dailydatewithgod

A beautiful growth out of awareness is in the ability to respond.  As a result of my daily commitments to my dates with God I have developed a pause between what scientists call stimulus and response.  I am better able to embrace responsibility for my life and my decisions because I am utilizing my ability to respond.  Our automatic pilot is set up to react. In some ways one could argue that it is set up to re-enact.  We play out what we know. We act the way we have created habits around.  This both works for us and does not.  The ways that work are areas in which we like the fruits of our reacting.  The areas where we are troubled are those that may have worked at some point but now seem to have a counter effect greater than the amount they are effective.  Those areas in particular are the ones in which we can take responsibility for and choose to respond.  It used to be effective in my life at one point to stuff down my feelings and then eat over them.  When my weight became a burden, the food was still effective but I didn’t like the after effect.  However, it was not until the food ceased being able to numb me out and I was over 300 lbs that I needed was willing to concede that it was time to take responsibility and choose a response.  It took time to build that in and it is what God has shown me how to do over these many years.  Day by day abstaining from those foods which cycled me into reacting and the behaviors that numbed me out, I had to find another way.  My mentors taught me that the shift in mindset required would take action on my part and the first part was asking for God’s help.

We are so used to categorizing things and seeing them as separate entities we forget how very connected everything is.  Our willingness to embrace the coherence of nature can be seen in how we view our bodies.  I always think it is funny to hear people talk about the mind-body connection.  What makes us think they are not part of the same whole? They are literally connected physically within a body and there are multiple network connections constantly keeping us up and moving. Our physical existence is a a brilliant demonstration of coherence.  The coherence does not end within our own bodies.  It is also in our physical bodies are connected to the natural world.  Without realizing it we impact and are impacted by the shift in the moon cycles and the sun’s magnetic rays.  Just because we are not experiencing something physically does not mean there is not a coherent system in operation.  This same coherence also operates inter-personally.  We as human beings are part of a greater whole.  We are impacted by the actions, thoughts, feelings, and energy of others.  When we are aligned together there is a sense of the coherence.  Think about people at a seminar or in a place of worship.  All gathered together in focus they coherently shift the energy in the room.  We sense it when we are around a group of people who lack coherence. Something just feels off.  God invites to look at how we connect with our hearts in our internal coherence can impact those around us.  It is what I get to do with God each day on our date.  God encourages us to make a connection to the coherence placed with our system so we can intentionally impact the coherent nature of the world and be the messengers of love we are designed to be.

One of the benefits of gratitude is its ability to put things in perspective.  As part of my daily practice i jot down or bring to mind things for which I am grateful.  On a day when my head is particularly loud I start with the smallest things.  I am grateful for my fingers and toes, the hair on my head, and the stop light that keeps cars from crashing into each other.  The impact of this is the ability to snowball into realizing how many things for which to be grateful.  When I make a list I try to come up with new things and I start by imagining what I would miss if I lost it.  My phone, the ability to hear, the way the sunset makes traffic a little bit more bearable, interesting questions asked by pod-casters, the ability to think of a new idea, and so on.  When we bring to mind what we would be losing in our lives if it were not there, we find a multitude of things to be grateful for. As challenging as certain conversations can be, if I did not have the opportunity to share my ideas and listen to others, I would be losing out on an opportunity to get to know another person.  If I did not have eyes to see I would be losing out on the beauty of watching two people greet each other in a warm hug. If I did not have fear about an experience I would be losing out on the sense of courage that I get from walking through it.  When we are cognizant of what we could be losing, we find all kinds of things to be grateful for.  I once heard that the most powerful prayer is two words, “Thank you.” God shows me daily that while there are things I want to oppose or run away from, I would be losing out on the opportunity to see the capacity and courage of my heart. Who wants that?

