dailydatewithgod

Besides the impracticality of perfection there is so much about it that is simply undesirable. I know I and many others harbor under the illusion or fantasy of how fabulous perfection is in whatever form it is.  But I think our idea of perfection is tied up in so much of our own sense of unworthiness that we neglect to see the blunder of the perfect. I agree I am drawn to things that appear to be all in place and lacking of flaws.  Yet it is only when we look at things from far enough away that we see perfection. The closer and more intimate we get with ourselves, with life and all that comes with it do we see the blunder. The perfection is not about the eradication of any kind of flaw or mistake.  The perfection is the acceptance of a blunder as being as what is meant to be in the moment it is.  In the recovery world this is referred to as facing life on life’s terms. The longer I am alive on this planet, the more experiences I have of how the very blunder I was trying to erase from my life ended up being the catalyst for something past any kind of perfection I could have hoped to achieve by erasing the blunder.  God invites us to open our hearts and see the blunders as life’s perfect way of teaching us how to love.  If we can see the perfection of a blunder in an experience as an avenue to access a deeper sense of what it means to be alive, what might letting go of needing to be perfect allow us to see in ourselves and others?

The face we show to the world apparently indicates our value according to some people.  I remember as a kid with acne how awful I thought my face looked.  It was horrible and I was so embarrassed.  I never wanted to show my face and I was horrified if I had a pimple that was about ready to pop but didn’t.  The absurdity of life is that I felt so gross and disgusting on the inside it was as though my complexion was telling everyone around me.  In a world that values images more than content of character, it is easy to understand why so many kids at an age when they are figuring out how they want to show up in the world walk around feeling like their complexion is their destiny.  For some people it is.  It is clear that as human beings our minds do a lot with the images we see.  We learn so much and take in all kinds of information from our eyes.  Yet the meaning we attach to those images is all our own.  God invites us as we witness the physical complexion of ourselves and others to look beneath the surface to the complexion of our minds and hearts.  Below the complexions we see is meaning we attach to the image in our minds and the energy from our hearts that we direct towards the meaning.  When we pause to notice the complexion of our minds and hearts we see where we can adjust the complexion we see with our eyes.  As a young girl, I did not know that the complexion of my mind was focused on telling me that to be included and liked (which to me meant safe and belonging) I had to have clear and beautiful skin.  And I did not know that the complexion of my heart could not speak loud enough to be heard past my self-hatred.  I was too busy trying to keep up with the fact that everybody else was buying into the same idea about our complexions.  God invites us to take a breath whenever we evaluate the surface complexion of a face, an idea, a belief, or anything and notice what the complexion of our mind and heart are saying to us.

When we consciously make our choices there is a power behind them because the intention and attention are matched.  Knowing the consequence of our choices adds another layer of awareness of how and who we are being in our lives. Yet we cannot know all the possible consequences that come from our actions. Some of them come as an understood reality of living in the world such as laws of nature. The consequential choices and ideas of others based on our choices actions cannot be known.  We have no idea what meaning others will attach to our choice.  We cannot know what interpretations others will attach to our way of being. Much conflict arises when we think we are certain that we know the intentions of someone else’s actions.  God invites us with compassion to pay attention to our own state of mind and heart as we interpret the consequences of other’s actions. It teaches us to recognize how we always see the consequences present from our own filter. God taught me on our daily dates that consequences will happen but knowing my own state of mind and heart when making choices and taking actions says more about who I am being.  It equally shows me how I will view the consequences of other’s choices. I learned that I can think about the possible consequences and aim for the best ones for all involved.  But I cannot control how others view my choices, actions, and the resulting consequences.   The only way to do so would be to either not be who I am by acquiescing to the desires of others or not take ownership of my choices and play the victim. Neither of those resonates with my heart even when my mind thinks its a good idea. Being a whole and alive human being means having an awareness of the presence of consequences and being willing to show up for them, even the ones others don’t agree with.  Our hearts give us the courage to stand with ourselves in the face of other’s confusion, dislike, or appreciation. God gave us the power we need to be who we are designed to be no matter the consequence.

