dailydatewithgod

It can be difficult to imagine how trying times are actually a hidden opportunity for enhancement. When we are in the throes of dealing with a difficult situation or person we are focused usually on getting it over with as soon as possible.  I don’t’ know about you but I can go into what I call the “just gotta get through” mode.  I know how to hunker down and make it through difficulty.  I have done it before and I can do it again. And yes, nothing lasts, and everything changes but seriously!  Who is built to live through uncertainty after uncertainty?  Who in their right mind is focusing on how to do so could be an enhancement to their life?  Not me.  Yet what God is constantly speaking into my heart as we continue to be in this uncertain and unclear state of affairs is “keep your eyes on me”.  It is an expression I have heard God share with me many many times throughout my life.  When the world is inviting me at every moment to look here, there, and everywhere God’s message is a different one.  Whatever our understanding is of the energy that is not limited to only our understanding is it is where we can find the peace we seek when all seems lost.  Learning to connect and reconnect is part of the dance with the divine.  Just as we breathe in and out we actually exist within uncertainty more than we realize.  Part of the beauty of the breath is in exploring the degree to which we can use it.  Perhaps it is not until there is a worldwide focus on the importance of our breathing, do we find ourselves open to learning what we can control and what we cannot at our basic force of life. We may not have a say in the first breath or the last breath of our lives, but we control how the ones in between go.  I am brought back to God’s message to focus.  In the attention to my breath, I can steady my mood, wake myself up, reignite my interest and focus, and so much more.  Maybe we are all being invited to breathe into the difficulty, awaken our hearts and discover the enhancement awaiting us in between our first and last breaths.

Working in the medical field, I learned the importance of the scope of practice.  The scope determines the boundaries in which one can practice medicine according to their level of licensure.  A nurse’s scope of practice is more limited than a doctor’s. A cardiologist has a different scope of medical practice than an endocrinologist. On a personal level, we ascribe scopes to people in our lives.  Our family exists within this scope, our and colleagues in another.  The scope of the relationship may be similar but each has different boundaries. People’s relationship to their scope is largely an agreed-upon matter among each culture.  Some elements of the scope are across all cultures.  God invites us to get to know the scope we work with when it comes to our relationship with all of the elements compromised in what we call the self. The scope of the heart is seen as different than the scope of the mind.  The scope of the body is different than the scope of the spirit.  To conduct oneself as a whole being, we need to find a way for these scopes to interact.  Knowing when and where it might be time to cross-scope can be the difference between surviving and thriving. As we become aware of the default scopes established in the basic human makeup, we can learn to explore the scopes we can create to be more fully present to our own lives.  We can notice when we involve the scope of our hearts with the scope of our bodies we are more likely to treat ourselves well.  When we involved the scope of our mind with the scope of our spirit we determine what it means logistically to bring our spiritual nature to something before that moment seen as solely intellectual.

Until we are pushed to our edge do we figure out our full capacity.   I have often thought if you want to know if you get along well with someone go on a road trip with them. When the madness ensues as it invariably does, you find out the character of each person involved.  Something about the constant time together coupled with the expectations and people adjusting to being out of their routine is a perfect mixture to break down the barriers we often keep up.  Our fierceness shows up when we let down our guard.  Sometimes it happens abruptly and other times there is a slow etching away of the guard.  When we bear witness to ourselves and others without the fortresses of who we are when everyone is watching, the fierceness that emerges encases a liveliness we do not often allow.  God invites us to know intimately the fierceness within ourselves.  Getting acquainted with the true nature of our liveliness when we are as some would say more wild is what allows us to tap into our fierce nature when we need or want to.  We spend so much energy trying to keep up with expectations of ourselves, others, and society as a whole it can be exhausting.  Tapping into our fierceness allows us to know the beauty of what happens when we don’t have it all together.  It is the same ferocity of life that caused us to scream when we emerged from our mother’s wombs.  It is the ferocity that alerts our minds when we are hurt emotionally and feel as though our hearts will break.  Breathing deeply and owning our fierceness puts us into resonance with the untamed beauty God has gifted us with as part of the collective livelihood that keeps the planet spinning.  I used to think I didn’t want to feel.  It was too hard, I numbed out.  The pain was unbearable.  When I stepped into recovery and began my daily dates with God I learned to open up to the fierceness of life living inside of me that I had become numb to.  We can feel fully and deeply if we are willing to be a bit wilder than is prescribed as normal.  Finding a way to tap into our fierceness allows us to be the unique beacon of light and love God created us to be.

