dailydatewithgod

The more time I spend with God on our daily dates and throughout the day, the more I see things for what they really are.  God invites me continually to an inner awareness of whatever experiences or ideas I am having.  It is not because I have all the answers, but I am the one having the ideas and experiences.  On some level, they work for me.  What I may not realize at the moment is the division they are causing within myself.  When I experience separateness outside in the world, I am merely witnessing my own capacity for division with myself.  God draws me back again and again to the space within my heart where there is no division.  No division of me from the truth of who I am.  I buy into the division because I am busy trying to get life to fit into the picture of what I think and want it to be.  I get stuck on the challenge of taking life as it comes.  From a survival standpoint, this makes complete sense.  Our brains are geared for survival.  Our hearts are geared for full life experience.  That includes standing at the edge of what we think is the division and finding a bridge.  The bridge is the connection between our minds and our hearts.  When we focus on needing life to be a certain way instead of tending to the maintenance of the inner connection we see the division.  It takes consistent practice to cultivate the awareness of the bridge within us. It takes faith to trust it is there even when we don’t see it.

While my drinking career was relatively brief, given that sugar is one of my mainline drugs, it is no surprise that I was drawn to various cocktail concoctions over beer or wine.  The explosion that occurred in my system from the medley of sugar-based elements along with the initiation of the alcoholic buzz was fun.  Unfortunately, given my propensity for not ingesting small amounts of anything or slowly meant that I did not stay long in the fun state.  I will spare you the details and just say that had I been more entranced by the lack of control that ensued I would have spent more time drinking and progressed even further into alcohol addiction.  For me, the sugar and whatever foods followed worked well enough, until I was in enough pain due to those consequences to take a different path.  On my daily dates with God which started because of the direction laid out for me in the 12 steps of recovery, I learned to fine-tune my awareness of the medleys already existing within me.  I used to look to the various sugar medleys and how I could create my own as a way to numb out the pain.  God has shown me how to connect to the medley of my heart and spirit. When the medley of being alive seems like not enough or too much and we are inclined to look outside ourselves for some relief, God invites us to get quiet and listen for the medley of our heart.  Often, I need to pause and step away from the hodgepodge of the scrambles of life and my breath is the first step.  The breath then awakens my heart which allows me to attune myself to the medley of the truth of who I am.  It takes practice especially when the medley of the world and its messages are loud and familiar.  Moment by moment I can choose which medley I am listening to.

From an early age, the adults around us pick up on our particular aptitudes.  They notice how we are drawn to particular activities or ideas.  They pay attention because as children we are endlessly fascinating (at least that is how children are described when they are behaving well) mostly because they find all new things fascinating.  Children find newness in places adults call familiar.  There is a seemingly never-ending curiosity about life. We tend to think that we have lost the sense of novelty entirely and it is only a faculty of childhood because so many things are familiar.  Our minds create structures around familiarity and away from entirely new because that can cause discomfort and requires energy.  It is where we get the notion that we are too old to learn or do something.  Yet within our hearts lies the faculty of newness.  Each breath we take is not the same as the last one.  Just ask anyone present in the room when someone farted.  One moment the breath you take in is free of outstanding odor and then next it is not.  The whole experience of breath is new and a part of our system wakes up because a decision has to be made.  Do we stay knowing in the next few breaths the odor will recede or do we get out?  I supposed it depends on the kind of fart or if it is our own.  My point (and I do hope you are laughing right now) is the faculty of seeing newness and approaching life with curiosity is not one we lose with age.  We may forget it is there or it may sound like a foreign idea for approaching life to our mind, but our hearts know it and practice it in the simplest of ways.  God invites us to make use of the faculty of seeing novelty and initiating a renewed fascination with life by using the lens of our hearts.  The faculty of sight in our hearts enables us to see past the labels and classifications we know and look at people and things from a different angle.  Even the simple pause presented through the breath, enables us to set aside a moment to ask, God, how do you see this right now?

