dailydatewithgod

I find myself torn between what is the right thing versus the wrong thing.  Which is God’s will and which is my will? What happens if I do not do God’s will?  What happens if I think I am making a choice from my heart and I am actually just letting my ego convince me that what it has contrived in my brain is coming from my heart? What if?  What if? What if?  As someone prone to thinking too much, this can be a treacherous place to be. When I remember to pause and breathe and reach for the hand of God I find myself returning to my heart space.  Somehow the language of my heart knows the answer I cannot conceive of.  The fault I find is that sometimes it takes a while for the translation to make it to my brain.  My heart speaks through energy which I perceive often in my body and in my feelings.  Before recovery, I made villains of both of those things.  The restoration to connecting to my own truth comes therefore when I pause to not make the body and the feelings wrong.  I also do not use them as my only guide in my decisions.  It is a restoration to its equal place of importance with my mind.  I sense this is how the spirit moves in and through us. When there is no friction between our hearts and our minds, we can see clearly and move through whatever we are facing.  We may not like it, it may be uncomfortable and call for courage but courage is what beats from our heart.  It steps onto the seeming battlefield of life that our minds may have created through visions of fear. I picture Wonder Woman coming out of the trenches and walking through the battlefield to get to those on the other side who need to be saved.  I don’t have bombs but my friction is found in the fear thoughts which come at me from all sides.  Breathing into the rhythm of my heart gives me a path to a separate myself from the friction of my mind long enough to allow the oxygen traveling through my heart to make it to my brain.  In the space of cooperation, I can find a way to navigate whatever I am facing at the moment.

There are all kinds of whispers present in the world.  We tend to disregard them the same way we do not think much about how leaves rustle in the wind. Rustling is just what happens.  In the same way, the wind whispers through the trees unnoticed, our breath causes us to rustle internally.  Physically we know the rustle of the breath wakes up our lungs and ignites our heart.  It promotes the movement of blood and oxygen in our system.  If our heart is more than a pump, what might the rustle do to our energetic nature? God invites us to become aware of the rustle inside of us.  What is crackling in our energy when we awaken our hearts?  What is inviting us to pay attention when the rustle comes through us?  What might our minds be attuned to notice when we allow the rustle in our hearts to be noticed?  We are affected as a whole being by all that we give and receive.  When we pay attention to the rustle created in us when we breathe in we may know more about the rustle we create outside of us when we breathe out.

It seems to work out in life that we do not discover that we can get up until at first, we fall.  We do not know if we have the power to overcome it until we are burdened.  We do not know we have light within us until we find ourselves lost in the dark. To become acquainted with our rising we must make peace with our falling.  I used to think I needed or wanted a God that would protect me from the trials of life.  I thought that was how it worked.  The bible talked about the fall of man and the rising of Christ.  Yet if we look closer at the stories we see that all through that process of were stories of man who found a way to rise above their circumstances.  Maybe in the story of Jesus, God was trying to remind us of the glory of our rising.  Perhaps Jesus was showing us how powerful it is when we are in our rising no matter the circumstance.  It is the rising of light in our hearts that makes us willing to take one more step, open our eyes again, and find the courage stored within us.  Our rising in whatever situations we find ourselves is about acknowledging how we fall or what caused the fall and the recognition that the fall will not define us.  As an incest survivor, my childhood experience is not the end of the story.  My life in addiction and self-hatred is not the end of the story. My life is made glorious in the big and small risings I made after that every step of the way.  Sometimes I fall back in old feelings and memories. My rising begins the I take a breath and bring myself back to the present.  I do not need a God to rescue me from my experience.  I want to be in relationship with a God who whispers in my ear that I am more than who I think I am.  I want to be in relationship with a God that built within me a system by which my heart is awakened many times throughout the day and inserts the courage to begin rising from whatever or wherever I am in the moment.  We all have experiences that we would qualify as fallen times.  God invites us to be with ourselves in the fall and discover the courage built within us to begin rising.