It makes complete sense that we believe everything we think. It makes sense that we believe what we see in front of us is all of what is actually there.  It would be exhausting and highly energy consuming to have to question everything we think and everything we see.  Our window to the world is the one residing in our own house.  What we lose sight of is the concept that everyone else is also viewing life through the windows in their house.  If they lived down the street would we harass them for not seeing what is happening outside in our front yard?  If none of the windows in their house give them an angle from which to see it, how could they?  We spend a lot of time being baffled by other people’s perspective without acknowledging the fact that they are working with what they have.  Before we can make someone else wrong for only seeing what they can see through their windows, we might want to ask ourselves, when was the last time we did not limit our perspective through our own windows by stepping outside our house?  Yes, it takes additional energy and effort to look at life through more than the windows in our own house or step outside of our house and see the larger picture.  It is what our hearts are motivating us to do when the windows we have become too narrow of a lens for life.  When the windows we have become clouded and hard to see through because we have things going on inside our house, it will influence what we see when we look out the window. Our minds are certain we can see all we need from our own windows whether they are cloudy or clear because it is what is familiar.  When we step outside into the unfamiliar we feel uncomfortable.  Only when we find ourselves unable to sustain cooperative and accepting relationships with others and the world by looking at them through our own windows do we venture outward.  When our minds are willing to acquiesce to the limitations of our own windows do we become willing to start by cleaning them up and determining if we need to step outside our house to take in the fuller picture.  It takes courage to notice and do our part to clean up the windows through which we see life. It takes greater courage to humbly acknowledge that we are missing out on the fuller picture of life by only looking at it through the windows in our own house.

The purpose of creating a proper setting in a film or on stage is to help the audience create a context of understanding for the interaction that is to take place.  What transfers from the witnessing of the interaction does not often include the setting as it is either implied or a generally accepted cultural norm.  The funny thing about our own lives is how in our minds we take something that happens in a particular setting and attach ideas to it without the setting.   In other words, something happens and we code it in our minds with particular thoughts and feelings. We do not encode the setting.  So then the next time we find ourselves thinking or feeling similarly even if the setting does not fit we wire off a similar response.  It is the brain’s way of being efficient.  If enough of the setting is there, we will draw upon our previous experience.  This formula while highly efficient at conserving energy and surviving through a situation, causes us to actually be reacting to something from the past.  Since our mind is busy pulling up past records and quickly reacting, we do not have to be fully present to the current setting.  One of the simple elements I learned from my daily dates with god is to find a way to presence myself in the current setting.  I can look at my hands or feet and notice where I actually am at this moment.  I can look around who is there with me and what the environment around me is.  When I take in the full set of the present moment, there is enough of a pause created before I react. In the pause to assess the setting of this moment, I can choose how to respond instead of reacting from the past.

We are impacted by more than we realize.  Things are happening on an energetic level simultaneously with a cognitive, emotional, or physical level.  There is no such thing as having only a physical experience. If we are breathing we are inputting information through our nervous system and it happens without our awareness. Sometimes we experience a strike of sorts within our own system.  There is a breakdown or stopping in our functioning on a physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual level.  Sometimes it is clear to us what is causing the strike.  Not all strikes have a big impact and some accumulate over time.  It can feel like a hit to our system or like something just ended unceremoniously.  The shifts in our reality because of a strike get our attention.  We find we have to reorient ourselves and find a new way to work.  In those strike moments, we are invited to approach a solution from a different angle.  We may need to bring all the elements to the table to determine how to resolve the strike.  We may need to let go of whatever has struck itself out of our experience.  God invites us to balance the players present at the discussion on how to handle the strike.  We may think it is just about a change of mind, but not realize the heart has something that needs to be heard as well.  We may be convinced it is just a physical strike on the part of our hand but maybe our mind is trying to convey that it is not able to grasp something.  The beauty and subtlety of life encourage us to be present and explore what is possible when addressing any strike from all sides of the table.

