dailydatewithgod

Sound is so amazing to me.  If I were to study a specific nuance of science it would be the science of sound if there is such a thing.  Sound is healing, rejuvenating, it needs no language, it is universal, and you do not even need ears to appreciate it.  Sounds have a way of touching our hearts energetically that seems to surpass the thinking mind.  Perhaps because there is sound within us.  I will never forget the feeling of being on a mountain top in the quiet of night when I could hear my heart beating, and the vessels pumping the blood throughout my body. The sound resonated all through me and I was awestruck.  Sound resonates within us and around us.  It moves our attention and reminds us when we need the silence.  It is such a touching experience that we use terms associated with sound that have nothing to do with it specifically.  We talk about how ideas resonate with us and why we found ourselves resonating with a group of people.  It was not the sound it was the energy behind the interaction. We know when we connect with something because it resonates with us.  To resonate is producing or being filled with a deep, full reverberating sound.  It is the reason we find ourselves moving to music, loving the sound of our name being spoken, and snapping our fingers to the drum beats in music and the city streets. God equipped our hearts to resonate with love.  It is why we are moved when we hear it spoken, watch it conveyed, and are motivated to take action in its direction.  Resonating becomes a way for us to know without always logically understanding when we are in the presence or absence of love.  God encourages us to pay attention to the resonating awakening within us in our various experiences.  If we can find the resonance of love present, we will see, hear, touch, taste, and feel the love of which we are made.  We are then able to share the resonating love as we move step by step through our day.

I do not think many of us view ourselves as healers. We leave that description to medicine men, health practitioners, doctors, nurses, and the like.  Yet, if we really pay attention how often have you found that laughter switches your heart into a lighter mode.  Couldn’t laughter therefore be the cure for a dark mood?  What about using our days to look for ways to connect with other human beings?  We may not think of it as a cure but know that when we have a conversation with someone who is truly listening to us, we feel a sense of restoration of our importance.  Curing restores our souls and reminds us of who we are at our core.  I would say that my daily dates with God are a daily dose of the cure for this wild and crazy world because it gives me the courage to remember who I am and what I am capable of.  If we find ourselves feeling life like an ailment because of all the noise and clamoring voices, then the cure would come from some peace and quiet.  Isn’t this how many describe what they want their vacations to be like?  What if God provided the kind of curing we need to restore ourselves to the truth of who God knows us to be through our breath?  This would mean we have the access we think others give us within ourselves any time we choose to pay attention to it.  I think laughter makes us breathe deeper. Perhaps there is a connection.

As a school kid, one of my favorite times of year was the beginning of a new school year.  I loved getting the new textbooks which had never been used and the blank notebooks just waiting to be filled with all kinds of information.  Plus who doesn’t love new pens, binders, and unmarked calendars?  Okay, so I was/am a bit of a nerd.  There was something about having a completely new slate from which to work that excited me.  Of course, the newness wears off rather quickly and the books become worn and used.  In college, to save money I bought used textbooks and pulled notebooks from the previous semester that still had blank pages.  Yet, even those I appreciated a great deal.  As a curios student of history I wondered where the books had been before and how what I learned the previous semester might apply to the current one.  I saw value in the new and the used.  The perfectionist in me wants it all to be a fresh new start but the realism in me knows that nothing comes from nothing and there is value in the history and knowing how far we have come.  I have learned that one does not negate the other because the option to start new is always present.  Newness from a deeper place of understanding helps create a potentially more meaningful experience.  I learned in recovery that once we make amends for our past actions where we have harmed ourselves or others, we do not shut the door on the past.  We use what happened and what we learned from it to change our way of operating going forth.  If I forget about it or do not look upon it to learn from it,  I am more likely to repeat it.  God has taught me whether an experience is new or used, it is about using it to grow in love.  Everything used was new at some point. The used version just has some battle scars.  Those scars are new to anyone who has not encountered them before and hold value.  Using our lives to be the creators and messengers of love in all areas, new and used, is living out from our hearts what we are designed to do.

