Tag Archives: self-discovery

Karma

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Recently, I heard a teacher say that to try and convince someone else of what you want for them, no matter how true or noble, is to take on their karma. Those words stopped me in my tracks, and left me feeling like I had stepped on a garden rake and gotten whacked in the face.

I began to think about all the times I had tried to get a person in my life to see something, or to want something. All the times I had tried to convince someone of something. Anything. All the times I had thought about how this person or that person, or the world in general, should do things differently. Do things the way I thought they should be done. And it didn’t matter one bit that I could justify to you that I only wanted what was best for them, when the truth is, I couldn’t bear what another was doing, for one reason or another.

Frankly, it was overwhelming to imagine taking on the karma of dozens, hundreds, even thousands or millions. Imagining myself weighing in on what all these people should or should not do. Want or not want. Believe or not believe. Sometimes having said it outright, while at other times thinking it.

This is something we all do. All the time. If you doubt this, watch how often you try and get someone to see things as you do, or try and get them to take your suggestion about how they should live their life. And it doesn’t even have to be about the big moments. It can be as “small” as what they “should” do about a difficult co-worker or whether or not they should buy something.

Watch how often you listen to the news or look out into the world and believe that you know better about what another person or group should or should not be doing.

And then, imagine taking on all of that karma. All the baggage, known and unknown to you and them, that goes with why and how they act as they do. All the karma around how they got to where they are now. All of their hurts, disappointments and dysfunctions. All of their projections, anger, blindspots and expectations. All of their insanity, fears and sadness. Even all of their past lives. Everything they need to account for, now becomes yours. Whoa.

It is so incredibly tricky when it comes to how we relate to others. So challenging to be in relationship without making what others do or do not do be about us. About our need to have them act a certain way so we can feel safe, connected and valued.

If this resonates and you want to join me, start by watching yourself in conversation with others. Catch yourself trying to convince someone of something, anything. For this to work though, you will have to be very, very good to yourself; as in not judging or shaming yourself when you see what it is that you are up to.

And when you do notice what’s happening, ask yourself, Do I want to take on this person’s karma? Do I really want to be responsible for how things turn out for them? And when you find yourself in a dynamic where another gladly hands over their choices to you about what they should do, run.

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Meaning & Purpose

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I’m reading a book where the author has just finished describing a study where more than half of us feel the work we do has no meaning. No purpose. That many of us believe what we do has no real use. With this comes all kinds of things from depression to disease to a sense of despair and worthlessness. And with all of this comes greater levels of unhappiness, addiction and vulnerability to looking for meaning in all the wrong places. To being prey for ways of coming together with others that offer purpose through harm. Like the KKK and other hate groups, getting into dangerous social media challenges, or being part of social trends based on peer pressure and the narrative du jour.

Right down the road we have a neighbor who when we first moved out here knocked on our door and asked if it would be okay to pick up the apples on the side of the road by our home. He went on to tell us that the tree the apples came from, a Baldwin, was an heirloom and likely over 100 years old. He waxed poetic about this being the best tasting and cooking apple there was.

At the time, I had no appreciation for any of this. Not only was I in over my head due to the big move we had just made, it didn’t feel natural to me to consider eating food off the land I was living on. I indulged him in the moment, and forgot about it all pretty quickly after he left.

Cut to twenty years later when that same tree died, leaving me grief-stricken over the loss. Over the years, I had come to anticipate and cherish its bloom that only came every other year. It was the apple of my children’s childhood, and a precious offering we shared with others.

For many years my neighbor tried grafting so he could propagate offspring from this ancient tree. It never took. Then I didn’t hear from him for a handful of years until the day I got a letter in the mail. He wrote that he had found other Baldwins and had successfully grafted them onto root stock, and was wondering if my husband and I would be willing to plant some of these tress on our land.

Besides our answer being a resounding yes, when he came up to bring the trees, it almost felt like we were adopting a baby from him. Not only did he have very clear conditions and instructions for the trees, he was very concerned about where they would go to insure they had a chance to survive the modernization of our world. At one point in the conversation, he told my husband he believed this was his purpose in life: To protect and continue the survival of this great tree.