There was a time in my life when I did not drink much water.  I thought it was too bland and tasteless. Today I drink more than enough for my body and strangely I am rarely thirsty.  I do notice that there are certain waters I enjoy more than others. Some leave a filmy taste in my mouth and with others, it can feel like I have just let a beautiful fountain run through my system. Mostly I am grateful for the easy access to clean water which is not the reality in some parts of the world. I recognize that the difference in taste has to do with the hydrant.  Depending on where the supply is coming from alters the experience when I drink it.  Even if it is the distinction between a warm and a cool hydrant.  There is something awful about taking in warm water on a hot day.  It makes me shiver just to think about it.  The same goes for ice water when you are standing in a foot of snow but on the other end of the spectrum.  The hydrant of our energy is equally important.  Water gives and grows life and so depending on the hydrant, the life that is given and grows will change.  The hydrant God encourages us to take a look at is our energy.  Our existence is so multifaceted that it is hard to parse out if we are drawing from the hydrant of our minds, our hearts, our bodies, or our souls.  Usually, it is a combination of all of them as we are whole beings. When we get still as God encourages me to do on our dates, we can learn to recognize which hydrants will provide the life-giving and growing supply I need for this moment.  There are times when I can be present in body but I am not drawing from the hydrant of my heart or my mind so I seem absent, even if only to myself.  Sometimes we need to prime the hydrant to pull the water from it.  It may need a twist or a tightening before the water from the hydrant will flow.  Attuning ourselves to our various hydrants serves us as we strive to show up as our most authentic selves in a given moment.

Being a lover of music, there is nothing better to soothe the soul than a little Sting. Something about his voice just runs right through you like you are being bathed in light. One of my favorites for many reasons is Fragile.  It is something that stands out to me in the middle of this current unrest where people are using their anger like a whipping stick and those who think they are harmlessly getting away with hurting people by stealing from them and destroying their property. I am all for protesting, using one’s voice, and standing up for what you believe.  It is one of our constitutional rights.  Part of what we are witnessing when see people hurt one another is their hurt.  We were not all given the tools needed to express our anger, grief, fear, sadness, frustration, and desperation in a healthy or even productive manner. We hurt others when we are hurt.  I do it. You do it. We all do it. Watching it on a grand scale at one moment in time has a profound effect on us. It speaks to me of the fragility of every person, whatever his or her reaction is to this experience.  It does not matter if we are in the face of it or watching from the sidelines.  It does not matter if we are appalled by it, hoping it will end soon before more people get hurt or cheering people on.  Our fragility and our basic human energetic connection mean we are not immune to it.  God encourages us when the information we are taking in begins to swirl and we find ourselves disconnected from ourselves as a result, to take a moment and go into our hearts.  It is by our connection and breathing into the fragility that we can find the resources to walk through this instead of hiding away whatever that means for each of us.

One thing I have learned is no matter how much I get to know someone or feel like I know how they operate I will never fully understand their method.  One’s method is about how they go about achieving whatever their aim or goal. If we try and measure people by their method, we lose the underlying picture.  It is like presuming we know how big the iceberg is based on the amount we can see above the water level.  I think we get in titanic proportions how detrimental it is to fall for that line of thinking.  The reality is many of us have not taken the time to determine what is underneath our own method let alone someone else’s.  We can notice a particular pattern but how often have we seen two different people do the same thing thinking it was for the same reason only to find out it was not.  I think the method of driving is to get from point A to point B.  For someone in a fast and slick car, the point of driving is to go for a ride in a really fast machine wherever possible.  Two different realities but the same method. I do not know that it is actually any of my business to understand the method of another.  I can accept it or not, but sometimes understanding does not reap the benefits one might presume. When it comes to ourselves, connecting to the underlying intention and perspective which guides our method allows us to pause and notice if the method we are choosing is the one best suited for the situation. When we are connected to the intentions of our hearts and use it to inform the processes of our minds, we are apt to choose a method for carrying out our intentions in a way that allows us to use ourselves and a situation for the greater good.  Often in those moments, we can detect the intentions underlying the method because of the energetic clarity which carries it through.  Imagine the kind of powerful force we can create in life when we are in alignment.

