dailydatewithgod

It is hard to imagine that one can transform their lives so much that who they find themselves to be after a time is completely different.  It is hard to imagine but possible.  There are so many ways I have witnessed both myself and others in recovery and other spiritual paths live a life transformed.  Who I am today versus 20 years ago not only looks different but thinks differently.  It is not as though who I used to be is erased.  You could say it has been incorporated and adjusted to be someone from which I do not want to run.  Being someone who lived amidst a subconscious daily mantra of self-loathing and criticism when things got to the height of my addiction, I could not conceive of the possibility of being at peace with myself and in acceptance.  I only had to be willing to see myself and life from a different angle.  I could not have chartered the path I have followed or known where my daily dates with God would take me over time.  I still do not know where this whole thing is going.  I only know that the more I come to know and accept the truth of who I am the more I see God everywhere.  More love becomes visible in the little and random moments.  It is knowledge not of the intellect but of the heart.  The heart speaks from a different angle.  Life looks different and much improved from this side.  Within my heart is the capacity to see all I am experiencing, good, bad, and indifferent as something of the moment.  From the angle of the heart, I can choose how much power I give a thought, a feeling, a belief, or an experience in this moment.  This means I can choose the angle of the heart to see it as working for me or against me.  The heart does not dictate its perspective.  The heart only provides another angle where I think there is only the one I see through my eyes.  There is no certainty in the heart’s angle except that there is always another one in the next moment, the next breath.

I think we can all concede that our minds are very creative.  Our imaginations are illustrious and there seems to be no end to what we can conjure up in our minds.  When we use this capability to enhance our lives, open ourselves up, and grow into what is possible, it is wonderful.  When it is used to create fear stories, run the worst-case scenario, and cause us to believe a mirage is real we find ourselves in pain.  It is not a problem that our minds have the capacity to create a mirage of fear.  It is simply important to know when it is happening and test it out.  Often we wait until we get there to let go of it.  Like a mirage in the desert.  We may not have to wait. Our breath provides a tool that can come between us and the mirage.  We pause, take a deep breath and in that moment before running the mirage again through our minds we can ask questions.  We use the energy of our hearts through the breath to bring us to this moment.  This moment is before the impending mirage will either show itself to be in fact a mirage or real. Based on the evidence of my life most of my fears have shown themselves to be a mirage.  By using my heart to bring me into the current moment before bellowing down the road to find the mirage and determine if it is real or not, is one way to have the chance to remind me of the last time I took off down the road.  My heart continues to show me a beauty embedded in our basic physical mechanism alongside my capacity to imagine is I can take as many breaths as I need to bring me to this moment.  The moment before the mirage.

I have noticed an interesting dichotomy about myself.  I am very organized in certain ways and messy in others.  I have let go of needing to fix it and stepped into acceptance.  I am sure there are deep psychological reasons or not, either way, I do not need to spend a lot of time navel-gazing to figure it out.  I have surrendered to the idea that if and when the time comes for me to address what has seemingly gone awry in my reality, I will know.  When my heart tugs at me to take a closer look at what is awry I may find myself fearful or even resistant.  Most likely the resistance will not last long.  Learning to trust my heart because of my daily dates with God has shown me that whatever looks awry is often a gift.  Whatever appears to the world as imperfect or a problem is simply a matter of misperception.  It is often in the things labeled as awry according to my mind that I have simply not allowed the lens of my heart to view.   I am less concerned by the form of what has gone awry than the state of my heart.  If something I am doing or being is in opposition to the truth of who I am I will commence by taking a look.  God guides my hand to my heart, encourages me to breathe through the fear or resistance, and reminds me that whatever is awry is not who I am.

One thing I do know is that as humans we have an unlimited capacity to make things complicated. I wonder sometimes if it is related to our love of stories and how we use them to convey ideas.  Perhaps we fall in love with the content and its complexity that we lose sight of the purpose of telling elaborate stories.  The point is to convey a particular lesson.  Maybe the complexity allows us to keep our minds busy and we feel more useful or intelligent. Whatever constructs we design in our mind our hearts seem to know what the simple truth is the moment it is revealed within the construct.  It is one thing we can count upon.  Often times when the heart sees right through the construct and whispers in our ears the simple direction or idea we shrug it off.  We presume it is too simple to be the real one.  It is only when the truth is conveyed through multiple constructs that we are willing to consider surrendering to simplicity. If we have built our identity around whatever construct our mind has created, we are less willing to concede to the simple premise of the heart if it seems to stand in contrast to our sense of self.  It is in the moment of feeling torn when I turn to God for a God construct.  It is the space in between the mind’s construct and the heart’s simple knowing of truth.  A God construct values the path from one to the other.  A God construct acknowledges the importance of all the complexities which have brought me to the space of being able to see and hear the simple message of truth from my heart.  A God construct does not demand immediate surrender, it simply lets me know the multitude of options available for the next indicated step.

