dailydatewithgod

Living in the United States I am acutely aware of the freedoms I have that others lack.  As a woman, as adult age citizen, and as someone who has agency in her own life there is a freedom to live and breathe that others do not have.  Yet it is amazing that within each of our own liberations we manage to imprison ourselves with our thinking.  If we do not take advantage of our freedoms it is not as though they get dispersed to others.  We have the choice with each breath to claim a stake in the liberation of our hearts and minds within any given situation.  There are plenty of experiences we will encounter in which we will feel like our freedom is lost.  Perhaps it is a matter of looking at it from a different angle.  Perhaps the circumstance we find ourselves in is the not physical manifestation of freedom we were expecting, but seeing it through the lens of our hearts provides a deeper sense of liberation.  I may not like my experiences as a child who survived some traumatic times, but I can recognize I have been liberated from the state of a child who had no agency.  When I experience flashbacks or deal with old patterned ways of being, I forget to liberate my mind and bring myself to the present.  When God helps me to ignite my breath and be where my feet are, I recognize that I have moved on. The eyes of my heart show me the strength and courage I have developed as a result of being an incest survivor.  My dogged attitude to find a way out of any kind of personal hell is a liberation that would not have come otherwise.  The liberation stemming from a willingness to see the gem within the coal alters my perception of freedom as a whole. It goes from something I have to something I can be present to in the moment if I choose.

One thing I have noticed over the years is God’s inclination to go with the simple.  We hear it spoken in sacred scriptures, we see it in nature, and we are aware of the power of simplicity, especially when it catches us off guard.  I have also noticed my inclination to complicate things.  Perhaps it is because God is in the moment and I am off in a million different directions.  Typically the first message I get from God is to pause and connect with my heart, with my breath, and be where my feet are. The simplicity of the moment allows us to get a reality check on the actual moment we are in so we know from where to proceed or if to proceed.  It is almost laughable the amount of times placing myself back in the moment and making sure my feet and my head are in the same place, simply solves the issue with which I am concerned.  If I get overwhelmed by all the things that need to happen to get where I am going, my breath, reminds me I can only do one thing at a time.  In recovery, they refer to it as taking the next indicated step.  Most of the time when I ask God for direction, I am not handed some grand plan.  I am whispered the next step. Then as it is with my breath, I pause with the next one and check in again.  Looking back those are the simplest, freest, and most powerful days  I have ever had.  The humility of letting go of how I want it all to turn out and the courage to be present in the moment and trust life to unfold as it will.

Have you ever thought about how much time and effort you put into covering up or keeping hidden the things that make you different?  There is a biological natural tendency to belong.  It is ingrained in us, however often we are given the message that we can only belong if we meet a certain criteria.  Somehow I do not think it is what God intended.  If that were the case, wouldn’t we all be exactly the same?  How boring would that be?  Very. Our quirkiness is what sets us apart.  Others might view our idiosyncrasies as less than but according to what or whom?  Is it because they are jealous that we are not working hard to hide parts of ourselves?  Is it because others are only able to see life through the lens of their automatic brain which immediately notices differences?  Is it because they do not want to be considered on the outside because of their association with us?  There are number of reasons why we and others chide ourselves for our idiosyncrasies.  God sees beauty in our idiosyncrasy and celebrates it.  God sees the creative force of love present in our idiosyncrasy and welcomes it.  God witnesses our idiosyncrasies and sees how we belong to the greater myriad of possibilities in the universe.  When I find myself heading down the road of self-judgment and self-criticism of my idiosyncrasies, I pause and lean on the one who’s got my back.  God how do you see my quirkiness? Widen the eyes of my heart so I am may fully embrace the expression of love you have given me to share with the world.

Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we do not know what to say.  We are afraid we will say the wrong thing or upset someone with what we say.  Typically this shows up when we are witnessing the vulnerability of another person.  It first and foremost puts us into resonance with our own vulnerability.  This can be unnerving and our mind starts doing jumping jacks because we have just stepped into the realm of embodied experience.  The opening of one’s heart that comes with vulnerable situations is not one that can be described well and it is different for all people involved.  When we step into the space of our heart, our mind is not in control and so words elude us.  We fight with ourselves because we fear the perceived loss of control and we say stuff to just fill the silence. Our mind jumps up with a standard list of responses and actions.  If we opt to be within brevity at those moments, we make room for our presence to hold the presence of another.  We allow our presence to be enough for ourselves when we are alone.  The ephemerality of words and actions in the presence of embodied heart-felt times is priceless.  It is contrary to the inclination of going, making, and doing.  Brevity is the opportunity for being to be enough.  In our hearts we know it is enough.

There is a constant chatter going on in the world surrounding this idea that we are called to be shakers and makers.  We are called to create and imagine.  As human beings it is in our DNA to make an impact on the world.  At least it is the message carried out by human growth and development, leadership, education, recovery, spirituality,  business, and so on in the U.S. Maybe it is just the effect of living in Southern California but either way it is a conversation I hear often.  What is our purpose? Why are we here?  What is the difference we want to make in the world?  These are all good things.  Intrinsically we create a sense of meaning in all our endeavors.  Our minds are meaning making machines.  We even make little inconsequential elements have greater meaning.  So when we are being told we need to align ourselves with the beliefs and actions of our highest selves and boldly create an impact on the world, it is not foreign to us.  On a heart level it is beating for a reason.  We are all created and have the ability to create.  We all leave an impact whether we intend to or not.  But our hearts have a gentler initiation into the consciousness around it.  Within us is the boldness we need to make an impact.  Our hearts call us to do so by being ourselves.  When we connect to the truth of who we are and dare to be that in the face of expectations and rules and regulations of the norm, takes courage.  It is about boldly impacting the world immediately around us and within us. The greatest courage we can garner is to be honest with ourselves from the heart.  It starts with the boldness of going inward and silencing the outside voices.  It is with the boldness of aligning our hearts and minds together so we can be courageous in the world outside. The boldness the world is requesting of us does not come in the form or pattern of a prescription that is the same for everyone.  Each day when we boldly dare to pause, connect to our hearts, be within ourselves, and present with all of who we are in the moment we are in is a day full of life.

I am always fascinated when you ask people how things went and they state good and that they can’t complain.  They can’t or they choose not to?  I mean we all can complain but it makes me wonder if it is because they do not think it is proper or they are completely satisfied.  In any given moment there are a number of upsets we experience.  Whether we admit to it or not we have a number of expectations and preconceived ideas going into any experience.  It could be as simple as how we think our drive to work is going to go or a first date. However, we are often not upset for the reason we think.  We determine that if only there was not traffic on the way to work it would have gone smoothly or if he or she had picked a different place to meet the date would have gone splendidly.  Our preconceived picture was not met and so we are perturbed.  Are we upset by the different experience or the disruption of our previously drawn picture in our minds?  We blame the experience or the person but maybe we are the responsible ones.  If we had created a different picture or let go of expectations would we still be upset?  In recovery I learned the crucial role of acceptance.  If I truly trust in a God who cares for me and is with me no matter what then I know I can face whatever comes my way without checking out.  In there I can roll with the upsets, I can accept things as they are not as I thought they would be.  Further on my daily dates with God I learned I can see them with my heart and find what there is to love within the upset or anything I decided I did not want as part of my reality.  I can learn to embrace the upsets as gifts because at the very least they remind me to be in the present moment and step out of the virtual reality of my mind.