There is something about clarity that opens the space for us to be more free. I can almost assuredly get a picture of the effectiveness of my life, if I wanted that kind of impeccable clarity, by comparing the level of clarity in areas of my life that work or don’t work. Ignorance is bliss in some sense but vagueness can get us into a lot of trouble.  This clarity of mind leads us to think that if we just understand things, we will be okay.  All we need is to elucidate them we will have no more questions that need to be answered.  This might work quite well for the mind but does it work as well for the heart?  The funny thing is no matter how clear things are in my mind, my heart may need a deeper level of understanding.  The elucidation requirements of the heart are very simple. Does knowing bring me closer or further from love?  Does the explanation I have been given bring me to a place of acceptance?  Life is messy and we fall for the illusion of understanding in our minds. Our hearts ponder the questions that are not understandable in our minds and there are many of those. On my daily dates with God I have learned to sit with the questions and make room through my breath for the elucidation to come from within.  The questions of the heart are rarely explained away by outside forces.  When we can cultivate the capacity to sit quietly with the curiosities and questions we embrace the opportunity for the elucidating of our hearts to speak.

Do you ever have times when you want to stay a little longer?  When you do not want something to end?  When it feels like time went by so fast and you barely had an opportunity to savor the experience? Those are the spaces where we want to linger.  It is more than a simple resistance to change, it is a connection to something that has been tapped inside of us which knows we need more of it, whatever it is. How do we know when our desire to linger is coming from wanting to savor the experience a little more or avoiding moving forward? What about the times when we do not want to linger?  Sometimes I think I would like a manual on how to handle those situations.  Sure, I have the 12 steps, the tenants of Christianity in which I was raised, people whom I admire, and things I do that I know make my life work for the best.  Yet in those moments of confusion when I can’t seem to move forward, I find myself searching for an answer.  When I am in fear, I want to know that what I do will not completely mess me up.  I am concerned about looking bad or like I don’t know what I am doing.  In those moments, I have rushed through lingering in my heart and pushed to having to know.  I move from being human to doing human. To linger longer in my heart opens up spaces that I make up will be hard to walk through, so I go back into my head to figure it out.  What moves the courage within me is hearing God whisper in my ear, “Come daughter, linger a while longer in your heart. I am here in the mess of it, you are not alone.”  After many years of our daily dates, I have learned to trust the still soft voice because though I might be scary, a little bit of lingering leads to greater freedom.

For the most part I am someone who likes to be prepared.  I can improvise and think on my feet quite well when needed but I do not try to go into situations completely blind.  The setting of a situation has so much to do with our experience of it.  The setting is as much the actual physical experience as well as our intentions. If I go into a meeting expecting to deal with a stressful situation my perspective is going to be slated to one of safety and protection. The meeting itself may be in a nice conference room with plenty of light and space between seats, but if I am intending to be on guard I will not notice any of that.  The setting of our intention impacts the setting of our experience of life.  On my daily dates with God I am setting myself up for a mindset in which I am more likely to remember God is in charge and I am whole.  I can set up the perspective of looking for what I can bring to a situation instead of what I can get out of it.  Creating a setting in which love can grow has to do with my state of mind, not with whether or not someone else is acting the way I want or meeting my expectations.  This is a different way of looking at life.  As someone who did not feel internally safe for a long time, my intention was set at a default of protection. This barred me unintentionally from experiencing so much of what life has to offer. As a mature woman I can choose to change that and where I am not able, ask God for help. By re-calibrating my setting in God, I can open myself up freely to be present for the adventure of life.

Have you ever wondered why we use symbols to convey ideas instead of words?  Or why we dream in images and not words?  Words are important but the impact of images and symbols is in their ability to convey multiple ideas across different languages.  We can be limited by words in a way that constricts what something represents.  How many of us feel as though our work life can be summarized best by the words on our resume?  Yet show a few snapshots of you in action and you would most likely convey a stronger picture of what your work actually means in your life.  The actions in our lives are representative of the impact, power, and validity of our words.  If our words are only letters strung together in sentences but do not represent any action they lose their meaning.  God encourages us to take a close look at what our actions in life are representing.  We can use the word love but is that represented by being on our phones when someone is talking to us?  We can say we value growth but if we shy away from learning new things or being willing to listen to someone with an opposing view, what does those words represent?  None of us are perfect but when we pause to take a look with curiosity and compassion at what we are doing from day-to-day, we might find ways of better representing the message God has written on our hearts.

