dailydatewithgod

One of the first stumbling blocks, when a person attempts to spend time in quiet or meditate, is the encounter with his or her chattering mind. Many believe they are terrible meditators because they cannot quiet their minds.  I have been meditating for about 18 years and all I can say is there is a reason it is called the practice of meditation. The point of meditation is to bring your attention and intention back whenever your mind wanders or when the chatter gets too loud. It is about learning to be a detective with your mind.  We do not have to take it literally. Some use a mantra to direct their thoughts.  Others visualize or listen to guided meditations.  I have used any and all of these different methods.  They are all beneficial but the end game for me is making peace with my thoughts.  One of the benefits I have found over the years is my pause before believing one of my thoughts as I go through the day.  I will talk back to my mind when I hear it make a blanked statement by asking for evidence of its truth.  For some years I assumed all my thinking was correct.  If I had the thought it must be true.  Thankfully, this is not correct.  As I learned to delve a little deeper I started to notice the clues certain thoughts were setting up. The pattern set down by the clues gives me a sense if I am headed into familiar but not necessarily helpful to my well-being territory.  Is the pattern cluing me into a feeling of peace, harmony, lightheartedness, frustration, anger, judgment, or relief?  Being able to notice the kinds of thoughts I am having gives me a temperature gauge on my current emotional state.  If I am in a good place, it is likely my thoughts will have the same resonance.  If I am feeling worn down or frustrated, my mind will conjure up more thoughts to keep my feeling state engaged.  I have also learned my thoughts can be sneaky.  If I am in a good place for a while, my mind will look for thoughts to support the idea that something not good is lurking around the corner.  It is the proverbial other shoe that might drop.  The purpose as far as I can tell of our thoughts is to enable our survival.  What the mind requires for survival is not the same as the heart.  By learning to notice the clues shown to me when I observe my thoughts, I can know if it is a good time to engage my heart.  My intention when it comes to dealing with my mind is to befriend it but not buy into it as if it is all there is.  God has shown me on our daily dates that making room for the heart’s energy is equally important to be a full human being.  I can utilize my thoughts by observing them and picking up on the clues which show me who I am being in the moment.  From there I can turn my attention to my heart and see if there are any adjustments needed to my attention.

We get so used to what we believe is normal that the moment something or someone stands outside of the norm we think it’s weird.  Even the word weird is used in so many contexts it has become normal.  I have often thought of coincidences and God-incidences.  Incidences where God chooses to remain anonymous.  There is also a great question we can ask ourselves when we come across something or have an experience out of sorts.  Is it odd or is it God?  Maybe some of the things we call oddities are really just things or situations where God is showing up in a way we did not expect.  I have found over my many years of daily dates with God that the one thing that stands in the way of trusting in God’s presence at all times is my expectations of God.  When I have decided knowingly or unknowingly that God would show up this way or that way and I do not experience God this way or that way, I presume God is not present.  God created me and not the other way around and I forget.  I start thinking I know how and in what specific way would be best for God to make his or her presence known.  Through that filter, the oddities whether in my own character or a situation are labeled as an anomaly, quirky, or just plain not supposed to be.  What if instead of seeing those things as oddities we embraced them as God’s presence in our character or present in our lives. Imagine how we would look upon our fellow human beings we labeled as odd if we saw their oddities as God-ities.  Okay, so it is not a word but neither in God-incidence and I have been using that one for decades 🙂

Taking the time to reflect is something we do not often do when we are bowled over by all the daily to-dos.  There is a social emphasis placed on it when it comes to the end of a year. Sometimes when we find ourselves in a situation where something dramatic happens it causes us to pause and take a deeper look.  But what about reflection each day?  What about choosing to get to know who we are and how we are operating in the world before we get to the end of our lives?  Are we aware of what our lives epitomize?  Do we know how we are impacting ourselves and others daily?  Does it encapsulate who we believe ourselves to be?  God encourages us to be in alignment with the encapsulation of our being.  It is not about doing everything right or being perfect.  It is about a desire to be an encapsulation of the truth of our hearts to the best of our awareness and ability one day at a time. My daily dates with God give me a chance to reflect and pause so I can notice what the encapsulation of my life is about.  I do not want to wait until I am at my last breath to look back at the encapsulation of a life that does not match what it is in my heart.

