dailydatewithgod

There are times in our lives when we find ourselves crying.  Sadness, grief, and even joy can cause this liquid to run from our eyes.  For some reason we often feel the need to apologize for it.  What exactly is it we are apologizing for?  Being human? Having feelings?  This natural way our bodies let go when we are weeping is cleansing.  It allows us to let go from the inside out and make room for something new.  God created our bodies with this mechanism to help clear out what we are letting go of.  Weeping is a beautiful example of something we do not have control over and are given a chance to allow as a genuine expression of where we are in our hearts, minds, and bodies. Like most things it is not what is happening that is good or bad, it is our determination that makes it so.  We have nothing to judge unless we give it the meaning of something. Which are we choosing, our meaning or God’s meaning? If we criticize weeping, what other God-given natural capabilities are we criticizing or working to prevent from happening?  If we apologize for it are we apologizing for God? Being in acceptance of who and how God created us opens us up to be the messengers of love we are designed to be.

God’s viewpoint far surpasses our understanding. We stand at the edges of it and try to wrap our minds around it but seem to fall short.  We get stuck thinking we need to grasp the vastness of love and being of God. The closest we can come to it is when we return to our hearts.  When we rest and let go of the mind’s need to grasp at vastness it can be present in our hearts.  Love is about allowing, not grasping.  In the moments we pause and take a breath into our hearts we sense the vastness of love present within us.  God did not create it out there.  God did not make the presence of love only available in grand gestures and significant spiritual experiences.  God places the vastness of love in the everyday moments of heart connection. If we want to touch the vastness of God’s love we simply need to pause and breathe into our hearts.  If we start to see it there, we will see it everywhere.

It’s hard to imagine why we need to obscure things from ourselves. In general, we tend to think we know ourselves pretty well. The truth is the most of what we know falls into two categories: things we know and things we know we don’t know.  A much larger chunk of reality exists in a third category: things we don’t know that we don’t know. In other words, what we are not aware of as something to be aware of. Here is where the obscuring works the best. It is not intentional on our parts to be obscuring but it happens simply by nature of reality.  We cannot know what we do not know that we don’t know.  This is where our engagement in relationships with others is our greatest tool.  We are designed as humans who are purposed to grow and learn in love to spend our lives discovering all the places and space we could not imagine love would be present.  Ultimately the obscuring is how we manage the uncertainty of living life.  It is comfortable to stay in the knowing what we don’t know. If we were able to be fully present in every breathing moment, we would be enlightened masters.  But we are in these temporal bodies and many of us have turned off our awareness of the information they provide as to our emotional and mental reality.  We can easily be consumed by the realities of what it takes to get up and move through life physically that we never get to those deeper layers.  Until our physical experience causes us to stop and take notice.  What is happening physically can be obscuring the emotional, mental, and spiritual capacities if we let it.  Or, we can choose to stop taking the physical experience and reality as all there is and go deeper. Pause and see what it is obscuring. Step out of the knowing what we don’t know part.  Enable ourselves to discover some of the things we don’t know that we don’t know.  Those mysteries provide insight into how we can grow our hearts.  The eclipses and veils of a physical ailment or difficult interaction with another human being, can be touched upon below the surface if we are willing to open our hearts and see versus just using our eyes.  Obscuring if understood as a mechanism through which we can know there is always more to know is not a bad thing.  It is entrusting that when we need to know, the obscuring will fall away.

