dailydatewithgod

With so much swarming around inside our heads and the constant chatter is amazing that we can concentrate and string together coherent thoughts.  The miraculous nature of all it means to be a human being and show up in the world is no small feat.  Getting to know our own machinery gives us insights into how we are being and behaving in the world so we can connect our intentions to it.  I remember early on in recovery I was required to do an inventory of all my resentments and fears-real or imagined.  The first thing I discovered rather quickly and a certain level of hilarity was how I had behaved over and over again in a similar fashion expecting a different result. I believe that is the definition of insanity.  The next thing I encountered was the degree to which many of the things I had held on to over the years were not real.  Especially when it came to my fears.  So many of them never come to fruition.  Most of them are just notions in my head that I give power and attention to which ironically makes them bigger and more fearful instead of dispelling them.  In the process of getting rid of the inventory I created, I shared with a sponsor all my silly notions with some embarrassment. However, it was a powerful experience to get them out of my head.  I learned that notions can go from being the whisper of a feather in my ear to a boulder on my shoulder if I let them build.  I saw that I did not need to carry them around if I started admitting them.  Not always to another person but sometimes on paper and always to God.  Sometimes our daily dates start with me laying out my notions before I am ready to be open to what God’s ideas are.  If I do not do that I attempt to layer God’s perspective on top of my notions.  If I have been carrying the notion around for a long time it tends to stick and by mere repetition be front of mind.  The replay of notions in my mind closes off my heart to hear God’s insight.  Its’ not even about whether the notions are good or bad.  It is about naming them, claiming them, and choosing to hold on and make use of or dump them.  It’s about seeing the gift they are whether we resonate with them in our hearts or entertain them in our minds.

Upon getting to know ourselves we will invariably uncover things we do not like about ourselves.  Often this comes through interaction with others.  We become aware because of their reaction that something we do or say is not met with the same level of understanding we have for where we are coming from or what our intention is.  On one level, it is important to recognize how our behavior is impacting others.  On another level, we will go crazy if we attempt to adjust ourselves based on the varied reaction of others. Given the multitude of factors that can fuel another person’s reaction, it can be helpful to notice a pattern.  In recovery, one of my early mentors would always say to me, “If you’re okay with it, they’ll be okay with it.”  She was not talking about intentionally trying to hurt someone or be careless.  She was speaking to the idea that I need to have a centering within myself.  Most of the time when I am worried about what other people think of me and how I am being, it is an indication that I have not come to a place of recognition and acceptance of myself.  The reality is people are not thinking about me.  My fears stem from what I really think about me.  Yet, if I have checked in with my understanding of God and am connected to the truth of who I am and accepted it, who I am being will be an extension of that.  Opting to pivot myself this way or that based on every different person I encounter means I lose connection with myself.  Even if there is a pattern in the way I am being received, God will continually invite me to connect to the truth of who I am at my core.  Only in the quiet space of my heart can I reconcile the truth of who I am with who I am being despite what ways I may be prompted to pivot by others.  It takes courage to look at ourselves. The purpose is to see more of how God sees us than we or anyone else does. Opting to pivot to the left or right based on the input from others will not take root unless we find a way to connect to the same truth within ourselves. God encourages us to pivot and embody the truth of who we are when we are connected to the love from which we were created.  If there is one thing I have learned on this journey it is that love doesn’t always look like I think love should look like.  I desire to pivot to the perspective of my highest self and with some self-compassion, I can recognize that my highest and best self is going to look different some days than others.

One of the fascinating things about children is their energetic enthusiasm for everything they experience.  This stems from the fact that usually what they are experiencing is new to them.  Life holds such novelty for them whether it is the toes of an infant or the sound of a fart for a three-year-old.  There is a fascination with finding more things that enable them to embody the novelty of life.  The curiosity propels them forward to search out more and more novelty.  Without being able to name it, the experience of novelty in their body, mind, and heart is invigorating and life-fueling. There was a moment that stands out in my mind to this day when I was in the throws of my food addiction. I remember musing when I stopped for an order at Burger King that something was gone.  I remembered back to how as a kid there was this excitement and I correlated it to a particular smell (a good one) of going to Burger King.  In the present moment, the smell was not there.  In the past, there had been a novelty because it was not an everyday thing.  It was my dad taking my sister and me for something fun to eat we couldn’t get at home. By the time I was knee-deep in my addiction it had long surpassed any kind of novelty or excitement. I was too busy using it as a vehicle towards a numbing and slow death. My experience may have been dramatic but as adults, we all lose touch with the novelty present at a young age.  The more known things and people are to us the more we take for granted the idea that they are known. If we are willing to pause and consider that there is novelty still present in all of those known elements, we can awaken our heart’s capacity to be in the unknown. There are many Saturdays and they happen every week but there will never be another Saturday like this one.  We may take a shower each day (and I hope you do) but we will not feel the hot water on our skin in exactly the same way.  The novelty is there if we allow our minds to let go of the known even for a moment and be in the present with our hearts. We can see the people in our lives with novelty, hear things with newness, and take in new information from an area we decided we already knew everything about.  Each of these elements teaches us something new about spreading the novelty into knowing the unknown about ourselves. Making room for novelty alters our perspective of life because it changes who we are being. Changing who we are being, changes what we see about our lives and those around us. Like the saying attributed to Anais Nin: “We do not see things as they, we see things as we are.”

