dailydatewithgod

We tend to accumulate armor as we go through life.  It is understandable.  Life is not easy.  We experience trials and tribulations.  We open ourselves up and we get hurt.  We feel all alone and tend to think we are the only ones who are faced with the kind of loss and grief that can come from being alive.  One of the gifts of recovery is the community of people one is surrounded by.  Who knew a random hodgepodge of people would provide the safe space I needed to let down my guard?  The difficulty with living with one’s guards up is how exhausting it becomes.  We all need a place or people with whom we can allow ourselves to breathe and to be. Some of us find it in our families, others find it in religious communities and still others in a group of recovering addicts.  Wherever we find the backing we need to stand tall and face ourselves through our challenges does not matter.  The point is to find it. When we have the backing of others who can see us with the eyes of their hearts, we can stand tall enough to allow breath into our own hearts.  The backing provides the posture and the groundedness to get reconnected with the truth of who we are.  We know this because we find ourselves standing taller when we let go of doubt, when we can release the burdens we are carrying in our backs or in our hearts, and when we receive the message through others or experiences that we are not the burdens we carry.  God works through all these elements of backing so we can get reconnected and aligned with the energy of our own hearts which carries all the backing we need.  Reconnecting and strengthening this inner backing allows us to move forward with our heads up and hearts open.

There is something enticing and titillating when the wind whispers across your face.  It is almost like being kissed by an angel. There are ways I have woken up to during my daily dates with God that show me how life caresses us. There is the literal touch like the angel kiss I described but there are also heart and mind experiences that give that some feeling.  You know it in the moments when an idea clicks or you are inspired to create something.  You know it when you feel a sense of warmth in your heart when you witness a loving exchange between others.  I even feel it in my tears as they stream down my face when I am wrestling through yet another layer of dealing with the effects of being an incest survivor.  A caress gives us an indication of connecting with something in us that speaks of hope.  It tells us we are not alone and sometimes it comes in a physical form from someone else, but that is only one way.  God has designed multiple kinds of caresses to show us we are cared for if we have the eyes to see it and the presence to receive it.

It is believed we all walk around with masks.  We have these various veneers which overlay who we really are.  We experience proof of our trustworthiness when someone is willing to remove the veneer and show us who they truly are. Correspondingly we indicate to someone how much we trust them when we remove our veneer or at least allow them to peer behind the curtain. Sometimes we do not realize how much we have allowed someone into our hearts until we find ourselves not keeping up our veneer unintentionally.  Sometimes situations open us up in such a way that to go back behind the veneer would not make sense.  When we let go of the veneer we are able to breathe and be who we are. Given how many roles and responsibilities we have, multiple expectations both of others and ourselves, and a desire to simply survive we go about wearing different veneers.  Over time we start to think who we are is the veneer and lose touch with ourselves.  We struggle to trust ourselves and our own heart enough to even just be with ourselves. Some of this is adaptive evolutionary behavior and some of it is familiarity.  We can build a whole person from a veneer but the moment we come across a circumstance in life that puts wholes and cracks in the veneer we fear we are going to fall apart. And we all will have those circumstances at some points in our lives. God invites us to take the moments of cracks and wholes to peer behind the curtain of ourselves.  God encourages us to open our hearts and see with the eyes of love encased in the courage of our hearts as to what is present behind or beneath the veneer.  We can begin by being curious instead of afraid.  It is not necessary to shed all of our veneers at once or even abandon them altogether.  God invites us to dance with them and our hearts and see how we can make room for a little more of our courageous self to live on the surface of our being.

With so much swarming around inside our heads and the constant chatter is amazing that we can concentrate and string together coherent thoughts.  The miraculous nature of all it means to be a human being and show up in the world is no small feat.  Getting to know our own machinery gives us insights into how we are being and behaving in the world so we can connect our intentions to it.  I remember early on in recovery I was required to do an inventory of all my resentments and fears-real or imagined.  The first thing I discovered rather quickly and a certain level of hilarity was how I had behaved over and over again in a similar fashion expecting a different result. I believe that is the definition of insanity.  The next thing I encountered was the degree to which many of the things I had held on to over the years were not real.  Especially when it came to my fears.  So many of them never come to fruition.  Most of them are just notions in my head that I give power and attention to which ironically makes them bigger and more fearful instead of dispelling them.  In the process of getting rid of the inventory I created, I shared with a sponsor all my silly notions with some embarrassment. However, it was a powerful experience to get them out of my head.  I learned that notions can go from being the whisper of a feather in my ear to a boulder on my shoulder if I let them build.  I saw that I did not need to carry them around if I started admitting them.  Not always to another person but sometimes on paper and always to God.  Sometimes our daily dates start with me laying out my notions before I am ready to be open to what God’s ideas are.  If I do not do that I attempt to layer God’s perspective on top of my notions.  If I have been carrying the notion around for a long time it tends to stick and by mere repetition be front of mind.  The replay of notions in my mind closes off my heart to hear God’s insight.  Its’ not even about whether the notions are good or bad.  It is about naming them, claiming them, and choosing to hold on and make use of or dump them.  It’s about seeing the gift they are whether we resonate with them in our hearts or entertain them in our minds.