I used to think that life was about making it to the end with the least amount of bumps or bruises.  It was part of the black and white thinking that thrives as a child and in the holds of addiction.  Everything is all or nothing.  What I now see and know in my heart from my daily dates with God is that it is more the other way around.  It is the bruises and the bumps it gives us a chance to discover our character.  It is not about the experience of them but what they invite us to learn about ourselves. Recently, my neighbor has been teaching his son how to ride his bike without the training wheels.  I remember when my dad taught me and my first solo ride on the street I banged right into the rear side of a parked car. It left a nice bruise on my hip but I got more of a sense of how to keep my balance.  Maybe in some alternate universe I would have known how to balance perfectly the first time on a two-wheel bike, but that is not the universe I live in.  More importantly the bruise became a sign that I took a risk.  I did something I had never done before and I did not die.  There is always a chance to get bruised, especially where our ego is concerned.  God invites us to see that our hearts come to the rescue when it comes to our ego’s bruising as it does in our physical bruising.  Just like it rushes to the part of our body that is injured to begin repair, our heart is ready to remind us that who we are is much more than our ego.  Our heart thrives on learning more of ourselves by taking the risk in the first place.  Our heart has the self-compassion to comfort us when our bruise is a symbol of being let down or disappointed in ourselves.  Allowing our heart to repair the bruise we are healed.

In the world of self-improvement the focus seems to be on becoming smarter, being healthier, more attractive, wealthier, and more envied by others.  There is nothing wrong with improving our minds and bodies.  I am not sure about increasing envy but perhaps that is more of a social media phenomenon. I want to continue to grow and thrive as a human being.  I find great peace in taking responsibility for all areas of my life and find that it allows me to be more authentic. A tremendous element of that authenticity is about the improvement of my heart. If I grow in all areas of life but still find myself guarded and not open to the presence of love in forms I do not recognize then what good is all that other stuff?  God has shown me on my daily dates that starting with the intention to improve my connection to my own heart is by being with what is.  It is not starting with the shoulds or the expectations of myself.  It is about starting the process of improvement from knowing that right now who I am is enough.  The true self-improvement comes from accepting who I am right now and then look to where I want to go.  Improvement is as much of a heart exercise as it is a mental exercise.  Improvement of the heart begins with recognizing the truth of who I am at my core because it is how I am designed.  In that, I recognize that no matter what I do or do not do I cannot undo the love from which I was created and there is no need to improve it.  The real face of improvement is one that brings us to the place of acceptance of the truth of love’s presence within us so from there we can grow love.

We often look for the big bang when it comes to experiences.  Maybe it is a thing particular to Western culture but that is the one I was raised in.  We value the end result more than the path.  We give greater importance to people who put on big productions and the more spectacular they are the better.  We have amusement parks.  A whole place dedicated to thrills.  It is not hard to see how all the little morsels of life get lost in the loud and spectacular.  Don’t get me wrong, I am just as drawn to the magnificent as anyone and as a recovering addict, I know all too well how quickly the escalation in needing something to be bigger and more fabulous than before. What has changed for me in the years since entering recovery and my daily dates with God is my attunement to the morsels along the way.  I have discovered a quiet and beautiful space within my own heart which when I am still enough, has so many morsels of freedom and peace to tap into I can be overwhelmed.  The morsel of subtle beauty in the color of a flower. The morsel of how a smile lights up a person’s face.  The morsel of hearing the sound of laughter.  The morsel of how my body feels after a deep breath or a good yawn. The morsels all build an experience of how to be at home with myself and the truth of who I am.  The outside world can go on and on with the loud and the spectacular and attempt to pull my attention every which way.  It is the morsel of love in simplicity that keeps me tethered to what has a life-giving staying power.  It takes time for the patient practice of stillness to open the eyes in my head to see the abundant morsels of light in life that my heart sees even after the fireworks fizzle away.

