dailydatewithgod

When we connect with something familiar there is a sense of ease and comfort.  It is like we can relax and breathe and our minds do not have to work overtime to figure out where something fits.  Comfort and familiarity already have space in our being and why we experience discomfort when we begin to explore outside the known.  What often experienced as uncomfortable is simply unfamiliar.  Based on our survival history there are times when unfamiliar can be life-threatening but in the modern world, we do not come into contact with a possible life ending experience on a daily basis.  When we recognize something or someone we can operate from the known.  On a deeper level when we recognize something within our hearts there is a resonance guiding us in knowing we are moving in the right direction. We are able to affirm a deeper knowledge beyond what we comprehend in the mind.  We experience it when we see a long time friend.  It happens when we remember an experience of warmth and love. We know it when we turn our minds in gratitude for what is.  We savor it when we are able to be fully present in the moment we are in.  Recognizing allows us to find our peace.  Our hearts recognition allows us to move through the discomfort of our minds and be with whatever outside experiences without judgment or criticism about how we should be somewhere else or doing something else.  When our heart is recognizing itself we are at peace with ourselves and we are capable of being with whatever unfamiliar or discomfort may exist.

We have so many questions about everything.  We want answers about everything. At our heart, we are all learners who desire to wish and grow.  We cannot help ourselves when it comes to being in a world full of mysteries.  Sometimes life feels like a bunch of jigsaw puzzle pieces without a box for which we have no guide on how to fit them together.  So we start to look for similarities and patterns.  We pay attention to which shapes match up and slowly begin to piece together the fabric of our lives.  We wonder if the pieces have value within themselves or are only valuable in the big picture.  Are we guided by the patterns set up by the creator of the puzzle or what we are told need to go together?  Do the pieces of our heart and mind both play a vital role in the whole picture or are some more important than others?  How long does it take us to put enough of the pieces together to get a fuller understanding of who we are? When we have pieced together the central focus of the picture are the pieces outside of that portion important? How do we move forward in the moments when we feel more like a bunch of scattered pieces than a full picture?  Is the picture still there even if we haven’t put it together?  God sees and values all the pieces of who we are.  God knows there are days when we need a hand in putting the pieces together to see how they fit into the fullness of life.  How long before we work on the puzzle pieces before we see what God sees?

So much emphasis in this world is on the acceleration process.  How can we be more productive in a shorter amount of time?  How can something be done faster? What is needed to expedite the process?  We get used to the fast pace of commerce and technology and want to use the same modality to get through things that pop up as issues in our personal interactions. I like to call them bumps in the road. Things that slow us down and cause us to reflect. There was a movie once about this which enabled a man to use a remote control and click past the difficult experiences.  Unfortunately, the side effect was he eventually missed out on the good stuff too because his life moved as if on fast forward.  It wasn’t until it was too late he realized the cost of being able to expedite the negative experiences.  We label people and occurrences as negative or positive so quickly we miss out on the journey to explore what is behind what is on the surface.  It takes courage of heart to be willing to embark on an expedition and learn something about ourselves and the nature of life.  I can think of many times in my life where if given the chance I would have opted for expediting versus and expedition.  What I could not see at the time was the benefit I would gain from going on the journey of the expedition.  Each time whether in a personal or a job situation, going through it, as painful as it was at the time, I learned about the nature of my own heart.  I discovered my capacity to endure heartbreak and not be broken in half.  I got the chance to distinguish between my expectations of others and the reality of who they are.  The expeditions I resisted in my mind were the callings of the heart’s journey to see my own level of courage in action.  A willingness to take the expedition instead of expediting the process provided the confidence to face the next bump in the road.  And as long as we are still breathing, there will always be another bump.  Looking back I would not trade the expedition for the chance to expedite the journey and I will need to remember that for this next bump coming up.

