dailydatewithgod

As things are rapidly shifting and changing in our world in response to the virus being experienced all over there is a sense of loss on many levels.  Loss of familiarity, loss of people, loss of connection, loss of what is okay and what is not, loss of jobs, loss of normalcy, loss of privacy, and so on.  We process the loss as best we can at the moment but when so much of it is happening at once it can seem overwhelming.  For those who resist loss or do not want to face it, there is an added challenge because it cannot be avoided.  Everywhere we turn we see it and feel it.  Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?  On one level it is but on another level, it is something we are built for.  On a physical level, we experience all kinds of losses on a given day we just aren’t aware of them.  We lose cells, we lose hair, and we lose breath. On a practical level, we lose minutes, we lose keys, we lose opportunities, we lose words, we lose ideas, we lose hope, and we lose connection with ourselves and others. We are simply experiencing loss with greater impact and it is happening for everyone simultaneously.  Nature goes through similar kinds of loss grandly but it does not appear to have a thinking mind to make a story about it.  It is simply what is.  I do not say this to devalue in any way the experience of loss.  It is a phenomenon of living that is real and can be a challenge even for those whom I would perceive as being most mindful and enlightened. Loss reminds us of the parts of this human experience that can just suck!  Not to mention that it can cause us to feel lost. God encourages us to find some relief by turning to the eyes of our hearts.  In the space deep within each of us where the knowing of all that is and all that will ever be is the courage to hold space for all of our loss and all of our hope.  It may seem ridiculous in trying to navigate through loss to pause and take a deep breath but I have learned that contrary action is often the most helpful.  Each day in my daily prayer and meditation as I meet myself and God to connect within on our date, I am reminded of who I am as so much more than what I am experiencing.  God holds the truth of each of us as more than we can imagine.  God knows whatever loss we are experiencing it does not define us.  Bringing the impact of loss in my life to my time with God as imperfectly (i.e.–my mind won’t stop racing or I can’t concentrate but I show up) as I do, opens the door to other options than just my mind comes up with. God reminds us not to confuse the impact of loss with a definition of us as lost.

When our lives shift in such a way that it alters the way we see ourselves the world around us irrevocably we find ourselves needing to reassess our sense of accomplishment and achievement.   We can see it when it comes to outside circumstances.  We go from being a kid at home to an adult on our own.  We shift from being single to married or vice versa.  We go from having a job to being unemployed or the reverse. Any situation where our reality is changed requires us to adjust our expectations of ourselves and others.  Our sense of what qualifies as a feat for a kid would be different than a parent.  Getting to a second date is a feat when dating in LA but probably not if living somewhere else. Landing an interview at an unknown company is a feat if we are looking for work.  Being able to breathe is a feat for someone on life support and is barely noticed by those of us who take it for granted.  As we go and change from circumstances and alter our relationship with ourselves we find we do not have the same feats we did before. Each day with each new breath we have the opportunity to be driven by the feats of our mind or the feats of our hearts.  Depending on how we define ourselves, we lay the foundation for which is considered a greater feat.  The world will always tell us that our feat is not real if it cannot be seen by others.  Yet our hearts have feats that mean nothing to the outside world.  I remember early on in recovery when after years of being emotionally shut off, my heart had softened enough that I found myself crying more easily. To this day I never apologize for crying because it is the most beautiful expression of release from my heart.  To the outside world, it may consider me to be weak or certainly nothing to celebrate, but in my heart I know it is an accomplishment.  Our hearts’ feats have a way of breaking things down into simple elements of gratitude. My heart can zero in on a feat that seems inconsequential to my mind. It is not about one being more valuable than the other but rather about the importance of connecting with the feats of our hearts as well as the feats of our minds.