This man is an exemplar of what it means to live with meaning and purpose. His actions were never based on what he was going to get out of all his efforts. His only drive being to answer a deep call from within. He is a wonderful living demonstration of how unique the expression of meaning and purpose can be in a person’s life. And my relationship to him and what I gained points to the unknowable and uncontrivable ripple effects our actions have on others when we find what we truly care about and live it all the way through.

None of this looks like, or “measures up to,” the criteria of our modern world where we have come to believe that for your life to have meaning and purpose, it must be about you and what you get. That you must have a million followers, that your efforts must be splashy, and that you must be ridiculously paid for what you offer to the world.

(The book I referenced is called The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet)

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The Way Of The Visionary

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I am getting close to finishing an Energy Medicine training with The Four Winds Society, and while there has been so much I have learned, there have been a couple of teachings that have really stood out for me. One of which I would like to share here with you. That being, the power behind cultivating an orientation to Life that understands that we dream our world into being with what we think about, the quality of our emotions, and what it is that we repeat over and over again in our lives through what we say and do.

From the perspective of this tradition, dreaming the world into being is the way of the Visionary: The one who understands that the world is always showing us, always a reflection of, the quality and integrity of our internal states. Always mirroring to us the condition of our love and of our deepest intentions. As you can see, this has got nothing to do with what is “out there,” and everything to do with what is “in here.”

This is the opposite of the prevailing cultural attitudes and mandates that would say we have to go out there to make the changes we believe are necessary. The current paradigm would say we have to manage and control the behavior of others for us to feel safe. That we have to interfere with the ways of the natural world and other sovereign nations to make them come in line with our needs and ideologies. We can see this in the technologies being created to block the sun to avert climate disaster, the ways that we now believe we have a right to know other people’s health and medical choices so that we feel safe, along with all the ways that we interfere with other countries under the auspices of humanitarian involvement masking our less than agenda-free interests.

And while we would say that we must go outside of ourselves to fix, correct and change what we do not want, are afraid of, are not in line with our politics or are challenged by, is this the wisest course of action? Is it actually true that if we don’t do something “out there” that it will all fall into disarray? Or is this a mere projection out onto the world keeping us from dealing with what really needs to be dealt with? In other words, us, and the state of our own being.

With our focus on what needs to change “out there,” do we even know whether or not our actions are good and necessary ones? How could we even know the answer to this question if we are out of touch with our own inner workings around why we want what we want, or are afraid of what we are afraid of?

To have vision when it comes to what the world needs and would benefit from, is to first and foremost know yourself. What it is that makes you tick. What it is that you fear and fall victim to, and then project out onto the world at large. Basically, why it is that you do what you do, and want what you want. Why it is that you must have the world be a certain way.

If this make sense to you, try this: The next time you find yourself demanding that others, or the world at large, be a certain way, ask yourself, “Why do I need this to be so?” Repeat this question to yourself three times, giving yourself lots of space between each asking to feel into the answer. Let this question work on you in a deep way and watch how your first answer may be very different then your last one.

The world is in great need of visionaries at this time. Those of us clear enough and brave enough to recognize that everything we want in the world begins with a close and committed intimacy with our own thoughts, emotions, actions and beliefs. A dedicated and devoted practice to changing the one thing in life you actually have dominion over. Yourself.

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Retreat

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I am heading out for retreat on the day I am writing this, and it has got me thinking about a quote from Joseph Campbell. Years ago his words gave me permission to retreat; well before I could articulate what I was doing and why. The quote goes like this:

“This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

This is why I go away, and this is why I maintain a daily practice. Exactly because of what he wrote. The experience is not something you can read about, watch on Netflix or hear about from another. It is not always easy. It is not always popular. You run the risk of being labelled selfish or indulgent.

Most of all, you run the risk of discovering aspects of yourself that you may not want to know about. Qualities, thoughts and emotions that you have kept hidden from the world. Interestingly enough, at first it will seem like there are only dark things you keep hidden, but if you stick with it long enough, you come to see how you also hide your light, your gifts, your superpowers.