We see cracks in the world. Cracks are on streets, in glass, on our skin, in doors and windows, in our communication, and our ideas.  Why is it we see them and know they are there but pretend they are not.  We present ideas as if they are full proof.  We close doors and windows thinking nothing gets through.  We communicate and can’t see how the other person did not understand us exactly.  Cracks exist and instead of pretending that they are a problem we can ignore, perhaps we can attend to them differently. Cracks are problems for which we do not have a solution. It is why we see them as some sort of crack in who we are as a person and therefore need to hide them.  Yet have you noticed how the cracks give a certain style and shape to things?  Cracks allow something to come through like some wind or a possibility we may have not known we needed.  If we embrace the cracks by looking at them through the lens of our heart we may find a reason to revel in them instead of wanting to sweep them under the rug.  Plus we all have them, so who are we really kidding by pretending?

In the western world for better or worse, we are obsessed with money.  Having it, not having it, who has more, when I am going to get my own, and so on. When we think of money in terms of it being an allowance it takes a different tone.  I do not mean the allowance one may have earned as a child but the act of allowing.  How much allowance to we give money?  How much allowance to make for our relationships?  What kind of allowance to give to ideas in our head that we have not vetted?  How much more do we make allowance for our thinking than our feeling?  Does it depend on the situation or do we generally value our thinking over our feelings?  When we look at how we allot our time we have some indication of what we make allowances for more than others.  None of this is a judgment, but it is powerful to take a look.  So often we go through life doing what we think we are supposed to be doing instead of stopping to notice if what we are doing or making allowances for in our lives resonates with the truth of who we are.  Allowance is much more than money.  It is how we choose to allocate our energy and our attention throughout the course of our lives.  The beauty is we can change our allowances as we move through life.  We can make adjustments as necessary.

So much of how we make decisions is based on guesses.  They make be educated or informed guesses but if we are honest with ourselves we make choices with a great deal of uncertainty.  We can never know what all the possible outcomes are of our decisions.  The best we can do is gauge the impact and power they may have. To awaken the greatest gauge when it comes to our decisions, we will want to involve as many levels and parts of ourselves as we can.  It starts with determining the gauge of the decision either by its possible impact, people involved, level of complexity, or measurement of success or failure. When we gauge our choices we can also look at how it impacts how we see ourselves behaving in or out of accordance with the truest part of ourselves.  The gauge can be about what the decision means about us or what we want it to mean about us.  Is our gauge based on the premise that we can be more of the truth of who we are in the world if we make this choice or that one?  Is our gauge guided by what other people will think of us?  Is the gauge about changing something about how we have been up until this point and now want to change direction?  Is the gauge measure from our mind, our heart, our spirit or all in conjunction with one another.  Will anyone who does not have the same gauge able to witness the impact of our decision and is that important to us?

There are times when our internal conversation is all about getting through an experience.  They are often defined as the in-between times we find ourselves in.   Those moments when our perspective is slated to the idea that where we are and what we are doing is not what we would choose. It could be sitting in traffic, being on hold with a call center, waiting for some information before we can make our next move, or standing in line at the grocery store. I read a statistic once that said we spend 3 years of our lives waiting in line.  I believe that was before Amazon, so maybe now it is only 2.5 years. 🙂 Often in these in-between moments, we are bracing ourselves in preparation for what might come next or how much longer something is going to take, or fear we are missing out on something else.  The bracing is instinctively based on a threat.  But the threats we have today are rarely life-altering. Have you ever stopped to wonder if in today’s world those moments in between when we are bracing could simply be a chance to catch our breath?  Maybe the purpose they serve is more than a chance to get stressed out mentally and physically.  Maybe our bracing is an automatic reaction based on our perspective, not on the actual fear or danger of something. Some of us are so familiar with bracing in any moment of discomfort we do it automatically. Discomfort which can derive from unfamiliarity can bring up fear and hence the bracing. These days we remedy the discomfort by occupying ourselves with our smartphones. That is one option.  Another option is to notice when we are bracing ourselves and use it as a prompting to take a deep breath.  We never know what might come into our awareness in those in-between moments if we let go of bracing.  Perhaps we will actually look at the person next to us in line at the store or in the car next to us and smile.  Maybe we can appreciate the courage of the call center person who is going to help us right after getting chewed out by the person previous to us who was bracing and took out his/her discomfort on them. Maybe if we pause and take a breath, let go of our bracing, when we do send a text or an email it will not be sent with the fear-bracing nature we are feeling.