As human beings, we seem to be masters of not being able to see ourselves.  It is baffling sometimes when I come to understand something about myself that I was unable to see until that moment.  It is though my mind creates this veil that prohibits us from really knowing what is going on underneath.  We have unconscious biases, we operate in ways that are contradictory to our intentions, or we have moments when we find ourselves behaving in ways we told ourselves we would never do.  It is perplexing, to say the least.  It is like there is this hidden darkness that is waiting to be seen in the light.  From my daily dates with God, I have come to understand that this complex system called “Colleen” is a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and energetic being. I suppose to think I would not have certain elements about myself to which I am blind would make me God.  God who demonstrates tremendous compassion and sensitivity has stood with me as the veil lifts to expose some darkness. Through the practice of pause and observance, I can appreciate the subtle way the system of me operates.  My mind which wants to just figure it out and get behind the veil so I can fix it all is clearly not what God had in mind. When I view the operating system of me through the lens of my heart and learn to see me as God sees me, I can trust that when the veil hiding any darkness in me is lifted is exactly when it is supposed to be lifted.  It is humbling to find myself in situations and not be who I thought I was because part of me was veiled to me. In those moments, God stands with me under the light of love and invites me to love the darkness which was hiding behind the veil.  It is not the approach my mind would take.  My mind would do its best to scrub it out and hope it never came back. I find God’s approach more realistic and recognize it requires courage.  Through the lens of my heart, I can appreciate the veil and discover the gift in the darkness.

Sometimes it seems as though the entire human experience vibrates on the idea of not enough. I know personally, I walked around with the constant narrative in my head about how who I was what not enough, what I did was not enough or wrong and before recovery, there was certainly never enough food.  When this whole virus broke out was that what was driving the madness about toilet paper?  Clearly, we learned there was not enough for the excess we thought was needed. Now in the stores, I see a plethora of toilet paper.  The miraculousness of our design as human beings comes from the designer.  God is always enough.  God exists as enoughness.  When we remember how we were created, we recognize that we are enough as well.  Our minds are creative with their fear stories and come up with all kinds of forms of not enough.  Most of the stories are based on a particular experience but we internalized the context of the moment as a static experience. Perhaps it is because the mind needed a way to externalize the reality of itself.  Our minds alone are not enough. We need the cooperation of our hearts and souls to know the plethora of life as it is present in this moment.  When I am experiencing not enough of anything, it is an indication of seeing things only through the lens of my mind.  The moment I stop and take a breath, I engage my heart which contains all kinds of reminders about how there is a plethora of whatever I truly need at this moment.  The plethora of love alone that I tap into when I engage my heart is enough to even communicate to my mind that all is well.  I choose to be grateful for the reminder that my mind to connect to the plethora of love in my heart each time it rattles on about something not being enough.

Venturing into the unfamiliar is not given the credit it deserves.  It is like random words put together.  We easily compare unfamiliar versus familiar as known versus unknown and think we have grasped the distinction.  What we fail to realize is everything about us is steeped in what is familiar.  It is not simply that we know about it.  We live the familiar. Our brains are wired for the familiar.  The goal when approaching the unfamiliar is to quickly and with the least amount of energy possible make it familiar.  Our minds do a lot of leaps and stretching of distinctions to do this survival task.  And again, all of this is baked into our automatic mechanisms we do not realize it.  In fact, often long after the unfamiliar has become familiar do we realize it has happened. We forget how daunting or unusual whatever flavor of unfamiliar we were bracing ourselves to face. God invites us to choose and intend to not only embrace the unfamiliar but to revel in the process.  It wakes us up, it engages our curiosity, it causes us to take in more oxygen and exert more energy.  In other words, it allows us to come alive. Our minds are so focused on making the unfamiliar familiar as soon as possible while our hearts are looking to enjoy all the moments in between.  Our hearts dare to step through each moment of fear and uncertainty.  Our hearts remind us it is not just about reaching the goal of familiarity.  It is equally about expanding how we are familiar with ourselves and our capacities.