Shakespeare wrote one of the characters in the play Cymbeline ending a scene by saying: “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.”  We are familiar with the idea that fortune favors the brave or the prepared or that we are the architects of our fortune.  Yet sometimes fortune shows up unexpectedly and without much direction.  We find ourselves not knowing what to do with it especially when it shows up in a form we do not recognize.  The question is, what do we do when we find ourselves with something that looks nothing like a fortune? Isn’t it silly to hold out the hope that when it is all said and done, it turns out to be the fortune we never knew we were seeking?  It can only be in hindsight that we recognize the fortune and as we face uncertain experiences, we do not know which ones will turn out well and which ones will not.  I can certainly recollect many times in my life when the worst thing happening to me turned out to be the best thing.  So as we are navigating daily and in some cases moment by moment through the realities of a global health pandemic it is our hearts which hold our fortune. We need our minds to be on top of the information and to carry out the practicalities of this ever-changing way of being in the world.  It is our hearts however that carry the energetic vibration of our mind’s focus.  Remembering to connect to the truth of who we are in love amidst the fear being pumped through our system will bring some balance and decrease our likelihood of staying mentally hijacked by the latest information. Our hearts’ beats bring us into the moment.  Pausing to breathe and connect with it will serve as the reminder that at this moment we are still breathing, we are still here, and we have the power to guide what we choose to focus on in each moment. God invites us in uncertain and unsteered experiences to start by connecting to the fortune of our breath which connects us to our hearts.  God designed our hearts with the fortune of love’s presence.

Getting to know the truth of who we are can be challenging depending on how wedded we are to our ideas about ourselves. It can actually feel painful to let go of some of the familiar stories about ourselves even if they cause us pain.  Familiarity means survival to our brains. In my experience, it is only when the pain of the familiarity is greater than the comfort of the familiarity are we interested in reevaluating its importance to us.  We behave based on how we identify ourselves and illumination of part of our identity as no longer useful for our greater good is painful and possibly threatening to our sense of self.  This where the message of the heart comes in.  Our hearts have the compassion to embrace that element of our identity and illuminate for us how it is served us well up to this point.  Our hearts have the courage to carry us through the process of letting go of what does not serve our greatest good and illuminate what is possible on the other side of the release. Our hearts have the grace to reintroduce us with gentle illumination to the truth of who we are at our core which has always superseded our head’s ideas about who we are.  God invites us to make room for the heart’s illumination and begin to behave based on our heart’s identity.

One of the things I have learned living in Los Angeles for twenty years is the importance of giving myself enough leeway when it comes to traveling around town.  The sheer number of people to navigate through whether on the road or on the street means making space and time to get from point A to point B.  If I don’t then I am rushing which I made a decision many years ago I was not willing to do.  It requires forethought and preparation and I do end up rushing around sometimes but I do my best to create leeway. My daily dates with God have taught me to make leeway for my heart.  My mind rushes in to fix things as they come up.  Before I have finished assessing the challenge, my mind has a solution.  I have learned it is good to pause before jumping into action based on my first thoughts. The pause is the leeway to make room for my heart to provide input.  It is as simple as a breath.  If my mind is racing, I will stop, put my hand on my heart and take three deep breaths.  These breaths are the leeway to awaken my heart’s lens and see some other possibilities.  It is one way I can connect to God and to the truth of who I am. From the space of my heart, my actions become a way for me to respond versus react to what is happening. It began by practicing leeway of the heart on our daily dates and then it became about practicing it in everyday moments throughout the day.  The leeway of the heart if nothing else opens the door to options outside of what my mind can conjure up. Those options often lead me down roads I would have missed in my rush to get to a solution.

In times of fear and uncertainty, we find ourselves discovering things we were previously unaware of about ourselves and others.  I have noticed people being kinder to each other.  I have always said and felt that pain is the great equalizer but we don’t often see each other’s pain or discomfort so we do not see ourselves in others. In situations of global experience, we unearth this bond we all have to the human experience of fear. We become aware of fears we did not know we were bonded to in our definition of ourselves.  The overwhelming uncertainty and constant change of information and circumstances that are sweeping through the world can be a palpable experience of pain that is the same for all of us on some level.  We, therefore, experience a simultaneous bond with each other because we recognize the commonality in our minds.  God invites us to notice that we are bonded in our hearts by the truth of love in all of us and have always been.  The fact that fear and uncertainty bring us to a place of bonding through pain is the portal through which to recognize our heart’s lens of the bond of love. We can’t stop at the bond of fear as that leaves us hopeless.  We have the opportunity to breathe through it into our heart space which reminds us that the bond of love to others and ourselves is what will allow us to ride the wave and meet each one another as the truth of who we are on the other side of this horrible experience.