It is hard to know how far we can extend ourselves until we try.  We may think our reach applies only within a particular area.  We think only if we are experts can we reach others with our ideas.  But those are only encompassing the scope of the mind.  Our hearts have a reach in a spectrum our minds cannot see.  We are not visibly aware of the energetic range scientists have detected extending from our hearts.  This means we are reaching those with our hearts energy beyond our physical reach. We know it when we come across someone and we acknowledge there is something about them making us either want to spend more or less time with them.  How far is the reach of our hearts?  If we see a homeless person on the street when we pull up to the stoplight, but do not have or want to give them money, will the reach of our hearts get to them if we hold a loving space for them for a minute?  If we extend the reach of our hearts ahead of us before entering the door to meet someone we love might they get the energy of our hearts before they even see us?  Might it affect our interaction?  We do not know until we try.  One thing I do know, underestimating the power of the reach of the heart is usually initiated by my mind, not by the creator of my heart.

When we have a sense of clarity in our minds we feel more at ease.  There is something satisfying to the mind about knowing what or for what purpose something is.  When an experience is pellucid we know what to do with it, how to interpret it and how to move forward. Unfortunately, most of life is not transparent.  In fact, we are simultaneously grateful and suspicious of transparent people and situations. Pellucidness makes it seem too easy. We like to complicate things.  We have a sense of satisfaction when we are able to figure out what is really going on.  Yet we do not like it when people or situations are not what they appear to be as though we are being played a fool.  It is a wonder we allow ourselves to make peace with reality with all the shenanigans we create in our minds.  Finding a space of pellucidness with our hearts is what can bring our mind into alignment.  If we are transparent within ourselves we at least know where we stand.  We know who we are and what we can and cannot do.  It is a lifetime of discovery to get to a space of peace with the truth of who we are but the more pellucid we can be, the more honest we can be, and the smoother the path.  It is not easy to face the parts of ourselves we do not like, yet the more we allow them to surface, the more we know from which we are operating.  The pellucidness of our dark side enables us to invite our heart to see it for what it really is, a side lacking a true sense of love and belonging.  This is why on my daily dates, God does not up and run when I make room for my darker sides.  God stays with me when I feel intense anger, when I am full of self-loathing, or just don’t think anything has changed.  God show me how not to abandon myself when my shadows become pellucid. God invites all of us to be pellucid with our shadows so we can show them the power of love.

I have experienced a lot of mixed messages about desire, wanting, yearning.  While it is an inherently human experience in Western culture it is often mixed in with the various messages about sexuality.  Yet what we hanker for is in all areas of our lives.  In learning to be human it is helpful to look at what we experience outside of the labels and judgments we have placed on various experiences.  Often what happens is before we allow ourselves to be with an idea, experience, or even person we preface it with the judgments and labels.  These are given to us by authority figures, family, society, media and so on.  We do not even realize we are doing it. The labels and judgments are so attached to whatever it is we cannot separate it.  When I have my daily dates with God, I learn to observe and be curious.  What might my hankers be telling me about what is in my heart or my head?  What messages are my hankers guiding me to learn about myself?  How might my hankers teach me more about love? Hankers are neither right or wrong as at their origin they are thoughts and feelings. There is a reason we are capable of having and feeling.  I am pretty sure God did not equip us with things that are not useful.  It is not about ridding ourselves of our hankers.  It is about being with them, seeing what is underneath them, and using them for the greater good of ourselves and others.

I am not someone who typically goes easy on herself.  I have been told more than once that I am harder on myself than others.  I have ideas as to where that comes from but at this point, it doesn’t even matter.  It is something I work on giving over to God all the time.  It is not inherently bad to make sure you are on top of things or not letting yourself get away with slacking in life, but taken to the extreme it is hard to breathe.  Not breathing is not being alive. Making room for some ease and self-compassion is one of the daily lessons God works with me on.  Looking for the cinches in my life which are evidence of my moving forward and living more from the heart are what I learn to keep my eyes on.  It is not about being without messiness or mistakes.  It is about seeing them and choosing to do differently next time.  I look at the situations in my life that I handle with so much ease they are a cinch and require very little thought.  The cinches where my connection to my heart is what is guiding me.  My mind sees it as a cinch because it does not require a lot of thought.  This does not necessarily mean one is not present, it is more about what energy one is present with.  When my heart opens and guides my vision, it is a cinch to remember what I like about someone.  When my heart is in the driver’s seat, it is a cinch to let it go when my ego is bruised by an interaction with someone who was not in his or her heart.  If I reflect at the end of day on the number of cinches of the heart I experienced, I can see how much I have opened and grown into being more of the truth of who I am.  Cinches are the little whispers of evidence in my life that there is a reason to continue to practice ease and compassion for myself and others.

