Anytime you allow anything or anyone outside yourself to cause you to choose hurt and to be disturbed inside yourself, then you are being shown how you can strengthen your understanding of the first and second laws of Spirit, to accept and cooperate, no matter what, no matter who. That can be a very tall order that perhaps only God in the flesh could fully express.
Nonetheless, the opportunity for you to fully accept and cooperate is available which can lead to realization of understanding, enthusiasm and compassion for exactly what is the reality of the situation. — John Morton
Understanding is a quality or condition of one’s consciousness associated with perceiving and comprehending the nature and significance of a person, situation, or experience. As the laws of spirit unfold, understanding typically comes forward once acceptance and cooperation have been achieved. Sometimes this is a rapid sequence of events and other times it takes years and years to work yourself through to understanding. Personally, it’s the acceptance part that is typically the hardest for me. Once I accept something, cooperation and understanding are pretty much a no-brainer.
Have you ever had one of those implausible streams of events that led you through twists and turns to just where you needed to be for something important to line up in your life? More and more, I am finding that happening followed by an “Aha!” moment of understanding why all those things had to happen. And, because I have a deep sense of God’s presence in my life and understand the karmic component of many experiences in my life, I often smile when these things happen.
Here’s an example. I went to my sister-in-law’s retirement party and was amazed by her startling success with the Ideal Protein diet. I had been looking for many years for a weight loss program that I believed in and felt confident would bring me success. Having hurt my knee several weeks before, I went to the chiropractor when I returned. I’ve been going to her for over two years and seldom had a physical adjustment. Instead, we used NET — a muscle-testing technique that identifies and releases mental and emotional blockages held in the body. I had been doing this work primarily to prepare myself to cooperate on a mental and emotional level with whatever weight loss program I choose.
This time, my chiropractor asks me to let her brand new associate look at my knee. She does so, and with my permission, gives me extensive adjustments. While lying on my stomach, I notice that she has a reverse crease in one of her toes. Curious, I ask about it and find that it makes her self-conscious. I apologize for bringing it up. She says “No problem — it’s mine and I have to deal with it.” Now sitting up, I grab my excess belly and say “I have to deal with this.” She grabs her belly and says “I know what you mean, I have to deal with this.” I mention that I am exploring a diet program that I am interested in and tell her it is the Ideal Protein diet. She just about falls on the floor in surprise, saying she has been studying this diet for a year now and is in the process of signing up to be a coach. I jump for joy because the deal breaker for me with the program had been the requirement to drive 90 minutes to a program center each week, and she would be local! We agreed to start later this week and for about an hour the little kid inside of me was so happy I could hardly contain myself.
So, one major form of understanding that arises in our lives when we accept and cooperate with whatever is happening is the wonders of 20/20 hindsight. Things often don’t make any kind of sense when we go through them, but later we can be filled with wonder at the perfection of what has happened and how meaningful it is to us.
Sometimes I just can’t get to square one with acceptance at all, for what seems like a lifetime and understanding is inconceivable. Many of my biggest life lessons have been this kind of struggle. When I am really lucky, a miracle of grace presents me with the opportunity to understand the situation first. In these cases the acceptance and cooperation follow easily. Here is an example that relates to my belief in karma, reincarnation and our essential identity as souls.
I had an extremely difficult relationship with my father. As a child, I could never please him. At the age of 7, I overheard him tell my mother that he loved my brother and sister, but I bugged him. I carried that as proof that he didn’t love me until my 50s. Then, several years after my father’s death, I had an extraordinary spiritual understanding that instantaneously freed me of my anger toward him. I was in a class doing a guided visualization process intended to bring forward deeper awareness of ourselves as souls. In the theater of my mind, I found myself sitting in a circle with my spiritual support team with an empty guest chair. My father appeared and took that chair. I became enraged, yelling at him that he had no right entering my safe and sacred spiritual circle of support. He was silent and sat there, somewhat humbly. I raged on, confronting him with his lack of love toward me all our shared lives together, saying how much he had hurt and wounded me and that I was now moving on with people who loved and supported me, and he was not welcome, and I wanted him to leave immediately.
One of my team members put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “I have an idea.” He suggested that since my father had shown up, perhaps there was some value there for me, and how about if we listen to what he has to say and then I could throw him out if that was still want I wanted to do. Subdued and slightly embarrassed by my tantrum, I acquiesced. I looked at my father and said “OK, so what do you have to say for yourself — why should I let you stay when you never showed me one ounce of love in my entire life?” He winced, and tears fell from his eyes, which shocked and softened me somehow. He looked me straight in the eye and told me he was only doing his job — it was part of his assignment as a soul to be my father, never showing me any signs of love or affection. This was intended to serve as a means of assisting me in learning to turn inward and upward to find my truth rather than seeking it out in the world. Instantly, that made perfect sense to me. My eyes filled with tears, my anger fell away, and something let go within me that had restrained me all my life. Somehow, I knew that what he was saying was true. I also knew that for the first time in my life, I was seeing my father, a fellow human being, as a soul. We were communicating soul to soul, and that changed me forever after. The reality of our essential identities as souls came through in that moment, through that experience, in a way that redefined me.
