Disarming your Little Warrior

You are perfectly imperfect and just because you are a master at something doesn’t mean that you don’t have moments where you forget everything you know and plummet into the depths of what is opposite.  These experiences are a part of the dance.  They give perspective and help us to see and feel the difference between being aligned and not.  With an attuned eye faced inward through these moments, we can begin to see the varied aspects of self, where they live in our body, and how aligned, if at all, they are with our Divinity.  If not, they are marking themselves as areas for healing.  A split side of us who broke off at some necessary time in our life in order to save the rest of us.  Now, in a safe environment, the warrior may still be fighting as if she is still at battle and survival is the only goal.  This is the very place that we approach ourselves with so much love and dignity and with a smile we take the armor off of our little warrior and find the scared child beneath.  We take her into our arms and ask her what she needs and then we do everything, and I mean everything to relentlessly care for her needs.  This task fueled by unconditional self-love becomes the sweet spot of healing the self through intimacy.  We are so afraid to look, to see the little warrior with all of her battle scars and tattered, well… everything.  We think there is a monster inside and yet, until we look, we will never know that the being inside, the being that is masked as a monster, is an aspect of ourselves.  We have made the ultimate mistake of turning away from ourselves and yet we do not know why we can’t feel love or connection.  We do not understand why we can’t just be without trying to change the way we feel.  Intimacy with others is impossible because we have not found intimacy with ourselves.   

Today I will face inward with love.  I will help to disarm and uncover the fearful aspect of myself that has dressed herself to fight and I will love her with all of my might and compassion and a deep curiosity for what she needs and a relentless commitment to meeting the needs of this part of myself.  And So It Is.

Spiritual Sustenance

“Good morning my Lord”

This is the way that my morning pages have begun for many years.  Being gay and therefore never willing to consider myself deeply religious in the traditional sense of the word, the word Lord is charged for me.  So, why do I start my writing with it each day… well, after a little research into the roots and origins of the word I realize that my intuition knows the way.  The Greek translation of Lord is the bread keeper.  We often think of bread as the food that we need but a broader translation of bread as it is used in the Lord’s Prayer is Spiritual Sustenance.  Of course, it makes perfect sense that as I sit down each morning to turn my attention to God, I am turning toward the Source of Spirituality which is God, the keeper of my spiritual sustenance.  So, whatever it is that you call the Source of your spiritual sustenance, just call it.  Don’t let the ways that people have made efforts to control people through a claim on God, take you away from your right to connect deeply, powerfully, and directly to a God of your understanding.  He, She, It is personal to you :)

1-2-3 Simple Solution to Remove Fear

Radical Accountability is perhaps one of the most challenging tools to use and principles to practice.  I don’t know why the human psyche is so drawn to trying to fix everything outside ourselves including other people before we will turn to the one and only place that we can participate in and effect change.  I have never found a more effective tool than the fourth step to promote, practice and execute radical accountability.  It’s a trick… we are told to sit and write all of our resentments and fears on paper. What we are not told is that after hours of writing and the humbling and embarrassing process of sharing the intimate details of our lives with our sponsor, that the only thing that we take onto the next steps, are our character defects that were identified in the process.  I remember the first time I wrote a 4th step and met my sponsor in a beautiful park in Seattle where I laid the intimate details of my life before her for a total of 5 hours… she shyly handed me a piece of paper with some words on it.  Little did I know that these were my character defects and that I was supposed to take them and ask for God to remove them.  When I look back I’m not sure that I have ever really understood steps six and seven.  Fundamentally I had a problem with the idea of asking God to remove them.  I did it in practice through the 7th step prayer but, I did not ever say “hey God, I have a lot of fear, please remove my fear and direct my thinking to what you would have me be.”  Well, check this out, and this is what is so amazing about the program, after nearly 20 years of being in and out of the rooms, I finally tried it and it flipping worked.  I mean, sometimes my fear will creep in again, but it has yet to become an obsessive overwhelming experience that has lasted even an hour let alone the days at a time of crippling emotional pain that the strongest drugs could not cure.  I’ve thrown everything that I have at this thing from therapy to month-long stints in treatment and, it was there all along.  It’s the 1-2-3 in dealing with fear.  

1. Pause when agitated or doubtful(fear).
2. Ask God to remove your fear & direct your thinking.
3. Find someone, anyone to help.

Just for today, I am reminded to forget about trying to figure out the “why” of my fear and to
simply practice the 1-2-3 fear solution presented by the brilliant 12 step program.  May you be fearless
and lovingly fierce today! 

