dailydatewithgod

There is something about being in the flow of life that allows for more flexibility.  There is a trust that happens which allows us to be open to new ways of seeing and thinking about ourselves and the world. We are grounded in a sense of peace so much so that bending will not cause us to fall over or break apart.  This is what my daily date with god has brought into my life.  When I am connected in my heart to my relationship with God and myself I am able to flex around the happenings of life.  I am able to bend and see things from different angles but bending does not cause me to break or become uprooted.  I can shift the angle of my eyes because my heart is calling me to look from another direction.  I can hear with greater clarity what my friend or coworker is telling me because my mind is bending to perceive them as someone who is love.  When I am in fear and worry I am stiff and not able to fully breathe.  My body nor my mind can bend because it does not know where it is grounded.  It fears that bending will cause me to break.  It is then I know I am not in alignment with the truth of who I am.

Have you ever wondered if you could just walk away from the thought pattern going through your own mind?  Early in recovery  I learned a very helpful phrase: “Thank you for sharing.”  Like anything it can be said with insincerity or become overused, but the idea behind it is acknowledgment.  Given that most addicts deal with some level of shame and are afraid to share what they are thinking and feeling, it is a helpful first step.  Additionally, I learned from those who came before me that sharing was a way to get it out of my head and not let it ruminate further.  I came into recovery suffering from a lot of stinking thinking. Plus the nature of substance addiction is such that when consuming the substance, it is hard to maintain a clear head.  Then you add into it the fact that I am someone who is known to over think things. I would let thoughts go round and round in my mind under the guise that I would be able to figure it out.  Through early experiences, it appeared to me that no one wanted to hear what I actually had to say.  I also learned that I would just need to figure it out on my own.  I know I am not the only one who was walking around with such mental constructs.  The power of being able to share authentically with a simple acknowledgement has helped shape my life moving forward.  It is one of the greatest gifts of being in a 12-step room.  You get up in front of a group of people, you share what is on your mind and when your time is up you sit down.  Sometimes they clap for you and approach you at the end of the meeting to say thank you. I believe one of the most beneficial elements began when I learned to tell myself, “Thanks for sharing.”  The same simple phrase when directed at my own thinking, allowed me to acknowledge what I was thinking and feeling and move forward.  I did not have to hide it or make it wrong.  I could just notice it. I constantly have thoughts and feelings running through my head, they can’t all possibly be as important as I once thought they were.  I can acknowledge them and move on. I do not have to attach myself to them. I found the same experience on my daily date with God.  The power shown to me by God as I showed up for our date full of thinking, good and bad, and God not running, judging, or dismissing is immeasurable.

The simplest expression of life can be experienced on many different levels. Whether something is plain or ordinary is only looking at it from one angle.  The energy it takes to smile may not take much but the impact may be great to the person who sees the smile.  It does not even have to be the person it is directed toward.  God calls us to be the messengers of love and somewhere along the way we got the idea it meant only grand gestures qualified.  The power of a plain pause before reacting may not be a grand gesture of love but if it could keep unkind words from being exchanged and a complex negative chain of events from occurring.  Think of how many times in our day we can engage in plain thoughts, gestures, and actions of love and create multifaceted waves of love. The possibilities are plainly simple.