The nature of existence leans towards survival.  The impetus behind every energetic and cellular expression is done for the benefit of life. One of the perplexing elements of human nature is our ability to act in ways that seem to contradict the inclination towards life. What we often do not realize is the degree to which something seems to be in contradiction is not in fact contradictory at all. We have a way of creating beliefs and conceptions that over time become the structures that benefit us.  What can happen over time is that our beliefs and conceptions change based on our experience but we do not update our structures.  The structures still benefit us in some way even if it is the false sense of security we get from relying on them.  At the core of many of the reasons I was not willing to change in my addiction was I still believed that being a fat person protected me and I lived protected in that structure. I created a whole persona around being fat and it had its benefits.  I did not have to have a strong voice because my body did the talking for me. I did not have to take a closer look at my sexual abuse history because it was easy to cut it out of my life. It was not until the benefits of being fat were outweighed (pun intended) by the detriment of being fat that the structure began to crumble.  It was not until I stopped using my drug of sugar that I could hear the still small voice in my heart and spirit which spoke the truth of who I am and dispelled my illusion of weight as protection. Everyone in the world could tell me how my sugar habit and fat body were not of benefit to me but it was not until I was open to discovering a different structure for a way of living, which for me turned out to be the 12 steps, which did not depend on my old beliefs and conceptions that I could see it for myself. From this comes compassion that enables me to see the behaviors of others and myself as recognition of benefit in action.

In the second of the 12 steps where one comes to an understanding of a belief in a power greater than oneself the literature states that “belief meant reliance, not defiance.”  The point is for a belief to work it has to be something we can rely on. What is the point if we do not use the belief we have?  Similarly one of my favorite quotes of C.S. Lewis is: “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.” One thing I realized early on was that if I was going to show up each day for my daily date with God it would not mean much if I did not rely on God to be there.  My understanding of God and what I am relying on has changed over time.  The idea of God’s presence in whatever way I need God to be that day is a reliance I have.  I may not feel God each day.  I may not sense a connection each day.  I may not find it useful or want to rely on God on a particular day. I show up as a demonstration of my belief in myself and in the process.  Over time the reliance on God while never a prescriptive thing has been one way to show my commitment to live from the heart of belief in the life-giving light that lives within me.  I enter each day not knowing what it means to be a believer but one thing I do know is a reliance on a power greater than myself is part of the deal.

When I find myself stuck in thinking or a feeling in my body I get frustrated. It is remarkable to me that I used to be so stuck I simply expanded my body to compensate for the tremendous false reality I was trying so hard to live.  Experiences that I had to keep secret from myself just to survive.  I see now with the lens of compassion that my denial was a protection mechanism. I am grateful I found a way to get through it long enough so I could enter a time and space where I could let it go. Food was the primary tool I had along with self-hatred and I used them to their full potential.  When I got into recovery and starting going on my daily dates with God I learned more tools.  Given my default into self-criticism however, I can sometimes use those very tools to hurt myself.  It is in those moments when I find myself in need of God’s sight which is beyond my own.  God’s vision of me is nothing like a religious or even spiritual one.  It is the energetic embrace of a love which I can barely allow myself to taste it is so powerful.  It is the rainbow that emerges after a storm of thunder and lightning.  It is the breath I takes after jumping in the deep end and hoping I make it to the top before my lungs burst.  There is a life force that God reminds me I am a part of.  It is both outside of my realm of understanding and with my capacity to know I am one with it at the same time.  On my daily dates with God I find myself caressing this experience enough to know that in the moments when I need to be embraced by it, it is just a breath away.  I am not sure why being an incest survivor gave me the opportunity to find and connect with this experience, but I am grateful it does. I suppose in all humility it means I am grateful for the whole of the experience.  Being able to say that in writing means I have found some peace in the madness that is created from trauma.  It gives me hope as I see us all in the world experiencing a collective trauma.  We too will find a way to collectively surpass the pain and trauma in whatever form it presents for us at this time.  I trust that if we are willing to be with it, we and God can transform it into beauty.

Sometimes commercials are downright funny.  The people who create them are very creative.  I do not even remember what the commercial was about but what struck me is how a situation can sound like one thing and then when you look closer it is something else altogether. The commercial has a couple stating that their new living quarters have a clogging problem.  One naturally assumes they mean that their pipes are clogged or something else is impeding their access to something. Then it switches to see the apartment above them which is a family of clog dancers!  It made me muse about what kind of things we view as blocking us from getting access or having something we need when it is really a dancing problem.  Given my inclination towards any kind of metaphor around dance, I could not help but smile.  Seriously, though, how many clogs in our lives are a matter of needing to appreciate the dance being gifted to us and not the impediment they appear to be? What kind of ideas seem to clog our minds not allowing us to move forward when all we need to do is learn how to dance?  Our hearts provide an opportunity to flow and move through a clog in our minds that we cannot get to seem past.  The awakening of the heart through our breath also wakes up our minds to start by stepping away from the clogged process of being stuck in the clog.  Every dance begins with a step, has rhythm, and invites us to be in the moment with our hearts.