We had just finished healing harbor last night. I was feeling spiritually fulfilled that we had been able to provide healing to so many people. At the same time, I was physically exhausted, my body ached from the rain, my eyes itched from my allergies, and every cell in my being just wanted to crawl into bed. It had been a marvelous and enriching day and then one of my healing staff said something, which just made the whole day a little brighter. “I really like your hair like that.” All I could do was take a deep breath and say was “thank you.” The funny thing was that I have wanted to shave it all off again, but Zoe has been encouraging me to let it grow.
Read moreNo More Structural Violence
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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Lessons from a One Legged Duck
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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Making that Change
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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Humanity and Inhumanity
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.Read more
Z is for Zealous
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:
Read moreY is for You
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.
Read moreX is for Xenophobia
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.”
Read moreW is for Warrior
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.”[1] 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.
Read moreV is for Victim
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.
Read moreU is for Uncomfortable
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.
Read moreT is for Toxins
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.
Read moreS is for Stalking
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.
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