The only problem with our thinking is we default into believing everything we think is true.  We have this false sense of security that if we thought about something or are thinking of something the truth will come to us.  We would not believe this about other people.  The idea of everything another person thinks is automatically true is laughable.  No one is 100%.  The challenge is that we go from there to the extreme of lying.  We think truth versus lie.  Maybe there are some grey shades in between.  There can morsels of truth in what we are thinking without the whole of what we are thinking being true.  Just like our feelings, our thoughts provide us information about ourselves.  We become aware of our perceptions through our thinking.  The idea of truth is not automatic because our perceptions are not the same as others.  How is it possible for both perceptions especially if they are opposing are true?  The thinking of someone else therefore appears to be intruding on ours.  Maybe all that is happening is the gift of a different viewpoint.  Maybe it is helpful to have someone else’s ideas intruding on our own.  Are we interested in getting to the whole truth or are we interested in being right?  The reason it feels intruding when someone insist upon their perspective based on their thinking is because we are concerned about being right.  If it does not matter who is right but that we get to what is right, there is no intrusion.  God invites us to engage with others in relationship and like all things, learn how to grow in love.  Instead of viewing others as intruding on our rightness, we are offered a chance to pause and see things from someone else’s perspective.

In the realm of understanding how we can become more of the truth of who we are, we have to look at what is driving our operation.  From where are we getting our motivation to take action in our lives.  We like to judge ourselves by our thinking but the world judges us by our actions. While our thinking may be brilliant, it does not have value until we write it down and share it with others.  Thinking in and of itself simply supplies the reasoning and the motivation for the action.  Our feelings or rather our interpretation of our feelings also motivate our actions.  Sometimes thinking comes before feeling, other times it is the opposite. Action draws from both.  As we learn to pay attention to how our thoughts and feelings impact create our reality we can see how they set the stage for the actions we are taking. Powerful action is created by the fusing of the two. When we choose to align our thinking and our feeling by fusing them together, we are energetically aligned with our heart and our spirit.  The actions we take have a greater and more lasting impact.  Think about a time when you did something good or bad with strong passion. Passion comes from the fusing of our thoughts and feelings.  Those around us can feel the effects long after we have left the scene.  God invites us to choose wisely what we are doing when we harness the power of fusing our thinking and feeling into action.

We all do it and we all condemn it and look down upon it.  Escaping into our phones, the media, other people’s lives, drinking, drugging, eating, shopping or something else.  It seems to be on the increase and because our default is to measure ourselves by our productivity in life we see it as a bad thing. In all of nature there is a balance between productivity and rest, between being charged up and cooled down, between excitement and sadness.  We move from one state to another because it is the flow of life to move from one state to another. Life does not have a judgment on our behavior they way we do.  We tend to see things through the lens of what is wrong here.  Escaping may be part of our natural inclination to seeking a break.  Stepping out of a situation and putting our attention on something else for a while gives our minds and bodies a time to be and move in a different way.  This can often provide insight into what the next productive step should be. If we ignore the need to pause long enough it will require an escape.  God invites us to pause all throughout the day,  its called breathing. The breath goes in and out.  If we are in a situation where we can only breathe in or only breathe out we will need an escape.  If we take a step back from the judgment and pay attention to what our way of escaping does for us we can make it a point to provide it for ourselves in a balanced way so that escaping does not take a turn for the worse or become our focus.

It seems the commercial world is full of endorsements.  You may be hearing a lot of it right now in the US because we are about to have an election.  The power of endorsing comes from the value we place on those who are endorsing.  The relationship to what is being endorsed becomes the motivating factor to get you to buy this or vote for that. It is how pretty much everything happens we just do not call it that. As human beings we are very heavily influenced by those around us, even if we think we are not. Every time we asked someone for their opinion we are trying to determine which view they are endorsing.  The question we want to ask ourselves in each moment is, what is our heart endorsing in this moment?  When we look at what God gave us as a tool to determine how to make our decisions we need not look to others but to the energy of our hearts.  When we pay attention to the message and the energy that is either growing or diminishing we have a sense of what our hearts are endorsing as the most aligned with the truth of who we are.  Many spiritual paths have similar endorsements and we think following those will make us good people.  They can create an experience of what it is like to be in alignment with our hearts but if our hearts are not on board, it will be disconnected from us and not be much of an endorsement. Sometimes, we get stuck in the disciplines and lose sight of the spirit.  The intention is to help us get back on the path of our hearts when we fall off course.  Slowing down, taking a breath, even touching our hand to our hearts gives us the chance to see what our true self is endorsing in the moment.  It may be scary, it may be joyful but the more we stop and listen the more clear the endorsements become.  God encourages us to know our own hearts as God does.  When we learn what endorsing love means in our lives it becomes clearer whether or not someone or something outside of us is in alignment with what we want to be endorsing.