In that moment, I glimpsed a spiritual reality so profound that it changed my history with my father. I no longer saw him as the heartless, self-centered ogre who could not and would not love me. I realized that as a soul, it had been an extraordinary act of love for him to take on that awful role in my life, knowing that I would hate him, and that he could never demonstrate his love for me or receive love from me. A deep taproot of anger, tension, and self-rejection was pulled out of me in that moment as I rose into my soul and knew us both as innocent and pure souls rather than as damaged people. We were just two sweet souls playing characters whose egos had been out of balance in the karmic dramas of our lives. I finally understood that we were right on course with God’s perfect wisdom, timing, and plan, balancing our karma and learning our lessons.
The Laws of Spirit are governing principles that provide access to the knowledge of ourselves as divine as well as human beings. In order to access our deeper spiritual truth, we must learn to accept, cooperate with and learn to understand even the most challenging people, situations, and circumstances in our lives. They guide us through a process of surrender that enables us to trust ourselves and God. Without this journey, we are left to live lives defined merely by our personalities, human faculties, and desires. It is the spiritual dimension that provides awesome meaning to our lives. The Laws of Spirit serve as the gateways to that dimension.
I hope you will tune in next week for the fourth Law of Spirit — loving. Until then, I look forward to your responses and reactions to this piece.
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Karma, Karma Everywhere
Sometimes, I walk through this world and just marvel at the fact that we are all souls with individualized karmic agendas. Our lives and stories are woven together in a perfect complexity of clearing our individual and collective karmic accruals. It is as though we have a kind of karmic DNA built into our physical, mental and emotional makeup, as well as our identity as male or female, our socioeconomic circumstances, relationship patterns, membership in a particular family, race and religious tradition. I have come to believe that before we incarnate each lifetime, we, as souls, choose the role we will play on the world stage that offers us the best possibility of clearing our karmic accruals.
I have always puzzled over the idea that we are all equal when our capabilities and opportunities vary so greatly. Prior to comprehending that we are divine beings, I thought equality was a nice idea destroyed by human greed. In fact, our equality exists regardless of human greed because it is as individual expressions of the divine that we are truly equal. Spiritual energy flows to us and through us as an equal-opportunity employer — like the sun. However, given our unique karmic accruals, we vary in our awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings and in our capacity to open ourselves up to the wisdom, guidance and upliftment of the divine. It is, therefore, for the highest good of our respective souls’ progressions to select unequal status in human form in order to work through our unique karmic agendas. So, on a spiritual level, a drunken bum is equal to a wise king, yet in physical and social status, he is not. Our equality is spiritual and manifests itself in physical form as an equal opportunity to fulfill our personal karmic agenda.
Our families usually provide fertile ground for encountering some of our heaviest karma. I was in my 50s when I started to see some of the actual karmic patterns and lessons presented to me through my family and woven into our lives together. Things that never made sense about our relationships suddenly made sense, and the childhood emotional wounds I had carried until then melted away in the light of this spiritual perspective. A resonance of truth and inner peace replaced all the years of anger, fear and frustration I had built up, especially in relationship to my father. I came to appreciate that we needed to be exactly as dysfunctional as we were in order to be presented with the opportunity to heal the karma involved. When I finally looked at my family relationships karmically, I saw them in an entirely different light which shattered many of my previously held beliefs, illusions and judgments about myself and my family members.
Here’s a specific example. Early on, I learned to give my father a wide berth. It was as though we had a personality allergy to each other. I could never get his approval, and spent a lot of time seeking it. He was a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy, and I was one who needed to walk to the beat of her own drum. It was a strained relationship at best and I never felt loved by my father. Then, in my 50s, several years after his death, I had a spiritual experience where I encountered him in the theater of my mind. I was blasting him for never having shown me any love, and I watched as a tear formed and fell out of his eye and rolled down his face. This disarmed me, as I had never seen him cry in real life. He looked me straight in the eye and told me that his assignment as a soul in relationship to me was to be my father and to never show me any signs of love or affection. This was intended to serve me in learning to turn inward and upward to find my truth rather than seeking it out in the world. My anger fell away, and something let go within me that had restrained me all my life. Somehow, I knew that what he was saying was true. I also knew that for the first time in my life, I was seeing my father as a soul. We were communicating soul to soul, and that changed me forever after.
The reality of our essential identities as souls came through in that moment in a way that redefined me and my history with my father. I no longer saw him as the heartless, self-centered ogre who could not and would not love me. Rather, he was a fellow soul, who in the most extraordinary act of love, took on this awful role in my life, knowing that I would hate him, and that he could never demonstrate his love for me or receive love from me. A deep root of anger, tension and self-rejection was pulled out of me as I rose into my soul and knew us both as innocent and pure souls rather than as damaged people. We were right on course with God’s perfect wisdom, timing and plan, balancing our karma and learning our lessons.
