dailydatewithgod

In a world of comparison and duality we tend to value the greatest, the highest, the grandest versus the worst, the lowest, and the simplest.  Perhaps there is a deeper reason for the reaching of the summit or obtaining of greatness.  Perhaps it is something within us moving us towards our highest good and being our highest selves.  I believe it is the spirit of God within us.  We can get caught up in the world’s definitions of the highest and actually end up operating from our lowest selves.  Our true highest sense of self is the embodiment of love and compassion.  It achieves and makes things happen but not necessarily by winning accolades or overcoming massive obstacles. Being our highest selves is about being in the moment.  It is the moments when we are in touch with our hearts and with the one who created us to be our highest selves.  Depending on the moment we are in our highest self may look like being the star, having the final say, or getting the recognition. Or it could be walking away from a chance to the star, keeping our mouth closed, and work that goes unacknowledged. One is not better than the other.  It is simply what is being called upon us by our hearts in the moment we are in.  When we are operating from our highest sense of ourselves we are in alignment with our hearts and the energy created by it has no measurement in our world.  I hesitate to try to describe it further because it will not be the same for you.  We each have the inherent knowledge of what it means to show up as our highest selves in any given moment. It is part of our design. When we take the time to pause and check in with our hearts, the more we can operate from this reality and elevate those around us.

Those of us who have been driving a car long enough know the impact of visibility to get where we are going.  When there is rain, fog, or snow visibility is impaired.  We are not able to see exactly where we are going because the our visibility is blocked.  The same thing happens when we rely solely on our physical eyes in seeing our life.  What we see can be clouded by our feeling, our thinking, and our fixed state of mind.  The eyes of our heart are also impacted by our thoughts and feelings.  Visibility is restored when we open ourselves up to the love of God freely offered in the moment.  But both can be clouded over.  We need the visibility of our eyes and our hearts to operate fully and with love in this world.  When we are willing to acknowledge the ways our visibility is blocked we have taken the first step towards inviting God in to restore our vision.  It may not take the form we imagine but our visibility can be renewed and we end up seeing like never before.

One of the first things I heard in the rooms of recovery that I entered over 16 years ago is: “Acceptance is the answer.”  It reminded me of a poem I read many years before by Virginia Satir entitled “I AM ME” .  The poem speaks about the concept of self-acceptance.  I was struck by it as a young person but did not really take in or believe it.  In my experience it begins by validating what we are experiencing before we do anything else.  I am so used to judging what I am thinking, feeling, and doing  I will bypass the opportunity to just call it out for what it is.  There is great power in validating one’s experience.  Another expression I learned along the way was, “Name it, claim it, dump it.”  If I cannot even validate by naming what is happening, how can I take responsibility for it and let it go? Moving forward in life requires us to name where we are first.  When I have my date time with God it begins with just being with what is. God is not judging it. I might be but my heart has softened over the years.  At least when I jump to judgment I can pause and take a step back instead of running with it. Our breath provides the moment to simply notice and validate the reality.  God does not see us as victims of life.  If we want to see ourselves that way and ultimately live our lives, a major step comes from validating what is.  There is plenty of time for judgment and action.  We must begin with being with it.

Life sometimes feels like a series of do-overs.  We like to think we are moving along a linear time line of events but it does not seem to be the case.  When we look at how the natural world operates there is very little that speaks the idea of a straight line trajectory. It is more cyclical like a clock, the seasons, and even the Earth and all the planets.  A cycle calls us to return over and over again to where we started.  Perhaps it is life’s way of allowing us to see our growth or demise depending on our perspective.  When I feel most stuck in life is when I perceive that I should be moving forward and it does not involve cycling back.  I think if I am returning to a point of origin I must not be getting something.  This harsh judgment does not allow for the beauty of the rhythm of life.  Just as I return to our dates each day and find God glad to greet me as though it has not been done before, I can learn to return to spaces and places in my heart and mind.  If I look at it from the perspective of what new understandings or capacities I have when I return, the returning takes on an entirely different experience. If I am not able to grow I will only see what I have seen before and it will feel like I am going in circles to nowhere. If I am willing to grow in love and light in the time of the cycle, the returning is as much a movement into something new as it is a reminder of how far I have come.

We tend to think of stumbling as failure and something to carry shame about.  Yet anyone who has bothered to try to traverse a different path then they are familiar with will find themselves stumbling.  Perhaps our stumbling is more about how we manage to find our footing once we stumble.  If we get stuck in the shame instead of using the stumbling blocks as building blocks we will end up staying where we are.  Sometimes our stumbling is to wake us up to how we are facing new realities with old lenses.  We are attempting to walk through something new using the usual methods and ideas.  It is when we stumble and get cut or knocked off our feet that we can look at something from a new perspective.  At the very least it is an opportunity to laugh at ourselves.  I remember when I first reached a healthy body weight after being obese most of my life.  Sometimes I would stumble over my own feet.  Me, a dancer, looking like a klutz!  (And actually learning how to dance in a smaller body was an even bigger hurdle requiring a lot of patience).  It was embarrassing but my whole sense of equilibrium had to adjust and it needed time.  This was the part they didn’t mention when they said how fabulous it would be to live in a smaller body. My center of gravity had shifted and I needed to stumble to figure out I did not need to put as much energy behind my steps as I had previously.  If I had not stumbled I would not have learned how to carry myself differently which caused me to see things differently and learn to shift my energy use.

