The last few days I have had some
time, maybe too much time, to think about all the injustice in our world and
the inhumane ways we treat each other. In the last few weeks, a number of
people have lost their lives due to urban violence, people have put off needed
surgeries because they cannot afford the deductibles, and this morning the
Supreme Court gutted the Voters Right Act, leaving the door open for
legislation, which would prohibit the rights of all Americans to vote. Each of these acts, as well as others, is
related in that they are all forms of structural violence.
One need not look further then the local television
station, newspaper, or internet provider for examples of physical, emotional,
and mental violence. The one form of violence not discussed is structural
violence.
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Several years ago, someone asked me how I came to this space
of compassion for humanity in my life. I remember the question as if it were
yesterday. At first, I was not sure how I was going to answer the question, and
then this simple word floated up from my heart – LIFE.
I once heard LIFE was an acronym for Love Is For Everyone. The
simplicity of that message resonated with me because it was part of what I have
learned my entire life. It was a valuable lesson I learned from my parents who
made room in their hearts for an infant who was looking for a home. My parents
believed that their love, as parents, was for me and for my two brothers who
arrived a few years later. Love is for everyone.
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Last
week, I ended by asking how we use our status in the world to create a more humane world.
How do we, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to the inhumanity in the
world? How do we try to avoid and deny responsibility for our place in creating
a more humane world for all of humanity?
We
have this tendency in our culture to blame people for not having achieved as
much or done as well as others. We see things at an individual level and rarely
look at the systemic forces that make it more difficult for some to achieve or
have access to what seems within the grasp of others. Rather than be willing to
critically look at these issues and the ways they are embedded within larger
institutions and systems of injustice and inequality, people tend to try to get
off the hook by denying and/or minimizing the situation or blaming the
situation on the “victim.”
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For
the last 26 weeks, I have been working my way through the alphabet one letter
at a time. It was not until I went to sit down and write again this week that I
realized there are no letters after Z. Blogging my way through the alphabet had
been challenging in some ways, especially towards the end of the alphabet,
however, since being done I realized I had become conditioned to focusing on words
associated with letters. This week, I moved back to the thoughts that have been
floating around in my brain.
As
I was working on my piece on humanity for this month’s newsletter, I found
myself frustrated because I wanted to talk about some of that which has
contributed to the inhumanity in the world. Over the next few weeks, I am going
to continue to reflect on humanity and inhumanity and ask we each reflect on
how we can be more humane in our lives with regard to the issues raised.
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I was sitting enjoying a cup of tea
excited about how I had made it through to the letter Y. I was entering the last
week, thinking just one more letter, and I will have made it through the entire
alphabet one week and one letter at a time, A through Z. I was thinking about words
that begin with the letter Z and after looking through my dictionary decided, Z
was going to be for Zealous. I closed my eyes, rolled over and went to sleep
prepared for a good night’s sleep and some amazing dreams.
Upon waking up in the morning, I was
greeted by an email from a friend with an early morning meandering on her word
for the day. You got it her word for the day was Zealous. I laughed and told
her I was going to use her meandering in my last reflection of the alphabet. This
is what she wrote:
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So much of
the suffering we experience in our lives comes because we can compare ourselves
to someone other then ourselves. You are you. I am me. Comparing myself to you
is like comparing apples to oranges. They are both wonderful in their own right
and just as they are. Each of them brings their own gifts to the table of
fruits. So starting today, honor yourself. Honor the person you are. Who you
know yourself to be may be different from who others know you to be and that is
ok. How others see you is about them. Honor yourself for who you are.
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We have
finally reached the last three letters of the alphabet, X, Y, and Z. there are
probably less words beginning with the letter X then any other letter in the
alphabet. However, the word, which seemed to grasp my attention this week, was
xenophobia: According to the Merriam Webster dictionary,
xenophobia is “the fear
and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.”
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If V is for Victim, then W is for Warrior and warriors are
not victims. When I first heard the word warrior I had this image of somebody
doing battle, at war against an enemy and it was not an image I wanted to
embrace. Warrior, as defined by Toltec Wisdom, is a Toltec who is “fighting for
freedom from her own domestication and social conditioning. She is free from
needing to link her self-worth to the beliefs, thoughts, and wishes of her
fellow human, free to be happy no matter what happens in life.”
Being a warrior, from this perspective is about embodying the five agreements,
detaching from those things, ideas, beliefs, and people who constrain our
happiness, obscure our clarity, and live as parasites in our mind, body, and
soul.
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Anybody who knows me knows I hate playing the victim, but I
cannot talk about my W word for next week, Warrior, without talking about the V
word for this week, Victim. In case, you were wondering, no I am not going to
tell you what X, Y, or Z are going to be. You will have to wait for those weeks
to come.
It is easy for most people to think about a situation or
experience where they wanted to blame someone for what happened to them or the
abuse they experienced. What we feel regarding those situations and experiences
is real. However, at the same time, choosing to stay in that space of reliving
the situation or experience can be self-abusive.
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Merriam and Webster’s dictionary
defines uncomfortable as “causing or feeling slight pain or physical discomfort.”
Some people when thinking about what makes them uncomfortable think about things
they wear. Things such as shoes may start feeling comfortable when first put on,
however by the end of the day, you can be so ready to slide your feet out of
them and slip into something far more comfortable. Sometimes after eating a filling
meal, the waistband on our clothes can make you wish you were wearing something
stretchable because it is beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. My female
friends will tell you that one of the most uncomfortable things they wear is a
bra and many cannot wait to get home and take that off as soon as possible.
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There are two sources of spiritual toxins in our lives:
internal and external. It is easy to understand how internal toxic cleanup is a
process. We can understand that stalking, as I wrote about last week, is a
process whereby our inner jaguar preys out the internal toxins, or parasites as
don Miguel Ruiz would refer to them, and ruthlessly remove them. We then go
back and seek to understand the roots of how that toxin came in and remove our
attachment to it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Nye, Naomi Shihah (1995). Words Under the
Words: Selected Poems, Portland,
OR: Far Corner Books.
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