Where or when I incurred this spiritual debt, I do not know or need to know. What is clear is that it was an enormous blessing and I had to walk through the karma to prepare me to recognize the truth when it was finally revealed to me. So, when I looked into my father’s crying eyes in that momentary eternity, I was looking into his soul from mine and seeing a truth far more real than all our battles as father and daughter over the years.
I don’t obsess about karma, but it has completely changed my way of understanding our lives. There’s karma, karma everywhere and I’m beginning to see it as the compost of our learning, growth and spiritual upliftment.
Australian Aborigines are reputed to go on a six-month walkabout as a rite of passage when they are 13 years old. Spiritually, I now see us as a bunch of souls on a great, karmic walkabout on planet earth, where we are given the opportunity to learn important spiritual lessons as balancing actions to our karmic debts. We are so many souls traveling side by side, passing each other by, perhaps connecting with one another and reaching into that oneness that is so familiar — for a moment or a lifetime — yet elusive somehow. Each of us marches to the beat of our own mysteriously unique drum. As fellow travelers in a giant cosmic labyrinth, we take the same journey into the heart of it all and out again, ebbing and flowing, alone, yet one. Day moves into night and night to day. We are born. We live and learn. We die. We are recycled.
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Surviving Technical Support
Over the past week, I have spent more than 15 hours on the phone with technical support for Apple, Time Warner Cable and Microsoft. I’ve spoken to about 30 different people in the U.S., India and the Philippines, and I have lost my mind on several occasions. I started out with one “simple” issue, which grew to about seven interrelated problems and my original problem and several others still remain unresolved.
I’d like to be able to say that I maintained my usual good nature throughout this experience. The fact is that I became a nasty and angry person who had no right to be so unkind to the innocent people who were trying to help me. I am not proud of that fact, and continue to take a good look at myself and my behavior to find a way to behave better in the future.
In an effort to gain some value from this experience, I decided to open up a discussion about this problem that I am certainly not alone in. Here are some questions I have. I am sure you have other ones. If you work for any of these companies, or other companies that have technical support departments, maybe you could do us the favor of passing the link to this article and reader responses along to your management team.
OK, it’s your turn. Do you have any other questions you would like to add? Do you have any answers that would make the experience more tolerable for the customer?
Again, I am not proud of how I behaved this past week. I wish I was the kind of person who didn’t get so frustrated and angry under these circumstances. Believe me, I tried meditating on hold, talking myself down off my anger, and lots of other techniques. Unfortunately, I’m not there yet. I do offer my sincere apologies to all those technical support people with whom I was less than delightful. And, I forgive myself for judging myself for being so darn human. Now, if we could only fix customer support services!
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How’s Your Existential Maturity?
I must admit that I have fallen in love with this new term — existential maturity. While no measurement scale yet exists, I think it is safe to say that our culture would receive a very low score. An all-encompassing fear and avoidance of death permeates our culture and misdirects much of our energy into:
The fear of death is at once culturally pervasive yet deeply private. The process of developing existential maturity involves recognizing and diminishing what Pema Chodron and her root teacher Chongpa Rinpoche refer to as “ubiquitous anxiety” — the underlying fear of uncertainty and not knowing what is happening or what is going to happen. It is a desire to feel safe, secure, and comfortable having all the answers in a world. Yet, our existential situation does not provide us with any certainty. Developing existential maturity requires moving our fears and anxiety to the background while enabling our love, courage, compassion, and authenticity to come to the foreground. It is what Pema Chodron calls “cultivating bravery,” so that we can be OK and not shut down in the face of our fears. When we choose to develop our own existential maturity, we also make a personal contribution to the collective process of transforming the culture of death from one of death-denial to one where we encounter death in a way that lovingly supports us as individuals, families, and as a society.
The origin of the term “existential maturity” can be traced to two individuals — Paul Wong and Rivca Gordon. In 2004, Wong posited an expanded vision of existential psychology in which “ethical, political and social considerations are inseparable from individual human existence.” On an individual basis, he urges us to find our true identity and to fulfill our most cherished dreams. “On a socio-cultural level,” Wong asks, “what could be done to change the conditions that perpetuate injustice and how can we facilitate community development?” And from the religio-moral perspective, he asks that we consider “what it means to treat others with respect and how we are to understand the meaning of suffering, pain and death.”
In Existential Thinking: Blessings and Pitfalls, written in 2007, Rivca Gordon discusses the idea of existential maturity within the context of the writings of Berdyaev. Existential maturity is said to occur “when a person undertakes the commitment to constantly choose to be a free human being” rather than being enslaved by external authorities. It “obliges a person to courageously and passionately strive to realize the utmost of his or her being, and to live the fullness of human existence.” The person acts “from the deepest core of his or her existential centre.” This act is an attempt to realize one’s human dignity as an end worthy in itself.
