Most of us when we hear the word, stalking think of someone who is constantly watching us, following or harassing us, making us feel afraid or unsafe. Those of you who know me well enough, know this is not the type of thing I generally blog about and you would be right. You also probably know that I tend to take words that have “negative” connotations to them and looking at them from a completely different perspective. So today, I want to talk about stalking as a healthy and transformative thing we can do for and to ourselves and not others.
Read moreR is for Rebuilding
This morning, I received an email from a long time friend who I have not spoken to for a long time. After looking briefly at our April newsletter said, “You have really evolved and come into your own. I am very proud of you. You have taken all the broken pieces in your life and have allowed the spirit of healing and love to make something unique and wonderful out of it.” I know that what she wrote came from a space of love. However, as I thought about it, I realized I had not made something beautiful out of the broken pieces. I had left that which was broken behind and begun to build a life for myself that was built on qualities that are life giving and left behind all that which I had allowed to become broken and the beliefs which contributed to that process got left behind.
Read moreQ is for Quiet
When I first began to think about the word Q very few things came to my mind. However, one of my readers suggested quiet. Ironically, I am sitting here unable to speak as my wife and I are both healing our way through viral laryngitis, which can take 1-3 weeks to run its course. The second thought that crossed my mind was a line from a poem I recently was blessed to hear. In this poem, she wrote about the “symphony of silence” which she heard while sitting in the garden. This made such perfect sense to me as so often some of my most powerful moments of enlightenment have come during those moments of silence, those quiet times where I am so in tune with the Spirit. In the midst of the quiet, we can hear the symphonic wisdom of our Spirit guides, the Infinite, and the cloud of witnesses surrounding us.
Read moreP is for Practice
This week, there were three amazing concepts offered as inspiration for my blog: patience, persistence, and purpose. As I had already blogged about patience a few months ago, I knew that would not be the one. However, as I began to think about the three words I came to realize that in their own way they were all related to practice. Practice requires us to be patient with ourselves. Practice requires us to be persistent as we strive to achieve our goal or change a behavior. Practice requires us to stay focused on the purpose we are trying to achieve.
Read moreO is for Opinion
I am always grateful to my readers who offer me inspiration as I work my way through this A to Z blogging challenge. My friend Jerry suggested I blog about opinions because everyone has one. His reason reminded me of what my wife Zoe says about opinions, which is actually a line from the 1988 movie The Dead Pool. “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one and everyone thinks everyone else’s stinks.”
The dictionary defines opinion as “a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty” and “a personal view, attitude, or appraisal." [1] Opinions are not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. They are simply what one personally believes. Some people change their opinion on something over time. However, sometimes opinions become so ingrained in our psyche that they are no longer an opinion, but a belief. If enough people hold the same opinion, it can evolve into a belief system.
Read moreN is for Negativity
The aspects of one’s spiritual life my readers suggest I blog on always intrigue me. The N words suggested for this week’s blog included negligence, negativity, naïve, and nonjudgmental. I was very tempted to write about being nonjudgmental as it is something I have been working on in my own life. It has assisted me with being impeccable with my thoughts and words. However, negativity seemed to beg me to look at it, especially as I strive to be intentional about being positive at all times and in all situations. The reality, however, is that there are memories from my past which do not always elicit the most positive of reactions. Perhaps it also intrigued me because we tend to, in this culture, think about negativity, or negative energy, as the polar opposite to positive attitude or energy. However, they are both parts of our lives and are interrelated and connected.
Read moreM is for Mal-intent
http://funologist.org/2010/12/03/new-words-mislike/
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog called I is for Impeccabilis. It was all about being impeccable with one’s words, thought, actions, and energy. The more we become impeccable in our lives, the less likely we are to practice mal-intent. Mal-intent is when we are not impeccable with our words. It is when we say or do something with the purpose of harming or hurting one’s self or others. Talking about mal-intent is not quite the same as talking about being impeccable.
