dailydatewithgod

We see cracks in the world. Cracks are on streets, in glass, on our skin, in doors and windows, in our communication, and our ideas.  Why is it we see them and know they are there but pretend they are not.  We present ideas as if they are full proof.  We close doors and windows thinking nothing gets through.  We communicate and can’t see how the other person did not understand us exactly.  Cracks exist and instead of pretending that they are a problem we can ignore, perhaps we can attend to them differently. Cracks are problems for which we do not have a solution. It is why we see them as some sort of crack in who we are as a person and therefore need to hide them.  Yet have you noticed how the cracks give a certain style and shape to things?  Cracks allow something to come through like some wind or a possibility we may have not known we needed.  If we embrace the cracks by looking at them through the lens of our heart we may find a reason to revel in them instead of wanting to sweep them under the rug.  Plus we all have them, so who are we really kidding by pretending?

In the western world for better or worse, we are obsessed with money.  Having it, not having it, who has more, when I am going to get my own, and so on. When we think of money in terms of it being an allowance it takes a different tone.  I do not mean the allowance one may have earned as a child but the act of allowing.  How much allowance to we give money?  How much allowance to make for our relationships?  What kind of allowance to give to ideas in our head that we have not vetted?  How much more do we make allowance for our thinking than our feeling?  Does it depend on the situation or do we generally value our thinking over our feelings?  When we look at how we allot our time we have some indication of what we make allowances for more than others.  None of this is a judgment, but it is powerful to take a look.  So often we go through life doing what we think we are supposed to be doing instead of stopping to notice if what we are doing or making allowances for in our lives resonates with the truth of who we are.  Allowance is much more than money.  It is how we choose to allocate our energy and our attention throughout the course of our lives.  The beauty is we can change our allowances as we move through life.  We can make adjustments as necessary.

So much of how we make decisions is based on guesses.  They make be educated or informed guesses but if we are honest with ourselves we make choices with a great deal of uncertainty.  We can never know what all the possible outcomes are of our decisions.  The best we can do is gauge the impact and power they may have. To awaken the greatest gauge when it comes to our decisions, we will want to involve as many levels and parts of ourselves as we can.  It starts with determining the gauge of the decision either by its possible impact, people involved, level of complexity, or measurement of success or failure. When we gauge our choices we can also look at how it impacts how we see ourselves behaving in or out of accordance with the truest part of ourselves.  The gauge can be about what the decision means about us or what we want it to mean about us.  Is our gauge based on the premise that we can be more of the truth of who we are in the world if we make this choice or that one?  Is our gauge guided by what other people will think of us?  Is the gauge about changing something about how we have been up until this point and now want to change direction?  Is the gauge measure from our mind, our heart, our spirit or all in conjunction with one another.  Will anyone who does not have the same gauge able to witness the impact of our decision and is that important to us?

There are times when our internal conversation is all about getting through an experience.  They are often defined as the in-between times we find ourselves in.   Those moments when our perspective is slated to the idea that where we are and what we are doing is not what we would choose. It could be sitting in traffic, being on hold with a call center, waiting for some information before we can make our next move, or standing in line at the grocery store. I read a statistic once that said we spend 3 years of our lives waiting in line.  I believe that was before Amazon, so maybe now it is only 2.5 years. 🙂 Often in these in-between moments, we are bracing ourselves in preparation for what might come next or how much longer something is going to take, or fear we are missing out on something else.  The bracing is instinctively based on a threat.  But the threats we have today are rarely life-altering. Have you ever stopped to wonder if in today’s world those moments in between when we are bracing could simply be a chance to catch our breath?  Maybe the purpose they serve is more than a chance to get stressed out mentally and physically.  Maybe our bracing is an automatic reaction based on our perspective, not on the actual fear or danger of something. Some of us are so familiar with bracing in any moment of discomfort we do it automatically. Discomfort which can derive from unfamiliarity can bring up fear and hence the bracing. These days we remedy the discomfort by occupying ourselves with our smartphones. That is one option.  Another option is to notice when we are bracing ourselves and use it as a prompting to take a deep breath.  We never know what might come into our awareness in those in-between moments if we let go of bracing.  Perhaps we will actually look at the person next to us in line at the store or in the car next to us and smile.  Maybe we can appreciate the courage of the call center person who is going to help us right after getting chewed out by the person previous to us who was bracing and took out his/her discomfort on them. Maybe if we pause and take a breath, let go of our bracing, when we do send a text or an email it will not be sent with the fear-bracing nature we are feeling.