There are moments in our lives when we feel like we have nothing.  Whether or not that is actually true is another story, but I believe it is a universal human experience at some point to feel devoid of something.  It could be physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually empty.  There are moments when we sense that there is not enough of what we need to get us through whatever it is. Yet instead of recognizing what little we might have and that it is not enough, we go with the idea that we have nothing.  It seems to fall into the same category of not knowing if the answer is right, so saying we don’t have one.  Maybe it is a black-white perspective we carry from our childhood.  Maybe it is those of us who fall prey to perfectionistic tendencies.  Regardless of the reason why we are invited to look behind the label of empty.  Given that we are not hollow or void of anything we truly need despite how we feel as that would simply not make sense in a world created from the abundance of love, what does it mean when we say we are or feel empty. In moments when I was sure I did not have the intellectual capacity to wrap my head around an idea, I felt empty.  In times when I could have sworn, I was going to die from lack of food I thought my stomach was empty.  In the experience of the world today I have often felt empty of the emotional capacity to be there for others in a way I would want to be.  God invites us as vessels of love to face these ideas of empty and finds masquerading behind it more of our ideas based on our expectations of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Empty could be a way of communicating that because we cannot see the plan of life within what we are happening we do not have what is needed to survive it.  Empty could be our way of indicating we humbly recognize our limitations.  Empty either good or bad is an invitation into surrendering to who we are as interdependent.  We like to think of ourselves as self-sustaining. When we are empty of that self-sustenance, we may just have the eyes to see what a gift it is to be alive and connected to each other, God, and the world.   Empty can be our invitation to expand what we know of ourselves to be into a living and breathing reality of interconnectedness with all of life.

There is tremendous value in being in the present moment.  Aside from the practicality and the fact that we cannot actually be anywhere else it behooves us to get accustomed to what it looks like for us to be in the moment.  All of the moment.  For me, it is about practicing acceptance of what is.  This may be a moment when I am physically in one space and mentally or emotionally in another.  At that moment, it is the one I am in.  I can become aware of the diversion of my attention or focus but in the moment before I can opt to change it, I first acknowledge and accept it for what it is.  My original inclination before my daily dates with God was to judge it.  I had developed a masterful technique of raking myself over the coals over the smallest things.  There were many moments in my life up until it changed in which it worked for me and I accept that.  The distinction is being grateful for the turn of attention to acceptance and gratitude which leaves less interest or benefit to continuing that particular practice.  It does not mean I never give myself a hard time.  It is simply a progression into less harshness.  Even in this time where the last beneficial thing would be to give myself a hard time about how I am handling the levels of uncertainty, the inclination to make my handling of things wrong is still there.  The progression while seemingly small or not enough (see, that is what I am talking about) . . . stop . . . pause . . . hand to heart . . .breathe . . . one . . . two . . . three.  Okay, let me rephrase.  The progression (the size of which does not matter) is being able to catch myself when the narrative in my mind is not accepting of this moment and how I am being on all levels at this moment.  The progression is remembering that I am in this moment to learn and grow in love no matter what it looks like.  Life seems to be a series of moments in progression from acceptance into love and in this moment I see the progression in me.

I am pretty sure of two things.  None of us are going to make it out of this life alive and most of us will experience some bumps, bruises, and dents along the way.  The first brings a little level of relief as it seems so easy to get caught up in a world that is determined to outdo life as if it were possible.  Maybe all of this rushing and worrying doesn’t need to be so intense.  Maybe it is okay to relax into the flow of life. Maybe we could be like the flowers that don’t argue about staying in bloom all the time and surrender to the season, we could do the same and with just as much beauty. Who knows maybe flowers do argue?  Maybe they are irritated when the bees come to take and place pollen. Maybe the process of going from a bud to blossom is painful.  We do not know any of that because we can only witness what is happening in action.  When we look at our own lives what do they look like when we compare our thoughts versus our actions?  Clearly, there are inconsistencies.  We see them easily in others, but not so easily in our own lives.  I did not grow up in the time of silent films and have only watched a few minutes here and there of some of the films, but I have watched old 8mm films of my dad’s family.  One can make up a whole story about what is happening when one doesn’t hear the words.  And even when we can hear the words we do not know what real thinking is going on underneath the words. The point is there are many layers of experience for us humans.  The real question is how much of what we are thinking, feeling, saying, and doing is aligned?  And what is it aligned with?  Maybe our goal here is to live a layered and bumpy existence in and out of alignment as we figure out the truth of who we are.  God invites us to engage in the learning of the whole of ourselves, discover the flow of life within us, and attempt to let go into it being the beautiful flowers we are at our core.