dailydatewithgod

I used to think life was all about the one. The one thing, the one time, the one idea, the one person, the one opportunity, the one moment, the one experience, the one look, the one action, the one story, the one modality, or the one philosophy.  Once I nailed down or encountered the one in any of the areas of my life I would be set.  I would either never have to have that conversation, do that thing, date another person, or believe anything else.  Somehow the one whatever would free me to be okay and not need anything again.  I am not sure what I thought would happen if I encountered the one.  It seemed to coincide with the lasts and perfects of life. Between the three of them, I am not sure what I thought would happen afterward.  None of them are sustainable as long as I still have breaths to breathe. I did not really think about sustainable.  Maybe it was too many cartoons with ever after in the end or TV shows with everything tidied up in a nice bow at the end of the show.  It matters little where this perspective came from, only that it is not doable for a whole lifetime.  I did not conceive that life was about learning yet I knew I loved to learn and have always been very curious.   I also did not get that life was about encountering an assortment of ideas, experiences, people, conversations, and ways of seeing the world.  Yes, there are moments of perfection, there are plenty of lasts, and time when we encounter the one thing.  Yet, something in our heart calls us to be open to the variety of life. It is the assortment of all these things (the ones, the perfects, and the lasts) which make up a life.  The deeper question is, who am I being during those ones, perfects, and lasts? Am I breathing through them and savoring them or looking ahead for the next one? Life’s endless variety is beauty made manifest through us. When I look back on my life I will be curious to see if I was open to the assortment life had to offer or if I passed things by because they were not the one I expected.

There is a relief when we get to call things out for what they are.  It takes too much effort and energy to always dance around subjects or set things up just so.  Perhaps it is because I am originally from NY where people are known for being straightforward, but I revel in the moments when I can call a spade a spade.  Maybe it is more of what Jesus meant when he said, the truth will set you free.  Even Shakespeare encouraged us to be true to ourselves.  Sometimes that requires us to be explicit.  These days the term is most often associated with sex acts or nudity being clearly depicted but that is only one element of it.  Even so, we can’t deny that we all have sex at some point and we are all naked under our clothes.  On my daily dates with God, I have learned how with compassion to be explicit with myself about myself.  I have certainly spent a large portion of my life living in denial and I trust I was for the length of time I needed to be.  After many years of my daily dates and building a trust that no matter who I am or what I may or may not have done, God does not love me any less, I am willing to be explicit with myself.  The power of my heart which is open and willing to learn does not run from seeing what is going on underneath.  Instead of falling for the illusion that what I am feeling or thinking is caused by someone or something outside of me, I am free to see the clear evidence of what my part is in the perspective I am holding.  It sounds devastating or in some cases shocking to be explicit with oneself but it is freeing.  If I can’t be explicit with me and learn to accept all of me, how can I expect it of anyone else?  Plus if I a not willing to be explicit with myself, I will never get to know the core truth of who I am and my capacity as a human being. The clarity to see what the courage of my heart can face, learn from, and engage with others comes from being explicit with me.

As human beings, it is in our nature to create meaning.  I am guessing there is some sort of fundamental purpose to our survival that comes from making meaning.  It explains how stories move us.  I often wonder if it is because meaning provides avenues for emotions.  It seems the longer I travel this path of life the more the role of emotions and their connective tissue seem to attribute to a sense of fullness when it comes to lived experience.  Maybe it is the e-motion, energy in motion aspect.  The meaning seems to provide a portal through which emotions can be channeled.  I often feel like I need an excuse or a reason to be experiencing an emotion, especially an intense one.  Yet sometimes it really just is energy in motion.  It is as though the meaning we place on emotions has both hindered and contributed to our ability to allow energy to move through us.  There are benefits and detriments from all the deciphering we do.  It is not that deciphering is good or bad, but it helps to be aware that whatever deciphering we are doing, it is through our particular lens of life.  We understand, discover, and interpret the meaning of anything through our individual minds.  There are some agreed-upon decipherments but even those at some point were accepted by us individually.  We get frustrated when we cannot decipher the meaning because we do not know how we feel about it if we determine we do not know what it means.  The idea that we do not have a feeling associated with something is either admired or thought to be not human.  The deeper question is whether the deciphering is stemming from our minds, our hearts, or both.  Are we simply digesting the information and replaying it in our telling of it to others void of emotion or are we laying on the emotion to convey our interpretation?  Intent plays a role as well as who we see ourselves to be.  God invites us to wonder how our deciphering would adjust the stories of our lives if we involved the mind and the heart equally in the interpretation?  If something which is causing us pain and restriction were to be deciphered through a different person’s lens, would it still be painful and restrictive?  What can we discover about ourselves and those around us when we opt to broaden and deepen our deciphering of life? Sometimes the simplest prayer I can say in any given circumstance is, God, how are you deciphering this? It is just another way of asking God, to show me God’s lens of my life in the present moment.