It is a funny thing when we begin to differentiate between what we have inherited and what we have newly adopted in our lives.  Physically we know the difference between an inherited heirloom and a brand new item given as a gift from a family member.  We may look at the heirloom and find nothing of value in it other than the matter of it being passed down generation after generation.  It is old, worn, out-dated and falling apart.  But we hold on to it because it is an heirloom.  Usually, it is seen as something with great value but again that is contextual.  Some heirlooms we readily agree with their value.  We see how they are valuable in today’s world, how we can still make use of them, acknowledge how they represent something of more than physical value to our family, and so on.  Do we have the same discernment when it comes to our ideas and beliefs?  Are we able to distinguish between present day gifts and heirlooms of thinking?  How readily do we operate with the ideas and beliefs that are considered precious by our ancestor’s but do not apply today?  Much like the story of the ham of which there are many variations.  Zig Ziglar’s is one:

It feels safe to operate within boundaries.  We like lines on the road, signs which tell us which direction to go, and consequences for not following or understanding them.  The difficulty these days is there are so many guides we are given in so many areas of life, it is hard to know which, if any, to follow.  How do I know which guidance will get me where I am supposed to or want to go?  How will I know as I follow a particular guide that it is moving me forward instead of backwards?  We look to people, ideas, institutions, and beliefs to be the guides in our lives.  Surely, one of those must have the answer for us.  If not, maybe the stars can be our guides.  Why do things seem to work for others when they follow a particular guide and not for me?  We search so much outside of ourselves to find the answers we are seeking.  It seems only rational on some level, that someone or something else knows how to guide us.  God is calling on us to pause for a minute.  Stop once in a while and check in with ourselves.  Is the guidance we are receiving for us or the people who are giving it?  What is the purpose of the guidance?  Does it correlate with the guide we have within ourselves?  Being in recovery and spiritual circles one often hears the question, how do I know I am doing God’s will?  I have found I can’t completely say for certain.  I am not sure I am supposed to be able to know exactly how God is guiding me from moment to moment.  What I can do is show up. What I can do is move in the direction that most seems to resonate with the power within my heart.  We are all gifted with the connection to all of creation and life itself within us.  Our first task is to get to know it.  To get to know the truth of the guide within us.  Many of us spent a lot of time pilling ideas, people, wounds, and unloving experiences on top of the truth of our hearts.  We need to show up, look at the build-up and trust that beneath it is the guide we want and need to connect with.

One of the super powers we forget to use more often is noticing. Not just seeing, but noticing.  Looking past what is obvious and pay close attention to what is happening at any given moment.  Noticing heightens our observation level allowing us to take in a full picture and experience the moment outside our defaulted boundaries.  Within noticing we are able to pick up on distinctions.  As we hone our skill of noticing we can make the distinction between what is happening and any meaning we are attaching to it. Our reaction to an experience comes from the distinction of what we are making something mean.  What is happening is just what is happening.  What we are noticing, is what we are noticing.  None of it has any meaning. Practicing this allows us to pick up on the pattern of distinctions we make in our meaning.  It is easy to not pick up on the distinction of what we are making something mean and just assume how we are experiencing something is exactly what it is but we lose out.  Our distinctions of meaning give us an indication of what we are called to play with in this life.  If I stop to notice, I pick up on how when one coworker provides an update on her project, I make the distinction that she is speaking defensively.  I can stop and look at why I label her language as defensive on her use of words versus another coworkers update.  Do I make the same distinction when reading her emails?  Do I make the same distinction with others but only on this particular project or all projects?  We find we can question our distinctions to provide indications of how we are thinking and feeling about a particular person or experience.  Stopping to notice these internal distinctions enables us to respond versus reacting to what we are noticing.