Releasing Your Being

We know that pain is far from beautiful in its initial experience of heart wrenching agony. It appears as a chasm that is nowhere near complete or whole. It tears at us, and urges us to feel that if we don't identify with what happened, we may as well forget our lives altogether. Our actions become a response to the pain we feel and our own expressions of life lived are sometimes shadowed by living in our fears. This is where it becomes possible to feel our own pain return to us after being forgotten for a long time. We feel our lives change in response to what caused us pain, and that is what we identify with when wellness seems to be gone. The conflict can linger in our lives even when the pain is forgotten. This is apparent when we try to be whole and run into the wall of hurt that seemed to be gone.

Some days these feelings seem to be so present there seems no way through. Other days, a wall emerges in the midst of everyday routine that appears as the ordinary and mundane fades into reminders of feeling that hadn't occurred to us in years. As that present moment is seasoned with a taste of a feeling that we have felt before it can be recognized as those old feelings that lingered in our subconscious until we found that it was woundedness and resentment that pulled us under.

These feelings, be they disappointment, loneliness, bitterness, as any myriad complex of emotional mashups have roots in the daily life. The walls that emerge, seemingly out of nowhere, come from the build up of this pain that has been swept under the rug until it cannot be ignored any further.

We cannot always stay close to those who have hurt us when we need to be whole again. Sometimes we need to be accepting and patient with our lives as we take the steps to be where we need to be whole again.  It is easier to respond to our own hearts with an understanding of the tension and the shame that these instances cause us to feel. We can be conflicted in ways we didn't even know we could, and when we see our humanity, we see that feeling whole includes our being ourselves in the broken places of our lives.

Being face to face with the experience of our hurt places is a frightening idea. It brings us to a place of unease, until there is a recognition of who that person with experiences of pain and wellness together is. As pain is understood, by feeling the impact of it in our lives and those around us, we find it no longer overpowering us. It gives us a connection to our lives and our true nature as we use what makes us alive to bring ourselves back to living.

Step by Step

I have a hard time looking for the answers to questions of life that I'd rather live and discover answers to than have it all figured out. That doesn't keep me from asking the questions that come back even when I thought I had the answer. The practice of being incorporates all that changes and develops across a lifetime. It is here that brings presence to a stillness while change constantly brings me to surprises that delight and surprises that make me concerned. The long term view that opens my eyes to the past and opens my soul to the future give me a chance to explore what this present can be.

Sharing this life, one that is a dance with the changing seasons and folk of all kind brings me to realize how much stay the same over the years. It is this sameness that brings out the goodness that is still full and rich in the midst of rain clouds and stormy tumult. To offer or receive a hand in the midst of uncertainty is to walk the world in greater harmony. When realizing our wealth of experiences are worlds to bring together, we find that even our differences are what we have in common.

For me, friendship has been a source of connection as well as collaboration. It can form a bridge that connects two souls or it can bring together ways of living that enhance the art of each person's experience. For friends to grow close, there often has to be an experience that each person recognized as a place where deepening and opening could occur. It is the opening of life that is like a new day, a flower unfolding its petals, a collaboration in creating a sports victory or a song, that embraces the other, that takes life in its grasp and lets go so that it can hold another hand, touch another soul, and sing a song for the times of sharing. The path of a friendship is the chance to be one's self and become one with their life as they live and laugh in the way of love for another.

Sunshine

The sun shines all over this planet leaving energy for plants to grow and light to illuminate our lives. For an emergence of sunshine is a creative force, cast on the snow and reflected in a glistening light and as rays like fingers reach through the clouds to the terrain of the Earth. It finds its opening in the crags and fissures along the surface of life as a guiding beacon into understanding warmth.

Our eyes open to the first light and close when our body calls upon us for a time of rest and renewal. As the sunshine bursts across the scenes of our lives there is the space to discover what is here in our lives, what is deepened and expanded in every moment. In recent days, I have felt the sunshine of new opportunities in the lives of friends who have danced into the dawn. I feel the gaiety of all we gather in the stories of our days. The stories that begin to glow with the happiness that surprises us as sunshine glows from the places that were once dark.

This is the sharing of sunshine. A dance with a dear friend, a smile with a new one, an understanding nod in an empathetic ear. As we illuminate life with the truth of who we are, we can bear the anxieties and fears that carry our hearts into realms of deepest need. As we hear how we're not alone, as we gather ourselves to trust life at its core, we can begin to soar together.

           

Reaching For Freedom

In the depth of our hearts there lies a place where we can live and find the freedom in that fullest space. It is a space of liberating expressiveness that brings out the fears and questions that plague one's mind with doubt. As a way to take flight, there must be the willingness to abandon that which others expect us to be and do. To live from our lives, we stand up in our experience and step into that place of unrelenting opportunity.

These places allow an intimate connection with life in the most powerful of ways. We evoke the essence of our beings as we honor our own paths with honesty and are changed when we experience the intersection of these places of love, discovery, understanding, openness, and transformation. The challenge within comes from wrestling with the forces that try to make our dynamic lives for us. No one can tell us what to experience when we love. We can only change when we are ready.

