dailydatewithgod

On my daily dates with God, I get an opportunity to observe the way that my mind operates.  It is fascinating and frightening all at the same time. There is so much going on and yet nothing at all.  The thoughts that I can either latch onto or not are merely visitors.  It is only when I grab hold of them, give them a place to stay, and forget to let go do they wear out their welcome. We cannot stop our thinking at least not entirely but we can remember that our thoughts are visitors and we get to determine their length of stay.  For me, that means making a regular practice of inviting them into conversation with my heart.  When there is an exchange of presence between my heart and mind I am better able to assess the best length of stay for the visitor.  When neither my heart nor my mind can come into an agreement, it is helpful to take a breath, initiate my spirit, and invite God into the conversation.  How do you see this?  Is this where my attention is best served?  Is this truly a visitor or are is it meant to take up residence?  The level of curiosity we can develop about where our mind is going and who it is being led by enables us to respond to the life happening within and outside of ourselves.

I’m not sure exactly where the idea comes from wanting to travel a smooth path, but it does not seem to be based in reality. The life I have known thus far is full of bumps and snags.  There is no such thing as a well worn smooth path unless I am blindly following a road that so many others have traveled.  Those are valuable roads but we are here to set the course on our own adventure.  This means we will experience snags.  The beauty of it is when we fall in that hole, get yanked back by that branch, come across that obstacle, we discover who we are.  In some cases, we find the path we are meant to travel through the snags.  We seem to think that being alive is about getting it right, having approval from others, and being a success.  What if being alive means we can navigate through and around the snags?  What if being alive means we have learned how to use the courage muscle weaved in our hearts to find the true vibrancy of life within ourselves?  God invites us to view the snags as the path instead of the impediments they appear to be and use them to create our lives.

Sometimes all we need is a little boost.  Just enough to wake us up or help us get moving.  We may think it would take something epic or cataclysmic to break the tension but then it happens when someone cracks a joke.  We are certain we have no more energy to take one more step and then we take a deep breath. We are convinced that it is only important that we have all the right words in our speech and appear cool and confident. Then we find out how much people related when they found out we were human when we stepped over our own words for a moment.  It is the missed stitch in the beautiful Persian rug that was put their intentionally.  It is the hole in our favorite t-shirt that we just can’t throw away because it is soo comfy at the end of a rough day. These are the gleams of our lives.  We miss them often because we are looking to be blinded.  Yet how valuable is a gleam of light in a dark room?  How immobilized would we become if we were blinded?  It is the gleams in life that give us hope.  It is the gleam of love that awakes in our hearts when we see the smile on the sick kid who just found his favorite stuffed animal to hold during chemo treatment.  Those gleams are the beats that keep the heart going.  God encourages us to learn what the light of life gleams connect straight to our heart.  The more we are familiar with them the more we share a gleam with others by being present to them which allows us to embody the gleam of life for someone else.

People may be speaking the same language but their vernacular has an impact on the translation.  Of course, there is the accepted understanding of vernacular that is cultural, geographic, or familial.  God encourages us to get to know the vernacular of our language with ourselves.  Aside from specific words, there is a vernacular to our physical, emotional, mental, energetic, and spiritual elements which make up the whole of who we are.  If we do not know the vernacular of each of these systems how can we begin to understand how we can operate more fully.  The reality is sometimes one or more of these elements have a louder voice and demand more of our attention.  Yet all are always present.  By knowing the vernacular of our mind we can help it to understand the vernacular of our heart.  If we take the time to embody the vernacular of our heart we can utilize it to communicate with our body and mind. The vernacular of our wholeness is the language of what it means for each of us to be fully alive.  Our vernacular may be similar to others but no one else is the whole of who we are.  An intimate relationship with the vernacular of myself is what God makes room for on our daily dates.  It grows and evolves as all language does.  Over time as we learn to open the communication lines through understanding the vernacular of all of what makes us ourselves, the better capability exists for us to engage with others who have a different vernacular than us.

One thing I have figured out is how full my mind is of stories telling me what I can and cannot do.  If I spend too much unchecked time in there it becomes as they say in the recovery rooms, a bad neighborhood.  Now I understand that my brain is geared for survival and developed to detect anything that may threaten that survival.  But I am not necessarily cognizant of that when I am listening to the bad news predictions going on between my ears.  The power of mindfulness from my perspective is not that it creates some ideal state of calm and zen but that it allows me some separation from thinking that all my thoughts are true and observing them as just happening.  The observation increases the feasibility of anything in my life.  Yes, of course, there are limitations.  But left to my mind’s default story, it is not worth the energy to discover what about my actions or ideas are feasible.  Maybe I cannot become a famous ballerina, but it is feasible for me to become a better dancer the more I dance.  I may not (insert grand desired goal for my life) but it is feasible for me to take the path of progression towards my desire.  It is even feasible that I will encounter surprises, learn something about myself and others, and grow in love because I am living.  When we learn to pause and not take as truth what our mind tells us is feasible and therefore worth it, we may even encounter a willingness to head in the direction of something that is not feasible for us but worth a try to find out what is feasible for us.