True retreat is not about distracting or indulging yourself. It is about one thing, and one thing only: Being with yourself through it all. Discovering the Truth of who and what you are. From this place, you are in a position to truly live. From this place, you are in a position to truly contribute.

Anything less is just a continuation of the same old, same old conditioning that has created the endless loop of suffering and misery we all struggle with. So why not take the chance of going off by yourself to see what there is to be discovered?

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The Myth of Being in Control

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Coming home on Sunday night from hiking with a friend, a day that was both awe-inspiring and grueling, I hit a bear on the dirt road to my house.

The bear shot out of the woods so fast and with so much focused momentum, I barely had time to hit the break just as I was hitting her. The sound was awful. Worse than the sound though, was the feeling of hitting the bear. Twice. I went back to check on her, but she was gone.

I felt like I had slammed into a wall head first after feeling so empowered by the day I had had. What was going on here? Was I driving too fast? Could I have dome something differently? How could this be happening after such an amazing day? What was the Universe trying to tell me?

I love the wildlife that lives all around me. More to the point, I look to them. I watch their comings and goings, and I am always alert to their messages. They are my inspiration and my teachers, and I had just hit one of my most revered guides.

I immediately went to wrong; as in this must have been my fault. I must be out of balance somehow. I must be in need of some lesson. But within seconds, I caught myself going to self-blame, set it aside, and opened up to see what else might be there.

Right away I had the knowing that even when we do not intend to cause harm, we do. It seems like it would be a hard pill to swallow, but in that moment, I was able to say Yes, I know that is true. There was such freedom in admitting just that. And while that was an incredible insight and shift, there was still more to come.

The next day in practice, as I contemplated what had happened, I got a strong message: There is so much in Life that is beyond your control. So while you would come up with all kinds of reasons for this and why it happened, some things in Life are just not in your control.

I think that for us humans, admitting we do not have the control we think we do is so terrifying, that it is far more palatable to blame ourselves, or another, then to recognize how much is not up to us. And that as we stand on the brink of the next generation of technologies which threatens to amplify our already out-of-control-god-like estimations of what we believe we can do, we further blind ourselves to just how much is not within our control.

So terrifying is it for us to feel how not in control we are that we would rather create a world based on a destructive illusion of absolute control of man over Nature than to align with our proper role in the scheme of things. Worse yet, the further we stray from knowing we don’t decide the ways of things, the unhappier, lonelier, the more desperate, sick and harmful we have become. And continue to be.

To be human in the age of so many technological advances masquerading as a source of complete control, the greater our challenge becomes to remember our place in the order of things. So if you’re inclined, get in the habit of regularly saying to yourself, “That is not something I have any control over.” 

You might just surprise yourself and find that instead of feeling terrified by that statement, you feel a sense of relief. Relieved to finally be in alignment with how things actually work here.

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When the Wrong Things Are In Charge

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Because I grew up in alcoholism, I am highly sensitive and keenly attuned to what I will call, “the wrong thing being in charge.” What I mean by this is that my internal radar picks up on people and circumstances in the world promoting, even mandating, that what is harmful be accepted as the norm. I know intimately the devastating and far-reaching impact the wrong thing can have on us individually and collectively; robbing us of satisfying relationships and a sense of ease, faith and security in the world.

The upside is, I carry this sensitivity with me everywhere I go. So it is very easy for me to spot other versions of the wrong thing being in charge. For instance, this capacity allowed me to see decades ago the interference screens would have on the health and well-being of our kids and our families; which is why my children were not given cell phones, why they were not allowed on social media and why their screen time exposure was kept to a minimum.

Spotting the wrong thing running the show is why I got out of conventional medicine, conventionally grown food and any other misaligned systems where I could figure out a way to opt out. Recently, when the University I taught at required that I, a student and teacher of the breath, wear a mask while I taught, I said no. These are my most obvious examples. There are more. Both large and small.

Whether you agree with my interpretation of what constitutes the wrong thing being in charge doesn’t matter. What matters is this: How often do you agree to something that in your gut, you know is wrong? It doesn’t even have to be some main stage world issue. It can be as simple as not saying something when someone near you is promoting the wrong ideas, or asking the wrong things of you.