I have found that most things happen in action and most of my worries or anxieties happen in thoughts. I learned in recovery the value of acting my way into right thinking versus the other way around.  As we come to know ourselves and our operating system we identify what fits and what doesn’t. Determining whether or not something fits happens when we try it on. The fittedness is identified through action.  It is true about clothes and about life.  I can look at something or someone.  I can read their labels.  I can see a similar idea but until I engage with the thing or person I do not know if they are a good fit for me.  We have all most likely had the experience of going by our eyes when it comes to clothing, trusting the label put on the clothes by someone else, or even picking something out because it is just like something we already own only to find out when we try it on, it doesn’t fit.  To live the truth of who we are and what fits for us is about embodiment. We can put all kinds of labels on ourselves or let others do it for us, but no label will ever give anyone the true sense of what it means to be in our presence.  Living is an action, not a thought. I can have all kinds of worry filled or anxious thoughts, but they live only inside my head. I can easily decide something is not for me simply because it is unknown to me, but all that does is keep me from acting out of fear. When it comes to assessing what is a fit for us, we are called to put into action the motion of trying things on The beauty of the action is after it happens I have a deeper knowing of who I am and what I am actually capable of.

In American culture, there is all this allure around vacations and getaways.  Around L.A. there is the lure of Las Vegas with the tag line, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” It is all based on the idea of needing space and respite from our everyday life.  I get it, it makes sense and it is important to have respite.  My quandary is what are all these vacations and getaways about if people come back feeling like they need respite to recover from their vacation?  Given how integrated we are with nature it is no surprise that we actually have moments of respite which are so inherent in us we do not recognize them or take them for granted.  The experiences of respite are so much a part of our day to day movements we overlook them. On the most basic level, our hearts invite us to moments of respite by prompting us to take a breath.  What happens when we seize that opportunity and deepen and or lengthen that breath?  What kind of unknown respite can we venture into when we play with breathing in different ways.  I have personally experienced the healing power of the breath to shift my perspective about any number of things.  Our breath is a tool for connecting to life in a new way.  God invites us to discover the unknown moments of respite open to us when we start with our breath.

How do we handle all the information and ideas that are being given to us from day-to-day? I am not talking about the ones we are already aware of as not connected to us.  I am talking about the ones which slip under the radar of awareness because we have already established them as acceptable. The acceptance may have happened before we could question their validity. How do we know if it is acceptable to us?  Do we simply take what our families, communities, and society as a whole have provided and hope it works out?  Do we even stop to notice if it resonates with us?  What if what we have been told is acceptable in our heads but is igniting a niggling of our hearts? Acceptable is an agreement.  Questioning an agreement requires us to use the moxie of our hearts to first take a deeper look at what is in there.  When we connect to what makes up our own heart we can assess the moxie needed to question what is happening outside of us.  We think it starts with questioning outside but God invites us to know our inner landscape.  Everything we receive from outside of us means nothing until we internalize it.  Getting to know the default filters we have in place gives us a greater understanding of what kind of moxie is needed to alter our perspective of the outside.  The moxie we see in those who externalize their questions and their protests is sexy and flashy.  The moxie needed to hold strong to the truth of who we are is more subtle.  Yet, the sovereignty demonstrated by someone who has found the moxie in their hearts is compelling.  It is the thing we cannot describe but sense in someone when they have it.  The beauty of connecting with our inner moxie is it grows and moves through us from our hearts into the rest of who we are physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and energetically.