Combining the perspectives of Paul Wong, Rivca Gordon, and Linda Emmanuel, suggests that we enhance our existential maturity by living with conscious and compassionate commitment to evolving a fully developed way of dealing with our individual and shared existence. It is about living authentically — sourcing our thoughts and actions from the central, unbiased core of our being. It has to do with choosing an action not just because it is deemed to be the moral or socially “right” or “appropriate” thing to do, but because it reflects the truth as one knows it in the core of their being, and they choose to be a person who behaves in this way. It is a personal commitment to engage in the entirety of one’s life rooted in a sense of personal responsibility, accountability and integrity that is in alignment with what one perceives as truth. It is about personal authenticity and collective caring and compassion.
For so many of us, our lives pass by in an uninterrupted race against time with more things that we feel we simply must do than hours in the day, weeks, or years at hand. Life consumes us with very little opportunity to explore how we are living our life. Who among us records periodic appointments on our calendar to assess our existential maturity? Where is there a space in our lives to ask questions like:
I like to imagine what our lives and society would be like if we lived in a world that encouraged and valued existential maturity. What would it be like if we were taught and motivated to connect to a deep sense of self and to live our lives from that place? What if we actually talked to each other in a curious and inquisitive way about such existential matters as the meaning of life and death? What if there were no external pressure to conform to a particular point of view, but rather we were encouraged to deeply think about and voice our deepest beliefs so that a collective response could truly reflect the individuals involved? What if we did not silence certain members of our society and give megaphones to others? What if everyone’s voice and well-being really mattered?
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5 Keys to Cutting Your Mental and Emotional Umbilical Cord
Do you feel like you are 5 years old again when you visit with your family? Do you feel like everything is the same somehow? Have you maintained the same role in relationship to your family throughout your life? The shining star? The black sheep? The outcast? The one who just can’t seem to do anything right? Think about how it is when you and your family gather together. Do you meet each other anew as the individuals you have evolved into since you were last together? Or do you all somehow fall into the same old familiar ways of being with each other?
When the physical umbilical cord gets cut at birth, you are just beginning to develop your mental and emotional umbilical cord — the invisible ties that bind you to your family’s dynamic way of being with each other. Whoever raised you gave you your first worldview in terms of what kind of person you are, what you could expect in and from the world, and what you need to do to be loved. It’s not as though anyone sat you down and laid this all out for you — it was put in place in a thousand ways each day. Perhaps you were taught how far you could go before generating a negative response by your father’s tone of voice or a certain glance your mother gave you. Just like an actor in a drama, you were cast in a role relative to the others in your family, and that role defined you, yet some part of you always knew you were not that role. Whether you were cast in a favorable or unfavorable light in your family, you will continue to see yourself that way until and unless you recognize this point of view for what it is and evolve your own authentic sense of self.
Here’s an example. Sasha is in her early 20s, having graduated from a prestigious college several years ago. She is highly creative and not suited to a traditional path. As her life coach, I am delighted by her progress in establishing her own identity after a lifetime of struggling with her place in her family. When away from them, or not looking at herself through their eyes, she is confident, productive, and clearly on track in her personal and professional development. Yet, when under their influence her sense of self-worth crumbles. She becomes sad, weepy, and completely unsure of herself and unable to speak confidently about what she is doing with her life. On closer inspection, it is apparent how this happens. Sasha is the younger of two children. Her brother has always been the family star — everything he touches turns to gold, and his parents have always radiated with pride in every little and big thing he does. With the roles of Mommy, Daddy, and Star Child already taken, Sasha assumed the role of the family’s Black Sheep at a very young age. By outward appearances, Sasha’s family are lovely and normal people who love her dearly. As with any family, however, the dynamic that exists between Sasha’s family is complex and challenging.
It is essential to recognize that these family roles are not “the truth,” but simply the roles we assume in our relationship to other family members. Typically, there is a sense of self that doesn’t match the role, and the individual struggles to reconcile the two. Having felt confused, misunderstood, infantilized, and alienated from her family until now, Sasha, in her early 20s, is right on course to be doing this work of establishing her true sense of self. She is learning to look at the family drama with compassion for them all. She is even seeing how her brother has struggled with his role as the star. Ultimately, everyone wants to shed these roles and just be seen as loved ones who are doing the best they can in life. After all, don’t we all just want to be accepted and loved?
So, how do we break free? Here are the five keys:
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How to Be an Awesome Human Being
I always thought that babies should come with operating instructions and that parents-to-be should be required to pass a parenting test. After all, a license is required to drive a car. Surely a course in the basics of taking care of a baby’s physical and emotional needs would help. Beyond these basics, I dream of a world that acknowledges and nurtures the spiritual dimension of our being and teaches us how to be awesome human beings. It’s really very simple. It’s just not very easy. It takes a lot of focus, willingness and practice, practice, practice.
Being an awesome human being requires mastering the fine art of being a human being. The “man” part of being human has been carefully defined to distinguish us from “other primates.” Man/woman comes equipped with opposable thumbs, an erect posture, a highly developed brain, the capacity for abstract reasoning, and the ability to communicate and organize information based on a symbolic system of language. The “hu” part is best understood when we realize that it is a Sanskrit name for God that predates the anthropomorphic image of God as a fatherly, human figure. So, to be “human” means to be both divine and earthly at the same time. What a balancing act — to be a soul or spiritual being having an earthly embodiment.