As we take a look at what we can create in our lives from day-to-day to further the expression of the truth of who we are it may stand in stark contrast to what the world expects of us.  Most of us judge things that are different from a place of wrongness.  It makes sense, our minds are instinctively set up to sniff out possible danger which often shows up in what is different.  Our default for survival is to avoid the anomalies, the differences, and be one with the crowd.  We can be assured of making it to the next stage because we are included and will be protected in case of outside danger.  Those who are like us will recognize us and include us.  Differing to our minds presents possible danger.  The very idea of diversity inclusion is foreign to our minds.  But to our hearts which experience God in differing ways, it is not something to be feared.  When we are willing to embrace differing, we are opening our hearts and minds to what God has created as an opportunity to expand our capacity for love. It does not mean bring it super close right away but there is no need to run from it or make it automatically wrong.  Our hearts are full of curiosity and because we know God can bring us through anything, we have nothing to fear.  If we are willing to embrace differing ourselves from the crowd by being curious in the moment and open to the discovery of love in a new way, we can be the light we are called to be.

Given God has created so many experiences of love, we can spend an endless time seeking God and never come to the same experience twice.  There is something to be said for the ones that resonate deeply with ourselves.  Each of us has a way of being the expression of love in the world.  Each of us is gifted with being able to be the voice, movement, and space of love for ourselves and others.  A lifetime spent in discovery of what is our rhythm of love’s expression is what brings our hearts joy.  Feeling everything along the path of discover is part of the process.  It is miraculous how we are able to embody the spirit of love in such a unique fashion.  The more attention we give to the discovery of how we are the best expression of love, the more we embody the imperfect process of life.  It is not about having figured it out already.  It is a lifetime of discovery.  It is about being open to paying attention on the discovery path to what resonates most deeply within us.  It helps to attune to what contributes the freedom of the expression of love within us and what holds us back from freely giving from the space of love. Learning to embrace what is holding us back is also part of the discovery.  God encourages us to embrace the discovery with full knowledge that there is no greater meaning of life than to spend it in the discovery of how we are the greatest expression of love we are designed to be.

For those of you who remember vinyl records, you’ll remember how miraculous it was that a needle read lines grooved on a piece of plastic and played the song through the speakers on the stereo.  The grooves were an easy way to tell when it was moving from one song to another.  It was terribly annoying if the needle got stuck in a groove and kept repeating over and over a small portion of the song. In other words for the song to play full-out, the needle had to be able slide smoothly along the grooves.  We too have grooves in our mind, our bodies, even our hearts.  They are the patterns by which we are able to see and hear the music of our lives.  Life has a rhythm and a cadence and it is all going according to plan until the needle skips a groove or someone touches the record too closely and causes the needle to skip forward or get stuck in a groove. This meant in order to hear the song, you had to buy another record or play a different one.  It is not like a cassette tape or CD that could be easily recorded over again. The question is what kind of grooves do we have in place in our lives that need to be interrupted or broken?  What grooves when opened us up to be willing to play a different music?  Do you like the music of your life?  Are their records we are still playing no matter how worn the grooves are? In order to determine where the music of our lives is getting its cues, we have to look at the grooves we are operating within.  Change is sustained by switching grooves.  God invites us to quiet our minds and connect to the grooves, to listen to what they are really telling us and determine if they are still useful.  Some of them were placed by family and society and no longer play the kind of music of who we are in our lives today.  As adults we get to choose the grooves go under the needle and play the music of our lives.