dailydatewithgod

There are times in our lives when we are forced to pause and take a closer look. It usually catches us by surprise as rarely do any of truly attempt to slow down.  We live in a fast-paced world with things we are asked to handle moment to moment.  We get used to moving from one thing to another barely glancing at the space between all in an effort to get more done.  And for what?  So we can make sure the epithet on our gravestone says, “She finished her to-do list before her last breath”?  Where would that fit exactly?  Taking time for reflection usually has to be created.  Anytime I have hoped it would just happen I found myself wondering where the time went.  As this thing called time just wandered down its own path and did its own thing. 😉 My daily dates with God are about creating reflection time.  Time to sit still and pay attention to the things I am saying and doing which create my being.  Checking in to see if they are in alignment with my heart and if I can still connect to the light of life within me.  The still small lighted voice I can barely hear when I am busy playing whack-a-mole with life.  Engaging in reflection is not just a practice to help one stay connected to the truth of who they are.  It builds in specific action which designs the reflection of the importance of presence in life.  How can I say I want my life to reflect certain ideas if I never take the time to figure out what those ideas are and how best to live them?  Reflection is the process and the result.  This allows us to check it off our to-do list as well as invest in our very being.  It can be challenging especially when we are so used to reacting instead of responding to life.  Newsflash: Life is full of challenges.  It becomes a question of which challenges we choose to take on, which ones feed our soul and our heart, and which ones do we want to reflect our very essence.

There are two sides to every coin.  There are positive and negative ions that make up the universe.  There are at least two sides to every story.  The glass is half full or half empty. All around us and within us are elements of duality.  Why is it then we go around expecting things to be only one way or another?  How can we really not anticipate both experiences of an eclipse?  Even our breath which comes in must go out if we are to stay alive.  The constant fluctuation whether it is from dark to light or light to dark speaks the story of a life full of duality.  No matter how much we think the goal is to maintain a specific state, the very changing nature of the universe in which we inhabit suggests the impossibility of the goal. The key is to maintain a sense of equanimity amidst the changes and fluctuations.  Our hearts invite us to question this idea we have of good versus bad.  Who’s to say, really?  How can we know in anything other than the moment which it is?  This does not mean never intending to live and be in a way that aligns with the truth of who we are.  It means letting go of exactly what it will look like at any given moment.  We can maintain the still steady intention of our hearts to be the creative, life-giving messengers of love we are designed to be if we choose.  It requires a connection to the truth of who we are and eyes to see the truth of who others are at their core.  The eyes of our hearts see past the duality of others and reconnected us to the oneness from which we were all created.  We all have to take both in and out-breaths.  We all choose to make our way as best as we can on this path called life unless we let ourselves get lost in the expectations or negative perspective of duality.  Instead of seeing it as unstable and untrustworthy, it is a call to step into the fullest experience of the duality of our lives and embrace all sides of who we are and who we are not. It is trusting in the overriding power of love which created the universe in which we exist. When we bring our hearts into our natural duality, we have the breath and the courage to ride the ever-changing waves of life.

It is amusing that an automatic function such as breathing is actually something we have to remind ourselves to do.  We need the constant in and out our breath provides but we take for granted its presence.  We often lose sight when we are restricting our breath and forget the solution to what we are experiencing may be to stop interfering.  When we are stressed or fearful our breathing takes on a different quality. When we are constricted physically we breathe in different areas of our body.  We do not become alarmed until our capacity to breathe is hindered all together.  At those moments there is nothing so precious as to be able to take a deep full breath. The automatic functioning of our breath ensures our survival.  But remembering to take moments and consciously breathe, changes the quality of our lives.  The breaths we take for granted provide the template for further exploration.  I have discovered how breaths help with pain, how breaths allow me to be more present, how breaths provide clarity of mind.  All of these gifts coming from breaths are somewhat hidden.  We have an amazing tool available at our disposal with every moment of our lives.  It is why there is such power in the pause.  In the pause, we can stop, breathe, and reassess where we are and what we need.  Our breaths place us in our body, connect us with our hearts, and slow us down just enough to know where to go next. Our breath is the first thing we take when we begin our lives and the last thing we take before we die.  How much power might we discover in these breaths during the time in between?