From the early stages of our lives we learn about value.  Before we learn the specifics, we hear the idea of values in conversation.  We also sense the values people have by watching and learning from them.  As adults we make decisions about what we value and use words to describe them.  We create goals that are in alignment with them and associate ourselves with others who hold the same values.  Yet our language is not enough. We speak volumes about what we value through our actions.  The way we choose to live our lives indicates to us and others what we value.  Anyone can talk a good game but if we are spending our time, attention and energy on things that do not add to the values we hold dear then words mean nothing.  The disconnect I have found in my life is when I adopt a value from someone else (family, friends, society, and so on) but have not fully decided if or how it is of value to me.  I think it is something I should value or that I should value it the way others do.  I may have a different understanding of what it means to value it.  As a recovering food addict I value living a healthy life and am grateful to have been given the chance to do so.  I do my best to stay up to date with what will contribute to it by what I eat and how I move.  However, the value of health does not involve jumping on the latest food trend because a bunch of people say it is good.  If I eat it and it messes with my piece of mind, a greater value, then I will not be partaking in it no matter how compelling the research.  It is not easy to stop and take a close look at our values, especially those we have held them for a long time. It is part of the process of growing up. God calls us to look at our values from the reference of our hearts.  If how I am thinking and behaving causes me to grow in love and open my heart then it is of value.  Since my relationship with God is my highest value I have had to let go of some things over time. It may feel good in the moment to criticize someone who is not in the room and even get some laughs from it, but did I create more love in that moment?  Which is more valuable, getting relief or being in alignment with how God sees me? It is all an imperfect process, at least for me.  Life in relationship with God is a dance.  You step forward, back, turn around, put one foot in front of the other and sometimes you learn to dance without any music.  But when I am dancing my heart is beating and I am alive.

When we think about what captures us and keeps our attention we find clues as to what we value.  The funny thing is that often we are so occupied by everyday worries and concerns that we spend our time thinking about those.  Many of them are things we cannot control.  Yet even those worries give us an indication of what is prominent in our hearts.  If our worries are about our job or the people close to us it tells us that they play a prominent role in our lives. If we concern ourselves with our bodies and our health it is clear those parts of our lives are prominent as well.  What we can use help in is how to focus the energy regarding the prominence.  Do we spend it in angst or in joy? Do we bring love and acceptance or fear and judgment?  We tend to think that we should distance ourselves from any kind of conflict, distress, things that make us angry, or cause us to feel pain.  Yet these can be our greatest teachers to lay for us what we are keeping prominent in our lives.  What we resist persists so actually we bring more focus to something the more we try to push it away and make it wrong.  What if we accepted worries, distress, conflict, anger as indications of what is prominent in our minds but has not yet found a way to connect to the heart?  What if we took the time to pause and listen beyond the noise of the commotion created by the “negative” aspects of worries and conflict?  What might we discover about our desire to take those prominent elements and bring them to our hearts for closer examination?

When we think of giving, it is usually within a positive context.  We think of generosity and sacrifice.  We give on many levels-physical, emotional, and spiritual.  Some in our minds may be more important than others but essentially we see it as a transference of energy.  It leaves us and go to the other person or experience.  What if with giving we were actually receiving?  What if it was not being subtracted from us but something that gets transferred to us as we transfer what we give to another?  This happens on an energetic level. Physically it looks like we are giving something and we no longer have it.  Yet we are given something in return.  Among other things, what transfers to us is the reaction of the other person.  What transfers is the energy of the experience.  We have a hand in how that goes on.  We don’t control it but we do not actually walk away from an experience of giving empty-handed.  The experience imprints on our mind.  This transference is something we play a strong part in when we are the receivers as well.  I am not sure I ever gave much thought to how I receive things that are given to me.  I learned to say thank you and be appreciative, but I do not always think about how it affects the person who is giving.  When we give to others usually our intention is to transfer the intention of our hearts as well as the physical element.  It is the intention that prompts us to give in the first place.  As we receive something we can choose to transfer the same intention if we choose to be present with the experience.  If we open ourselves up to the paying attention to the transferring that occurs with giving and receiving we can bring the power of love and growth to any interaction regardless of what is physically being given and received.

God calls to us with in our hearts to awaken the spirit of life deep within us.  We make all kinds of judgments about whether people are deep or shallow, we label conversations as small talk, and we presume to know the depth of another person based on one conversation or experience.  What would it take to acknowledge ourselves and others?  What if it is about what we are willing to see in others?  They are not deep or shallow but how much we are open to seeing the depth of the presence in them.  What if every interaction held the possibility of depth if we connected with the depth of love within us before engaging with others?  Perhaps the world only seems surface and not real because we have lost touch with how to connect to our own depth.  God is ready and willing to show us the depth of our own hearts when we slow down and get quiet.

