remembering that who we all are is love, we can learn to forgive the world for not being as we would like it to be at any given moment. Breathing in, commend your spirit to the inner freedom of the I AM awareness within you by silently saying to the offending condition (person, place or thing, e.g., an unreasonable boss, a traffic jam, or unpleasnat weather), “I AM NOT dependent on you being other than you are at this moment for me to feel good and be at peace.” Breathing out, silently say, “I will maintain my inner peace no matter what you do or say.”
In the final scene, Acte, the love of Nero’s life, stands by the unlit funeral pyre where Nero’s body is lying. We hear Acte’s thoughts, “Nero had a dream of Rome, a dream of a better world.” Acte takes a flaming branch and lights the pile of sticks encasing Nero’s body. Referring to the fire that burned Rome during Nero‘s reign, we again hear her thoughts, “He [Nero] did not light the fire but the fire in his soul consumed him. Let us forgive him as we hope to be forgiven.”
What! Forgive Nero who fed all those innocent early Christians to the lions? But how can we? We can because we are all Nero. We are all consumed by the fire of desire to change the world everyday. It is as if we say to ourselves, “I need the world to be different before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my unreasonable boss to see I’m right and he’s wrong before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my wife or husband to agree with my point of view or I will remain disturbed and unhappy.”
Yes, the desire to improve conditions around us is fine but we can do so by taking a breath, relaxing, and doing so as we are strengthened by feeling good first. Then we are inspired to change the conditions around us as we breath freely with less tension. But we do so not because our peace of mind and well being depend on it.
The word spirit in many languages is equated with the breath. When Jesus died on the cross on that first Good Friday, he did so after he commend His Spirit into God’s hands. In little ways each day, we can choose to do the same by exhaling the tension we feel when we want to change the world. We can commend our spirit into the hands of the I AM That I AM awareness within us. It is the awareness that is not dependent on conditions: it is conditionless. What can I say about myself that is not subject to change while I draw breath on this planet? I AM. I exist. I AM this or that, a butcher or baker or candle stick maker is subject to change. Even my gender can be changed if I were to elect to have an operation.
Right now, allow yourself to feel the peace of choosing to cast the fire of the desire to change any conditions into the sacred fire of the all-consuming love of God Whose name is I AM THAT I AM. We can then tap into the peace of that consciousness within us when we become still and cease striving to change the world. Then we stop being consumed by the fire of our desire as Nero was. And, we can stop seeking revenge against those we feel wronged by as Nero did. According to the film, when his pregnant second wife died, Nero asked Saint Paul to raise her from the dead. But when Paul was unable to do so, he told Nero that it was not God’s will. Nero became enraged and thus began his slaughter of Christians.
When Jesus commended His Spirit into God’s hands, an earthquake shook the Earth. The thick curtain barring the way to the inner sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The barrier to intimacy with God was removed. Just as the 8.8 earthquake in Chile shook La Tierra Madre to Her core and shifted the coastline of South America, practicing forgiveness today as Christ did is capable of causing an inner earthquake that can shake each one of us to the core of our usual sense of ourselves. As long as we cling to a body-based sense of ourselves, centered in the reactive reptile brain, forgiveness makes little sense. Revenge makes more sense. “You hurt me verbally or physically, I’ll get you back.” But when we remember that who we are is spirit, and the essence of that spirit is both breath and love, we can aspire to forgive as Christ did those who crucified Him.
• Today, resolve to retain your inner freedom by not allowing anyone or anything rob you of your ability to feel good and be at peace. Reflect on how it is in remembering that who we all are is love, we can learn to forgive the world for not being as we would like it to be at any given moment. Breathing in, commend your spirit to the inner freedom of the I AM awareness within you by silently saying to the offending condition (person, place or thing, e.g., an unreasonable boss, a traffic jam, or unpleasnat weather), “I AM NOT dependent on you being other than you are at this moment for me to feel good and be at peace.” Breathing out, silently say, “I will maintain my inner peace no matter what you do or say.”
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