When we allow the wrong things to be in charge in life, we play the role of the victim. The one who has no say. No power. Believe it or not, we derive benefit from this. How? By believing that because it is not up to us, that someone else is in charge, we can abdicate the responsibility of our lives and our actions to someone or something that is outside of us.

This disempowering abdication asks, Who am I to say something is off? Who am I to challenge the status quo?

Who you are is someone who can look around to see how all the wrong things we have let be in charge, have left us ill. Right down to our very souls. We are sick with the acceptance of what we know is not right.

Lest you believe this is far beyond you and your little life, it is not. We are sensing beings who know immediately when something is off. This is a built-in knowing that reveals itself to you every single day. And you don’t need to have grown up in alcoholism to come by it. Why? Because your capacity to know down deep the right and the wrong of something is within you. It is only a matter of whether or not you will tune into it.

Maybe it is that small tug in your gut. The feeling that something just doesn’t add up, or smell right. It is akin to the record skipping, or the moment in The Matrix when there is a visual glitch in the program.

To be clear, this is not about pointing the finger or shaking an angry fist at the news. Instead, it is choosing to see when something is off, and doing whatever is yours to do. Whatever is within the scope of your power to right that wrong. To stand as a beacon. Not as one who calls out another’s behavior for their own glory, but because it is so.

We deny this role in our lives for all kinds of reasons. We don’t want to be “that person.” We are afraid others will not like us. Maybe they will mock, leave or ridicule us. Maybe we will lose something. Whatever our reason, we have become complacent and lethargic after so many years of being enslaved to the wrong thing. It has become the new “normal” now to just go along.

To be mediocre, silent and compliant.

But if you want something else, begin to pay more attention to the radar that lives within you, and learn to act on it. Tap into that feeling that something is “off.” Even if you cannot articulate why. You will have to pay very close attention here because it is very easy to miss. Especially since so many of us have grown so accustomed to accepting the wrong things, and believing that this is just how it is now.

My advice? Be willing to be the one, in whatever way you can, to say “The Emperor has no clothes on.” Not as a way to elevate your status on social media, not as a way to lord something over others and certainly not as a way to put yourself in the position of deciding right and wrong for another. But as a bona fide acceptance and hard won capacity of growing into being an adult who lives by a solid personal code of right and wrong. And who carries that with them everywhere they go.

No matter what.

 

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You at the Center

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This week one of my practitioners told me about a bold and daring leap he just made. After thirty years of working with the insurer, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, when this year’s contract came up for renewal, he said no. No to signing up for another year of being a cog in a machine that does not care about him, the work he does, or the patients he sees. No to losing money each year to pay them their split, while being hamstrung by their inhumane policies. No to their suggestion that if he wanted to make a profit, he should just double the amount of patients he sees; effectively turning his practice into a treadmill of poor care and hurried practitioner-patient connection.

No to being a slave in a system that has outlived itself. That has become more invested in its financial gain than the welfare of others.

This is a hard, hard reality to catch up to as so many of us have long believed that the institutions charged with our health are here to support us, to get us what we need, to bridge the gap for us when we are not well. And even if we have known that we are not getting what we need, it feels too scary, too impossible, to step outside of what appears to be the only game in town.

I mean, what would happen if we didn’t have the large medical conglomerates and institutions as a backstop? Well, we are about to find out as more and more of us are waking up to the fact, that not only is there another way, we have to find that way ourselves. We, are in fact, creating that way right now out of the rubble of what no longer serves.

And it can’t come soon enough when you fully recognize that what’s passing for “healthcare” is not only not working, it’s hurting.

I know this one well. When I took that first step out of the conventional medical system almost 30 years ago, I was simultaneously hit by some of the deepest fears I have ever known, right alongside an almost giddy sense of possibility of connecting to something that might just include all of me in the equation. That might just offer me more than a prescription or perhaps, “there’s nothing wrong/nothing I can do for you,” after a seven minute office visit.