I remember the game Operation we played as kids. I particularly hated that awful buzzing noise when you got too close and touched something you were not supposed to.  I am actually not sure what the point of that game was other than to determine how steady one’s hands are under pressure.  Needless to say, it did not inspire me to become a surgeon, probably for the best. Knowing the workings of our own system is a vital role for all of us.  Doctors and specialists know our makeup and how to operate it because we are humans and there are lots of similarities.  Only we know the intricate operation of the system called us.  It is remarkable when I think back to how much power I handed off to someone who knows a lot about me, in general, to determine what is happening with me specifically. I am not advocating for becoming our own doctor let alone surgeon, at least not in the traditional sense.  I am the only person who has been with me through all the phases of development of the system called me.  Taking the time to understand how it operates on all levels is one of my primary responsibilities.  If I am going to have any sense of how to operate my own system, I will need to know what it is made of, what has shaped it, what affects it, and how it operates when high or low functioning.  God encourages us to get to know ourselves not because it will cause us to become navel-gazers. God encourages us to develop intricate knowledge of the whole of who we are so we can operate in the flow of the universe.  We are going to experience breakdowns and wrong turns.  Being able to distinguish between an indication of amputation versus mutation is valuable. It is a different level of operation if we are going to completely remove a part of ourselves versus modify it.  I am not speaking physically, I would leave that up to the physical surgeons.  We are more than physical and the operation of life as a whole invites us to participate and play.  Knowing what we bring to the table so we can add to the grand operation begins by being curious about the whole of who we are.

It is a difficult thing for us to grasp how little of the full picture we really are grappling with.  The reality is we are most of the time dealing with a sliver of information in the chunk of information available.  It is in large part because our system would explode if we were to grasp it all. It also lends itself to the creation of interdependence and a sense of greater awe of life.  We can muddle about complaining about the slivers we are given wishing we had more or we can make use of the ones we have.  God encourages us to engage with the slivers we have access to, seek out others, learn what they are showing us about our perceptions of life and discern which ones are the most relevant to how we are called to show up in the world.  The beauty of the slivers of our awareness is in what may be their uniqueness to a particular experience.  Sharing those with others while making room for others to share their slivers with us widens our perspective. The opportunity to widen our slivers of perspective is what allows us to breathe in more vision and grow in appreciation and curiosity of how others see things differently than us.  The slivers of others may contain more colors, shapes, and shades then we even knew were possible.  Instead of being frustrated with how others can have a limited perspective, we can remember we are all operating from slivers of the whole picture and be curious about how their sliver formed their ideas.  We can open ourselves up to acknowledging that the slivers of our minds are different than the slivers of our hearts and spirits and find a way to allow them to work together so we do not have to be at war with ourselves.

One of the balancing elements of energy that our hearts bring into our system mirrors that of the body.  The flexibility and looking at things from a different angle are not always an easy switch for our minds to make. It behooves us to be able to fixate and replay information in our minds.  The more rote something becomes the less energy is required to make it happen and therefore more is available for survival.  We know the benefit of having flexible bodies but developing flexible minds is equally important. Our hearts are endowed with a particularly playful nature which allows us to be more agile.  The agility of our hearts starts with a fresh breath of air which immediately wakes up our minds.  We notice it when we pause and take the breath, when we change what we are looking at, and or adjust our physical state.  By centering our attention at our hearts and paying attention to the steady rhythm of beats we feel moving internally within us allows us to become agile.  The agility required to open our minds starts with turning our attention away from the fixation and our breath is the easiest way to begin the transition. It sounds too simplistic, but most God-designed things are at their core.  Our level of agility is an interplay between the heart, mind, and body because we are whole beings. If we find ourselves stuck in one way of being over another, perhaps it is the unstuck element that is needed to introduce our agility to the moment.

Somehow the idea of wishing gets placed in the arena of something that is hoped for but never fulfilled.  Unless of course, you live in a place like Disneyland.  When we use the term desire all of a sudden it is upgraded to something adult and usually sexual or other elements of increasing complexity. Desire is no more and no less than the hope of the heart.  It is an elemental force that continues to create.  It is part of our God components.  When we place ourselves in the realm of our heart’s understanding we see the importance and the energetic motivation that sits within each desire.  Perhaps the reason we desire is that having sufficient motivation is what gets us out of our heads and into action.  Desire is neither good nor bad.  It is simply a god-given element of creation in life.  It is the hopes and wants of the life within us which keep us moving forward despite challenges.  It requires the courage in our hearts to keep our desires on track and in line with the truth of who we are.