 Who we are and what we do is based on how we see ourselves. Fine-tuning our lives is less about changing the behaviors and the actions and more about looking at what beliefs are driving them.  The beliefs we embody we took on from circumstances and those around us who taught us through their behaviors at a young age are what need some dispelling.  Most of those circumstances do not exist today.  We are not children anymore. It may be painful to look at the ideas about ourselves that we think we cannot be who we are without, but doing so with the courage of our heart is a way to alleviate the burden we carry.  We have gotten so used to being with parts of who we are as a result of our beliefs which were simply passed down to us without question.  These beliefs are cultural, familial, societal, and run through every area of our lives.  If we are living from it, it is a belief about who we are.  God invites us to be open to dispelling our beliefs about ourselves that do not work for us.  If dispelling them means I can be at peace with who I am, I will walk through fire.  When I was deep in the throws of self-hatred and addiction, I had no clue that I could question what I thought about myself, let alone dispel them.  I was addicted to my thinking about me. On my daily dates with God, step by step I get the chance to stop, breathe and look at all sides of each of the ideas about myself and the world.  I get to ask if they work for me.  I have the opportunity to invite my heart to show me what it takes to dispel these ideas so I can make room for the truth of who I am at my core to emerge.  Dispelling beliefs about anything sounds messy and sometimes it is, but how much is freedom worth to you?

We do not often reflect on how useful our legs and back are.  That is until they stop functioning the way we have become accustomed. Together they provide us the opportunity to move and be in the world without bumping into others all the time.  Our legs move us forward and back and our back allows us to stand upright and see where we are going.  Our backs also provide the support we need to hold our space when we have moved or need to stay still.  The kind of backing design in our biological structure mirrors the kind of emotional backing we need for our hearts to grow and be open.  Just think of how one way we signify physically when we lack support.  We curve our shoulders as though to protect our hearts.  When we are exhausted emotionally or physically we slouch and do not stand upright with a strong back and open heart.  We can blame it on the lack of support from others.  But how much of the backing we need comes from within us?   When was the last time we acknowledged ourselves for showing up for our own lives?  Regardless of whether others approve can we provide our own backing?  Are we willing to trust the courage of our hearts to withstand the troubles and trials we will experience as we walk through life?  Have we taken time to know the depths of our own heart and its capacities? Do we see our hearts as backing us?  Or do we imagine ourselves as faint of heart and always in need of backing from others?  It is not to say that we will not experience backing from others, but knowing how to access it within us will cause us to stand tall and keep our hearts open.  We can allow our internal backing to convey the message of our strength of character and courage through the physical demonstration.  There are times when I want to slouch over and protect my heart.  I would swear there were times when I could not find an ounce of courage anywhere within my own heart.  God has taught me to start with my breath.  By physically opening myself up to the spirit (respiration) I can call upon the backing to connect to the courage within myself.  It may bring up feelings of everything but that which will back me, but then I am at a place to start.  Until I meet myself and my heart where I am, I cannot provide the backing I need at the moment I am in.

We fundamentally understand the ideas that many things originate or grow from beneath the surface.  We get that when we are looking at something above ground there is often a foundation below it when it comes to a building or looking at a plant. It does not just appear above ground.  Why is it when it comes to human beings we assume we are dealing with everything about them based on what we see and hear?  How is it we take people at surface value?  We are amazed when we grow closer to people or take the time to get to know someone that there are many elements underneath what is presented.  We are even surprised when we recognize within ourselves how much is underneath our thinking, actions, and patterns.  If we are interested in changing any element in our lives we will not get very far at making consequential change until we start looking at what is underneath what we think is happening in our lives.  It can be scary if we have been told to sweep things under the rug or spent a lot of time growing up trying to hide elements of our lives from others.  It seems counterintuitive to go underneath whatever the behavior, thinking, or habits are showing up in our lives.  God invites us to embrace the courage of our hearts which sees with the light of love into the potentially darker space underneath ourselves.  Our heart has the capacity and the courage to do this because it is in full knowledge of the light within the underneath places.

So much of the language we use in our own minds is rather mindless.  We do not pay attention to the dialogue or rather monologue running in our heads.  It seems to be motored by necessity.  No wonder people balk at the idea of quieting their minds or think it is impossible.  From my daily dates with God, I have learned the way to quiet my mind starts with paying attention to the monologue.  One of the things I noticed early on and I still catch is the use of the word must.  It is in there a lot. It is as though something inside of me feels compelled by many things.  Learning not to judge the musts enables me to peek behind them to see what is motivating them.  There is often a push for some sort of perfectionist ideal which comes from someone or something else which my mind determined will keep me safe from criticism and abandonment.   In the end, that is usually what these musts are about: keeping me safe so I can survive. With the opportunity to see them for what they are I can invite the perspective of my heart in. God gives me the space on our dates to explore the musts and shows me how to see them through the eyes of my heart.  My heart itself has no musts, it simply knows that at this moment I am alive and have all the love I need within me.  When I invite this perspective to my mind, the pressure of the musts dies down and I soften.