Read moreL is for Ladders and Lent
A few weeks ago, a colleague posted the above picture on Facebook. It generated a thoughtful and insightful discussion of ladders. We talked about how the ladder is not just a place on which we ascend, but also a place on which sometimes we must descend. We each climb our spiritual ladder at our own pace. Rabbi Elimelech, a Hasidic mystic, taught that if a person wishes to rise higher in their spiritual journey, they must have mastered the character traits of their lower level. He taught that a wise person would first test the safety of the rungs of the ladder to ensure they are whole and intact, so that you could return to them at any point if need be. All too often, we focus on the ascension as positive and think of descending as negative. However, there are some very healthy reasons for returning to a lower rung on the ladder. For example, sometimes we just were not ready for the next rung. Sometimes we have something we need to let go of before we can move forward.
Read moreK is for Kindness
Some words are easier to use than explain. Kindness is one of them. I recognize an act of kindness when I am the recipient of one, but trying to explain it has been difficult. It is not so much what someone has done that makes it feel like kindness, but the context in which it happens. For example, when I was still able to drive and had my own car, friends would swing by and pick me up so we could go do something together, I never thought twice about them doing that. It was just something we did for each other. Now that I can no longer drive and I have lost my paratransit services, when my friends offer to come take me and my manual wheelchair so I can go somewhere with them, I experience the effects of their act of kindness. In a poem called Kindness by Naomi Shihah Nye,[1] she explains that kindness is an inherent part of who we are. We become kind and gain an understanding of kindness when we understand what it is to have been in that space of deep sorrow and loss.
[1] Nye, Naomi Shihah (1995). Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Portland, OR: Far Corner Books.
Read moreJ is for Jealousy
When I was in seminary, Dr. Gail Ricciuti, my homiletics professor, told me about a book by J Ruth Gendler called The Book of Qualities. It has since become one of my favorite books, in part because she has helped me to understand human qualities, such as jealousy, in new ways and enabled me to put a very different human face on them. She wrote this about jealousy,
Jealousy stands by the blue flame of the gas stove stirring obsession stew. In his mind he is tearing people limb from limb. He wears a shirt that is almost in style with it odd angular shapes and bright edges. He can be quite charming when he wants to be. He certainly has a flair for drama. After a while though, the roles jealousy takes begin to seem shallow, dishonest, repetitive. The more upset he feels, the more loudly he denies it. For a time I stopped giving parties because he wouldn’t come if I invited certain people. At that point, I couldn’t give a party without inviting him, and I was unwilling to censor my guest list for his sake. He is quite capable of showing up anywhere unexpected, uninvited, unwelcome.Read more
I is for Impeccabilis
Impeccabilis is Latin for impeccable which means not to sin. The first agreement in Toltec Wisdom is to “be impeccable with your word.” So what exactly does that mean? To be impeccable with one’s word is not just the verbal or spoken word, but also those that float through your mind. It means we are mindful of what we think about others, the universe, and ourselves.
Being impeccable with one’s word is not easy. Read moreH is for Heart
Most of us know that the heart is the organ, which pumps blood through the circulatory system. They are also a symbol of love, which you often find on Valentine’s Day cards and are the shape of candies that people give each other on that day, at least in the United States. However, the heart I have been thinking about today is not a physical heart or a material heart, but the spiritual state of being which enables love to flow through our mind, body, and soul. It is that state of being which enables love to flow in us and through our interactions with others.
Several years ago, a dear friend underwent open-heart surgery. She needed it to fix the disease, which had physically damaged her heart. Recently, I had a conversation with an acquaintance who suggested she needed open heart surgery because she had experienced so much wounding and hurt that she no longer trusted herself or others.
Read moreG is for Gratitude
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-archer/gifts-the-gratitude-exper_b_582207.html
“If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” – Meister Eckhart
Gratitude is more then an attitude, it is a way of being. It is a spiritual practice, which has been shown to have significant impacts on the quality of one’s life. Two psychologists, Michael McCollough of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, wrote an article about an experiment they conducted on gratitude and its impact on well-being. The study split several hundred people into three different groups and all of the participants were asked to keep daily diaries. The first group kept a diary of the events that occurred during the day without being told specifically to write about either good or bad things; the second group was told to record their unpleasant experiences; and the last group was instructed to make a daily list of things for which they were grateful. The results of the study indicated that daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy. In addition, those in the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, were more likely to help others, exercised more regularly, and made greater progress toward achieving personal goals.