To be an awesome human being requires three things:
That’s it — just three things!
First, let’s look at what it means to be simultaneously aware of our spiritual and earthly existence. Wrapping our brains around this means grasping that we are at once limitless yet limited, of God yet earthly, finite yet eternal. We have the freedom to explore the vast complexity of our being as much or as little as we choose. Unfortunately, for many people there is no structure or stimulation in their lives to motivate such an exploration.
The world’s great religious teachings are filled with passages about what it means to be fully human. In The Wisdom Jesus, for example, Cynthia Bourgeault suggests that the incarnation of Jesus served the purpose of showing humanity how to fulfill “our only truly essential human task here … to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood.” Bourgeault notes how this claim of Jesus as the Christian role model for the human challenge of synthesizing physical and spiritual existence is affirmed in the gospels. Jesus frequently uses the term “I am,” as in “‘I am the shepherd,’ ‘I am the door,’ ‘I am the vine,’ ‘I am at your heart’s door knocking,’ ‘I am in you and you in me’ … In so doing, Jesus has identified himself with being itself.”
Whether looking through the lens of Christianity or some other theistic perspective, the challenge to know ourselves as both divine and earthly is there to be reconciled, and as Bourgeault suggests, it is our only essential human task. To know and to welcome God’s presence in ourselves is a worthy and essential vocation for us all.
The second requirement of being an awesome human being activates our conscious intention and choice. To live consciously requires the willingness to hold oneself responsible and accountable for one’s thoughts and behaviors. This eliminates such excuses as “I wasn’t thinking” or “I wasn’t paying attention.” To live consciously means to hold the intention of keeping your awareness present in the moment and building the ability to notice when your attention wanders to the past or future and then bringing it home to the present. It takes practice.
To live consciously from the inside out, deeply connected to the truth as you know it, means connecting the observations of your conscious awareness in the moment to the wisdom and truth that has been activated in your consciousness. A far richer life can be led from this deeper place of truth rather than the egoic external orientation of personal preferences and approval-seeking. When we reach outside for gratification, we are telling ourselves we are not enough and thus reside in a consciousness of lack. When we express outwardly from that deep inner place of truth, we have the ability to recognize what is true for us in the world because it resonates with the truth within us.
Finally, to love ourselves and others without conditions is the crowning achievement. This is not a matter of romantic love, but rather the feeling and expression of devotion to the well-being of ourselves and one another. It is a recognition of our kinship and underlying oneness. When we love in this way, we make nothing more important than loving one another. This kind of love is the most powerful force in the universe. It unites us as one through the trials and triumphs of life. Without it, we are separated by our judgments and personal, positional preferences. With it, we are magnificent. This kind of love is achieved through compassionate and caring choices made repeatedly day after day until it becomes who and how we are.
To be an awesome human being is not a matter of being perfect, for perfection does not exist in human form. We can only strive to do our best, humbled by the knowledge that we do in fact stumble and fall, and that those seeming “failures” are usually our most wonderful life lessons. To be awesome is to recognize and accept the challenge of being the very best “you” that you can be. Those who live this way serve as an inspiration to others to do and be the very best they can.
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Understanding: The Third Law of Spirit
Anytime you allow anything or anyone outside yourself to cause you to choose hurt and to be disturbed inside yourself, then you are being shown how you can strengthen your understanding of the first and second laws of Spirit, to accept and cooperate, no matter what, no matter who. That can be a very tall order that perhaps only God in the flesh could fully express.
Nonetheless, the opportunity for you to fully accept and cooperate is available which can lead to realization of understanding, enthusiasm and compassion for exactly what is the reality of the situation. — John Morton
Understanding is a quality or condition of one’s consciousness associated with perceiving and comprehending the nature and significance of a person, situation, or experience. As the laws of spirit unfold, understanding typically comes forward once acceptance and cooperation have been achieved. Sometimes this is a rapid sequence of events and other times it takes years and years to work yourself through to understanding. Personally, it’s the acceptance part that is typically the hardest for me. Once I accept something, cooperation and understanding are pretty much a no-brainer.
Have you ever had one of those implausible streams of events that led you through twists and turns to just where you needed to be for something important to line up in your life? More and more, I am finding that happening followed by an “Aha!” moment of understanding why all those things had to happen. And, because I have a deep sense of God’s presence in my life and understand the karmic component of many experiences in my life, I often smile when these things happen.
Here’s an example. I went to my sister-in-law’s retirement party and was amazed by her startling success with the Ideal Protein diet. I had been looking for many years for a weight loss program that I believed in and felt confident would bring me success. Having hurt my knee several weeks before, I went to the chiropractor when I returned. I’ve been going to her for over two years and seldom had a physical adjustment. Instead, we used NET — a muscle-testing technique that identifies and releases mental and emotional blockages held in the body. I had been doing this work primarily to prepare myself to cooperate on a mental and emotional level with whatever weight loss program I choose.