There is a constant narrative running through our minds.  So much of it, we are not aware of because it is typically the same narrative.  We have become so used to it we do not notice it is even happening.  We would most likely go mad if we were to notice all the thoughts running through our heads. It would literally exhaust our brains.  Therefore our minds must have the capacity to filter and draw our attention only when necessary.  The difficulty with this is when we have narratives that do not serve our best interest.  The ones we have had running since before we recognized our capacity to take in information.  It is the default narrative.  The only way to catch it is to pause and notice it. One way is to notice the things we say without thinking.  The words or phrases that seem to topple out of our mouths.  They give us an indication of what kind of narrative we have about the situation we are facing at the moment. On my daily dates with God, I was exposed to the practice of just noticing the thoughts that ran through my mind by watching them and not owning them. It may sound strange but it creates a distance from them.  The distance then allows us to determine which parts of the narrative are truly ours versus what we took on when our brain was on record as a little kid.  Given the power we hand over to the voice in our head, the narrative must be one that supports who we are at our core.  It can be overwhelming to listen to the narrative when we first start, but it is worth the discomfort.  Only by noticing what we are allowing to narrate our lives can we know what we are working with and the distinction between the unknown narrative running through our minds and the narrative of our hearts.  God stands ready to hold witness without judgment and listen with a warm embrace.

When we link in with the energy of our hearts we are connected to a different kind of vision than the one provided through our eyes. It is not that one is right and the other is wrong, they both have their place and their role in our lives.  Our hearts have an assortment of capacities that our minds do not but they work in cooperation with one another. Connecting to our hearts brings us closer to the breath of life.  Learning to see our lives through the assortment of lenses provided by our hearts provides a level of humility.  It is a humility that we do not lend ourselves when it comes to believing what we see with our eyes. We have such certainty and fixed ideas when it comes to what we are physically seeing.  Given the assortment of lenses in our hearts, we cannot feel the same certainty.  It is not as easy to fall for the illusion of certainty, especially when we find the lens of our hearts impacting the lens of our eyes. God invites us to peer into the assortment of possibilities that God has access to by connecting to our hearts.  As assortment that moves beyond our fixed ideas of how things should be or whatever other expectations we have.  In the expansive assortment of the lens in our hearts, we can pursue avenues of perspective that our minds will tell us are not possible.  God encourages us to give the assortment of lenses of our hearts a try and notice if we experience some freedom.

Sometimes it is hard to know what to do with the information we are given. We may not know what we think or feel about something or someone.  Our mind automates what category it falls into in an effort to minimize our having to think about it.  The brackets in our brain were established in the first seven years of our life when we were watching and taking in all the information and ideas we could from the words and behaviors of those we saw as authority figures.  We looked to our parents, teachers, media, culture, loud and popular voices and actions to tell us what bracket to know where to put pieces of information.  When something new to us arrives within our realm, we assess it based on the established brackets and know what to do with it.  If it does not seem fit within a particular bracket, we will either automatically disregard it or put energy into creating a new bracket or a way to make it fit in an existing one.  We call them biases and predispositions but neurochemically they are well-worn pathways and strong circuitry in our brains.  God invites us to open up the circuitry to the bracket of our heart so we can look at information and experiences through another well worn albeit less used path.  It is the bracket that encapsulates the variety and possibilities which cannot be held within our minds. The pause needed to make time for the path to and from the bracket of our hearts is well worth the wait but it is not as immediate as the one provided from the first thought.  It takes a level of discipline and intention to allow for the pause to travel to and from the bracket of our hearts.  The good news is the more practiced we get the quicker the travel time.

There are some people we meet that we feel connected to automatically.  There are situations we find ourselves in and we have this sense it is exactly where we are supposed to be.  These experiences are so striking to us we see them as perhaps unusual and rather profound.  What if what we are experiencing is an awareness of the linkage that our hearts have with other hearts.  Henri Nouwen used the phrase “Heart Speaks to Heart.”  The linkage we feel with others and certain experiences or even things comes from the space within our hearts.  It is a place that recognizes the sacredness of all things.  Most of the time we default to the vision provided by our eyes and so we can miss the linkage.  The profound and outstanding moments of linkage come when the power of the linkage supersedes the vision of our eyes and see more from the eyes of our hearts.  In the moments when my eyes seem to blind me to anything sacred or heart like in another person or situation, I turn to God with one simple prayer. “Help me to see with the eyes of my heart.” When I am willing to let go of the vision I am holding with my eyes alone, the linkage appears and ultimately I see the sacredness in whatever I am beholding.