Upon getting to know ourselves we will invariably uncover things we do not like about ourselves.  Often this comes through interaction with others.  We become aware because of their reaction that something we do or say is not met with the same level of understanding we have for where we are coming from or what our intention is.  On one level, it is important to recognize how our behavior is impacting others.  On another level, we will go crazy if we attempt to adjust ourselves based on the varied reaction of others. Given the multitude of factors that can fuel another person’s reaction, it can be helpful to notice a pattern.  In recovery, one of my early mentors would always say to me, “If you’re okay with it, they’ll be okay with it.”  She was not talking about intentionally trying to hurt someone or be careless.  She was speaking to the idea that I need to have a centering within myself.  Most of the time when I am worried about what other people think of me and how I am being, it is an indication that I have not come to a place of recognition and acceptance of myself.  The reality is people are not thinking about me.  My fears stem from what I really think about me.  Yet, if I have checked in with my understanding of God and am connected to the truth of who I am and accepted it, who I am being will be an extension of that.  Opting to pivot myself this way or that based on every different person I encounter means I lose connection with myself.  Even if there is a pattern in the way I am being received, God will continually invite me to connect to the truth of who I am at my core.  Only in the quiet space of my heart can I reconcile the truth of who I am with who I am being despite what ways I may be prompted to pivot by others.  It takes courage to look at ourselves. The purpose is to see more of how God sees us than we or anyone else does. Opting to pivot to the left or right based on the input from others will not take root unless we find a way to connect to the same truth within ourselves. God encourages us to pivot and embody the truth of who we are when we are connected to the love from which we were created.  If there is one thing I have learned on this journey it is that love doesn’t always look like I think love should look like.  I desire to pivot to the perspective of my highest self and with some self-compassion, I can recognize that my highest and best self is going to look different some days than others.

One of the fascinating things about children is their energetic enthusiasm for everything they experience.  This stems from the fact that usually what they are experiencing is new to them.  Life holds such novelty for them whether it is the toes of an infant or the sound of a fart for a three-year-old.  There is a fascination with finding more things that enable them to embody the novelty of life.  The curiosity propels them forward to search out more and more novelty.  Without being able to name it, the experience of novelty in their body, mind, and heart is invigorating and life-fueling. There was a moment that stands out in my mind to this day when I was in the throws of my food addiction. I remember musing when I stopped for an order at Burger King that something was gone.  I remembered back to how as a kid there was this excitement and I correlated it to a particular smell (a good one) of going to Burger King.  In the present moment, the smell was not there.  In the past, there had been a novelty because it was not an everyday thing.  It was my dad taking my sister and me for something fun to eat we couldn’t get at home. By the time I was knee-deep in my addiction it had long surpassed any kind of novelty or excitement. I was too busy using it as a vehicle towards a numbing and slow death. My experience may have been dramatic but as adults, we all lose touch with the novelty present at a young age.  The more known things and people are to us the more we take for granted the idea that they are known. If we are willing to pause and consider that there is novelty still present in all of those known elements, we can awaken our heart’s capacity to be in the unknown. There are many Saturdays and they happen every week but there will never be another Saturday like this one.  We may take a shower each day (and I hope you do) but we will not feel the hot water on our skin in exactly the same way.  The novelty is there if we allow our minds to let go of the known even for a moment and be in the present with our hearts. We can see the people in our lives with novelty, hear things with newness, and take in new information from an area we decided we already knew everything about.  Each of these elements teaches us something new about spreading the novelty into knowing the unknown about ourselves. Making room for novelty alters our perspective of life because it changes who we are being. Changing who we are being, changes what we see about our lives and those around us. Like the saying attributed to Anais Nin: “We do not see things as they, we see things as we are.”