When we take a real look at our lives we see that we have accumulated ideas and ways of being.  Some of them originated with us but most of them we inherited.  We adopted ideas and actions based on what was modeled to us when we were young.  We created adaptive ideas and ways of being that made sense to us.  The challenge of maturity is taking a look at our cache and determining which parts are useful and which parts are simply familiar.  There is nothing wrong with familiar it is just that it may no longer who we have grown into being.  When we reach into the cache of our minds we come up with the same patterns.  Learning to see the cache through the lens of our hearts is the gateway to an honest assessment of what we want to keep and what we want to delete or even transform.  Just like our web browsers of cache which makes it easy to pull up information, it can make it hard to create a new search or mode of networking.  Approaching our cache with heart gives us the capacity to appreciate the value it has provided so far and determine with courage if it continues to serve us as being the truth of who we are.

Being in a world full of technology we have become accustomed to a rapid rate of change.  Things seem to pivot from one thing to the next at the drop of a hat.  Working in the world of IT in Healthcare has created a barrage of change.  It is as though the doors are coming undone. Supporting those who are taking care of people on the front lines means being able to be flexible. Knowing what we are doing and why we are doing it has an impact but often we can’t wait to understand why to do what needs to be done. Understanding comes later.  Not having an awareness of the hinges upon which we are pivoting creates a sense of instability.  Healthcare historically hinges on sound research and data but in times like these, there is no time to gather it. It is easy in the midst of all that is going on with information coming from every angle no matter what industry one works in to feel like the doors are going to come off because there are no hinges.  Those are the moments when God calls upon us to get connected within.  If we can manage to remember that who we are hinges on the power of our hearts, we can ride the waves and take the pivots.  The doors of our being will not fall flat because what they are opening has such an uncertain reality if we are hinged to the truth of who we are as God knows us to be.  Following the path of the spirit is less about having the answers and knowing and more about simply knowing what our true self is hinged on. Our breath opens our awareness to our heart and we are more than halfway.  In moments when we forget to breathe our very being feels unhinged.

There is a fabulous song that will never fail to lift or change my mood, it is “Sway” sung by Rosemary Clooney.  The Latin flair, the horns, and the classiness of her voice amplify its appeal and it makes me want to move.  If music has the power to move us, what else has power over us to influence our behavior that we can’t see?  Music has so many layers beyond the hearing of it that it is hard to nail down exactly which part has enough sway to make us sway.  God invites us in all experiences to pause and notice how we are experiencing them, what meaning we are making out of them, and what they motivate us to think, feel or do.  We are in and around situations in which we pick elements based on our senses but below the surface are the things that sway us into movement.  Taking the time to get to know our own heart gives us a window into what sways us to action or inaction.  Our breath is also an indicator of what has sway over us.  Learning to connect with our hearts through our breath is the gateway to being the one who has the most sway over ourselves.  So much of what we experience in life are things we cannot control.  In uncertain times like now, we feel the sway of what is happening outside of us with a deeper palpitation.  We can experience ourselves being swayed in one direction by this information or another by this person who said something entirely different.  Being able to slow down and connect with our hearts through our breath gives us access to our own internal sway.

Two essentials things I learned embarking on a path of recovery many years ago is 1) I often think I am the only one going through what I am going through and 2) I am never the only one going through what I am going through.  It seems as though our minds which make everything personal lead us to believe we are all alone.  Yes, things do affect us personally and we all have our particular lens through which we experience life. There is nothing inherently wrong about this.  The difficulty we experience however comes when we allow whatever it is to lead us into thinking we are separate because of it.  There are certain basic essential elements of being a human animal showing us over and over again as we go through life how similar we are.  We become deceived by what we see with our eyes.  We do not notice the collective experience because when we look we see the differences.  Most of the differences are on the surface and our brains take things at face value.  Our hearts are willing to open us up to what is beyond what we are seeing. Our hearts know what it is like to connect energetically even before we connect in physical proximity.  There is a lot of discussion about the importance of physical distance and isolation because of the world health crisis right now.  If we look with our eyes only we will not see what we are all collectively going through. If we can be feeling it, so can others.  If we are experiencing it, most likely so are others regardless of what our differences may be.  There are certain things in life which provide the opportunity to break apart the divides we have created with our ability to notice distinctions.  As terrible and uncertain as things are right now, maybe we can use it to remind us to stay connected through the lens of our hearts.  Maybe we can open ourselves up to what it looks like to remember we are part of the collective human race and are not as alone as we think we are at any given moment.