For people like me who like to think things through I can get stuck in analysis paralysis.  I am not sure if a part of me just feels better knowing I have thought through everything before I make a decision or if it is a fear of getting it wrong.  It is probably both. Our thinking minds are a beautiful apparatus which we are given to grow and develop throughout our lifetime.  It takes conscious effort to engage ourselves deliberately instead of just being pulled in one direction or another. There is so much in life that calls for our attention it is easy to get into the mindset that we do not have a say in where it goes. My daily dates with God have taught me a thing or two about negotiating with my mind. By negotiating I do not mean further analysis.  I mean a baselines negotiation of where my attention will reside.  When I can pause and notice what I am focusing on, I can take a step back and negotiate its importance at the moment or at all.  We are drawn to the loud and the flashy by nature of their energy level.  This takes the form of people, media, and cell phones.  Knowing we can embody a level of self-preservation by negotiating within ourselves where we will spend our own time and energy is powerful.  It takes practice and a willingness to be uncomfortable with not always going with the easy way, but it serves the whole of ourselves when we choose to exercise our negotiating powers.  We think we need to negotiate with other things or people but no one forces our attention. Some things are tricky in how they capture it, but it is always our choice.  Negotiating whether to go along with it or change the course of our mind’s attention presents the opportunity to respond with our minds, our hearts, and our spirits when making a choice.

We think we want to know how it all turns out.  We think whatever we are facing in life will go easier if we just know how it will be when we are done going through it whatever experience we are having. These assurances are not offered by life.   The funny thing is the one end we do know how it turns out is the end of our life.  Life ends in death. Yet we do all kinds of things to avoid it, pretend its not there, stave off it’s coming, and so on. If we behave this way when it comes to the biggest known possible, what do we think we will do with other kinds of known endings?  Often when we are focused on the outcome of a particular desire, we disconnect from what it is we truly want.  We get tuned out from what is happening beneath the surface. We focus on the result not realizing what we want is not what we think we want.  What we desire is the feeling we think the thing or experience will generate.  The true desire beneath wanting to know how something will end is about wanting to feel safe and okay.  We desire to know whether or not we will survive what may seem at the moment to be unbearable.  We want to know we will be okay whether or not we succeed or fail at a particular task.  We want to know if we will have to redefine who we know ourselves to be based on how whatever it turns out. Our mind is trying to configure a way to get our hearts online.  What if we started with our hearts?  What if we connected to the deeper knowing within ourselves which contains the truth of who we are?  If we were to turn our focus from what it looks like on the outside to what is generated from within us then the desire for things to turn out a particular way leaves us.  It does not mean it is not okay to desire certain outcomes.  It means we will be doing ourselves a favor by using our mind’s desires as a wake-up call to initiate the feelings we are intending to generate. How tightly would we need to hold on to the outcome of a particular desire if we already possessed what was underneath the desire? God invites us to a cooperative experience between the desires of our minds and the desires of our hearts.  They are both looking for the same ending.   It is the ending that reminds us of what God already knows about who we truly are.

We have been created to be the face and body of love in this world.  We are designed to be an annex of the life force of love which God has threaded throughout all creation.  To claim our place as an extension of this life force we have to let go of thinking we are just our physical selves.  Maybe it’s just me, but it seems rather pointless to be here and then die all just to go through the motions.  There is value in experience but what value?  When I am honest with myself it is the moments when I can feel the energy of my heart come alive that I feel connected to something more.  The annex of energy coming from within me creates a whole other level of life.  A life where I am a part of a bigger picture.  It is in those annex moments when there is a purpose to my being.  It may last just a moment or for longer, but it opens up the possibility of options for what it means to live.  Being an annex of love resounds in me in a way that being a woman who has a job, lives in an apartment, dates men, is part of a family, makes money, has beautiful hair and a pretty smile does not.  I believe we are all more connected to each other than we look or act like we are.  When we allow ourselves to live and risk from the space of being an annex of love we know ourselves as God knows us.