Mark Twain is attributed as saying, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”  I think I prefer Seneca the Younger’s version as he does not mince words when he stated, “There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is in your expecting evil before it arrives.” Regardless of who actually said it best, most would concede its truth. The point is, we human beings do a lot of forecasting in fear not realizing that we are setting ourselves up to be spooked in the present.  Perhaps it is easier to make up bugaboos about the future than courageously sit with the reality that we just don’t know.  On one level our bugaboos are quite humorous.  I have often wondered if my mind intended me to be a screenwriter.  I mean the fear scenes can be so elaborate and pull me in like no others.  When I pause and take a deep breath and reflect on them as bugaboos I can remember to laugh at myself.  In the deeper breath which comes from the laughter, my heart opens up a bit more.  Then the lens of love has a way to connect to my mind and bring me back to the present moment where there are no bugaboos.  I am able to see with a level of gentleness which did not exist before the smile and laughter that I may just be having a moment of uncertainty and my mind decided to conjure up a bugaboo to be helpful.  My eyes open and allow me to recognize my hands and feet being in the physical space I am in.  The bugaboo creates a domino effect to get me back to my center.  Who knew that a bugaboo would be the boo I needed to bump open my heart?

There are many rites of passage that occur in our lives that we discard as not important because they do not fit into the acceptable or commonly acknowledge elements of initiation.  We know the standard ones such as certain ages or things like marriage or accolades of sorts.  Each day however we experience a level of initiation within ourselves.  Each breath is an initiation into a new moment.  We awaken our hearts and alert our minds that we are ready to keep going.  It is a default in our system and it happens so many times throughout the day.  it is only when we are deprived of the breath do we realize we are being initiated into a different experience.  What would it look like to use the initiation of our breath intentionally? What might we set a new trajectory for in our lives if we utilize the automatic feature of our breath to awaken the spirit of life that is present within us?  How might it color our day if we paused to recognize whatever we are experiencing at the moment has an opportunity to shift when we use our breath to initiate a course change.  We have the capacity to initiate a new focus, to stop what we are currently doing and evaluate it, or even simply move our body.  These kinds of initiations do not need to show up on anyone else’s radar.  They are not dependent upon outside value.  We can utilize our own system to create an initiation into the kind of life we want and feel called in our hearts to live one breath at a time.

As we are experiencing things there is an inner dialogue going on which colors the way we perceive the experience.  We tend to underestimate the presence of our state of mind when it comes to interpreting for ourselves or others what we think is happening. God invites us to hone our attention to both our state of mind and heart. Both impact our perception so automatically that we take them for granted.  It is why it is valuable to have multiple people involved in creating something or making decisions, especially if those decisions or creations will impact others.  Learning to notice what our state of mind and heart are is critical in our interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships. God encourages us to know the makeup of our own mind and heart so we can see the signs of the expression of our internal states.  We may not be able to tell in a given moment what our state of mind or heart is but it will be evidenced in our behaviors.  Anyone who has ever lived with another human being knows what it is like to find out something they never knew about themselves because the person sharing their space doesn’t like their behavior.  More kindly there is also a way in which those we are close to, know how to flex around us because they can determine by our behavior what our state of mind and heart are even if we can’t articulate it. When we pay attention to our internal state of mind and heart we develop the capacity for self-compassion and empathy towards others.

The reason the idea of being in the moment is so powerful is that it is the only place we actually are.  We think because we can ruminate on the past and envision the future that it gives us some kind of hold on it.  But the reality we cannot reach past the horizon of the day or moment we are in.  It is tempting to ride the mind’s rollercoaster to the past or future especially when the moment we are in is one we would rather not be in.  On my daily dates with God, I get the opportunity to practice being where I am in the moment.  God encourages us to cultivate our attunement to the now because it is the one place where we can meet the truth of God and of who we are at our core.  We get anxious about the future or the past and what happened and lose sight of the fact that those horizons are either no longer here or outside our purview.  If we want to do something to adjust what happened in the past or set a different course for the future, it will happen within the horizon we are in now. We cannot reach back and redo something, although time travel has always fascinated me and I would jump at the chance. The now is the one space we can be physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and energetically at the same time.   With all our faculties right here, right now, we can create.  We are most empowered in the now moment.  So often we get spun up into where our mind can and does go that we spread ourselves too thin.  We do not have the energetic capacity to face what is right now because we are playing outside the horizon of our very being.  The good news about the now moment is if it is one would rather not be in, we need to take a beat and it will pass.  Not every now moment is going to be all good or all bad, and none will last.  Taking time to absorb the beauty of all that lies within the horizon of now is a gift we may not want to miss.

I am not sure how the idea of whether or not someone can consider themselves creative got pigeonholed into only belonging to those who are artists.  The very fact that we are alive means we are creative. Our very being is a creation.  The way we live our lives is a development of that original creation.  It may look sometimes like a pile of dung and nowhere near a painting.  There are times in our life when the sound of our lives is more like nails on a chalkboard than an Emmy winning song.  In the moments when the reality of a concept lives outside the definition of our minds is precisely when God encourages us to connect with our hearts to reach into the reality of our creativity.  Our hearts which move the flow of life through us live out the experience of creativity.  Each breath, each flow of blood, each cell awakened to a new moment is creating the energy to show up for our lives.  When we think of ourselves as not creative because the smile we extend to someone does not create a magical connection we limit the witness to the life essence of what creativity is.  Our lives are not simply a measurement of results.  Our lives are creativity in motion. We are the embodiment of a live painting and the rhythm of the song of life.