For people like me who like to think things through I can get stuck in analysis paralysis.  I am not sure if a part of me just feels better knowing I have thought through everything before I make a decision or if it is a fear of getting it wrong.  It is probably both. Our thinking minds are a beautiful apparatus which we are given to grow and develop throughout our lifetime.  It takes conscious effort to engage ourselves deliberately instead of just being pulled in one direction or another. There is so much in life that calls for our attention it is easy to get into the mindset that we do not have a say in where it goes. My daily dates with God have taught me a thing or two about negotiating with my mind. By negotiating I do not mean further analysis.  I mean a baselines negotiation of where my attention will reside.  When I can pause and notice what I am focusing on, I can take a step back and negotiate its importance at the moment or at all.  We are drawn to the loud and the flashy by nature of their energy level.  This takes the form of people, media, and cell phones.  Knowing we can embody a level of self-preservation by negotiating within ourselves where we will spend our own time and energy is powerful.  It takes practice and a willingness to be uncomfortable with not always going with the easy way, but it serves the whole of ourselves when we choose to exercise our negotiating powers.  We think we need to negotiate with other things or people but no one forces our attention. Some things are tricky in how they capture it, but it is always our choice.  Negotiating whether to go along with it or change the course of our mind’s attention presents the opportunity to respond with our minds, our hearts, and our spirits when making a choice.

We think we want to know how it all turns out.  We think whatever we are facing in life will go easier if we just know how it will be when we are done going through it whatever experience we are having. These assurances are not offered by life.   The funny thing is the one end we do know how it turns out is the end of our life.  Life ends in death. Yet we do all kinds of things to avoid it, pretend its not there, stave off it’s coming, and so on. If we behave this way when it comes to the biggest known possible, what do we think we will do with other kinds of known endings?  Often when we are focused on the outcome of a particular desire, we disconnect from what it is we truly want.  We get tuned out from what is happening beneath the surface. We focus on the result not realizing what we want is not what we think we want.  What we desire is the feeling we think the thing or experience will generate.  The true desire beneath wanting to know how something will end is about wanting to feel safe and okay.  We desire to know whether or not we will survive what may seem at the moment to be unbearable.  We want to know we will be okay whether or not we succeed or fail at a particular task.  We want to know if we will have to redefine who we know ourselves to be based on how whatever it turns out. Our mind is trying to configure a way to get our hearts online.  What if we started with our hearts?  What if we connected to the deeper knowing within ourselves which contains the truth of who we are?  If we were to turn our focus from what it looks like on the outside to what is generated from within us then the desire for things to turn out a particular way leaves us.  It does not mean it is not okay to desire certain outcomes.  It means we will be doing ourselves a favor by using our mind’s desires as a wake-up call to initiate the feelings we are intending to generate. How tightly would we need to hold on to the outcome of a particular desire if we already possessed what was underneath the desire? God invites us to a cooperative experience between the desires of our minds and the desires of our hearts.  They are both looking for the same ending.   It is the ending that reminds us of what God already knows about who we truly are.

We have been created to be the face and body of love in this world.  We are designed to be an annex of the life force of love which God has threaded throughout all creation.  To claim our place as an extension of this life force we have to let go of thinking we are just our physical selves.  Maybe it’s just me, but it seems rather pointless to be here and then die all just to go through the motions.  There is value in experience but what value?  When I am honest with myself it is the moments when I can feel the energy of my heart come alive that I feel connected to something more.  The annex of energy coming from within me creates a whole other level of life.  A life where I am a part of a bigger picture.  It is in those annex moments when there is a purpose to my being.  It may last just a moment or for longer, but it opens up the possibility of options for what it means to live.  Being an annex of love resounds in me in a way that being a woman who has a job, lives in an apartment, dates men, is part of a family, makes money, has beautiful hair and a pretty smile does not.  I believe we are all more connected to each other than we look or act like we are.  When we allow ourselves to live and risk from the space of being an annex of love we know ourselves as God knows us.