I have found that most things happen in action and most of my worries or anxieties happen in thoughts. I learned in recovery the value of acting my way into right thinking versus the other way around.  As we come to know ourselves and our operating system we identify what fits and what doesn’t. Determining whether or not something fits happens when we try it on. The fittedness is identified through action.  It is true about clothes and about life.  I can look at something or someone.  I can read their labels.  I can see a similar idea but until I engage with the thing or person I do not know if they are a good fit for me.  We have all most likely had the experience of going by our eyes when it comes to clothing, trusting the label put on the clothes by someone else, or even picking something out because it is just like something we already own only to find out when we try it on, it doesn’t fit.  To live the truth of who we are and what fits for us is about embodiment. We can put all kinds of labels on ourselves or let others do it for us, but no label will ever give anyone the true sense of what it means to be in our presence.  Living is an action, not a thought. I can have all kinds of worry filled or anxious thoughts, but they live only inside my head. I can easily decide something is not for me simply because it is unknown to me, but all that does is keep me from acting out of fear. When it comes to assessing what is a fit for us, we are called to put into action the motion of trying things on The beauty of the action is after it happens I have a deeper knowing of who I am and what I am actually capable of.

In American culture, there is all this allure around vacations and getaways.  Around L.A. there is the lure of Las Vegas with the tag line, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” It is all based on the idea of needing space and respite from our everyday life.  I get it, it makes sense and it is important to have respite.  My quandary is what are all these vacations and getaways about if people come back feeling like they need respite to recover from their vacation?  Given how integrated we are with nature it is no surprise that we actually have moments of respite which are so inherent in us we do not recognize them or take them for granted.  The experiences of respite are so much a part of our day to day movements we overlook them. On the most basic level, our hearts invite us to moments of respite by prompting us to take a breath.  What happens when we seize that opportunity and deepen and or lengthen that breath?  What kind of unknown respite can we venture into when we play with breathing in different ways.  I have personally experienced the healing power of the breath to shift my perspective about any number of things.  Our breath is a tool for connecting to life in a new way.  God invites us to discover the unknown moments of respite open to us when we start with our breath.

How do we handle all the information and ideas that are being given to us from day-to-day? I am not talking about the ones we are already aware of as not connected to us.  I am talking about the ones which slip under the radar of awareness because we have already established them as acceptable. The acceptance may have happened before we could question their validity. How do we know if it is acceptable to us?  Do we simply take what our families, communities, and society as a whole have provided and hope it works out?  Do we even stop to notice if it resonates with us?  What if what we have been told is acceptable in our heads but is igniting a niggling of our hearts? Acceptable is an agreement.  Questioning an agreement requires us to use the moxie of our hearts to first take a deeper look at what is in there.  When we connect to what makes up our own heart we can assess the moxie needed to question what is happening outside of us.  We think it starts with questioning outside but God invites us to know our inner landscape.  Everything we receive from outside of us means nothing until we internalize it.  Getting to know the default filters we have in place gives us a greater understanding of what kind of moxie is needed to alter our perspective of the outside.  The moxie we see in those who externalize their questions and their protests is sexy and flashy.  The moxie needed to hold strong to the truth of who we are is more subtle.  Yet, the sovereignty demonstrated by someone who has found the moxie in their hearts is compelling.  It is the thing we cannot describe but sense in someone when they have it.  The beauty of connecting with our inner moxie is it grows and moves through us from our hearts into the rest of who we are physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and energetically.

At the outset, it does not make any sense that we would have agreements that are unknown to us.  By definition, the idea is you are aware and are choosing to agree with something or someone.  The agreements unknown to us are the subtle ones often masked as experiences and stories. They are the agreements we make as young children to make sense out of something no one can or does offer an explanation for.  We hear it in the silly reasons children give for why things work the way they do.  As adults, we do the same thing but by then it has become such a well worn or commonly acceptable story that we do not question it.  Only when those agreements break down to we begin to see their fallacy. We have not done something wrong by creating agreements.  They are a survival tool, but like any idea, as it is repeated it becomes a belief.  Many of the beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, what we are capable of, or even how things are supposed to go are based on agreements that have no relevance in the present moment. God invites us to pause and take a look at the agreements we are carrying in our minds.  I have uncovered agreements about my responsibility in situations, thinking I must be the problem, or that I am not enough, or I must be wrong if I see things differently. We are called to peek behind the curtain of the agreement and find out if it still resonates with our hearts today.  Many agreements I had were based on circumstances no longer present about who I am or what my role is in my family and in the world. When I became willing to look at them with curiosity and hold them in my heart, I noticed they do not resonate with who I have become and in fact, were never based on the truth of who I am.  There are many more I suspect which will come to light as I travel this path of growing in love and awareness of all that is.  I no longer fear that the knowledge of these agreements will make me unknown to myself. I believe it will open me to get to know myself and others the way God knows me.