So as we venture into life, we find these experiences that free our inhibitions and allow for something almost divine to emerge. What does it take to fully liberate a soul for a moment alone if not a life time as well? To be free from the chains of life? When these freedoms are kept in bondage by discrimination, oppression, trauma, misunderstanding, and fear, a full life cannot be lived. Perhaps a lifetime of moments of walking through the gentle moments of sunshine and bitter winds, amidst the shade of a tree that grew alongside the roads that brought us new and old memories together, and among the breaths that we felt our freedom as a means to overcome our collective fears and struggles.

To be free, we have to reach into ourselves and extend into the heights of our dreams and goals, affirm the shadows standing beside us and grow tall together. To be free, we still will live with consequences and the experience of pain, but it is different when the pain is understood as it is overcome with love and compassion, each day, each life at a time.

Barefoot Friendships

There's nothing like being barefoot in a friendship. While barefooted, or fully present in the moment you're with a friend, your spirit can connect to the depths of the channels you both have experienced in a rush of storytelling and understanding. It can be like experiencing two lives simultaneously while the empathy of your experience brings you closer together.

Friendship, to me, is a story of life forming from its rawest elements: emotion, humor, questions, hopes, wonders, fears, loves. It changes our outlook on life and enriches it with an understanding that nothing is perfect in an idyllic way. It has to be perfect in our own way, that is to say it has the potential to be perfect in the path of understanding a coming together after communicating the centers of our lives, no matter what place they are in.

As in a spirit of camaraderie, therein lies the knowing of not knowing. Life has a way of surprising us, moving us into scary places where our hearts are tense with feeling and rent with disappointment. Together in friendship, our lives form where emptiness tries to pull us apart. Solitude brings us new perspective. Maybe there will be a way through this misunderstanding that allowed me to accept the complex truth of mutual realities. Maybe I can laugh and know the intimate places of my soul because a friend brought me there and loved me there.

To trust is to nurture the freedom of communicated experience with each other. Then we can be barefoot, present, and alive. Alive to really uncover what we knew we could be had we only released the moment we thought we knew how it would all work out.

About Fear

Today is the first day of the first full week of the new year according to the Gregorian calendar that is commonly used personally and professionally in my life. As a new year in 2014 has taken hold, so to has old habits that return showing that a new year doesn't keep life continuous in the patterns that have begun in moments passed. The new year had me thinking about fear, the emotion that makes it hard to accept any part of reality. With so many perspectives and biases, wounds and scars, histories, and other experiences woven into our interactions and our experiences, fear is easy to feel. 

The questions I asked myself what it would take to live my life fully, especially if I wanted it to be unique. I kept coming back to fear. It has been a persistent feeling that I've noticed to be quite a contagion no matter the severity of the circumstance. Fear of failure, inadequacy, the end of the world, open spaces, death, rejection, being loved, elevators, heights, snakes, the dark. I could go on with my list and risk sounding like I want to start one of those psychiatrist booths that Lucy van Pelt is always using to get Charlie Brown out of a nickel, but that's not what this is about. There is something about fear that provokes people to do things they wouldn't otherwise dream of doing. I don't think there is a way to keep fear out of our lives, but I do believe there are ways to be aware of it so it doesn't influence us in ways that risk us from living life fully. 

While I cannot speak for anyone's experiences but my own on this blog, I will share that thinking about the future with some consternation and apprehension can make the present moment more tense and less freeing. I prefer to be a bit of a free spirit with some conscious thought included in what I do, think, and say in order to gain different perspectives on what parts of life I may be thinking about.  If I read something in the news that had a decidedly grim outlook and I thought there may be hope, I would probably choose the side of hope. Now hope may feel a bit naive, and maybe it is premature to think that way without knowing all sides to a certain situation, but if I were to to take the time to do that, I would find so many different thoughts and experiences that both validate and negate my own that it would be hard to really know what to think after that. 

So I have taken some time to rest with uncertainty, to accept the paradoxes of life and death as part of this universe, this life, this world that I've been traveling along for 24 years. I can be afraid or I can let life be a wonder of delight and surprise that can both be superficial and of depth to making meaning, purpose, and goodness from the acts of kindness and laughter that appear in the midst of coping with the hardscrabble realities that pockmark our lives and help us direct our conscious efforts. To live without fear is to not be afraid, but to live without fear controlling our entire lives.  Happy New Year! 

Encounters

Layers create the dynamics of our lives. What appears in front of us has a depth beyond and a shallowness before in an intersection of space and time. Nothing stands alone, even if it takes a solitary path. A simple melody is a sequence that allows each instant of life its moment and one moment would not be the same without the other. 

In the formation of the aesthetic of life, a rhythmic flow doesn't have to rhyme in order for it to follow the channel it moves along. Shifting ground, the layered forms don't stay in place for long. A new formation is created and develops so life can take place there. Just as the seasons change, so do lives and friendships that never held their place entirely forever. 

As I walk the world, the landscapes appear in front of me exposing my body to the growth that feeds my spirit and opens my consciousness to the experience of all that is interconnected and related. Flowers emerge where fungi once stood before. Leaves have fallen and gather where I stood years before. This isn't just my experience, but as time and seasons cycle, I notice that even in the similarity of life's patterns, there are still surprises of wonder. In the space of life we share, off and on the internet, there can be these layers, what is shared and what is a continuation of what has formed. As life keeps moving, so do the overlapping and colliding of reality.