We all have different styles of relating to others.  There are common factors within those different styles but it is easy to categorize them as friendly, harsh, abrupt, fearful, forceful, with or without energy, or gentle to name a few.  Our approaches to other people and ideas do a lot to shape how we perceive the response to our approach.  We like to take things as they are and pretend we have no impact on what comes back at us, but that is simply not true.  Our mindset and heart-set set the course of our approaches and play a role in our perception of what we are approaching.  The kinds of approaches are widely varied, but we tend to get comfortable with some more than others.  They become our default approaches.  We also often alter which approach we use depending on the environment, people, or various preconceived notions we have about what we are approaching.  Without consciously intending to we go into anything with an approach based on what we think or feel something or someone is going to be like.  We can do our best to consciously let go of any preconceptions but often there are preconceptions we are not even aware of that are so ingrained we do not realize they are anchoring our approach style.  What we learn becomes directly impacted by our approach.  It is not so much about getting rid of our approaches but becoming aware of them.  The degree to which we keep them present in mind and know which approaches will most likely create a non-desired outcome will determine how effective we are at trying a different approach.  We think we know that when our mom or friend speaks about a particular subject upon which we disagree with them we will want to approach them convincingly so they can see the error of their ways.  If we check in with ourselves and pay attention to what approach our heart would take it might be to simply listen with curiosity for the first time as though we had never heard them speak about it before.  By changing our approach we might learn something.  The something we might learn may be about the topic or our mom.  In the time I have spent on my daily dates with God I notice that my heart’s approach is more inclined towards curiosity and connection, whereas my mind’s approach is inclined towards insistence upon sharing my perspective and making my point.  They are both valid but being aware of them I can determine based on what I want to get out of an interaction, which approaches will best serve that purpose at the moment.

We are used to seeing tags on our clothing.  The little piece of fabric provides all kinds of useful information. It informs us of what we are dealing with. The tag tells you what the materials comprise the article, the size, how to care for it, and what to avoid doing enabling you to get the most optimal use out of it, and where it was made.  In most cases, we read the tag once and then cut it off and throw it away. We glance at it, categorize it with others that are similar and wear it.  Seldom do we stop to reflect on who was involved in the making of it from the designer to the person who put the label on the clothing. I have often wondered if it would be helpful for people to have tags.  We certainly do a lot of labeling of each other without having any information.  It would helpful to have a label of correct information to verify our ideas.  How much more care would we have towards other people if we knew what they were made of, where they come from, how to best take care of them and so on. I know it sounds a lot like how we treat our animals but often we do a better job in how we take care of our animals than our fellow human beings. What kind of tags do we give ourselves?  What words or turns of phrase do we say without much thought when describing ourselves.  What kind of tag does that provide those around us so they know how to take care of us? Given that we are formed over time and we develop an outside appearance and an inner reality, what would a true tag tell the world about who we are?  Just like some clothing, it is not what it seems.  God invites us to notice what tags we are wearing that we have placed on ourselves, were given to us by others and may or may not be applicable any longer.   By pausing to notice our self-made tags given we don’t actually have physical ones, we get an idea of what we think and feel about ourselves.  Our own tags show the world where we come from, what we are made of, and how to care for us.  What do you want your tag to say?

Sometimes in a world of variability, it is hard to know what we can count on.  One of the beautiful elements of life is its variety and the opportunity for choice.  It is a privilege to be able to make a choice from so many options.  The greater question is, how do we choose among the staunch elements of our lives?   How do we make staunch choices which align with what we desire in our hearts and in our minds? First, it helps to identify what areas of our lives we perceive as needing to be staunch. There are the elements the world tells us must be staunch but the reality is everything changes. How in a world where everything changes do we find elements of staunchness?  On my daily dates with God, I have learned to turn the intensity of my attention from what the world is doing to what is happening within me.  Where can I find elements of staunchness in my own awareness?  How can I in my thoughts, feelings, and actions be a staunch presence for myself? How can I remember that no matter what happens or what changes, the presence of love which God created within me is always there?  I can try to deny it, hide it, run from it, or take it for granted but the moment I take a breath and open up the space around my heart I can reconnect.  It is the staunchest element of my existence because no matter what I try to do or think I succeed at doing, I cannot undo the work of God. How can I make choices from a place of remembering what is truly staunch in my life?