The beauty of our mind is its ability to make connections to our current understanding.  It is a brilliant way to not have to start from the beginning every time we learn or incorporate new information. Can you imagine having to relearn how to read letters and how words create sentences every time you went to read or write something? It would be exhausting.  The downside of this is it keeps us from accessing innovation. We are aware of the newness of people or experiences only to the extent that they are operating outside of our current understanding.  Even when they do we often miss it because we layer in front of it what we expect.  In recovery, I learned the importance of letting go of expectations.  It is not easy, but it is simple.  On one level it sounds depressing not to expect anything.  It sounds like we are not hoping in anything.  However, our hearts embody the understanding that we can hope in the newness of an experience without being tied to the specifics.  It is about breathing into the awareness of the joy of surprise in any being or experience, even ourselves.  Letting go of expectations allows us to be surprised by the innovations life will present in the moment we are in.  Innovation gives us the space to get to know the people we are with and the experiences we are having just as they are with the value of their wholeness.  God invites us to hold on to the hope of innovation in whatever moment we are in and let go of the expectation of what that innovation will look like.

We all have moments in our lives when we feel lost.  Sometimes they are long moments.  Sometimes they seem as though we are always lost and only once in a while do we know our way.  There are so many elements involved in the whole of our being it is can be challenging to figure out what is setting the direction of our lives.  It is our thoughts, is it our feelings, is it our perception, is it our reaction, is it our choices?  What elements outside of ourselves are guiding our way in life? So much to consider it can be overwhelming.  God encourages us to lean into the heart navigator. Learning to understand the true nature of who we are at our essence gives us an inclination of what kind of direction to take.  It does not mean the navigator will make it all turn out.  It does not mean that we will only feel good as a result.  It will, at least from my experience, give us a sense of personal sovereignty and closeness with the truth of all of life.  The heart navigator becomes a compass we can look to for the general direction.  Our minds are always chattering on about the specifics and those are important.  It has charts, graphs, trajectories, landmarks and so on.  It looks to what worked before and what has worked for others. Sometimes, however, the mind’s preoccupation with specifics causes us to not see the forest through the trees.  We can lose sight of the fact that we are in the middle of a beautiful forest full of life where the heart navigator leads us even if at the moment all we see are pine cones scattered about.    God is not asking us to use the heart navigator so we become angelic and perfect in life.  God invites us to know through the navigation of our heart the beautiful design called us.

Perhaps it is our zest for life.  Perhaps it is misconstrued ideas. Either way, we are fascinated by big things.  Big things, big experiences, big outcomes, big stories, big events, and so on. When something occurs with power, it grabs our attention and rightly so.  On the other hand, we often seek to mute out when we get overwhelmed by the big things. I know what it is like to be numbed out under the guise of wanting to prevent myself from the impact of negative things, especially big ones. The downside is I ended up being numbed out to everything.  It is like living a life with no sound or sense of touch.  Missing the fervor of life means that we miss out on the essence of being alive.  Life seems to be a series of all kinds of experiences.  Remembering the truth of who we are enables us to courageously face and be in the life which we face with each breath. God invites us to remember that while things seem to our eyes to happen all at once, most often life is in piecemeal.  One of the gems of my daily date with God has been the opportunity to tune into the piecemeal experiences of life. The piecemeal that happens in a moment.  The piecemeal elements of life that open my eyes to the reason I am taking the path I am to get to the big thing. The ones that at the moment seem insignificant but later attributed to the experience that helps me grow beyond what I thought was possible.  It is the piecemeal elements which add up to the big moments.  The truth is most of the time we have no idea which piecemeal will be a part of the bigger picture.   We could be in the middle of something big and not realize it. Not to mention sometimes it is the piecemeal elements when given focus open us to a big-hearted moment.