Blog #36 October 2, 2012 Creating space for new emergence

Scheduling open time dedicated to the unknown

On July 31st, I flew home from my 3 1/2 month pilgrimage overseas. It was time to bring home the unconstrained spontaneity and awareness of the present moment, “what is here, now?” I was wary of the routine and chores of householding regaining their grip on my nascent creativity. I knew that a series of important family events would take priority in August. Maureen was visiting from NYC, David, preparing to leave for at least a year on active duty Navy orders to Djibouti, in Africa. We enjoyed a 5 day trip to Lake Chelan for swimming, wine tasting, and reading in the sun together. I helped David move out of his apartment and sort his belongings into storage or our house preparatory for sending to him in Djibouti.

Grocery shopping, preparing meals, cleaning up, keeping up with garbage and recycling, doctor and dental appointments closed around me. I went to the apple store for 8-10 hours for classes and assistance in using my IMAC and IPAD, photography, word processing, and the new Mountain Lion operating system. Pat and I went to Oregon for 5 day Ceile De silent retreat. I worked hard on a teaching presentation for the UWMC first year medical students on “Medical student well-being”, learning to use the Apple equivalent of powerpoint, “Keynote”. I attended an excellent seminar at Swedish hospital on Physician Well-Being. I also sought to relax and not become driven by my task lists, to read the newspaper, books, and magazines, and exercise outside vigorously to improve my conditioning. Keeping up with snail mail and email and reconnecting with friends was a priority.

I shared fun summer activities with Pat and supported her during an illness as her work was wearing on her. Gradually, my days became more and more dominated by lists and things to do. I practiced daily writing intermittently, journalling, and recording dreams. I strengthened my meditation practice and began to explore training in mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR). I began to notice the return of increased neck and back pain and misalignment, requiring a return to the chiropractor. I developed a dental abscess in right upper face that required painful root canal, antibiotics, and construction of a new biteguard. It slowed me down and distracted me a lot.  As is my usual tendency, I pushed through it.

Despite the painful body ailments, I deeply enjoyed a 1 1/2 day enneagram workshop combined with the Dance of Universal Peace. I love the people and the energy and grace of this annual program. My niece, Naomi, who is now graduated from college, 22 years old, visited for the first time in many years , and stayed at our house. I enjoyed showing her around Seattle and hosting her for 5 days. Her visit was especially heart warming as I have long sought to reconnect with my siblings and their families. As September came to a close, I recognized a familiar unwelcome busyness overtaking me. And, I had not blogged for over a month.

My intention of getting a writing coach and reserving daily hours for writing eluded me. On the other hand, I had begun an 8 week training in Kabot-Zinn’s Mindfulness program MBSR, beginning to work toward the experience and life style that would eventually allow me to become a teacher of the MBSR. I notice that although I have meditated and sought awareness for many years, remaining awake and aware mindfully is very difficult. I am excited by the vision of increasing my awareness and presence with the aid of this program, daily practice, and subsequent required retreats, leading to teaching this to doctors and other health professionals. It is in total accord with my sabbatical theme of what is here, now? What better gift to myself and the world can I give than helping to increase awareness and raise consciousness of our own default patterns of reactivity, fear, violence, and scarcity?

Awareness, in my experience, brings a calm peace, a compassionate and kind disposition to our human foibles and ignorance. When I am aware, I have a choice to not act out my fears and attachments, to eschew violence and reactivity, in favor of a more loving and accepting attitude toward everyone and everything. When I am aware, I am not on autopilot, reacting to life according to fight/flight survival related habitual neural pathways, learned early in childhood. I agree with my wise mentor, Richard Rohr, who says, “pain that is not transformed, is transferred”. If I am aware of my own pain and suffering, I can choose to experience it fully and accept it as part of the truth of my human life, with compassion. When I accept and am reconciled to suffering, I don’t take it out on someone else or “kick the dog”. I don’t pass it on, creating violence and suffering in others. I do not know what pathway ahead that I am called to as yet, but I am convinced that a contemplative life of mindfulness is a key part of my spiritual calling.

I have spoken of writing, perhaps writing a book. Yet, my ego and my shadow have resisted the discipline so far. It is hard to discern whether becoming a writer is truly my spiritual calling or an ego thing. Perhaps, it is both. Perhaps, my call to writing will only emerge freely when I have let go of any attachment to outcome. I believe that my spiritual path will only evolve in process, through listening for the divine still small voice. My ideas of a book and recognition or financial reward may be the critical obstacles to writing in the moment. The divine can only emerge in the present. I cannot hurry or force it, I cannot “push the river”.

To be fully alive, I must receive the pain and the joy, fear and love that life offers me. I acknowledge that I am not in control of reality, and I wait and watch with wonder and curiosity about what I experience, what is going on, within and without.  In my life these days, it is as if everything is an experiment.  I have experienced frequent brief moments of attunement with the divine flow, in which I joyfully embody and act from, and with the creative emergence, in each moment. This is my deepest desire but quite difficult for me, as living in this way requires a continuing surrender each moment, and profound trust in God and the universe. My ego and default patterns react with fear and reflex effort to control, to cling, or to avoid reality. These holding patterns contribute to painful misalignment and muscle tension in back, neck, and head. It is what it is. I do not know whether becoming mindfully aware of my body can loosen the grip of old neuromuscular reflexes. In the meanwhile, I trust my body to be part of my soul’s guidance.

From “The Four Quartets”by T. S. Elliot (1943)

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre to pyre–

To be redeemed from fire to fire.

Who then devised the torment?

Love, Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hand that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power can not remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

The Many Wines, Rumi

God has given us a dark wine

so potent that drinking it,

we leave the two worlds.

God has made sleep

so that it erases every thought.

God has made Majnun

love Layla

so much that just her dog

would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines

that can take over our minds.

Don’t think all ecstasies are the same!

Jesus was lost in his love for God.

His donkey was drunk on barley.

Drink from the presence of saints

not from those of other jars.

Every object, every being

is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoisseur and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.

Judge like a king and choose the purest,

the ones unadulterated with fear,

or some urgency about,

“What’s needed”.

Drink the wine that moves you

as a camel moves when it’s been untied,

and is just ambling about.

The Road Home

An ant hurries along a threshing floor

with its wheat grain, moving

Between huge stacks of wheat,

not knowing their abundance all around.

It thinks its one grain is all there is to love

So we choose a tiny seed to be devoted to.

This body, one path or one teacher.

Look wider and farther.

The essence of every human being

can see and what that essence eye

takes in the being becomes.

Saturn. Solomon!

The ocean pours through a jar,

and you might say it swims inside the fish!

This mystery gives peace to your longing

and makes the road home home.

Begin, Rumi

This is now. Now is.

Don’t postpone till then.

Spend the spark of iron on stone.

Sit at the head of the table.

Dip your spoon in the bowl.

Seat yourself

Next to your joy

and have your awakened soul

pour wine.

Branches in the spring wind,

Easy dance of jasmine and cypress.

Cloth for green has been cut from pure absence.

You’re the tailor,

settled among his shop goods,

quietly sewing.