We all have our likes and dislikes.  Growing up I was told what I picky eater I am.  Up until about 16 years ago I used to see that as a bad thing.  Now I recognize it as a proclivity towards certain foods and mixtures of ingredients.  I used to think in order to admit that I am drawn to one thing or another I had to have some clear explanation but the truth is sometimes we just find ourselves with preferences towards particular people, ideas, events, and the like.  Who we are as a whole human being is a combination of our different proclivities.  God invites us to connect with them and see how they shape the kind of life we are living.  We are encouraged to utilize them to be the messenger of love in those ways and experiences.  There is no place where God is not present so if you have a proclivity towards tattoos maybe it is because there is love needed in that community.  We have to be careful when we find ourselves using our proclivity to elevate ourselves above others or exclude an opposite proclivity.  Because we form communities and support networks often in alignment with our proclivities, the potential for group think sometimes leads proclivity to be used in a non-loving way.  Through my daily dates I am returned to the recognition that who I am is whole and complete.  There is an understanding that God can use me through my proclivities to grow love if I choose to invite him in.  When I remember this, I do not need to exclude or make wrong those who do not have the same proclivity because the eyes of my heart see the other proclivities as equally spreading the message of love.

The world we see is dependent upon the lens through which we are looking.  We have all had good and bad days and if we take a moment to reflect we notice something in our attitude and perception that caused us to see them as good or bad.  The beauty of the way God works is in the option we have to change our perspective anytime we want.  When we pause and notice our breath.  We can hear the voice in our heads that reacts to the first bad thing to happen in the day . . .”Oh great!  This is not supposed to happen.  Ugghh!  Why does this always happen to me?  Just what I need, a bad start to the day, now the rest of the day is a loss.”  At our next breath we can pause before we let the bad day perspective set the course for our day.  In those moments, I need God’s help because I am not able to see it from a different perspective.  The moment I launch into a conversation about how something is happening to me I have activated the victim template to be downloaded into my brain.  The template has a well-worn groove after being used so often. I have newer ones but I need God’s help to activate them. So the next part of the conversation in my head is “God, I see that I am taking this personally, help me to change my perspective and notice that sometimes things happen that are annoying and not what I want to deal with today.  Remind me I am not alone and how I can make this work for me today.”

A beautiful growth out of awareness is in the ability to respond.  As a result of my daily commitments to my dates with God I have developed a pause between what scientists call stimulus and response.  I am better able to embrace responsibility for my life and my decisions because I am utilizing my ability to respond.  Our automatic pilot is set up to react. In some ways one could argue that it is set up to re-enact.  We play out what we know. We act the way we have created habits around.  This both works for us and does not.  The ways that work are areas in which we like the fruits of our reacting.  The areas where we are troubled are those that may have worked at some point but now seem to have a counter effect greater than the amount they are effective.  Those areas in particular are the ones in which we can take responsibility for and choose to respond.  It used to be effective in my life at one point to stuff down my feelings and then eat over them.  When my weight became a burden, the food was still effective but I didn’t like the after effect.  However, it was not until the food ceased being able to numb me out and I was over 300 lbs that I needed was willing to concede that it was time to take responsibility and choose a response.  It took time to build that in and it is what God has shown me how to do over these many years.  Day by day abstaining from those foods which cycled me into reacting and the behaviors that numbed me out, I had to find another way.  My mentors taught me that the shift in mindset required would take action on my part and the first part was asking for God’s help.

We are so used to categorizing things and seeing them as separate entities we forget how very connected everything is.  Our willingness to embrace the coherence of nature can be seen in how we view our bodies.  I always think it is funny to hear people talk about the mind-body connection.  What makes us think they are not part of the same whole? They are literally connected physically within a body and there are multiple network connections constantly keeping us up and moving. Our physical existence is a a brilliant demonstration of coherence.  The coherence does not end within our own bodies.  It is also in our physical bodies are connected to the natural world.  Without realizing it we impact and are impacted by the shift in the moon cycles and the sun’s magnetic rays.  Just because we are not experiencing something physically does not mean there is not a coherent system in operation.  This same coherence also operates inter-personally.  We as human beings are part of a greater whole.  We are impacted by the actions, thoughts, feelings, and energy of others.  When we are aligned together there is a sense of the coherence.  Think about people at a seminar or in a place of worship.  All gathered together in focus they coherently shift the energy in the room.  We sense it when we are around a group of people who lack coherence. Something just feels off.  God invites to look at how we connect with our hearts in our internal coherence can impact those around us.  It is what I get to do with God each day on our date.  God encourages us to make a connection to the coherence placed with our system so we can intentionally impact the coherent nature of the world and be the messengers of love we are designed to be.