It is clear we are meant to move and change.  Our bodies, nature, and all the natural laws of the universe speak this truth in their very being.  It is funny that we often resist movement until we get started.  Once we are in motion and open to change it just happens.  We can experience the same thing within our own minds and hearts when we open up to the shifts in perspective offered to us by our lives.  We do not have to go far to seek out opportunities to shift our thinking or feeling.  Most of the time they are right in front of us.  We get stuck when we close ourselves off to these shifts because we fear what the result will be. We step out of the moment and find ourselves ruminating over the end of the path or how we are going to make it happen.  Life invites us to take a breath, take a step, and dance into the mystery of moving through a shift.  We get stuck in fearing how it might change who we say we are or we resist the invitation to shift due to a fear that we will be shown wrong for where we were before the shift.  But like the shift from night to day, one does not make the other obsolete.  They both have their role.  All the changes in our lives are not because we were wrong or bad before and now we are right and good.  The opportunity to shift occurs because it is time to discover something new about ourselves, about our heart, and about our capacity to learn from love. We need not resist the shifts in our lives no matter what form they appear in because we are far more capable of the changes we are being invited to live.

It is clear we need to have a sense of belonging to a particular group whether it is family, society, or some other construct of a group in order to survive.  As independent as we think of ourselves, we are actually much more reliant on others than we like to admit.  It is in our design.  It is not a flaw that we feel a sense of loss and confusion when we are not able to claim to belong to something.  We are born into a  particular family group and culture.  There are the groups our parents belong to which usually means we belong to them since we cannot get around on our own the first many years of our lives.  All of these places of belonging give us a sense of where we fit.  As we mature and can make choices about where we belong, we are given the opportunity to asses if the places of belonging with which we identify are fitting to us or places we are trying to fit into.  It is only natural to want to stick with what is familiar.  But over time if we are working so hard to fit into something that is not fitting for the truth of who we are we lose ourselves.  God did not design us with a sense of needing to belong just so we could force a fit that isn’t there and squash the truth of who we are designed to be.  There is a sense of loss when letting go of the familiar but the more we are willing to embrace what is fitting for us and the core of ourselves, the more we are able to live and breathe and be.  It takes courage to look at our family, society, and various groups to which we belong, acknowledge their role in our lives and see with truth where we fit with them and where we need to stop trying fitting ourselves to them.  The more we grow in relationship with God and with our own hearts the clearer the path to aligning with what is fitting for us we will be able to do and be the person we are called to be.

If you have ever committed to spending any amount of time abstaining from complaining you most likely came face to face with your rankles in a way you had not done so before.  What else are we supposed to do about those irritating little elements of life that pop up, if not to vent about them?  Clearly, our rankles represent things that are not working in our lives.  They are the elements that seemingly tear at the smooth and productive life we set out to live each day. Wait, who told us life was supposed to go smoothly?  I keep forgetting. 😉 There are the lines, the traffic, the unconscious actions and words of others.  There is no way to describe them other than to say they are irritating.  What if our rankles say more about us than we would like to admit?  After all, there are some common rankles but we have rankles that are not rankles for others.  What could that mean?  Perhaps our rankles tell us about our current state of mind.  Maybe we could use them as indications of what we are not in acceptance of at the moment.  It is not about being wrong because we are experiencing something as a rankle.  Our reaction to that thing and perceiving it as a rankle is an emotional one.  The people, places, and things we experience as rankles are not in and of themselves irritating. It is our perception that makes them rankles.  We all know of times when we find ourselves neutral to how someone is behaving around us when previously we saw it as a rankle.  Why is it the line at the grocery store is more of a rankle when we are feeling rushed?  The context in our mind is what makes something neutral and creates a rankle.  The good news is we can choose not to fall for the story of the rankle our mind is telling us in a given moment about a person, place or thing.  Breathing and centering in our hearts makes this easier.  Funny how our hearts do not perceive nearly as many rankles in our lives as our minds do.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wished you could transfer the experience to someone else?  Perhaps it was overwhelming.  Perhaps it pushed you a level of surrender about not being enough.  Perhaps you simply did not want to deal with the person or situation and would happily pass it on to someone who does.  We have all been there.  On my daily dates with God, I came to see that life happens for me, not to me.  It is a slight change of word but very powerful.  In those moments when I would like to do a transfer, I turn to God and say: Really?  Are you serious?  How is this possibly for me?  I may go even so far and say, I didn’t ask for this.  Who would want this?  Can’t it be transferred to someone else to face?  I am certain God smiles at my childish perspective and invites me to stop and take a deep breath.  The only transfer I am in need of is the one from my head to my heart.  Within me, within all of us, is the energy and the courage to face whatever thing or person we would like to transfer.  By pausing, taking a deep breath I connect yet again with the eyes of my heart. With those eyes, I am able to transfer my pain, doubts, frustration, and disdain for the experience to a pool of infinite guidance and wisdom.  In our very being is the presence of God which enables us to transfer out of our fixated mind’s perspective and open to something with more possibilities.  We can allow ourselves through these kinds of transfers to learn more about our capacity to grow in love.

