It’s a new day!

It is funny how the universe confirms things for you. I woke up the other morning with this song by Avalon in my heart, called “New Day.” Over the next two days, the conversations between friends and I, and friends and others were all about how today is a new day. The reality is that today is a new day and each moment is a new moment. Each second is a new second. As Alice Walker once wrote, “we are never the same river twice.” Each moment in our lives is a new moment and each day is a new day. The chorus to Avalon’s song says, It's a new day Oh, it's a new time And there's a new way I'm gonna live my life All the old has, passed away And the new has come Thank God, It's a brand new day
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Lighting the Divine Fire

A few weeks ago, I talked about Satyagraha and wrote about it in response to a question about what I believe. The reality is that the question I answered is not what I believe; it was about what I know. There is a difference between what I believe and what I know. I have been told many things in my life. Some which I have believed and some of which I have not. Sometimes I can believe that what you tell me is true for you. At the same time, I know it is not true for me. A few things got me thinking about the difference between belief and faith. One of them was a conversation I had with a friend of mine about my meeting with the Permanent Ordination Council when I was seeking ordination. One of the questions I was asked was about how I reconciled being a lesbian and being Christian. I told them that for me, it was not a question of reconciliation, but about faith
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Re-spect Yourself!

It is funny how things from different aspects of your life lead you to the same place in different ways. For example, I was looking at a friend’s facebook page and she had a link to Aretha Franklin singing respect. I was enjoying her sing this song and remembering when she first recorded it. While I could not remember any of the other lyrics, I could remember her singing RESPECT find out what it means to me. I have always thought of the word respect as it has been traditionally defined. I had been taught that when you hold someone in esteem or honor, then you are respecting him or her. Sometimes we can use the word to talk about how we show regard or consideration for someone’s rights. If I asked most people to define respect, my guess is that is how they would define or think about that term.
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Satyagraha

Recently, someone told me they had read something I had written a few years ago asking people to talk or write about what they believe. They said they had never read my what I believe statement. While I have written it out before, what I believe is ever evolving as I evolve. Over the course of my life, I have come to develop some fairly simple, but powerful beliefs that guide my life. What I believe has been influenced by what I learned while attending Hebrew School, growing up in a Jewish home, my study of scripture, and my readings. Probably most influential in my life has been the writings of a diversity of sacred texts, Ghandi, and don Miguel Ruiz.
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Growing Instructions

This past Saturday, June 18, 2011, I hosted a surprise gardening and garden party for Zoë. Those who came to help celebrate her 57th birthday each brought a plant to go in our new front yard in an attempt to give her the front yard of her dreams this year. While most of our friends gave her plants or gift certificates with which to buy plants, a few of our friends gave us seeds. One of the things I realized in the process is that each plant and package of seeds came with growing instructions. As I thought about these instructions, I came to realize they were not just about caring for the plants, but also instructions for spiritual growth and evolution. The first step was to plant your seeds. Nothing can grow if you do not plant it.
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Curb Appeal: The Soul – Part 2

I have never been much of a gardener. So learning from Billijo this past week has been an amazing blessing, I think for both of us. Watching her and asking her questions, I have come to realize the spiritual significance to gardening, working the dirt, and the secrets of gardening. It has been a journey that began when she first started, and has continued to reveal new secrets and spiritual lessons as the yard continues to be transformed. While I have realized that this is her gift to us, I have wanted to do what I could to be a part of it. Billijo got me involved by having me sit next to the wheelbarrow with a sifter over it. She would bring me these clumps of grass and dirt and my job was to sift off the dirt and remove that which was not good soil.
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Curb Appeal: The Soul

Zoë and I have lived in our home for about 6 years now. While we have slowly made changes to the inside of our home to make it feel more like us, our yard was another story. I have long felt like somebody should have nominated us for Curb Appeal: The Block. We definitely had the worst yard on the block. Now mind you nobody has said anything, but we knew. The original owners had had over planted and neglected the maintenance. We had continued that tradition and now things were dying because they were overcrowded. With neither of us being gardeners, we were not even sure what to do to enhance the curb appeal of our home.
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Grace in Community

Those of you who know me personally know that I should have stock in some tissue company because it takes so little to bring tears to my eyes. While there have been days in my life I have cried because I was angry and days I have cried because I was sad, the past year and a half or so, I have most cried for two reasons. One is when my body has been in pain, which fortunately has not been very often. The other, is that my cup is overflowing with experiencing the Creator’s love. One of the situations which always leaves me feeling humbled is when I am blessed with the experience of grace in community. It is that kind of moment like January 1, 2000. It seemed like that day everyone was in love with each other.
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Removing the ASS before U and ME.

Growing up I remember hearing my parents and other adults say “When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME.” For the last 18 months, I have been working on no longer making assumptions in my life. I am not even sure that in the beginning I realized how often I made assumptions. I knew that I like so many people made assumptions. However, it was not until I consciously began to work on not making them that I realized how often I did. I began to realize how many times I made assumptions about the little things in people’s lives. It really hit me one day when I was having coffee with a few of my students and they began talking about a couple at a table near us and creating this whole life about them just by looking at them.
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Living in the How

Last week, I wrote about the importance of leaning in. This Sunday, I was blessed with an opportunity to practice what I teach. It was one of those times, and maybe you have been there, where you are invited to an event you really do not want to go to. It is not that you cannot physically go. It is that you do not want to go. As a friend of mine said, it was one of those awkward times like when you are invited to your ex’s wedding. You are happy they have moved on and found someone who makes them happy, you wish them well, but you do not need to go to the wedding. It was that kind of thing. So this Sunday morning was one of those moments for me. I knew the minute I saw the invitation I was not going to go.
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Which way are you leaning?