One of the benefits of gratitude is its ability to put things in perspective.  As part of my daily practice i jot down or bring to mind things for which I am grateful.  On a day when my head is particularly loud I start with the smallest things.  I am grateful for my fingers and toes, the hair on my head, and the stop light that keeps cars from crashing into each other.  The impact of this is the ability to snowball into realizing how many things for which to be grateful.  When I make a list I try to come up with new things and I start by imagining what I would miss if I lost it.  My phone, the ability to hear, the way the sunset makes traffic a little bit more bearable, interesting questions asked by pod-casters, the ability to think of a new idea, and so on.  When we bring to mind what we would be losing in our lives if it were not there, we find a multitude of things to be grateful for. As challenging as certain conversations can be, if I did not have the opportunity to share my ideas and listen to others, I would be losing out on an opportunity to get to know another person.  If I did not have eyes to see I would be losing out on the beauty of watching two people greet each other in a warm hug. If I did not have fear about an experience I would be losing out on the sense of courage that I get from walking through it.  When we are cognizant of what we could be losing, we find all kinds of things to be grateful for.  I once heard that the most powerful prayer is two words, “Thank you.” God shows me daily that while there are things I want to oppose or run away from, I would be losing out on the opportunity to see the capacity and courage of my heart. Who wants that?

There is something about clarity that opens the space for us to be more free. I can almost assuredly get a picture of the effectiveness of my life, if I wanted that kind of impeccable clarity, by comparing the level of clarity in areas of my life that work or don’t work. Ignorance is bliss in some sense but vagueness can get us into a lot of trouble.  This clarity of mind leads us to think that if we just understand things, we will be okay.  All we need is to elucidate them we will have no more questions that need to be answered.  This might work quite well for the mind but does it work as well for the heart?  The funny thing is no matter how clear things are in my mind, my heart may need a deeper level of understanding.  The elucidation requirements of the heart are very simple. Does knowing bring me closer or further from love?  Does the explanation I have been given bring me to a place of acceptance?  Life is messy and we fall for the illusion of understanding in our minds. Our hearts ponder the questions that are not understandable in our minds and there are many of those. On my daily dates with God I have learned to sit with the questions and make room through my breath for the elucidation to come from within.  The questions of the heart are rarely explained away by outside forces.  When we can cultivate the capacity to sit quietly with the curiosities and questions we embrace the opportunity for the elucidating of our hearts to speak.

Do you ever have times when you want to stay a little longer?  When you do not want something to end?  When it feels like time went by so fast and you barely had an opportunity to savor the experience? Those are the spaces where we want to linger.  It is more than a simple resistance to change, it is a connection to something that has been tapped inside of us which knows we need more of it, whatever it is. How do we know when our desire to linger is coming from wanting to savor the experience a little more or avoiding moving forward? What about the times when we do not want to linger?  Sometimes I think I would like a manual on how to handle those situations.  Sure, I have the 12 steps, the tenants of Christianity in which I was raised, people whom I admire, and things I do that I know make my life work for the best.  Yet in those moments of confusion when I can’t seem to move forward, I find myself searching for an answer.  When I am in fear, I want to know that what I do will not completely mess me up.  I am concerned about looking bad or like I don’t know what I am doing.  In those moments, I have rushed through lingering in my heart and pushed to having to know.  I move from being human to doing human. To linger longer in my heart opens up spaces that I make up will be hard to walk through, so I go back into my head to figure it out.  What moves the courage within me is hearing God whisper in my ear, “Come daughter, linger a while longer in your heart. I am here in the mess of it, you are not alone.”  After many years of our daily dates, I have learned to trust the still soft voice because though I might be scary, a little bit of lingering leads to greater freedom.