To give an idea life we put it in motion.  I remember as a kid being overly concerned and hard on myself when I had bad thoughts.  In order to be the good Christian girl I thought my job was to only think nice things.  It is a belief I carried all of my life.  I knew fundamentally that the real badness would come from acting on them but nonetheless I saw myself as flawed and less than ideal because I had thoughts in my head that were not nice.  I did not understand that we all have all kinds of thoughts all the time.  Thoughts that never stop, good or bad, right or wrong.  My default perspective on myself was that I had done something wrong and I was to blame even for things I did not do.  I remember hating when a kid next to me in class would get in trouble.  I found myself cringing as he was getting disciplined.  It’s no wonder I was seeking a way to numb out.  By showing up for my daily dates with God I began to learn viscerally what I was being exposed to on how the human mind functions.  That on some fundamental level most people walk around feeling like they are not enough or do not do enough.  We measure ourselves by what we see with our eyes instead of what our heart sees.  We look to other flawed humans with their mixed ideas about themselves and expect them to provide us with something they cannot do for themselves.  Growing up I figured if I just followed the rules and did what was expected of me, I would be seen as okay and therefore safe.  It was a great illusion that worked on many levels and so it became my practice.  But practice did not make perfect it made for internal struggle.  It made for a need to numb out.  It made for a life constantly seeking the approval of others.  We all do this to some degree.  We are designed to belong to each other and we know growing up in a particular culture or family what the expectations are of members. My daily dates with God have shown me another option.  I get to spend time each day with a being who loves and accepts me no matter what good or bad I have thought or done. I have learned to turn to the core of who I am to determine whether or not I am approved of.  My practice of showing up for these dates has brought me closer to the peace I thought I would experience from all my other practice but never did.  I now recognize the key to my long desired peace and freedom lies in the main practice  of showing up for myself and for God one day at a time.  It is about honestly evaluating if all the other practices in my life are in alignment with my core practice or detract from it.

We are drawn to the familiar and the longer we live our minds will continue to filter what it encounters based on the familiarity. Scientific studies have shown that what keeps a person young is the experience of novelty.  In the space of variances we are back in a child mindset from which we can grow and learn.  One of the greatest gifts that has unexpectedly come from my daily prayer and meditation date with God is the realization of variances within the familiar.  When we learn to pause and breath, it opens our eyes and our hearts to see what we may have not seen before.  Practicing and using the eyes of our hearts gives us the power to witness all the variances which have been staring us in the face but we were blind to.  On automatic pilot we know who that person is, we understand what they are saying (they always say that anyway), and we know how to drive to work without thinking about it.  When we are present to the experience as it is, we find the various new road we could take to get to our destination or the layout of the houses and trees we drive past every day to work.  In the moment, we notice the variances of expression on the face of our loved one and we hear something different in their voice when they share with us their words and ideas.  God invites us to discover the variances in the familiar instead of allowing our automatic piloted mind to run the course of our day.  Taping into our hearts in the moment we are in gives us access to a whole new world we never knew was there all along.

One of my favorite things in the world are flowers.  They are a gift of possibility among plants.  There are so many variations of colors, shapes, and sizes.  Flowers brighten up a room and bring smiles to people’s faces.  They are like a love letter from God that arrives unexpectedly.  There is so much that goes into the creation and development of flowers that happens without our knowing.  Yet we get to benefit from their presences all the time.  We come to know them in their blooming.  In our own lives our period of flowering can seem effortless to those outside of ourselves because they cannot know what is happening beneath the surface.  Unless we share the story of our flowering most may just see the end product and think we have always been that way.  We do not benefit just from the end product of a beautiful flower.  We benefit from the whole process because other systems and ways of life continue because of the needs of a flower for its growth.  A botanist could explain it better than I could, but many elements including how we get food to eat come down to the interplay of flowering in nature.  Flowering happens to flowers and all other plants, including ones that sustain our livelihood. Having a greater appreciation for the process of flowering in nature provides an enriched perspective of the gift of beauty that flowers provide.  The same can be said in the story of our flowering.  Knowing how we bloomed is as much an essential part to appreciating the beauty of who we are as noticing it when it reaches its pinnacle.

We tend to think new is better.  In many cases it is.  Who doesn’t want the newest version of something, even ourselves?  When we are new into an experience it is the fascination with the unknown.  We see this all the time in children.  Everything is new for them and holds such possibility.  As we age, newness is largely defined as better or a chance to start over.  We are okay with newness as something else but are not always as open to newness is replacement of something of which we prefer the old.  Many times we prefer the old simply because it is familiar. Instead of the new bringing possibility, it brings fear because we are being asked to let go of what we already know.  It is apparent in our thinking which impacts our feelings and our actions.  There is nothing wrong with something that works, but we are funny creatures that hold on to things even when they aren’t working.  God encourages us to embrace newness as children do with a sense of wonder and fascination.  We are asked to open our hearts and embrace the fear of the unknown so as to grow our capacity for greater love in our lives.