I cannot tell you how many times I have chided myself for not being aware of something.  I always thought it was my job to know things before I could know things.  There was enough happening for me as a kid that defied explanation, so I came up with my own.  I learned to fill in the blanks.  While it ensured my survival and put my brain to rest somewhat, it has its limitations.  As a child, I could not ask God, what is happening here?  How do you see this?  What do you want me to learn from this?  I just decided I had to figure things out. I learned to read people and pay attention without really paying attention to the difference between what was being said and what was felt.  I am not some sort of psychic or special in any way, we all have the capability to be aware of more than what is at the surface. I developed a hyper-vigilant state of awareness to keep myself safe.  It is helpful to survive but exhausting.  And even within that there were things I missed.  The difference is I thought there was something wrong with me because I missed or I feared being hurt.  There was no room in this perspective for humanness.  Growing closer and closer to God on our dates each day has taught me to trust I will become aware of things as I need to be aware of them.  I am not meant to live on guard watch duty all the time.  I will see the things in me and others I need to see as in the time needed for me to learn and grow from it.  This means the same is happening for others, no matter what I think about their level of awareness which can be equally challenging to accept. God is invested in our growth in love in our lifetime.  God is not in a rush.  God is not wondering why we are so clueless.  God will love us no matter how much awareness we show up with.  God meets us at the level of awareness we are in today.  Slowly over time I have learned to imperfectly adopt the same attitude of love and acceptance towards myself and others.

In a clear-cut world of results we value certainty.  We look to those who are decisive as being powerful.  Those who are hesitant, including ourselves, are seen as weak and indecisive.  They are holding things up and not about action.  Yet, how many of those who demonstrated certainty and decisiveness started out from a place of hesitancy?  Being hesitant is not a good or bad thing, it is a stop on the road to action, to certainty, to decisiveness.  When we utilize the message of hesitancy as a reason to investigate more or be patient it can be the very thing that allows us to get to the place of decision and then action.  Hesitancy is one of those in between periods.  It can be a fruitful incubation period in which we take the time to pause, go within our hearts, and get clarity. In the hesitancy we can ask God to help us.  God, help me to know if I am hesitant because of fear or because it is not yet time to decide.  God, guide my heart and mind into coming into alignment during this period of hesitancy so I can be the person who carries out the decision with peace of mind. Hesitancy gives us an inclination into what is important to us, what we are risking in making a decision, and what kind of meaning we place on the decision.  God invites us to stay with the hesitancy long enough to utilize it in serving a greater purpose.  She wants us to use the power of hesitancy to check in where the alignment is with our hearts. He is ready to walk with us there when we have the courage to take the journey.

What is about light that fascinates us so much? We want to be able to go faster than it.  We miss it when the sun is down or covered by the clouds. It is the first thing we look to turn on when we enter a room.  We think something is wrong if it is not present.  We rely upon it to be able to see things clearly.  All the physical elements of light make living more doable.  But what about what it does for us spiritually and emotionally?  Have you ever noticed how being in natural light can lift your spirits?  Or how there is something inside of us that opens up when we see the light in someone’s eyes?  All these elements are ways in which light reaches us on a non-physical level.  There is a spiritual spark that happens in our hearts.  It awakens us to a part of ourselves that we sometimes fall asleep to.  We are drawn to the sparkling because it is already within us.  It is the spark of life itself.  There is a reason why enlightenment is considered a spiritual high ground.  It is the experience in which the sparkling within our hearts lights our path in such a way that we see everything differently.  We see the sparkling of all the elements of nature, people, and circumstances.  We see as God sees. One of the benefits of my daily dates with God is the recognition of light in myself and others.  I can see the sparkle in another person much quicker than I used to be able to.  And when I can’t, I reach for the hand of God to show me.  God directs me back to my own heart where I connect with the sparkling light within me.  It lays the foundation for the filter through which the eyes of my heart guide my vision for that moment.