At the outset, it does not make any sense that we would have agreements that are unknown to us.  By definition, the idea is you are aware and are choosing to agree with something or someone.  The agreements unknown to us are the subtle ones often masked as experiences and stories. They are the agreements we make as young children to make sense out of something no one can or does offer an explanation for.  We hear it in the silly reasons children give for why things work the way they do.  As adults, we do the same thing but by then it has become such a well worn or commonly acceptable story that we do not question it.  Only when those agreements break down to we begin to see their fallacy. We have not done something wrong by creating agreements.  They are a survival tool, but like any idea, as it is repeated it becomes a belief.  Many of the beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, what we are capable of, or even how things are supposed to go are based on agreements that have no relevance in the present moment. God invites us to pause and take a look at the agreements we are carrying in our minds.  I have uncovered agreements about my responsibility in situations, thinking I must be the problem, or that I am not enough, or I must be wrong if I see things differently. We are called to peek behind the curtain of the agreement and find out if it still resonates with our hearts today.  Many agreements I had were based on circumstances no longer present about who I am or what my role is in my family and in the world. When I became willing to look at them with curiosity and hold them in my heart, I noticed they do not resonate with who I have become and in fact, were never based on the truth of who I am.  There are many more I suspect which will come to light as I travel this path of growing in love and awareness of all that is.  I no longer fear that the knowledge of these agreements will make me unknown to myself. I believe it will open me to get to know myself and others the way God knows me.

We fall for the illusion that our physical presence is the most important and in some cases the only presence that matters. We place such high value on what we can see, touch, and hear that the elements of reality that are under the radar are not given as much value.  Yet all of us know what it is like after someone with a lot of energy exits a room.  We have been present with someone who is physically with us but is somewhere else in their mind or heart.  In the same way, we recognize how someone’s physical presence is no longer with us, there is an awareness of their energetic presence no longer being with us.  It makes me wonder what I leave in my wake when I leave someone, a room, or experience.  How much of my energy remains and for how long and to what degree are the other people with whom I was present are still affected by my wake? Just like watching the waves that come behind the back end of the boat as it is moving forward, what kind of wake do I leave and for how long?  Do I have good ripples or bad ripples?  It is dependent upon our frame of mind and heart when we occupy the spaces we are in.  If I want to leave a good wake, it helps to notice what I am present within an experience just before I leave.  Scientists have learned that the last thing we experience is what sticks in our minds about how we felt about it at the time.  Taking a closer look at my state of mind and heart as I am wrapping up an experience will have an impact on what I leave in my wake.

We tend to begrudge the idea and experience of discomfort.  We label unfamiliar as discomfort and belabor the growing pains that come more from the resistance to change than actual change.  Some of this is how we have survived the course of evolution and some of it is just habitual thinking.  Yet everyone who has ever found themselves in a growth phase with any level of awareness deeper than just the actual physical experience can tell you, it is those moments that we find out who we are and what we are made of. It is why we love the stories of heroes and the people who survive and thrive despite all evidence to the contrary.  It is why our heart sings with joy when we watch other people stand up after falling down, rebuild after having their house destroyed in a storm, or cheer when the underdog team wins the final game.  There is a place inside our hearts that contains the tenacity of hope.  It is there when we dare to take another deep breath after letting go of all the breath we had in us just a moment ago.  It is there with each heart pump compelling us to move forward no matter what terrible projections our mind’s conjure up of how it is all going to end badly.  This tenacity is not known to us until we find ourselves in a situation we do not think we can survive.  The mind is ready to give up but the heart keeps tenaciously pumping hope into our system.  It is why we feel the tinge of recognition pull on our heartstrings when we see it happen for other people.  God invites us to get to know this tenacity of hope which keeps us in the flow of life and ready to handle more with the courage of our hearts than our minds can imagine.

Our minds require energy to be present.  As a means of survival and preservation of energy, our brains do this marvelous thing of recording information and experiences.  This cuts down, in theory, our need to be fully present during an experience because we can use our already familiar resources based on the already obtained information.  It is an ingenious process but the downside is it makes us unaware of the constant fluctuation of life in familiar experiences, with familiar people, and familiar ideas.  Even if there is a similarity our system knows it does not need to be on as high awareness because most likely they already possessed energy and power we have will suffice.  The upside of this is we do not need to start from the beginning every time we encounter someone or something as if we were the main character in the movie Memento. Given the constant fluctuations of life, it is easy however, to miss out on how the people around us, our ideas, and various experiences are not what they once were.  We all recognize this phenomenon when we realize we notice changes in someone we have not seen in a while versus someone we see every day.  Our hearts call us into a pause each time we take a breath to make room for the fluctuations of life.  We have the opportunity at each breath to allow an awareness of whatever fluctuations are present to be made visible to us. Sometimes it is just easier or we are too worn out by life and all the other new things we are encoding to take the pause.  Is it any wonder we are a bit overwhelmed by the speed at which life is constantly changing with technology?  No wonder our brains are not interested in using much more than survival energy to see the persons we work or live with’s daily fluctuations. It could, however, come in handy to take our hearts up on the offer of the pause to see one person in our lives’ fluctuation, especially if the lens through which we currently see them has grown foggy and weary.