This time, my chiropractor asks me to let her brand new associate look at my knee. She does so, and with my permission, gives me extensive adjustments. While lying on my stomach, I notice that she has a reverse crease in one of her toes. Curious, I ask about it and find that it makes her self-conscious. I apologize for bringing it up. She says “No problem — it’s mine and I have to deal with it.” Now sitting up, I grab my excess belly and say “I have to deal with this.” She grabs her belly and says “I know what you mean, I have to deal with this.” I mention that I am exploring a diet program that I am interested in and tell her it is the Ideal Protein diet. She just about falls on the floor in surprise, saying she has been studying this diet for a year now and is in the process of signing up to be a coach. I jump for joy because the deal breaker for me with the program had been the requirement to drive 90 minutes to a program center each week, and she would be local! We agreed to start later this week and for about an hour the little kid inside of me was so happy I could hardly contain myself.
So, one major form of understanding that arises in our lives when we accept and cooperate with whatever is happening is the wonders of 20/20 hindsight. Things often don’t make any kind of sense when we go through them, but later we can be filled with wonder at the perfection of what has happened and how meaningful it is to us.
Sometimes I just can’t get to square one with acceptance at all, for what seems like a lifetime and understanding is inconceivable. Many of my biggest life lessons have been this kind of struggle. When I am really lucky, a miracle of grace presents me with the opportunity to understand the situation first. In these cases the acceptance and cooperation follow easily. Here is an example that relates to my belief in karma, reincarnation and our essential identity as souls.
I had an extremely difficult relationship with my father. As a child, I could never please him. At the age of 7, I overheard him tell my mother that he loved my brother and sister, but I bugged him. I carried that as proof that he didn’t love me until my 50s. Then, several years after my father’s death, I had an extraordinary spiritual understanding that instantaneously freed me of my anger toward him. I was in a class doing a guided visualization process intended to bring forward deeper awareness of ourselves as souls. In the theater of my mind, I found myself sitting in a circle with my spiritual support team with an empty guest chair. My father appeared and took that chair. I became enraged, yelling at him that he had no right entering my safe and sacred spiritual circle of support. He was silent and sat there, somewhat humbly. I raged on, confronting him with his lack of love toward me all our shared lives together, saying how much he had hurt and wounded me and that I was now moving on with people who loved and supported me, and he was not welcome, and I wanted him to leave immediately.
One of my team members put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “I have an idea.” He suggested that since my father had shown up, perhaps there was some value there for me, and how about if we listen to what he has to say and then I could throw him out if that was still want I wanted to do. Subdued and slightly embarrassed by my tantrum, I acquiesced. I looked at my father and said “OK, so what do you have to say for yourself — why should I let you stay when you never showed me one ounce of love in my entire life?” He winced, and tears fell from his eyes, which shocked and softened me somehow. He looked me straight in the eye and told me he was only doing his job — it was part of his assignment as a soul to be my father, never showing me any signs of love or affection. This was intended to serve as a means of assisting me in learning to turn inward and upward to find my truth rather than seeking it out in the world. Instantly, that made perfect sense to me. My eyes filled with tears, my anger fell away, and something let go within me that had restrained me all my life. Somehow, I knew that what he was saying was true. I also knew that for the first time in my life, I was seeing my father, a fellow human being, as a soul. We were communicating soul to soul, and that changed me forever after. The reality of our essential identities as souls came through in that moment, through that experience, in a way that redefined me.
In that moment, I glimpsed a spiritual reality so profound that it changed my history with my father. I no longer saw him as the heartless, self-centered ogre who could not and would not love me. I realized that as a soul, it had been an extraordinary act of love for him to take on that awful role in my life, knowing that I would hate him, and that he could never demonstrate his love for me or receive love from me. A deep taproot of anger, tension, and self-rejection was pulled out of me in that moment as I rose into my soul and knew us both as innocent and pure souls rather than as damaged people. We were just two sweet souls playing characters whose egos had been out of balance in the karmic dramas of our lives. I finally understood that we were right on course with God’s perfect wisdom, timing, and plan, balancing our karma and learning our lessons.
The Laws of Spirit are governing principles that provide access to the knowledge of ourselves as divine as well as human beings. In order to access our deeper spiritual truth, we must learn to accept, cooperate with and learn to understand even the most challenging people, situations, and circumstances in our lives. They guide us through a process of surrender that enables us to trust ourselves and God. Without this journey, we are left to live lives defined merely by our personalities, human faculties, and desires. It is the spiritual dimension that provides awesome meaning to our lives. The Laws of Spirit serve as the gateways to that dimension.
I hope you will tune in next week for the fourth Law of Spirit — loving. Until then, I look forward to your responses and reactions to this piece.