God Is Either Everything of Nothing At All

Return to me again and again.  Like anything that holds mastery, one must practice, practice, practice.  Knock the rust off and begin to flex those spiritual muscles, reestablishing and maintaining your connection with the Divine.  At first, if an individual has spent little to no time in direct communion with her, they may only get a small sense of their connection or may have a feeling that there is nothing at all.  But, if they come again and again, what seemed at once impossible to reach, will bear fruitful presence as the intimacy of one’s personal relationship with her deepens.  I italicize her because truly, it is crude to anthropomorphize God as a woman or a man.  I think that’s exactly why it so rubs me the wrong way… because my God is Infinite and all-encompassing, so when I hear people refer to God as him, it makes my energy shrivel like a raisin inside of me… I have to fight not to shut down to the words that follow that reference when a peer or mentor is speaking.  I want to shout and scream STOP right there… we are talking about the same all-powerful presence of Love, Intelligence, Compassion, Care, Joy, and Grace… surely you don’t mean “he” for these belong just as much to a woman as they do to a man and, a God that doesn’t hold the motherly qualities of nurture and unending patience would not be a complete God to me…. And, surely your not shrinking God into a man for that would defer the qualities of God present in the earth as Grounding, Flow and Awesome unfathomable power that is humbling beyond belief to those who play in her storms and waves and on her rivers.  Surely the God that flows as these is not he or her but It… the unexplainable force which rushes forth as every river, every wave, every snowflake falling onto every mountain which is also God.  Yes, we pray and the intimacy of the connection makes us want to to think that we are talking to a parent for a parent knows a love for their children that is hardly comparable but it is so so so so much more than a parent…. And, yes, I have come to believe that we can ask it to remove our blocks, our fears our angers, and to direct our thinking… so, that implies that there something that listens and has the power to act.  I don’t know how it all works, but I know that it is and it does and it becomes as personal to us as we are able to believe.  If I could get one thing across about this God stuff, it would be, don’t take anyone else's word for it, save as inspiration to begin your own journey, your own relationship with the unending love, wisdom, and grace of God.  You don’t need to follow a single rule to get there or to gain favor you just need to begin.  Maybe that moment is now.  As God to reveal herself to you in his own way and in a way that you cannot miss.  See what unfolds and feel free to report back.  Much love to you on your journey today.

Wholeness Is Our Most Natural State

Wholeness is our nature. 

It becomes seemingly covered and fragmented by the moments of our lives..  Then, it becomes a glorious experience when our wholeness finds a rare moment to reveal itself.  It feels so good compared to the experience of our fragments or our covered selves.  We begin to hunger for these moments and in this experience the “spiritual seeker” is born.  We hunger for our most natural, pure state.  This is only after experiencing what we are not.  We are not a piece of ourselves.  We are not the things that block and voer us up which is what we are experiencing when we feel anything less than whole.  How many times have you really, truly felt whole in your life?  The moment we become conscious of the ability of another to judge us, we begin the process of fragmentation… instead of expressing our whole self, we only express the piece that we want the other to see in order that they might judge us as right or good or kind.  In essence we forgot that we were already perfectly and holy a part of life and became small in order to be a part of, to belong to someone or someone or something else.  If we were truly experiencing our wholeness, there would not be a need to be a part of because that implies that we are a part looking for other parts to become whole.  It is in coming home to the truth that was always there, that we are inseparably and always one whole individual which means undivided.  Let us not play the game today of forgetting that we are already perfect, whole and complete.  Let us experience the peace and power of remembering our inherent wholeness.  Let us shine as beacons of this truth that others may return to themselves and shine their light.  One light at a time, let us light up the world with truth that has a simple and profound potential for deep and lasting healing.  You are whole.  I am whole.  We are whole.

How Do We Learn to See Truth

Do you hear the Divine beneath the words that are being said

Or, are you caught in the mire, the haze of space between the truth

Where do you live, Is this where you want to be

The world of the Spirit has no opinion on the matter

Heaven is not a place far away but the space at the center

Within the soul, unaffected by the outside world.

How do we learn to see the spiritual truth?  How do we learn to hear with our hearts?  By tuning in we turn on the light and we see all that can be seen.  Like flipping on the light switch in a room, we can turn on our connection with God through devotion, through prayer, through meditation.  By tuning our internal radio to the almighty spirit within, we are tuning the focus of our listening to the channel of the heart.  The language of the heart is universal.  It’s a long drop from the head to the heart… most listen with their minds, their brains, discerning and analyzing and pulling apart the purity of the message that is trying to be conveyed.  We fragment what was beautifully whole into chunks of information that support our stories and break apart our truths.  In this mental listening, we become separate.  It’s an illusion.  But if you close your eyes and consciously bring your capacity to hear down into your heart and plant it there for the day,  Drop your capacity to see into the higher self that rests behind the thinking mind and let the Divine eye blaze through the maya and reveal the truth of what you are looking at with brilliant clarity.  Notice how differently you experience the world.  Then ask yourself, is this a better way of living today.  Maybe so.  Maybe not.  The choice is yours.  So much love to you on your journey today.  May you wake to the brilliant world of the Spirit today.