When we take a moment to think about it we can all name places we enjoy being. It could be our home, workplace, a space in nature, a particular site of history, a worship space,  or even in the presence of a particular person or people. Some of those places for me are standing on the shore and watching the ocean waves, spending time with my best girlfriends, in the a Catholic Church, or dancing. When we are in a place where we feel accepted and can breathe there is a sense of safety which engenders authenticity and freedom.  A common license plate frame I have noticed while sitting in Los Angeles traffic is, “I’d rather be . . .” The places where we can be ourselves brings a softness and an openness to life. The reason we connect to these places outside of ourselves come from an inner knowing of the same experience of place in our hearts. It is part of our design to want to be ourselves and be with ourselves. God invites us to take a look at how we can bring the outside experience of place we love being by reconnecting to it in our hearts.  God knows by so doing it will resonate strongly in our being. This enables us to be in that place because we are being it wherever we go, even when sitting in traffic. We no longer have to depend upon the physical construct of the actual place. We are being the same presence as the experience of those places in and of ourselves no matter where our body is in the moment.

One thing I have learned about life through my daily dates with God is love prevails.  The power and the courage to keep going despite difficulties and obstacles is built within us by God in order for love to continue.  We find a way to hope or trust someone who does.  We manage to make it through and still be breathing.  Love prevails because until God ceases to exist there is no way it can be destroyed completely. We may feel distant from it or stop believing in it.  But God is love and therefore it always prevails.  We are made from the designer of love so prevailing is possible no matter how much our head tells us we are not worthy or have walked too far away.  The prevailing nature of love is God’s sign that life is still present and worth a shot.  It reminds me of a quote that I read many years ago, “every newborn child is a sign that God has not yet given up on us.”  I know when I feel torn inside and have walked through periods of darkness there remained in me a sense that God as I understood God did not see things the way I did and therefore there was another option.  Perhaps it is my dogged curiosity but something made me not wiling to give up until I discovered it.  It has been a long time since I have been in that dark of a place but each day I get a chance to renew my commitment to prevail along with love no matter what things look or feel like.

My prayer for us is the curiosity to discover the prevailing nature of love’s presence in our lives in ways perhaps we have not seen it until we decide to today.

Innovation seems to be the biggest buzz word these days. In my professional field as well as business in general.  It is as though if we are not talking about innovation, we need not talk.  I am not sure if it is a western mentality or just the way human beings like to attach to the latest and newest novelty in whatever it is, but we are so quick to jump on the bandwagon.  The brain loves novelty and it wakes us up and we are invited to see all things new when we are focusing on a few things new.  It is revitalizing and rejuvenating to be running with the newest ideas and trends.  Sometimes we do so at the cost of valuing what is currently happening.  The funny thing is that it is in the process of doing what has already been established as standard practice ideas of innovation get stirred up.  I think there is a way to value where we have come from in the process of moving forward.  When I was in my disease of addiction I had many established ways of being.  They worked for me to help me survive until they did not.  It was only when they began to break apart that I noticed how unmanageable my life had become.  If I didn’t have those and only jumped from one thing to the next, it may have taken longer to see my life spiraling out of control.  Over time I have also seen how some of those established patterns and ways of being did not need to be completely replaced but adjusted.  I was raised in the Catholic Christian faith and while my spiritual practice has expanded into other areas, many of the religion’s established practices and understandings of God play a very important role in my life today.  They were fundamental in me having a relationship with God to begin with. There is an expression in recovery which I think honors the established parts of our lives: “We do not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it.”  If I had not been there, I would not be here.  The hardest area of my life in which to reconcile this is when I see the effects of being an incest survivor.  There are many ideas and ways of being I established to survive in body and mind that are not effective as a grown woman.  Some of which are still very present for me.  In the process of seeing them and learning to let them go, I must honor them for the safety they provided at the time.  I made the best decisions I could, given what I knew, understood and the circumstances I was in.  I may not need to keep such established ways of being and ideas, but I do not need to make them wrong or label them as pointless.  All our experiences, ideas, and ways of being we have established in our lives serve us in some way for as long as they need to.