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Love: The Fourth Law of Spirit
As the previous articles in this Laws of Spirit series attest, this sequence of spiritual wisdom steps can be enormously useful in extricating ourselves from the challenges we face each and every day. It is practical spirituality at its best. In order to get to the loving, we have to first work our way through our “issues.” This means doing what is necessary to achieve acceptance, cooperation, and understanding about whatever person, situation, or circumstance we are grappling with. Then, we are simply left with the loving that joins us together as one.
Spiritual love is characterized by deep peace, freedom, and an absence of resistance or “againstness.” When we love in this way, we unite and embrace the other. When love is unconditional, there is no withholding of our self in any way, nor is there any judgment of our self or others. There is no hidden agenda of how we want the situation or person to change. We may not like the person or situation involved very much, but we recognize that there is more going on in life than our personal preferences.
This love that joins us together as one is different from romantic love. It is not about feeling all warm and fuzzy and affectionate about something or someone. It is not characterized by intense desire and attraction. Rather, it is a sense of connection to an underlying unity of all that exists. It is a choice to be kind and compassionate based on an awareness that on a non-physical level we are so unified that whatever I do will affect you. It is transcendence over a personal agenda to a desire for the highest good of all concerned. Spiritual love says, “I might be distressed by you or your behavior on a personality level, but I know that spiritually, we are all one and I wish us no harm.”
Loving is love in action. It is about what we create, promote, and allow — our contribution. We don’t need to live our lives engaging in big and little battles each day with other people trying to further our personal agenda while they seek to advance their own. Alternatively, we can know ourselves as powerful creators and meet the situations in our lives from an awareness of oneness and caring about the highest good of all concerned. What would this look like? Consider the last time you and your spouse or a friend had a serious disagreement about something. Did you become curious about how and why they arrived at their point of view or were you too busy trying to get them to see things from your perspective? Regardless of what they were doing, the question is what were you doing in the discord? Were you seeking to restore harmony between you through mutual understanding or were you building a case for how wrong and unacceptable they and/or their behavior were? No matter what the other person did or did not do, when practicing spiritual loving we hold ourselves accountable for how we respond to the situation. We hold the intention of not doing any harm to ourselves or others. We do not fuel the fire of discord, but seek to remain connected at a deeper level in spite of our respective flaws.
I can’t help but wonder what would happen to our divorce rate if spouses were held accountable for their vows to love, honor, and cherish each other in good times and bad. The laws of spirit provide excellent guidance in how to do so. The missing ingredient is practice, practice, practice. The true value of working with the laws of spirit is that you feel better about life and about yourself and you are far more likely to be kind and compassionate to others.
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No Plans for the Holidays? How To Enjoy Them Anyway
It’s very easy to fall into a “poor me, nobody loves me, I’m going to go eat worms” state of mind when you don’t have any invitations for the holidays. Alternatively, you could choose to enjoy your holidays anyway. It’s all in how you see it and who you hold accountable for the situation. Here are some strategies that might help you sort your situation out and maybe, just maybe, have your best holiday season yet.
Regardless of what activities you engage in over the holidays, be sure to take the time to
connect in your heart to the spirit of the holidays. For example, on Thanksgiving, whether with a crowd or by yourself, dive into the wellspring of gratitude for all you do have in your life and allow yourself to sense the oneness with others who will be acknowledging their blessings as well. My wish for you is that you treasure yourself and take the very best care of yourself possible… and have some fun!
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The Top 5 Things to Do When a Loved One Is Dying
I have far more I’d like to say on this topic than can be contained in a single post. So I will summarize my top five here and do follow-up articles on each of the five in the future series, What To Do When A Loved One Is Dying: Parts 1-5.
1. Don’t assume you are supposed to know what to do.
We live in a death-denying culture that has a hard time even saying the word “death.” Needless to say, we are not taught how to face our own death or that of a loved one, and are likely to panic in death’s presence. Or at the very least, we’re likely to be ill at ease because we don’t know what to do or not do. So start by recognizing this state of affairs, and don’t pressure yourself to “do it right.” When someone you love is dying, it’s okay to be a mess — just try not to dump your mess on others — especially the one who is dying.
This goes for others as well. No two people are going to respond the same way and most will be woefully unprepared and unskilled at dealing with the situation. This will not, however, stop some from shirking their responsibility or being self-appointed bullies demanding that others follow their lead.
Lead with your heart — keep your love flowing with the dying person and others as well — if possible. Nothing is more important than loving each other. Do your best and then some.
2. Make it a priority to demonstrate your love for the person who is dying.
The fact that your loved one is dying can be overwhelming and scary. Do your best not to let that get in the way of keeping your love alive as you see them off on their journey into the unknown territory of death. Love them up, down and sideways, but don’t make a big deal about it — just let your love flow and watch for little things that you can do to be of service to them. If you enter your loved one’s room and say something like, “Your color looks good today,” when you both know he or she is dying, your real communication says, “I can’t handle this and need to pretend it isn’t happening.” Be honest. Be authentic. Be you. It’s okay to let them see your fear and distress, but don’t let that overshadow your love. Express your gratitude to them for the ways they enriched your life, share happy memories and yes, do say goodbye — but do it tenderly. Don’t be afraid to touch the dying. Nothing communicates our love more than holding hands and stroking our loved one’s hair.