God does not see parts. God sees wholeness.  Wholeness of being and wholeness of humanity.  It makes a lot more sense to our minds to compartmentalize things.  It allows us to digest information when we break it into parts and chunks.  When it comes to how the heart sees things, wholeness is the default mode.  Perhaps it is the reason our hearts feel like they are breaking when we have lost a loved one or are angry.  Our hearts feel as though they are being attacked and will breakdown.  We literally feel like we can’t breathe.  Our minds interpret it as due to the particular separate thing but it is because we are not able to see the wholeness of the situation.  Our heart is not able to function as it was intended because we are trying to place the constrictions and functions of our mind where it does not work.  We are gifted with both perspectives but we cannot simply put one where the other is meant to exist and hope it works out.  Talk about trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.  God calls us to use the lens of wholeness when we find our categories and distinctions are causing our vision to break down and fall apart.  Hint: if we are not able to breathe while using our lens of separateness, it is an indication of our heart’s nature telling us something is amiss.

The blessedness by which we were created is beyond our imagination.  To fully understand what is happening the realm of God’s mind would make us God. One way I am able to get what I would consider a glimpse is when I notice the intricacy of nature.  Nature as in the world but even more so the nature of our human body and its construction.  All the cells which each have their own individual eco system, the networks of blood and electrical impulses that keep us functioning and moving as one being are very elaborate.  In fact we cannot yet get a computer to duplicate the kind of system that operates in our brain to keep us alive.  The apparent sacrosanctity in which we were designed speaks to the profound love and deliberate consciousness of God’s intention. And all of it goes on without us needing to be conscious of it.  This causes me to evaluate the level I am not aware of the sacrosanctity of myself but of other human beings.  Quickly they become the other.  Without effort on our part, the differences and the judgments come into play.  We all seem to be just as unaware of how immediate the lack of sacrosanctity occurs. The difference is in our choice to use the pause we are given with our breath to notice the thoughts before we act on them.  It is as though the unconscious effort to breathe is also a part of this dynamic system. It is calling us to wake up and notice the sacrosanctity view of God.

There are things we come to know and understand as time goes on.  Life has a way of revealing itself. We often think we want or need to know everything all at once.  I think I will be better prepared to handle things the more information and understanding I have.  Over time I have come to see that things are revealed just as they need to be.  I can trust in the value of being present in the moment in which I need to receive the information and understanding that is being given to me.  I never need to fret over the fact that I do not have all I need to do what I need to do because God would not leave me ill-equipped.  Why would a God that love and cares for me leave me hanging?  I may not like what I perceive to be the limitation of information but just because I think I am limited does not mean I am.  God’s level of revealing in retrospect is perfect.  Sometimes it is not the lack of what has been revealed but my resistance to trusting in it which gets in my way.  Or it could be the way in which it is revealed to me. I may not recognize it because it does not match my expectations and I discount the revealing.  Our daily dates help build the muscle of trust so I am able to walk into my day trusting in God’s level of revealing and ask for the courage to receive and accept what is revealed.

When God pours out love into our hearts at our creation, he creates a steady stream of life’s energy.  We can choose to be in the stream or we can block it off.  God keeps the streaming going regardless of what we choose to do.  Sometimes we may think we are not worthy of it but God is not stopped by what we think or feel.  God invites us to continually open ourselves up to the stream of love.  It means letting go of our damns and stop building sand bag walls. The beauty of God is that if we even attempt to take down one brick or remove one sandbag, he will find a way to allow the stream to come through the open channel.  She knows we are not keeping up the walls to block the streaming because we are trying to be difficult.  We have just forgotten that we are actually a part of the stream.

As a life long dancer there is something quintessential about the ability to move that I have felt internally as well as externally.  Most of our movements can be very mechanical. One foot in front of the other, hand to mouth, phone to ear, and so on.  Then there are those movements inspired by something.  We are caught be the spirit of music or the sound of the trees in the wind and we can sense an internal connection with movement.  If we are not worried about what others might think, sometimes we actually allow ourselves to go with the flow.  Letting go of the judgment allows us to be with what we are feeling and be in the movement.  We catch ourselves swaying a bit with our walk, snapping our fingers to the music in the store while in line, or drumming the hood of our car when we are pumping gas.  If you pay attention you can see a certain peaceful expression on their face.  It happens when they allow themselves to engage their inherent movement and sync it with the inspiration they sense within.  The movement becomes an honoring of the spirit within their hearts.  We have all had times when we felt immobile.  For me, the times when I am not able to participate in movement with my whole body cause me to feel less at peace.  There is something about being able to move with the rhythms of nature and spread the energy that are life-giving. As someone who has spent a large part of her life hating and vilifying her body, the continued reconciliation process involves surrendering to the movement of the moment without judgment.  I am grateful for a heart that senses the movement of life and communicates to my body how best to express it in the moment.