Emotional Literacy

It is in the coming, wholeheartedly to meet the Divine that we always find her, always.  We could never be separate but in our minds. She cares not whether you acknowledge her existence as you, yet she is always there.  The funny ways of our mind resist this so greatly.  Turning within is the most challenging turn in the human world.  Humans are the only species that has the capacity to turn inward.  We are the only kind, that we know of, with the gift of self-contemplation.  We are the only being where God can look at itself, looking at itself. Surely this gift was designed for some greater good and yet, it has also caused great many trouble.  Be supported as you turn inward through mentorship with folks who know the best in you and love you unconditionally and have gone through the landscapes of their own consciousness and seen what humans would judge as not favorable about the ways that they have behaved in the world.  They also know that they are not bad people for having behaved in less than whole and integrated ways. Once we have faced our own missteps we can hold greater space for others' perceived mistakes. We live in a paradigm where judgment has become a protection mechanism… a guard to the gate at the entrance of one’s own consciousness.  Many have never even approached this gate… but, somewhere deep inside of them, they know it’s there. They also sense that there are monsters in there that no one should EVER see. So, the guard of that gate judges anyone who walks by it, giving clues as to the false realities that have been stored in there over the years of a person’s life.  

I was listening to a Brene Brown podcast Unlocking Us the other day.  She was interviewing a Yale Professor on the topic of emotional literacy.  I loved this podcast because I feel passionate about helping to unlock these gates which were built by a society that has demanded perfection and therefore instilled the gates at the entrance of our feelings and emotions.  We were meant to feel and express every single one of these emotions throughout the moments in our lives but we were told for various reasons from a very young age that we were not to express them because sadness was not for boys or anger, shan’t be expressed by girls because it is so very unbecoming.  Well, fuck that. If I don’t express anger, I repress anger and that, my friends, is a loaded gun stored, gaining ammunition, in my consciousness… waiting to go off sideways at some inappropriate time down the line. All because your gates to your true feelings are locked and my anger threatens you and the sturdiness of the lock on your gate.  You have no space in your emotional body for me to feel a goddamn thing. And, literally, this is a damn for God. God is at the center of me and of you and is dying, literally, to be unleashed, but we have blocked this flow with this lack of emotional availability as a nation, a culture and, as individuals. This has GOT to stop. You do not need to fix somebody because they feel sadness or pain… no, that is just energy in motion that needs to leave the body, the system, before it becomes dangerous and toxic and another brick on the wall of china that you have been building between yourself and God.  And, we wonder why the drastic increase in disease, addiction, mental health challenges. We are damned up human beings as a result of our fundamental priorities in our culture. We must create space for emotions and feelings… we must, else we will continue to whither individually and as a race. Emotional literacy and emotional availability are two sides of the same coin… the topic needs to be addressed and built into the foundation of the way we live.

Start with being unafraid to feel your feelings.. Express them as emotion every day.  Unblock the damn and let it fly as art, as beauty as the movement of life into this world where it was meant to be expressed.  Do not harm another in your pursuit. Stay true to the truth that your truth should not harm another… if it will, find another way to express it.  But, express it - else you will be damned...

On Codependency

Where art thou in the bubbling fire of resistance

Here and now in the midst of all of this

Resist not the journey of another

for she is in my hands 

loved and directed as any other.

Ok, father, then I pray…

for the highest and best of everything

for my love and all of her ways

forgive me for trying to fix 

what does not need to be fixed

forgive me for forgetting

that you know what you're doing.

I humbly turn my attention to the most appropriate inward place

focusing on the growth of the only one I am meant to change

I will grow in love and compassion and empathy for my love 

and all whom I come across and meet

May I just stop trying to fix everything out there

and see the Divine perfection I bear.