Several decades ago, a 5-year-old boy named Mikey taught me a very important lesson about emotions. It is one of those lessons, which keeps being brought back to me. I have been reminded of it a number of books that I have read and then again today as I was reading my selection in Denise Linn’s Soul Coaching. The lesson is to lean into the experience, not lean away from it. See all too often when we are going through a challenging time, or a situation that is difficult or causing us discomfort, we tend to lean away from our feelings and emotions. We try to move away from what we are feeling. We try to move away from the pain, the anger, the fear, the discomfort. So rather then feel these emotions, we try to move away from them into a place of constructed neutrality and calm
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Being a Sacred Observer

Yesterday, I was challenged to do something I had not done in a while and that was to be mindful of what I said and what I thought. Denise Linn calls this being a sacred observer. Miguel don Ruiz uses a similar exercise in which he has you write down all those thoughts that float through your head. So often, we are not aware of the language of our thoughts. Even when we do not speak language that is disempowering, we may think it. It is a humbling experience when you observe your speech and thought patterns. One of the things I wrote about in my process journal about being a sacred observer yesterday was how even others conversations can bring up disempowering and negative thoughts in our minds, especially when they trigger unhealed wounds.
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Why I love Pat Parker

Pat Parker was an African American lesbian poet who died in 1989. While Pat and I never met, her poetry has been this powerful influence in my life. like so many poets she wrote about the world around her. However, it was through her poetry that she found the place to give voice to her life and her realities as an African American lesbian feminist. She wrote about things that were personal and political. She wrote truth in her poems in a way that touched peoples lives and continues to touch people’s lives today. Perhaps the poem that has made the most significant impact on my life is called “For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend.” While I can appreciate the entire poem, it is the first two lines that continue to resonate with me today and I can continue to use in my teaching. She wrote: “the first thing you do is to forget that i'm Black. Second, you must never forget that i'm Black.”
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Your Tire Is On How?

One of the things I suggest people do is to maintain a gratitude journal. It is something I do on a daily basis. I write down five things every day that I am grateful for and they can not be the same things I was grateful for the day before. Sometimes I write them down throughout the day as I find myself being grateful and other times, like today, they come at the end of the day when I have time to just sit and reflect. Usually, they are things that I am aware of. Things that I know the Creator has done in my life. Like a friend who calls just when you need to hear their voice or the way you can feel loved when your cat curls up on your shoulder and purrs. But sometimes, I am reminded of how the Creator is working in my life when I am not even aware of it
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If God is love, then _____

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. One of the things I learned growing up in the temple was that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s understandings are not our understandings. Lately, I have been wondering if we put God in a box because it is what we have been taught to think about God. I guess what brought me to this place was the scripture from 1 John 4:8 that says God is love. ok, so what is love and how does it shape how I think about God. A while back I wrote a piece called Mastering Love. One of the things I wrote about there was that love has no obligations. As I have learned to embody love without obligations in my life, I have come to realize that what I do or do not do is out of my free will; it is because I want to do whatever I have done or said. When I have felt pressured or obligated to do something for someone, it has come from a sense of fear of what might happen or what others might think if I do not do X. In thinking about this in terms of God who is love, I have come to the understanding that God is not obligated to do anything for any of us. If God does anything for us in our lives, it is because God wants to, not because God has to. What I do in my life for God is because I want to, not because I have to.
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Love thyself!

It really doesn’t matter what faith tradition you explore. When I look across ancient wisdom writings and contemporary writings on spirituality, I find myself coming across some very basic and simple teachings about loving one’s self. Over the last few years, I have been making notes about things I have learned to do and am working on doing in my life to bring myself to that place of unconditional self-love. The other day, I started organizing some of my notes, part of my spring cleaning ritual, and realized I had a whole list of lessons I had learned about how to be more loving of myself. I could probably write a whole book on this, so I thought I would share a few of the highlights J
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No More Casting Calls

Each of us in our own ways, consciously or unconsciously, has voluntarily played roles in our lives. Some of us have gotten so good at playing our roles that we no longer hear the Infinite Presence calling us to step out of the roles the world has cast us in, and step into the role of the true and authentic self. Some of us have chosen to conform to this world, not be transformed in it. Some of us have been performing our roles for so long; we no longer realize we are still in character. It is as though in many respects the world has tamed us, domesticated us, and taught us how to conform to the ways of the world. We do so many things without even thinking about them, just because that is how we have been taught to do them
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Clearing out your inventory!

Teaching courses, such as the one I do at SUNY Brockport, means that I have the opportunity to interact with people from a wide diversity of belief systems. It is always amazing to me how a group of people can have such diverse perspectives and beliefs on everything. One of the things we have been discussing all semester is how beliefs and knowledge are socially constructed and so deeply embedded in our culture and our way of life that rarely do we think about or acknowledge that these are belief systems or that there are other ways of being in the world. One of the things a few of my students were discussing recently were those things they lost and unlearned as they have grown up. Don Miguel Ruiz talks about this as the domestication of the planet in his book The Four Agreements.
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Want to lose weight?

There is hardly a person I talk to these days who does not think about their weight. How can you not? On the one hand, we have all these food shows (which I love btw) that tell you to stay hungry and keep cooking and diet commercials that try to sell you THE diet to follow to maintain that perfect figure while they even cook for you. As a result the diet industry in our country is growing at an exponential rate even in what we have been told is a struggling economy. Yet, how many of us are carrying around excess emotional and spiritual poundage and do not ever consider taking some of that weight off.
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