That might actually get to the very root of what was happening, while offering me a map for how to step forward.

That first step for me meant tuning into the feeling that I wasn’t at the center of my care. A faceless, nameless system was. This hurt. It felt like a betrayal. Another step took me in the direction of starting to open up and be curious about what else was out there in terms of health and healing. This felt exciting as I began to learn about ancient traditions and how it was that my body worked.

But perhaps the biggest step of all has been learning, experience by experience, to claim full responsibility for my health and healing. No matter what kind of medicine I choose to use, or who I choose to work with, it always boils down to the same thing: The onus is on me. There is no abdication to an expert. There is no one who will do this for me. Because this is, after all, my body.

I can’t tell you what to do or how it will turn out for you. I can’t give you a clearcut map to follow. What I can give you, should you begin to consider whether or not you are getting what you need out of your current “health” care options, whether or not the institutions that are serving you, are actually serving you, is a beginning place.

And that beginning place starts when you begin to wonder. Wonder if you are at the very center of the care you receive. Wonder whether what is happening in the systems all around you… from the cost, to the procedures recommended, to the maze you must travel to get what you need, to the fact that you must keep a job you hate to be covered, to the imbalanced focus on treatment as opposed to prevention, to the way your practitioner types away while you are talking to them, to the rushed sense you have when you finally get in to see someone, to the teller-like atmosphere in the office when you check in…is in fact, in your best interest.

This is a very big and necessary thing we are doing here together and “the only” thing it asks of you is to begin to shift your perspective from “Someone else is in charge of my health,” to “I am in charge of my health.”

 

 

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Alchemy

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A Tarot reader I work with and love introduced me to the concept of Alchemy. She described it as the resolution of opposites and the birth of Something New being the essence of this ancient and esoteric practice. Historically, alchemists used something called an athanor; an oven that heats at a high and even temperature to transmute substances.

The discipline of alchemy has gotten me thinking this past year of how it is that we put seemingly unrelated things together, and then “heat” them up until they merge into a Holy Union.

I’ve been thinking about this not from the perspective of physical substances, as in turning lead into gold, but instead, in relation to the process of doing one’s own deep, and often difficult, psychological, emotional and spiritual work in the service of creating a new substance.

In other words, how do we take what we have been given and become the Alchemist in our own lives?

I believe this would require being willing to pay very, very close attention to ourselves. Not in the anxious, fear-based, judgmental ways that seems to be currently in vogue. But from the perspective of someone being deeply interested in themselves. As in, what makes me tick? Why do I do what I do? Why do I believe what I believe? Why do I say what I say?

This is about a close examination of one’s self and the life you are living. Not as justification to find fault, penalize or fall into victimhood, but as a daring and courageous attempt to go for the gold!

This requires allowing yourself and your life to be the athanor; the strong, steady and heat-resistant container for changing one thing into another. But instead of gold, the coveted prize is to Know Thyself. Something of this nature requires a willingness on your part to look, to spend time with yourself, to wonder about how it is you are living. It demands diligence, courage and patience to undertake such a lofty endeavor. For there will always be many, many reasons to quit the work of the Alchemist. Many voices, distractions, fears and dead-ends to undermine your commitment, that must be combatted.

But if you are up for it, begin to consider this: What in my life needs alchemizing? What feels impossible, but in need of transmuting? Begin your experiment there. And then, What happens if I try this? Or how about that? What if I turn it around and look at it like this? Or that?

Be willing to let go of the demands of how things are supposed to look, or even turn out. (This one shift alone is perhaps the greatest game changer. Or deal breaker if not tended to.) Instead, open yourself to the preciousness of your own life, and what is just begging to be transmuted. This requires learning to see that every unwanted piece of lead or scrap metal in your life is, in fact, gold in disguise. Just waiting to happen.

*Vici Williams is the Tarot reader I work with and she is not to be missed. Be in touch with me for her contact number at susan@rememberingwhatmattersmost.com

 

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Waiting

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In a recent personal exploration, I came in contact with what I will simply call here, “Waiting.” That part of me that gets put on hold, that stops breathing fully, that gets frozen, that even, on some level, ceases to live.