Tailor your efforts according to the time available. Respect the fact that time can be very short from hearing the prognosis to the actual time of death. One of my personal pet peeves is when people are inconvenienced by the news, as though their loved one should have checked on their availability rather than having the audacity to sound the red alert at an inopportune moment. When your mother has a 50/50 chance of making it through the night, you don’t show up four days later!
3. Respect the authority of the dying to make his or her own decisions.
The person who is dying is the boss. If they are conscious enough to be making their own decisions — don’t bully them into doing things your way. Just as sure as you are that your way is right for you, know that their way is right for them no matter how different it is from your own. If someone holding a healthcare proxy is in charge, his or her authority is to be equally respected. Ideally, each of us gets our ducks in a row before our dying time. In reality, most do not. As a result, a lot of financial, legal, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual life-or-death decisions get made in a hurry, at the last minute. This can cause a lot of chaos, confusion, conflict and mixed up emotions among family and loved ones. Do your best to quickly align yourself with the wishes of the dying. It is their death, not yours.
4. Accept that he or she is dying. Don’t fight against it.
It’s fine to hope that things will turn around and death will be postponed. However, if death is what is happening, it helps enormously to accept that fact. We are taught to fight against death like it is an evil monster. In fact, death is as normal as birth — we just haven’t been trained to see it that way. I find it sad when doctors and loved ones subject the dying to endless invasive drugs, tests and procedures when it is obvious that it is time to die. I am an enthusiastic supporter of hospice care for the dying.
Each of us is born one moment of one day, we die one moment of another day and have an unknown number of days to live in between. Make the most of the time you and your loved one have left together. Fill it with tenderness and be of loving service to their wishes and needs. Give them a good send off.
5. Contribute to maintaining a peaceful environment.
When someone is dying, they have enough to do handling their own process, which might include physical pain, fear, emotional turmoil, confusion, regrets, etc. Assume that any discord in their environment will add to their load and be unkind on the part of those causing it. Even if the dying person is seemingly unconscious, assume he or she can hear and be affected by everything that happens around them. If family members are squabbling, take it outside of the room. Consider the dying room a sacred space where only love and comforting activities are allowed unless the dying person requests otherwise.
Just give your loved one the best send off possible leaving no regrets.
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Do You Need to Lighten Up Your Life?
Lightening up your life is about choosing to transform your trials and tribulations into revelations and intentionally engaging in the journey of uplifting your consciousness. Light is not only one of my favorite topics but something we all need to understand better if we want to sit in the driver’s seat of our own lives.
On the physical level of our existence, light exists as a reflection. What we see is the electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths. This illumination or giving off of light is what allows us to see one another and the world around us. In order to be seen or to see in the physical world, we move out of darkness into light.
In the non-physical or spiritual realms, light is a state of being or awareness. Some speak of the “I am” presence — the awareness of one’s true self or identity being spiritual in nature rather than the physical identification of one’s self as a body with a personality. Physically, you reflect light. Spiritually, you are light. Put the two together and you become quite magnificent!
There is a bridge between the light of the physical and spiritual worlds. This bridge is your consciousness — what you think, what you believe, where you focus your attention or awareness and thereupon take action. Unless and until you decide to shed light on this process, your default settings carry on diligently — most often without your awareness. Aristotle uses the metaphor of light to exemplify how an active intellect works — the one who makes choices, takes actions (both physical and non-physical), the one who turns on the light, so to speak.
I had a dream once where my mother and I were in a huge domed room filled with windows of all shapes and sizes — each with its own customized window shade. Some of the shades were fully drawn while others were partially or completely rolled up exposing the light. My mother asked, “What should we do?” to which I replied, “Open as many as we can to get as much light shining in here as possible.”
Years later, life has taught me that each of us has a different tolerance and desire for light — both physically and spiritually. I don’t say that as a judgment, but rather as an observation of our individualized path of personal evolution. Notice how much light you are willing to shed on your life’s journey.
Some people are so busy reciting their woes and experiencing themselves as victims of the circumstances and people in their lives that it never occurs to them that they have the power to change how they perceive their situation. This is another classic example of “Is your cup half empty or half full?” Are you so busy keeping track of every disappointment or irritation in your life that you are missing the opportunity of being grateful for what is going well at the same time? If you are one who sees the potential for more light in your life, consider some of the following wisdom and techniques for gaining more altitude so you can see more clearly what is really going on.
Next time you are in a foul mood, try this simple technique:
If that doesn’t improve how you feel, try asking yourself the following questions:
Each of us chooses the quality of our lives through the choices me make and those we avoid. If your life isn’t bringing you happiness, satisfaction, learning and growth then maybe it’s time to take a better look at how you are creating, promoting and allowing what is present in your life. Shine some light on your repetitive thoughts and feelings and you are sure to find some clues of what you could be doing differently to yield better results.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
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