Read moreF is for Fog
I was looking at the image on our website's homepage and the fog, which hovered over the water and the mountains, caught my attention. The fog seemed heavier in some spots then others. As a result, I could see the details in some areas more then others. It reminded me of when I was driving through fog and I could barely see what was ahead of me. However, as I moved through the fog in faith, a few feet at a time, I always reached my destination. Sometimes I had to slow down and focus on being mindful of where I was and what I could see, but I made it through.
Read moreE is for Empty
This might seem like a strange way to begin my first blog for this New Year, but empty for me is an awesome space to be at in my life. I am not talking about the stressful kind of empty like when you run out of gas on the highway because you did not realize your gas tank was empty. Nor am I talking about that space when you may feel like you are running on empty because you have no energy left in your life. Nor am I talking about how you feel like your life is empty of love, life, and meaning, although that too would be a great focus for a reflection. Rather, I am talking about this state of happiness and bliss, which comes when one is empty, and in need of nothing.
Read moreD is for Destiny
I woke up this morning wondering whether to reflect on destiny or devotion as they both resonated with my spirit for different reasons. However, the more I reflected on the word destiny, the more it drew me in and made me realize I was destined to write about destiny on the day I celebrate the 11 year anniversary of the woman I was destined to share my life with.
Talking about destiny is not as easy as it seems. One of the challenges I found was in how to define it. The definitions I found in dictionaries often times used destiny interchangeably with fate, as if they are the same thing. Fate is about all that was decided before we are incarnated. Destiny is about our participation in our life and how we respond to what arises in our life. Do we make the best of our lives regardless of what situations we encounter?
Read moreC is for Compassion
It is not as if I have not written about compassion before. I have done so a couple of times in Compassion and Courage’s Friend: Compassion. However, I felt inspired to reflect on this spiritual value again for two reasons: the holiday season and the recent tragedies globally involving the deaths of children and adults. The recent tragedies at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and at the Chenpeng Village Primary School in the Henan province of China[1] have begun conversations about weapon control and addressing mental health issues domestically and globally. These are the topics most frequently addressed by the media and on social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, surrounding these and similar tragic events in our world.
Read moreB is for belief
This week I was blessed with a number of B words to consider as inspiration for this week’s blog. Those included bread, body, blessings, bologna, and breathe. No offense to the one who recommended bologna, however, short of bringing back memories of fried bologna sandwiches from my childhood it left me short of inspiration. Although I did feel blessed when my mother would make them and I would take a deep breath between each bite and give thanks for what was then a very special treat in my life. The others left me with memories of topics I have blogged on recently, or at least in the last few years. For example, there were the blogs Breathe before speaking, Breath, Baked to Perfection, and To the love of my life.
What I believe about bread, body, blessings, bologna, or breathing is only true for me and only if I agree that it is true.
Read moreA is for the A’s
Lately, others have invited me to participate in some interesting blogging challenges. This week was no different. For the next 26 weeks, I will be blogging my way through the alphabet. When I asked some of our Facebook and Twitter followers for some A words as inspiration for this week’s blog, you offered me appreciation, awareness, agreements, attitude, asparagus, and anchovies, in no specific order. While the last two might seem a stretch in terms of this particular reflection, the more I thought about these letter words, the more I realize that they were, in their own unique way, related.
One of our followers suggested the word appreciation because she said she appreciated everything Inspiritual does for our readers, members, and followers. While we too appreciated the feedback, I realized that being able to be grateful and appreciate someone else’s actions, words, or behaviors was in part about awareness and attitude. If one is not have an attitude of gratitude about the blessings in one’s life, then one cannot appreciate the fullness and richness of those blessings.
Read moreBecoming a butterfly!
For the last several months, in our newsletter, I have been writing about the metamorphosis type transitions we undergo when we are faced with a major life transition. Metamorphosis is not easy, not simple, and the process is filled with challenges. Metamorphosis is the process a caterpillar undergoes, as it becomes a butterfly. Metamorphosis is not about being a caterpillar or a butterfly, but the journey from caterpillar to butterfly. Metamorphosis brings about a dramatic change in character or appearance of those who go through it. Metamorphosis is about evolution. It is about rebirth. It is about transformation. It is about conversion. It is about making corrections at any point in time in your life. It is about remolding, realigning, and readjusting to what the Divine is calling you to become next in your life. It is about the willingness to take quantum leaps in your life and make total changes, often times radical and sudden. Are you ready?
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