In the corporate world, interpersonal skills are often couched under the term “soft skills.” I find it funny that the term soft and therefore less than is associated with the courageous and sovereign task of taking ownership of oneself and be conscious of the impact one makes on the world.  That somehow by buying into the illusion that who we are is only what we think and letting ourselves be run by our genes and our automatic programming is good because it makes us hard and tough.  For some strange reason being away from psychology and how our mind impacts more than the matter outside of us that we can touch and feel is seen as soft.  Somehow over time, the psychological and spiritual or non-physical dimensions of humanity split off into the realm of religion and non-scientific pursuits.  We created this idea of body versus mind versus spirit.  As if we can split ourselves up into these categories.  All of the world we see the consequences of the illusion that we are split into different selves.  We believe we can actually split up the part of us that thinks from the part of us that feels and forget that they originate from the same space.  We are born whole but quickly split ourselves and our lives into different categories and realms. We then decide some of the categories of our split nature are more important than others and we place emphasis on them. Is it any wonder that the world is full of people who are more interested in maintaining how they are split off from others than how we can connect with one another in our wholeness?  On my daily dates with God, I am invited into a space of silence with my whole self.  I have days when I feel split into pieces and have no idea how to get to wholeness.  Those are the moments God takes my hand and brings it to my heart.  I am guided back to my breath which engages my body, my mind, and my soul.  God knows me as whole and desires for all of us to see ourselves as a whole person connected to a whole world. Perhaps healing the splits in the world can start with our breath as well.

We take for granted that what we are experiencing is what is happening.  We rarely quantify it as one way to experience what is happening.  It is in our nature to think others experience things the way we do, why wouldn’t they?  We also assume that if others could just perceive it the way we do, all would be well in the world.  Any conversation with another person or hearing a series of eyewitness testimonies that contradict each other will wake us up to the illusion of our thinking this way.  It is not bad that we do this, we are not wrong for it.  It is just a matter of being aware of it so we do not fall for it.    Making a practice of awareness about the preciousness with which we hold our own perceptions as the truth will keep us from finding ourselves unable to fathom why other people experience things differently.  Furthermore, if we are not wrong because of it, then by extension, neither is someone else.  We can move from a place of not being able to fathom another’s perception, to a desire to fathom why they experience the way they do. An interest in the fathomable nature of another’s perspective is curiosity at work.  It is a stance that says we believe we can learn from another person.  A genuine interest in the fathomable nature of another’s perspective is at the heart of a conversation.  We do not engage with others because we want to convince them how their ideas are unfathomable.  We engage because we generally want to wrap our minds and hearts around why or how their perception is fathomable.

Something is mesmerizing occurs when we watch the animation. We see human lifelike qualities given to drawings.  We marvel at how such non-human characters come to life simply because we have created images and made them move as though they are alive. Literal animation is something we witness outside of ourselves but there is an animation happening within us as well.  It is not typically comprised of colorful characters who display human-like qualities.  Instead, it encompasses all the elements of our aliveness stemming from the energy within.  We are often not aware of it until we experience its absence.  When we are moved by this animation, we are present to the world without much thought or effort on our part. Some people experience it as being in alignment with something greater than themselves. Others describe it as being a flow state.  The inner animation seems to stem from a space inside of us that does require us to think it into being.  It is the expression of who we are in the moment.  Given our different states, this animation can express itself in all forms.  It is both positive and negative.  It is as though who we are experiencing ourselves to be at our core creates expression.  We can learn to tap into this animation by becoming aware of our inner states.  Energetically we animate where we are in the moment which can contradict what we are saying or doing to intentionally animate ourselves to the world.  In other words, are we being who we truly are or who we think we should be? When the two are in alignment there is little thought involved and it is powerful.   Some might describe it as a time when they are embodying a character. The question is whether or not the character is our true nature or one we are pretending to be. The animation is the aliveness of our being.