Even with all the accepted truths and understandings in existence in the universe, the paradoxes still exist. It can range from disappointing or disheartening to outright betrayal when we come to grips with a paradox.  It is part of the maturity process.  We begin to investigate the accepted beliefs and so-called truths that seemed to have no opposite when we were growing up.  Often the first bump we have is when we realize things are not always what they seem.  Or we wake up to a fact that has multiple layers to it.  We feel a sense of safety from what we perceive as being solid and unbreakable.  Growing up is coming to terms with the paradoxes which make real for us the fragility of us and our lives.  Paradoxes are neither disheartening nor enlightening within themselves.  They are simply a reality of the duality in which we exist. Most spiritual concepts are simple in nature and it is what draws us to them.  Navigating how to adopt them and incorporate them into our lives is where the paradoxes show up.  Making peace with the presence of paradoxes as the nature of coming to know the truth of who we are at our core which contains no paradox is the dance of life.  One who has experienced the love of God finds no paradox in that.  How the experience then affects all other areas of his or her life in the little and grand moments is where paradox appears.  Knowing how to return to a space where no paradox exists is the invitation God extends to us.   It is up to us how often we accept the invitation.

There are so many elements of life that are not the way I would think they would be.  It does not make sense that we learn what our wherewithal is until we are pushed past what we think is our capacity.  It shows up every facet of living. There is often a disconnect between what we think and reality.  It is therefore helpful to have facts and figures so we can validate or invalidate what we have decided is true in our minds and what is actually true.  We acquiesce to the reality of wherewithal when it comes to elements outside ourselves and we refer to them as objective. It seems as though there is a reality inside our minds, shaped by our individual and sometimes shared perspective. Then there is a reality in the outside world.  When we make up our minds about our own wherewithal we do not know the truth of it until we somehow live the experience.  God encourages us to keep this in mind when it comes to our capacity for love. We do not know the means that exist within our hearts until we attempt to stretch ourselves past what we think.  It is the same principle I experience in yoga class when the whole time I am holding a pose my mind is telling me I do not have the strength to do it. The wherewithal that is designed in our hearts is learned in moments of courage.  The moments when we take a chance to resist what our heads tell us is the wherewithal of our hearts.  It is about moving through moments of fear or pausing and breathing when I think I do not have the wherewithal to be kind one more time. It is the stepping outside the beliefs in my mind about the resources of my heart that the actual wherewithal of my heart gets to share with my mind the reality of what it and I are made.

Do you ever find yourself with a proclivity towards a person, idea, or experience?  There is a part of you that is captured by this person or thing but you can’t figure out why.  The penchants we develop don’t always come from our minds.  We could spend hours unearthing how we developed a penchant but what is the purpose?  God invites us to travel down the road of our penchants with curiosity.  With open eyes and hearts, we can explore what is there.  Perhaps it is not the focus of our penchant but it is the penchant that moves us to go down the path.  I have learned that life is so much more about the process than it is about the content.  Penchants that stem from our hearts can often lead us to places we could not conceive of in our minds.  It is life’s invitation to go in a direction we may not have otherwise.  A penchant will guide us to let go of judgment before we even get started.  Anything that can move us away from judgment is a movement closer to love.

I remember as a kid when one of us had a bad cough my mom would apply Vick’s VapoRub.  Along with the gentle touch from my mom, it had this soothing capacity that even if I didn’t the coughing did not stop right away, I believed it would get better.  We have all had those experiences on a physical level when we get the salve needed to cure our ailments. God encourages us to notice the salve we need and seek on an emotional and spiritual level. On my daily date with God, this begins with learning to tune in to the state of my heart.  It is as simple as touching my heart and taking a deep breath.   The attention is drawn to my heart and the fresh oxygen through my nose is like a lubricant to my soul.  We underestimate it because sometimes it only lasts as long as that moment.  We devalue it because we think we are too busy to stop and seek the salve we need for our whole selves.  Living in a work and productivity-focused culture which values salve time only when we are on vacation we can deprive ourselves of getting to know the whole of who we are. There are unlimited ways to find the emotional and spiritual salve needed when we find ourselves stressed out in our mind or body.  One system affects the other.  If we apply the ointment to our skin but do not breathe through the anxiety of what story we are making up about the rash on our arm could mean, the salve is only partial.  There is more awareness today of the full nature of complex systems that make up our reality as human beings.  Getting to know the salve present within our own selves to soothe ourselves empowers us to navigate through this crazy thing called life.