All while I wait for something to happen.

For that email, that phone call, that person to change. For the permission to be myself. For the madness to be over. For the guarantee that something will or will not happen.

Contrast that to the part of me that could not wait to get out onto the trail this morning. The part that didn’t let a standing temperature of eight degrees with a wind chill of well below zero cause her to wait for another time. The part that actually reveled in the gale force winds causing the trees to talk and sand tornados to appear out of nowhere.

We are a world of waiting. For the next text, the next like, the next, next, next…

These recent years have found us all in a waiting game. Waiting for a test result to tell us what’s going on and how we must proceed. Waiting for the permission to go outside. Waiting to be told when we could be with loved ones again. Waiting to be given the okay to take our masks off, go back to work, gather. Waiting for something to go away. Waiting for something to save us.

We wait for our boss or spouse to change. We wait for vacations, the weekend and retirement. We wait for the next package to arrive from Amazon. We wait for the diagnosis to tell us how we’re doing, or for the weight to finally come off. We wait for ourselves to change. For things to be somehow, somewhere different. We wait to die.

We wait and we wait and we wait.

Waiting is child’s play. It is a mentality that says my life is not in my hands. It is a mindset that says my freedom, my health, my wellbeing, my very life is not up to me. That there are forces out there that will decide how free and alive I can be. Where I can go, how I can live, and what is possible.

But the Truth is, Life does not wait. Our lives do not wait. They go on, with us or without us. So just as the wind did not wait for me to go on a run before it unleashed its full force, I ask you, as I ask myself: Are you waiting or are you living? 

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Red Flags

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This morning I did something I almost never do. I went online before my morning practice. It’s not like it’s an ironclad rule to never do this. It’s just that I know that when I start my day in reflection, I’m a different person. Closer to who I most want to be when I begin my day by checking in, as opposed to checking out.

But the allure today towards the screen was just too strong. A friend had told me about a meditation, and I got it into my head that this would make my practice better. Deeper. That maybe this would be what I needed to get over the hump of an obstacle I had been struggling with. Maybe it would get me closer to Source?

That right there should have been a red flag. But the temptation of the one-click-away to salvation was just too strong.

Once on the site and ready to buy the fix I thought I needed, for some reason the payment wouldn’t go through. So I tried it again. And then, again. And again. Actually a bunch more times. I even walked away for a minute, and then came back to try once more.

And so it was, with some sense of loss and disappointment that I headed into my morning practice. But not with my usual sense of commitment and eager anticipation.

Yesterday, I would have told you that I am far too experienced to believe that some meditation would fill some hole. Today I would tell you, some part of me does not know better. I would tell you that this whole business of what we need, and what we think we can get immediately via the screens is very, very seductive. In such an exquisitely insidious and invisible way that there’s a good chance you won’t even know it’s happening.

Why? Because the false promise of easy access salvation to a better life with just one click, flies under the radar of the rational mind. The part of us that believes we are in charge and know exactly why we are choosing what we do. What I am describing tells another story. One where our deepest longings, those places beneath the surface of awareness that drive us without us even knowing it, are easily hijacked by what is available across a screen.

It is so sobering to experience just how vulnerable we are to the belief that what we need is out there; in someone else’s hands, in an app, some purchase, a meditation download. This morning, I am deeply humbled by the ease with which I was hooked. Equally, I am deeply grateful for the daily reminder of my morning practice. Something that caught me today before I fell too far from Truth.

That Truth being, there are no quick fixes out there. No matter what form they come in. The real Truth is, it is in us. Whatever it is that we are looking for. Do we need help? We do. But the trick is, not to confuse the help (someone else’s map) with the answer we are seeking (which can only be found in the direct knowing of our own territory).

So yes, use what’s out there to spark you. But never, ever, believe something outside of you will do for you, what only you can do for yourself.

P.S. When in doubt about where you are in all of this, be on the lookout for the compulsion that you just have to have (fill in the blank) to be okay. Use that feeling of impulsiveness on your part to have something right now, as the red flag being flown to warn you off the lie you are about to buy into.

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