As independent as we all think we are the very idea is suspect.  There are so many things and people that help us through any given day it would be hard to measure. We need the bolsters in our lives.  It is why they are there.  We are designed to be in relationship with one another, even the people we perceive as in our way.  We all make a contribution to one another either negatively or positively thus shaping our next move.  The difference lies in responding versus reacting.  When we go with our first thought which is based on survival we do not see all of our options.  We need the bolsters in our heart to shift from reacting to responding.  When we use the bolster of our breath to get some fresh oxygen in our bodies plus a pause to create a space between action and reaction.  If our heart was not initiating our system to take in fresh oxygen numerous times each day, we would die.  Aside from the mechanical nature of this automatic system, it awakens the inner dimensions of our being housed in our hearts.  These are the bolsters that prompt us in the willingness to be vulnerable enough to reach out to others and to God.  We are not always able to find the needed resources to respond to life on our own.  It is easier (actually it just takes less brain power and energy because it is automatic) to react. It can be automatic if we use the faculties available in our system prompting us to pause. The pause allows us to garner the bolsters needed to determine a response.   A response that may initially require more energy from our hearts and mind but less clean up afterward.  It is humbling to realize we do not have all we need easily at our disposal to respond in a way that lines up with our hearts all the time. However, the capacity and the choice to respond is within us.  We can also choose to seek out the bolsters needed and choose what to do with what they offer.

As we travel through this thing called life we encounter special experiences and people that leave a mark.  Our lives are somehow altered by our experience of them.  We recall them with fondness and in some cases cannot imagine how our lives would be if we had not met the person or had the experience.  In some cases, we make a big deal of recalling these experiences by celebrating them once a year or holding on to a physical object which reminds us of it or them.  This is how we create rituals in our lives.  It is built into our storytelling inclination as human beings to honor such events and people.  It is not about pomp and circumstance or making a show of it for others.  It is about recalling a time or an experience where we connected to ourselves.  The reason we are so impacted by these people and times that we want to hold them in a place of honor is that it reached something deep within us.  Perhaps it was an unexpected connection we did not know was there.  God invites us to continue to cultivate this honoring of life within ourselves.  If we did not have it within us, we would not be able to see it outside of us.  Honoring the truth of who we are at our core transforms us into being the truth of who we are.  In a world full of masks and machinations about what it means to be alive, our hearts live the fullness of life one beat at a time. Without the core of who we are none of it would mean anything.  What would it look like to be honoring the reality of our true selves?  How might honoring this within us shape the eyes through which we see others and life’s circumstances?  These are the questions baffling to the mind but delighting the heart.  When I spend time on my date with God and allow the world outside to grow quiet, I am reconnected to the honoring of life itself which God has designed within each of us.

It is important to belong.  It is a survival need. When we belong to a group of people what comes with it are the ideas and things to which they are attached.  We are not aware of all the attachments at once.  These are not the kind that requires consent ahead of time.  These are the inherent kind. The funny thing is even when we separate ourselves from the group whether, through distance or choosing a different path, the attachments are still there.  There is a mindset that comes along with belonging.  Many of the groups we belong to we were born into. We had no say in the matter and many of the attachments became attached to our identity as a person in addition to them being part of the group identity.  Becoming aware of those attachments as we mature is what God calls us into our hearts to do.  In order to distinguish the truth of who we are we need to take a look at what attachments are in place. Some of them may still apply, others may not.  Our lives are about being and becoming the best version of ourselves.  The version that lives with breadth, depth, and light within our hearts. We may be hindered by some of the attachments and not know it if we don’t look.  We may be guided on a particular path in the opposite direction of one of those attachments in rejection of them.  To determine which parts of this are allowing us to be the truest expression of ourselves calls for some introspection, some curiosity, and some levity about how these attachments have played a role in our lives.  We do not need to root them all out today, it is a lifetime process because being the best version of ourselves is about growing and changing throughout our lives.