God Has My Back

Yesterday I was having a tough time making a decision about something fairly important.  The decision was clouded by fears that I have struggled with for many moons. These are rooted in codependency.  Codependency is the disease of the lost self… what this means is that we are disintegrated. That due to childhood trauma we begin to depend on non-sustainable forces outside ourselves and most often this shows up as overdependence on a person or people in our lives to meet our basic needs.  We have come to believe that whatever we depend upon is the source of something that we absolutely need at a fundamental level. Therefore the thought of losing this thing, a fear fantasy set up in the future, also a mechanism of trauma becomes terrifying and we can often go into a panic about something that is both created and has its life in the mind.  When my trauma is activated it can be very difficult to make decisions because I am busy trying to control my environment and the people in order to feel safe. Of course, this is an illusion and an example of codependency. The only true safety is the safety of embodying the knowledge that God lives within us and this God that also lives in everyone else is the true source of all of life.  I don’t have to be afraid to lose a person or a situation because, although it is ok to desire and value connection with others, they are not the source of our happiness. We can be dependent on others… it is not a matter of going about life alone, but, if something changes, the source of that very thing that I am afraid to lose will rush to meet me and all of my needs in the next moment of life in some other way.  This is faith or trusting the process based on past life experience. Sometimes faith has to start with the reasoning in my mind. What I mean by that is that if my trauma triggers a shit storm of fear, I can grab a guiding light that will lead me back to the truth. In this case, the guiding light may be a statement of Truth like “Regardless of my fear, I know that God has my back… I know that God is everywhere present and all-powerful and all-knowing and that somehow within this truth is a path to my fulfillment.”  Fulfillment is having all needs met….and, my God is not stingy with meeting my needs. My God is so Good beyond anything I can imagine, that meeting my needs in abundance has always been her way. I am not saying that she gives me what I think I want all of the time, but when I truly surrender to her I find myself blown away, again and again. Sometimes it’s unanswered prayers that I need to trust the most. It’s times like these when I have learned that God has a specific path and place that she is working hard to bring me toward.  It’s like sometimes I get the feeling that I am on a one-lane road with my brights on and here and there I see a little side road that I think I want to take but I am already past it by the time that my thought catches up to me. Or, I may even turn down that road but inevitably I come to big orange construction barricades that say… do not enter. What I find during these times when I seem to get rejected over and over again is that I am close to something big that has been in the works for my life and that last stretch is protecting me from myself.  This is one the Divine says NO, you may not take this side street today. Get back on track, stay the course, you’re almost there.

Contradiction Or Paradox

It is the turn of a new year and now is a wonderful time to align myself with my highest potential, serving the greatest good, realizing the dreams that have always informed me of God’s path for me. It is time to release the ways that I resist my own good in the world. It is time to clean up the birth-place of my soul. It’s not a one-time event like the birth of our physical being. No, it is every moment of every hour of every day that we are lucky enough to call ourselves alive in this wild and crazy world. First, I will begin by seeking the stark contradictions in the ways that I live my life. I facetiously have always referred to this crossroads as balance. I laughed the other day as a colleague commented as I crushed my Cinnabon roll while waiting for the salad that he overheard me order, I thought you were “all healthy” when I heard you order a salad. With a crooked grin brimming with the high of the sugar rushing through my system, I said no, “I am well-balanced.” just like I balance my yoga with a can of chewing tobacco and my restful nights of sleep with all-nighters that are just a part of the line of work that God chose for me at this stage of my life. Somehow though, it has worked for me thus far. When I say it has worked for me, I mean that I am still alive… I have survived the meth balanced by Church, the alcohol tempered by a morning run or a hot yoga class, the days in the city running with the drug lords, with climbing through the rocky mountains on skis with some of the finest athletes in the world. I always wondered what it would have been like had I surrendered myself completely in entirely one direction… to the streets without a home, begging for money to feed the increasingly crazy beast, stealing my sanity until death the only door left for me OR straight-lining it in the world of adventure and athleticism, maybe even into the pique experience of professional sports or the Olympics. But, then I realize that just isn’t me. I am brilliant and bright some days, and others I am dark and sullen. My brightness is tamed by my inner blonde who misses the most obvious cues from my environment. I know when she’s out because of those familiar “are you shitting me” eyebrows which cock crooked when I act from this place. Yet, people aren’t afraid to tell me how smart I am which is usually sort of shocking in a way. But, something inside of me knows. Something inside of me agrees. 

So, how much power do we have to influence our existence?  Or is finding the center of the paradox the only way. I can’t surrender until I am damn well ready, but the only true power I have comes from defeated surrender. We can’t rush our way to the center of the Paradox any more than we can rush God to bring the things we want when we want them. So, whether it be by chance or by grace, I finally found myself, barely in the last week of the last year, surrendered to a life of sobriety. Finally. Ugh. Wow. How? I don’t know… I spent the whole year toggling between a great thrill that came from drinking and drugging, the depths and despair that accompany those experiences, wanting to be ready but not being ready…. At all. Knowing that every time I went to a meeting and knowing the futility of trying without that surrender. But, in God’s sweet time, the thing finally damn came. I hope that every one of the 525600 minutes of 2020 are lived sober by me. That is my hope. I believe that is God’s will. We shall see. But, my prayer today is to get out of my own damn way and live the life that God would have me live and to be the person that God would have me be… again, we shall see. But, here is to hope!